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Synthesis and characterisation of Fe(III) and Co(II) complexes: a magnetic study
No full textAbstract not currently available
The detection of perfluoro carboxylic acids in complex environmental matrices utilising ultrasound-assisted extraction and chromatographic analysis
Get PDFAnthropogenic chemicals are an essential part of modern life, infiltrating everyday life as well as industrial applications. While those compounds are beneficial in many ways with their intended use, dissemination into the environment has become a significant concern. One class of compounds, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), have been of particular interest to research, due to their potential adverse effects on non-target species and prolonged residence times in the environment, hence, monitoring of concentration levels is advisable. Wastewater treatment facilities have since been identified as a crucial point source of contamination, recognising that traditional treatment processes are not designed to breakdown complex chemicals and chemical mixtures. By comparison, the practice of sewage sludge (biosolids) application to agricultural land remains less scrutinised despite presenting a more diffuse and unpredictable prospective entry route for contaminants into agriculture and the wider environment, however, readily availability and economic advantage over conventional inorganic fertiliser keeps the application of sludge products relevant.
This thesis describes the method development of a gas chromatographic – mass spectrometric (GC-MS) technique for the detection of perfluoro carboxylic acids (PFCAs) with electron impact ionisation. Optimisation of the methods progressed through the evaluation of instrumental parameters and successfully separated and detected PFCAs (PFHpA (C7) – PFDoA (C12)) with a limit of detection of 25 ng/mL respectively. Efficacy of the method was dependent on the degree of volatility and interaction of compounds with the engaged stationary phase, with smaller PFCAs, ranging from PFBA (C4) to PFHxA (C6), ultimately not successfully retained in the process.
A previously implemented ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) method for the detection of pharmaceuticals in biosolids was adapted and optimised for the detection of perfluoro carboxylic acids in biosolids and soil matrices. The amount of soil undergoing extraction was investigated in the process, with 1 gram of soil achieving comparably lower recoveries to 0.5 grams of soil, albeit with improved, reduced relative standard deviations, fitting with the previously optimised to 1 gram of biosolids for the process. The implementation of multiplexing, the simultaneous extraction of three samples, was found to be consistent across the employed sonication device and reduced the sample preparation time by 66 %.
The application of liquid chromatography and orbitrap mass spectrometry (LC-Orbitrap-MS) analysis overcame issues with the detection of smaller PFCAs and overall sensitivity observed GC-MS, however, matrix effects had to be addressed in the process. All investigated PFCAs, ranging from PFBA to PFDoA were detected across six biosolids batches whereas biosolids-amended soils collected over 2 years were found to contain varying levels of predominantly PFHpA and PFDA. Regardless of the continued biannual biosolids application, differences in the PFCA concentration profiles in soil were observed with a spike and successive decrease in concentration within a month of the initial monitored biosolids application. The comparison with agricultural soil that never received biosolids-amendment does not show any significant contamination with PFCAs and hence suggests that the biosolids-amendment is responsible for the introduction of PFCAs into the soil environment receiving the biosolids treatment despite discrepancies in PFCA profiles. The utilisation of UAE and LC-Orbitrap-MS was able to reliably detect PFCA concentrations in both, biosolids and soils, making it a suitable approach for the investigation of environmental trace analysis
A microhistory of Port Glasgow c.1841 with particular reference to the economic and social role of Irish migrants
Get PDFThe purpose of this microhistory is to identify if interrogation of Census data (1841) can contribute meaningfully to a greater understanding of the experiences of pre-famine Irish migrants in Scotland. This is achieved by examining the economic and social circumstances of Irish migrants in the small town of Port Glasgow, on the west coast of Scotland, in the period immediately preceding the famine in Ireland c.1845. The detailed interrogation of Census data (1841) undertaken in this research, whilst recognising limitations inherent in such data, demonstrates the number of Irish people who were present in Port Glasgow in 1841, and reveals the ‘layers’ of their lives as individuals, family members, workers, friends, and neighbours. By consulting relevant primary and secondary sources and legislation pertaining to housing, employment, education, and Poor Law provision this microhistory offers a fuller appreciation of some aspects of the lives and work of Irish people in Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century. Where appropriate perceptions of Irish people as being ‘alien’ or ‘the other’ have been qualified.
Detailed scrutiny of a sample comprising three Enumeration Districts in Census returns pertaining to Port Glasgow (1841), has contributed to an understanding of the number of, mainly working class, first and second generation Irish people who were present in these areas of Port Glasgow at that time. Appropriate comparisons between Greenock, Paisley, Dundee, and Port Glasgow have been employed to consider the effects, if any, of location, place of birth, gender, age, and/or generational differences. The important economic contribution made by Irish men, boys, women, and girls in the textile industries of Port Glasgow has been explored in detail and the notion that Irish male workers were predominately labourers has been contested.
This microhistory has highlighted the importance of local research, such as this, which qualifies generalisation which may be found in studies of large urban conurbations due to the volume of data. Only by looking beyond ‘the numbers’ can the lives and work of Irish people in Scotland in the nineteenth century be more fully appreciated
Analysing the serological response to feline coronavirus and potential for cross-reactivity with SARS-CoV-2
No full textAbstract not currently available
Infrastructures of solidarity: the spatial politics of the left in 1980s Scotland
Get PDFThis thesis is an exploration of unemployed workers’ centres, women’s centres, and lesbian and gay bookshops as infrastructures of solidarity on the left in 1980s Scotland, with a particular focus on Glasgow and Edinburgh. I examine the construction, running, and closure of various spaces, demonstrating the ways in which the crafting of these infrastructures intimately shaped the spatial politics of solidarity produced within them. I propose that these are uniquely illuminating case studies through which to understand the myriad constitutions of the political left in 1980s Scotland. I build on Massey’s key theorisations on space, as a product of social relations and as a domain of multiplicity, to interrogate the ways in which infrastructures of solidarity were shaped by various political and emotional trajectories (Massey, 2007). This thesis draws from a set of oral history interviews that I conducted between May 2021 and February 2022. Consequently, I argue that the historical emotional geographies of solidarity in 1980s Scotland are best emotively and reflectively explored through oral history interviews.
This thesis makes a number of central contributions. First, I contend that an analysis of solidarities that are built in particular spaces can reveal the inter-play of different subjectivities that shape relationships and acts of solidarity. The process(es) of crafting infrastructures of solidarity reveals how left-wing activists negotiated questions of space, funding, and labour in ways that did not always align exactly with the proposed aims of the centre or bookshop in question. The insights gleaned from these infrastructures of solidarity reinforce Doreen Massey’s assertion that you cannot take any space as given along the lines of a predetermined location or subjectivity (Massey, 2005). As such, this thesis attends to an existing gap in historical and geographical literature regarding a detailed examination of spaces such as unemployed workers’ centres, women’s centres, and lesbian and gay bookshops. Second, I demonstrate the ways in which fluid conceptions of space, as spheres of multiplicity, can further strengthen theorisations of solidarity as a generative political relation often constructed between diverse political groups (Featherstone, 2012; Massey, 1999). I centre the interpersonal relationships built within and between particular spaces, arguing that accounting for these in an analysis of the coexistence of difference within these sites, allows for a nuanced and generative conception of solidarity. Thirdly, I demonstrate that engaging with the complex emotional reflections produced by solidarity when negotiated across diverse political groups should be central to our understandings of how solidarity is built and maintained over time. From this, I stress that care is an integral relation to factor into an analysis of these emotional relationships of solidarity. The empirical material I engage with throughout this chapter evidences the thoughtful care-full solidarities that sustained those organising within these infrastructures and ultimately the spaces themselves.
Finally, I make important methodological contributions in this thesis. By centring the inter-subjective relationship between the oral history interviewees and I, I develop a framework for a politically grounded, collective research practice that captures the historical geographies of solidarity and struggle as we organise. I consider how the production of oral histories can enable those of us involved in political struggle to look both back and forward simultaneously. Doreen Massey (1999) proposed that engaging with the multiplicity of space insists on the genuine openness of the future (p.3). I write from these foundations, to assert the practical contributions of this thesis in the building and doing of solidarity
Reimagining international human rights law in the context of climate change
No full textAbstract not currently available
Characterising the dynamic tissue and immune response to radiotherapy in rectal cancer
No full textAbstract not currently available
Interactive shared visuo-tactile perception and learning in robotics
Get PDFHumans possess the ability to seamlessly integrate perceptual information from vision and tactile sensing to maintain a high-level cognitive understanding of the environment. Similarly, leveraging vision and tactile sensing can enable robots to interact with novel objects in unstructured environments. This thesis presents novel approaches for visuo-tactile perception and learning in robotics, focussing on object pose estimation, recognition, and reconstruction.
For robust pose estimation of unknown objects in dense clutter, a novel recursive filtering formulation termed translation-invariant Quaternion filter (TIQF) and its global-optimal version stochastic TIQF (S-TIQF) with visuo-tactile point cloud data are proposed in this thesis. A two-robot team with vision and tactile sensing autonomously declutters the scene and retrieves the pose of the target object which can be opaque or transparent using STIQF. Moreover, S-TIQF is deployed to correct hand-eye calibration with arbitrary objects in-situ which is necessary for shared perception. In addition to rigid objects, the pose tracking of articulated objects is a challenging task that requires integration of vision and tactile sensing. A novel Manifold Unscented Kalman Filter method on the SE(3) Lie Group termed ArtReg is presented, which is used for tracking the pose of objects. Using ArtReg, a novel framework is designed for detecting, tracking, and the goal-driven manipulation of unknown objects (single, multiple, or articulated) without assuming any prior knowledge regarding object shape or dynamics.
This thesis also presents a new vision-to-tactile cross-modal learning approach for object recognition where the network is trained with dense visual point clouds and tested with sparse point clouds acquired from tactile sensors. A novel unsupervised domain adaptation loss function is proposed to minimise the gap between the visual and tactile domains. Cross-modal adaptation allows the robotic system to switch to tactile sensing in case vision sensing is compromised, thereby increasing the robustness of the system.
Object reconstruction is another fundamental perceptual challenge that enables downstream tasks such as pose estimation and recognition. This thesis introduces a novel deep learning-based 3D object reconstruction approach utilising sparse tactile point cloud data to accurately recover the geometry of category-level unknown transparent objects leveraging only synthetic data for training. Furthermore, it is also demonstrated with visuo-tactile point clouds for opaque objects, wherein the tactile data are used to refine the shape in regions of uncertainty in the visual data.
The proposed methods have been rigorously validated with extensive experiments on standard datasets and robot experiments and have been demonstrated to outperform state of-the-art approaches
Enhancing cognitive outcomes in paediatric epilepsy: a feasibility study and systematic review
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