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Injury Incidence in Adolescent Rowers Within England: A Prospective Study
Get PDFContemporary research analysing injury incidence in junior rowers is lacking, and what has been published has focused solely on performance-level athletes. The purpose of this study was to investigate injury incidence in junior rowers from grassroot clubs and school rowing programmes across England. The study also explored if injury rates were influenced by gender, training, or geographical region. Finally, the results of the report would offer suggestion if socioeconomic status might be associated with injuries in junior rowers. The study adopted a positivist, prospective approach examining mainly quantitative injury data from a
cohort of 1530 rowers aged 12-18 years (803 females and 727 males) across 34 rowing clubs, covering all regions. Coaches completed an anonymous injury questionnaire to record injuries in junior rowers over a six-month period. The
following variables were compared; gender, age, height, weight, hours trained, injury site, attainment, classification, injury reoccurrence, and severity. 56.7% of
females reported injuries, in comparison to 41.7% of males. Out of 727 males, 3.3% reported an injury to their coach, and from 803 females, 3.8% recorded injuries. Injuries were most common in junior rowers aged 16 compared to younger age groups. There were no notable differences between hours engaging in exercise training, but injury rates were lower as years of experience increased, as most reports were from rowers who had been training for 1-2 years, followed by those training 3-4 years. 88% of injuries were sustained in the training environment as opposed to during competition. Muscle and tendon-related overuse injuries were the most common injuries, with the most reported site being the trunk
(38.3 ± 14.3). Finally, the highest injury rates were reported from clubs located in the top 40% of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England. These findings have
relevance to athlete injury prevention strategies and impending future research into the factors associated with injury prevalence, both physiological and sociological.
Moreover, additional research into junior injury incidence in rowers has the capacity to support the findings of this study and promote suitable interventions to reduce the occurrences of injuries in rowing, supporting long-term continuity of the sport
The Stage Controversy: Jeremy Collier and the Moral Reform of Politics, 1688–1722
No full textThis thesis addresses how the ‘rage of party’ in Britain from 1690 to 1722 was introduced into and reinforced by the Stage Controversy through pamphleteers’ and playwrights’ communication with their audiences. The two parts of the thesis focus respectively on the Nonjuror Jeremy Collier’s works and Reform Comedy. Part I explicates the political meaning of Collier’s anti-stage pamphlets, but not in a straightforward manner. It reconsiders what Collier thought he was doing in the first two decades after 1688 and redefines his works on politics and drama as special types of conduct books. In order to determine the composition and origin of Collier’s conduct writing on drama, the three chapters in Part I are arranged in reverse chronological order, from his anti-theatrical tracts between 1698 and 1708, back through Vanbrugh’s profound criticism of conduct literature in The Relapse in 1696, and further back to Collier’s anti-Revolutionary pamphlets between 1689 and 1696.
Part II goes beyond the widely-accepted definition of the Stage Controversy as a pamphlet war and addresses how reform comedians influenced the audience’s emotions toward obedience when constructing their counter-arguments to Collier’s critique. The three chapters in Part II proceed chronologically, from comic playwrights’ hostile reaction to Collier between 1698 and 1704, to the reversal of Colley Cibber’s attitude towards Collier’s criticism in The Careless Husband in late 1704, and finally to reform comedians’ reflections on the justification of resistance and Arthur Bedford’s condemnation of the impenitence of the theatre from 1705 to the 1710s. By juxtaposing reform comedies with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conduct books, Part II explores the shift in Whig playwrights’ discourse on contract theory from contractual resistance to contractual obedience. It also re-examines the interrelationship between the stage controversialists
Hominin Cognitive Development: Brains, Bodies and Behaviour - A Comprehensive Approach
Get PDFThe cognitive developments of early hominins, which may have begun as early as the transition to bipedalism following our ancestors’ split with the great apes, ultimately enabled these early humans to consider concepts and undertake strategies that were previously unimaginable. Although this evolutionary trajectory has long been an inquiry of interest, cognitive research has often relied on hypotheses drawn from psychological theory or neural evidence provided by brain moulds (endocasts) made from early hominin crania, which can preserve sulci and gyri patterns of the hominin brain. These neuroanatomical landmarks are often difficult to discern with the naked eye; however, technological advancements in medical imaging can now produce digital brain endocasts of early hominins at high resolution. Furthermore, medical imaging can now observe the activated cerebral regions of conscious living humans engaged in various tasks or mere thoughts, thus demonstrating the correlation between these regions and specific actions or mental activity. Thus, the cognitive regions activated during the manufacture of stone tools in modern humans implies that these neural structures were either in development or already formed during Lower Palaeolithic tool-making.
This thesis takes the first comprehensive approach to the study of hominin cognitive development, through the contextualised reassessment of hominin crania/endocasts, in concert with hominin manufactured stone tools. The synthesised evidence herein establishes how changes in hominin behaviour, driven by climate and environmental change, generated post-cranial adaptations which, in turn, resulted in neural adaptations, thereby contributing to the evolution of the brain. The evidence suggests that this likely occurred in a mosaic fashion, perhaps as early as the latter australopithecines. It is also likely that the cognitive advancement of these neural structures and the acquisition of new behaviours had a concomitant effect on one another.
Continued work would benefit from a collaboration between the stone tool specialists and palaeo-neurologists, as well as public access to the digital endocast files
The Varieties of Christmas Magic: An ethnography of festivity, identity, and worldview in British life
Get PDFIn the context of contemporary Britain, ‘Christmas’ has become synonymous with a distinctively hope-saturated world of utopian enchantment and vitality. It is the contention of this thesis that the set of ritual practices and corresponding moods wrapped up in the annual performance of this festive occasion have come to hold an ‘active mirror’ (Turner 1982) up to the very root of our hopes, fears, values, desires, disappointments, ideals, and beliefs. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the North East of England from 2016-2019, this study seeks to delve into the complexity of this emotional matrix to explore what the world of Christmas might reveal about the nature of religion, culture, value, and belief in Britain today. Observing the ways in which Christmas comes to be performed across a range of public settings and lives, I seek to crosscut the go-to debates which have tended to dominate both colloquial and scholarly discourse around the more classically conceived ‘religious’ vs. ‘secular’ associations of Christmas to cast a broader anthropological lens upon the varieties of transcendence which become so clearly manifest in experiences of the festival, and which find especial resonance in references to the ‘Christmas spirit’ and/or ‘magic’. To this end, I suggest that Christmas not only provides an apt empirical window through which to study a range of diverse contemporary worldviews, beliefs, and attitudes, but constitutes in and of itself an especially prime site of meaning-making in the contemporary world. Considering in particular the manner in which Christmas comes to mark and mirror the key changes and transitions of people’s lives, this study represents to my knowledge one of the very first ethnographic attempts to examine the important role Christmas continues to play as a prime ritual-symbolic platform for the ‘sacralisation’ of contemporary British identities and worldviews (Mol 1976)
Essays on Sales Promotion and Consumer Decision Making Process
Get PDFSales promotion is a common tool used by retailers. However, even though it is commonly used in marketplace, sometimes it cannot achieve the results as retailers expect. Thus, the specific process of consumer decision making and factors that influence the effect of promotions on consumer behavior need further research. This thesis is composed of a literature review of sales promotions, consumers response to a specific sales promotion (Minimum Purchase Requirement deal), and consumers’ decision-making process when using different symbols to shop. The first chapter presents an integrative review to summarize past empirical or theoretical literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of consumers’ and marketers’ response towards monetary and non-monetary sales promotion. The second chapter examines how the consumer’s regulatory focus influences their shopping behavior when they choose to use Minimum Purchase Requirement deals. The third chapter focuses on the interaction effect between symbol usage and personality traits on consumer’s consideration set in online shopping. The relationship among the three chapters is that the first chapter reviews the existing research about sales promotion, and the second chapter focuses on a specific type of sales promotion and examines the effect of consumers’ goal pursuit strategy (regulatory focus) on purchasing behavior when using the deal. Even though the third chapter focuses on external triggered decision-making cues (symbol usage), psychological factors (personality traits) and decision-making process (consideration set) in shopping rather than sales promotions, it follows the same thread of research in consumer decision making process and factors influencing consumer behavior. The thesis aims to contribute to the literature of sales promotion, regulatory focus, priming effect of symbol usage and consumer decision making and behavior. The findings have important implications for marketing practitioners and retailers
Measurement, Knowledge, and Representation: A Sociological Study of Arctic Sea-Ice Science
Get PDFSatellite-derived observations of Arctic sea ice are instrumental in contemporary sea-ice research. Through the production and dissemination of data products, these observations shape our understanding of Arctic sea-ice conditions, knowledge of which is essential for informing policy responses, decision-making, and action in the face of unprecedented climate change. However, due to the complex, dynamic, and indeterminate nature of sea ice and various scientific and technological challenges involved in its observation, measurement, and representation, the accuracy to which these products depict Arctic sea ice is limited. Moreover, the methodologies used to acquire, process, and report satellite data vary between scientific institutions, resulting in inconsistent estimates of key sea-ice parameters.
Informed by social constructivist arguments developed within science and technology studies and critical cartography, this thesis contends that satellite-derived sea-ice data products represent a particular way of observing, interpreting, and classifying complex geophysical conditions that is socially and culturally contingent. This raises important questions about how sea-ice knowledge is constructed through the interactions between sea ice, sensing technologies, and social practices. Accordingly, this thesis integrates ethnographic and visual methodologies to critically explore how dynamic and indeterminate geophysical data are acquired, processed, and reported in Arctic sea-ice science. By examining sea-ice data products in terms of their underlying practices and technologies, institutional settings, and the broader socio-cultural, political, and historical contexts in which they are embedded, this thesis provides insights into the sociological nature of contemporary sea-ice research. It concludes that greater recognition of the social contingencies shaping how sea-ice data products are generated and disseminated is needed to foster more democratic and socially responsible forms of scientific knowledge. The findings presented in this thesis may provide valuable starting points for critically examining how sea-ice science may be made more equitable and enriched or improved by alternative perspectives
Constraining anomalous couplings in the gauge-Higgs sector at high-energy colliders
Get PDFSeveral physical phenomena suggest that the Standard Model is not the ultimate theory possible for describing Nature, and looking for deviations from the theory prediction might be a hint for physics beyond the Standard Model. Nevertheless, the lack of tantalising evidence for new resonant physics, along with our ignorance of the energy scale at which such physics should arise, require us to improve current precision measurements to further test the Standard Model.
It is possible to treat the Standard Model as an Effective Field Theory, valid up to a high cut-off energy scale above the electroweak scale, equipped with a new set of Lorentz structures, the so-called anomalous couplings, that extend and parametrise with modified couplings the vertices allowed by the Standard Model. The interactions between the Higgs and the gauge bosons are thought to be a promising avenue to scrutinise the Standard Model for any new physics effects.
In this Thesis we explore the gauge-Higgs sector to segregate the anomalous couplings that arise in viewing the Standard Model as an Effective Field Theory. In doing so, we investigate the capability of current and future experiments at constraining said anomalous couplings through standard processes involving gauge-Higgs interactions that might shed light on what potentially lies beyond the Standard Model.
We study the so-called golden channel in the environment of the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, as well as the Higgs-strahlung and Z-boson fusion processes at the high-energy stages of both the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider. These channels allow us to project stringent bounds on anomalous couplings in the gauge-Higgs sector that can be probed at high-energy colliders
Decolonial Approaches to Reading Distress, Healing, and (Well)being in Contemporary African Diasporic Contexts
Get PDFTaking a decolonial and intersectional approach, this thesis formulates a reading practice for attending to expressions of distress and healing in contemporary African contexts. Drawing on literature, visual and performance art, film and television, this work explores how these creative engagements engage with indigenous Afro-diasporic epistemologies to resist or rescript Eurocentric narratives of illness and recovery. Considering how the ‘healthy’ subject in the psychiatric imaginary is produced at the intersection of contemporary neocolonial, neuroscientific, and neoliberal discourses, this work suggests that the body might instead be used to reimagine alternative modes of selfhood and relationality, beyond an often disembodying and depoliticising biomedical register.
The first chapter unpacks Eurocentric conceptions of reality and being, considering how the distressed subject has been constructed through a Western psychiatric imaginary. I suggest that indigenous African ontologies and cosmologies might allow us to replot aetiology and pathology beyond a conventional psychiatric narrative, depathologising distress itself. I attend to the most visible signifier of difference and a site where racialised violence has been inscribed: the skin. Here I draw on a range of sociocultural, psychoanalytic, and medical discourses to dislocate the epistemic binary between mythology and reality. I begin with visual artist Wangechi Mutu’s collagic reworking of the mythologised black female body. I situate this alongside expressions of embodied distress in Akwaeke Emezi’s semi-autobiographical, queer Bildungsroman, Freshwater, and Yrsa Daley-Ward’s memoir, The Terrible. I find striking resonances in biomedical and sociocultural appraisals of the skin and brain, which intersect to produce a neoliberal subject oriented towards resilience, flexibility, and happiness. The second chapter explores how the healthy citizen-subject has been modelled in contemporary ‘neuroculture’. I interrogate the structural asymmetries that create conditions of distress, and afford conditional access to particular institutional visions of (well)being. Bebe Moore Campbell’s 72 Hour Hold and Jacqueline Roy’s The Fat Lady Sings offer insights through their depictions of women under psychiatric care in the U.S. and Britain respectively. Eloghosa Osunde’s visual art series, ‘Color this Brain’, and Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose allow us to reimagine the relationship between the brain and distress in ways that exceed the visual and verbal toolkit of neuropsychiatry. I conclude by turning to the question of healing: what does it mean to be ‘whole’ and ‘well’? I consider the body as a medium for establishing networks of communal care and connection. I explore how Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters and Selina Thompson’s performance art piece, salt., undertake the cultural labour of imagining curative spaces and trajectories for the future that are more meaningfully aligned with black women’s needs and desires
Carbon dioxide emissions from the oxidative weathering of sedimentary rocks in highly erosive settings
Get PDFChemical weathering of sedimentary rocks is an important control on the composition of Earth’s surface system and climate over geological timescales, via two main pathways: i) the oxidation of petrogenic organic carbon (OCpetro); and ii) the oxidation of sulfide minerals coupled to the dissolution of carbonate minerals. Both processes are characterized by the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and consumption of oxygen (O2). However, the corresponding present-day weathering fluxes and their environmental controls are only partly constrained due to a lack of in situ measurements. This research presents direct measurements of CO2 release that were performed in steep, rapidly eroding terrains of the Waiapu catchment, North Island, New Zealand, and two neighbouring catchments in the French southern Alps that are part of the Draix-Bléone observatory. For this, the tools for studying the gaseous exchange of CO2 and O2 during oxidative weathering are refined. It is shown that direct measurements using drilled gas accumulation chambers are feasible during short-term (≥ 1 week) field campaigns in remote areas. In addition, the gaseous movement of CO2 and O2 in shallow weathering zones can be quantified, which supports upscaling local findings to the wider landscape. Following this approach, high CO2 emissions are reported that identify steep terrains as hotspots of oxidative weathering in the geological carbon cycle. Furthermore, the contributions to the bulk weathering fluxes from OCpetro oxidation and sulfide oxidation coupled to carbonate dissolution are assessed with radiocarbon and stable carbon isotope analyses. For this, a microbial impact on the oxidation of OCpetro is discussed. Based on repeated fieldtrips across multiple seasons, important environmental controls on the size and source of in situ CO2 emissions are identified, including temperature, precipitation and the chemical composition of the bedrock. Overall, the oxidative weathering fluxes and their environmental controls presented here provide a basis for future models of Earth’s geochemical and climatic history. It is highlighted that these now need to consider a positive climate feedback by the response of oxidative weathering fluxes to warming
Ibn Bābawayh, follower of Ḥadīṯ or follower of Philosophy?
Get PDFThe scholarly consensus regarding Ibn Bābawayh is that he was a traditionalist, a follower of the text ḥašawī who did not go beyond the Šīʿah traditions. However, this thesis will explore the original hypothesis that his work has been characterised by Muslim Aristotelian and Platonic thought. This would have come about through his reading of Muslim thinkers such as al-Nubaḵtī, al-Rāzī, and al-Fārābī. No researcher to date has sought to thoroughly research possible links between Ibn Bābawayh and Greek philosophy. In pursuit of the exploratory aim of this hypothesis, I will provide relevant information about the thought of abū Bakr al-Rāzī, as far as is currently available. I will also show why Ibn Bābawayh’s doctrine cannot be fully explained by the Imāmī tradition, but instead indicates that we should understand that he drew upon external sources, in particular, the logician and metaphysic Muslim schools. I will pursue twelve key arguments for the link between Ibn Bābawayh, and al-Rāzī
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