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Geochemistry & Stratigraphy of the Mesozoic & Cenozoic Sedimentary Rocks Encountered in the Mandawa Basin, South Eastern Tanzania
No full textThe Mandawa Basin in south eastern Tanzania has long been regarded as the most hydrocarbon-prospective onshore sedimentary basin in the country. However, despite containing the ingredients necessary for a working petroleum system, no commercial hydrocarbon accumulations have been discovered. One of the keys to understanding the Mandawa Basin petroleum system is understanding the stratigraphy of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary rocks encountered within. Whilst a wide range of stratigraphic techniques have been applied to these rocks, comparatively little attention has been paid to elemental chemostratigraphy and how it could contribute to the understanding of the evolution of the Mandawa Basin.
In this thesis, 1993 rock samples have been subjected to inorganic geochemical analysis. The dataset has been employed to produce a chemostratigraphic framework for the Mandawa Basin that comprises 10 chemostratigraphic sequences and 22 higher resolution chemostratigraphic packages. The index elements employed model variations in the abundance of quartz, feldspars, clay minerals, heavy minerals, and authigenic minerals. In many cases, the mineralogical interpretations drawn from the inorganic geochemical data are corroborated by published mineralogical datasets and by supplementary heavy mineral and pyrolysis data acquired in this thesis. The geochemical and mineralogical data illustrate changes in depositional environment, climate, and sediment provenance throughout the Mandawa Basin sedimentary record, with key geochemical boundaries often coinciding with documented tectonostratigraphic and palaeoclimatic events that occurred in East Africa during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras.
The chemostratigraphic framework is tied into the existing lithostratigraphy of the Mandawa Basin and every formation has a unique geochemical signature. Based on the geochemical data, revisions are proposed to the lithostratigraphy, which adjust the time limits and thicknesses of all formations to varying degrees. Of the more substantial adjustments in the subsurface is the recognition of a thicker interval of evaporitic sedimentary rocks deposited during the Pliensbachian and Toarcian, necessitating the definition of a thicker Nondwa Formation with two members, and a thinner Mbuo Formation. The deposition of the laterally contiguous Kihuluhulu / Kiturika / Makonde Formations is restricted in time to the Aptian, meaning that the succeeding Kilwa Group spans a greater interval of time than previously interpreted.
The subsurface chemostratigraphic framework is correlated with confidence to outcrop exposures sampled across the Mandawa Basin. Again, whilst there is a great deal of consistency between the Mandawa Basin ?chemo map? proposed here and previous lithostratigraphic maps, revisions to the outcrop geology are proposed. Of the more substantial adjustments to the outcrop stratigraphy, is the recognition that Cretaceous rocks probably cover a greater area of the Central Mandawa Sub Basin than originally thought (possibly onlapping the Masasi Spur) and the revelation that the Upper Kipatimu Member is likely Early Cretaceous rather than Late Jurassic in age and coeval to the Kihuluhulu Formation. The end Aptian marine transgression (Mavuji - Kilwa Group boundary) is clearly defined geochemically and is mapped in both the northern and central sub basins with ease.
Enrichment factors of the redox-sensitive elements Mo, U, Ni, and Cu have been calculated from the extensive Mesozoic and Cenozoic claystone dataset to identify anoxic / euxinic environments in the Mandawa Basin in which commercially viable source rocks could be preserved. The results highlight that euxinic environments exist but are restricted in time to the Early and Middle Jurassic Epochs (Pliensbachian to Aalenian Stages) only. Selected claystone samples with high enrichment factor values have been subjected to pyrolysis to determine TOC content and kerogen type. The results revealed that source rocks with Type III kerogens derived from terrestrial plants are the most dominant in the Mandawa Basin and that rocks with Type II kerogens are subordinate. No source rocks with Type I kerogens have been identified in the data acquired for, or reviewed in, this thesis. The results indicate that gas is the likely hydrocarbon product of the pre-salt source rocks, whereas gas and oil are possible from intra-salt and post salt source rocks
Steroid resistance and Inflammatory bowel disease
No full textBackground: Steroid resistance remains a significant issue amongst IBD patients and mechanisms of resistance remain poorly understood. Endogenous Glucocorticoid metabolism may represent a key regulatory pathway in IBD. 11-beta hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 and 2 are key isoenzymes which control the activation and inactivation of cortisol at a tissue level. The aims of this dissertation were to provide a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms of steroid metabolism in IBD and outline the role of the 11-beta hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase enzyme system in IBD overall and specifically determine if alterations in this pathway may play a role in IBD resistance.
Methods: A retrospective observational study was undertaken to identify clinical predictors of resistance amongst IBD patients initially to determine current rates of resistance in a tertiary IBD centre. A literature review was then undertaken to identify potential mechanisms of steroid resistance in IBD and to examine the role of the 11-beta hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase enzyme system in IBD. Additional prospective studies were then undertaken to examine the11-beta hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase enzyme and its cofactors in IBD patients using real time PCR. We later went onto examine this system in relation to steroid responders and non-responders.
Results: Rates of resistance remained significant at 22%. Clinical predictors of GCS failure included an elevated CRP, significant anaemia, hypoalbuminaemia, severe endoscopic disease and extensive disease. Our initial data concluded that 11-beta hydroxysteroid 2 gene expression was downregulated in patients with IBD with an increased 11-beta hydroxysteroid 1:2 ratio correlating with inflammatory activity in IBD patients. We later identified that resistant subjects demonstrated reduced levels of 11-beta hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1, Hexose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase (regulator) and the glucocorticoid receptor with an apparent upregulation of inflammatory cytokines compared with responders.
Conclusions: Early identification of these critical clinical indicators of GCS failure could improve overall outcomes for the patients. Significant alterations in 11-beta hydroxysteroid enzyme system exists amongst steroid resistant groups. Further work on mechanisms GR upregulation and increased 11-beta hydroxysteroid type 1 expression may provide a potential therapeutic pathway to overcome GCS resistance. Alternatively, basal measurement of 11-beta hydroxysteroid, glucocorticoid receptor and cytokines amongst IBD subjects could enable earlier identification of patients likely to fail GCS, potentially avoiding cumulative side-effects and earlier escalation of therapies
Continuity and reform: a case study analysis of assessment in Irish post-primary education through the evaluation of stakeholder perceptions
No full textThis research procures and analyses the perspectives of parents and students, regarding
post-primary assessments. Two specific events prompted this research:
1. The reform of Junior Cycle Assessment in 2015 involving systematic reform to
include the assessment of skills and competencies required for 21st century living
(DES, 2012a; NCCA, 2017).
2. An Inspectorate report following a Whole School Evaluation, recommending
summative data from the school entrance assessments be utilised to ‘provide a
more realistic perspective on student performance.’ (DES, 2016e, p.3).
The two events highlighted reform of assessment towards the formative at Junior Cycle
with a simultaneous focus on summative student performance within the post-primary
system.
The researcher was keen to establish parent and student perspectives to assessment in
post-primary education to ascertain how they as primary stakeholders experienced all
aspects of the system. Subsequent to an extensive literature review, the following research
questions were identified:
• What is the perception of post-primary assessment among students and parents in
a case study school in Ireland during a period of simultaneous continuity and
reform?
• What are the benefits of assessment within a post-primary school?
• What are the challenges of assessment within a post-primary school?
Thematic analysis of the qualitative data resulted in the emergence of three interlinked
themes:
• Stakeholders perceive assessment through the purpose of the assessment
• Stakeholders perceive assessment through the culture of assessment
• Stakeholders perceive post-primary assessment has an impact on student
wellbeing.
Each of the three themes are discussed in relation to the research questions and
conclusions and recommendations for the case study school, for national policymakers
and for future research in the area are identified
An Analytical Tool to Help Researchers Develop Partnerships with Children and Adolescents
No full textAll researchers whose research involves children and adolescents have decisions to make about how and when to engage with those involved in and/or affected by their research; who to engage with and who to leave out. This paper offers a tool that researchers can use to help them address these issues in a purposeful and ethical way. The paper discusses earlier work on child-rights-based approaches to research which influenced the approach taken here. However the main inspiration for the proposal was the author’s own research with children working on coffee plantations in Nicaragua; in particular the Transformative Research by Children and Adolescents methodology that was used, and the critical reflection on method¬ology prompted by this experience. The tool is presented as a matrix which can be used for planning and designing, as well as evaluating research. It seeks to foster coherent critical thinking around three related dimensions: At what stage in a research process should researchers seek to engage with children and adolescents? What type of engagement is appropriate, particularly in relation to the sharing of decision-making power? And finally who is included in the process and who is excluded? The matrix is used to carry out a reappraisal of a recent research project by the author, showing how this analysis can shed light on a number of issues that might not otherwise be given sufficient attention
Incidencia de niños, niñas y adolescentes como ciudadanos/as activos/as en Nicaragua
No full textEn este documento presentamos los resultados de un proyecto de investigación realizado en sociedad por el Centro de Servicios Educativos en Salud y Medio Ambiente, CESESMA, y la Universidad del Norte de Nicaragua, UNN, en el marco del programa "Ciudadanía Activa en Centro América", con el fin de encontrar respuestas a las siguientes cuatro preguntas claves: 1. ¿Cuáles son las condiciones que favorecen la incidencia política de niños, niñas y adolescentes? 2. ¿Cuáles son los espacios o modalidades de organización y participación que propician la incidencia de niños, niñas y adolescentes como ciudadanos/as activos/as? 3. ¿Cuáles son las estrategias de intervención y las metodologías de facilitación que nos conducen al éxito en la promoción de incidencia política de niños, niñas y adolescentes? 4. ¿Cuáles son los obstáculos que tenemos que enfrentar y cómo los han superado?Irish Ai
MiR-200c-3p contrasts PD-L1 induction by combinatorial therapies and slows proliferation of epithelial ovarian cancer through downregulation of β-catenin and c-myc
No full textConventional/targeted chemotherapies and ionizing radiation (IR) are being used both
as monotherapies and in combination for the treatment of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). Several studies show that these therapies might favor oncogenic signaling and impede anti-tumor responses. MiR-200c is considered a master regulator of EOC-related oncogenes. In this study, we sought to investigate if chemotherapy and IR could influence the expression of miR-200c-3p and its target genes, like the immune checkpoint PD-L1 and other oncogenes in a cohort of EOC patients’ biopsies. Indeed, PD-L1 expression was induced, while miR-200c-3p was significantly reduced in these biopsies posttherapy.
The effect of miR-200c-3p target genes was assessed in miR-200c transfected SKOV3 cells untreated and treated with olaparib and IR alone. Under all experimental conditions, miR-200c-3p concomitantly reduced PD-L1, c-Myc and β-catenin expression and sensitized ovarian cancer cells to olaparib and irradiation. In silico analyses further confirmed the anti-correlation between miR-200c3p with c-Myc and β-catenin in 46 OC cell lines and showed that a higher miR-200c-3p expression associates with a less tumorigenic microenvironment. These findings provide new insights into how miR-200c-3p could be used to hold in check the adverse effects of conventional chemotherapy, targeted therapy and radiation therapy, and offer a novel therapeutic strategy for EOC
Metaphor processing in tweets
No full textMetaphor plays an important role in defining the interplay between cognition and language. Despite its fuzziness, this ubiquitous figurative device is an essential element of human communication that allows us (as humans) to better understand and, thus, communicate unfamiliar experiences and concepts in terms of familiar ones. Metaphor comprehension and understanding is a complex cognitive task that includes grasping the interaction between the underlying concepts. This is very challenging for humans, let alone computers.
The last few decades have witnessed a growing interest in automating this cognitive process by introducing a wealth of ideas to model the computational recognition and comprehension of metaphors in text. Many approaches and techniques have been introduced to explore the automatic processing of different types of metaphors and the preparation of metaphor-related resources.
In spite of the attention that metaphor processing has gained recently, the majority of existing approaches do not process metaphors in informal settings such as social media.
Twitter offers a novel way of communication that enables users all over the world to share their thoughts and experiences. The social media content circulated on this platform through the short informal tweets poses a challenge for automatic language processing due to the unstructured nature and brevity of the text as well as the vagueness of topics. Such unique characteristics of tweets, coupled with the importance of studying metaphoric usage on social media motivated me to study metaphor processing in such a context.
Metaphor processing in tweets can be beneficial in many social media analysis applications, including political discourse analysis and health communication analysis.
In this thesis, I investigate the automatic processing of metaphors in tweets focusing on two main tasks, namely metaphor identification and interpretation. My aim is to improve metaphor identification to study the usage of metaphoric language in healthcare communication and political discourse in social media. Furthermore, I aim to improve metaphor interpretation to aid language learners and to enrich lexical resources. I, therefore, study various NLP and deep learning techniques to automatically identify and interpret metaphors in tweets. To the best of my knowledge, there has been no attempt to process metaphors in tweets in part due to the lack of tweet datasets annotated for linguistic metaphor. Thus, the focus of the work presented here is not only introducing models to process metaphors in tweets but also developing the necessary datasets.
Overall, the work is divided into three main research themes; the first focuses on the development of metaphor annotation schemes and the preparation of datasets for both tasks. The second is concerned with the automatic identification of linguistic metaphors in tweets under a relational paradigm which explores three main ideas, namely distributional semantics, meta-embedding learning and contextual modulation. Finally, the last theme focuses on metaphor interpretation along the more complex ``definition generation\u27\u27 approach, which provides full explanation of a given metaphoric expression. Experiments are conducted on the introduced datasets of tweets as well as benchmark metaphor datasets to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. Furthermore, the proposed datasets and the best models from this thesis will be made publicly available to facilitate research on metaphor processing in general and in tweets specifically
Applying lean six sigma methodology to a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility: A case study
No full textThis research examines a case study on the implementation of an effective approach to advanced Lean Six Sigma problem-solving within a pharmaceutical manufacturing site which manufactures acetaminophen (paracetamol containing pain relief) tablets. Though this study was completed in a single manufacturing company, the implementation of this study delivers important application and results that can be deployed in other such manufacturing companies. The manufacturing site faced backlogs in customer orders due to increased demand. Increased demand is due to brand popularity and recognition, product efficacy and a COVID 19 pandemic that intensified the demand for pain relief tablets in an already very busy site. With increased demand, to ensure timely deliveries, customer satisfaction and minimize delays, sources of site productivity losses and
wastes needed to be analyzed and reduced or eliminated. Manufacturing Packaging line downtime was identified as one area of concern. The goal of the research was to introduce a problem-solving technique to reduce downtime within a manufacturing site without affecting the production required to fulfil customer demand while increasing product quality. The research utilized an integrated LSS methodology which identifies, stratifies and effectively eliminates non-value adding (waste) activities, by following a 7-step customized problem-solving methodology which resulted in complete elimination of the issue under investigation and savings of just under half a million dollars. The
learnings are being deployed and leveraged worldwide across the pharmaceutical organizations parent site and sister sites. The presented results demonstrated that Lean Six Sigma methodology and tools are effective for accurate root causing of problems and enablers of implementation of continuous improvement
Joint submission to Oireachtas Committee on Children, Equality, Disability and Integration re: General Scheme of a certain Institutional Burial (Authorised Interventions) Bill
No full text[No abstract available
Planning as Justification
No full textMuch theorising in our field is focused on what planning should do. Such work is generally informed by perspectives borrowed from social and political theory that are used as an analytical lens to examine where planning practice has gone wrong and as a platform to prescribe how planning should be corrected to deliver better ends. For example, the work of Dewey and Habermas has deeply influenced the communicative and collaborative approaches to planning by informing stances on how planning should be democratically orientated to provide an effective means to identify and provide for ends. Associated with these theories but differentiated by emphasis, is a strand of planning theory that combines social and political thinking to focus on the ends to which planning practice should be directed and specifying the means necessary to deliver such ends. This family of planning theory includes Just City, advocacy planning and phronetic planning approaches. Another prominent vein of planning theory is primarily occupied with critiquing consensus focused approaches, and is illustrated by neoliberal and post-political critiques, as well as work on the dark side of planning. Although different in their particularities, what all these approaches have in common is a concentration on what planning should or shouldn’t do, rather than what planning is. 1 Linking these approaches together is an implicit prioritisation of means over ends, such that democracy, participation, recognition, respect, (re)distribution and avoiding abuses of power become the focus through which the formulation and delivery of ends are evaluated. In this sense, a concern with means is implicitly privileged over, or even conflated with ends in theorising and interpreting practice. For example, a common theory-infused planning analysis would seek the provision of more affordable housing (ends) through greater state intervention in house building (means #1) and collaborative methods in decision-making (means #2), rather than seeking the provision of more affordable housing (ends #1), by relying primarily on a private sector dominated system of property companies acquiring and developing land banks in response to market dynamics (means), with the ultimate aim of maximising shareholder profit (ends #2)