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Risky business: understanding non-Israelite mothers as risk-taking legacy makers
Full text linkOf the thousands of characters in the Hebrew Bible, both named and unnamed, less than 15% are women, and an even smaller amount of those are given names—an estimated 170. Whilst the field of research on female biblical characters is naturally limited by the small amount of individuals to explore, feminist biblical scholarship often seeks to fill the gaps left by the original authors of the text. This might include exegetical approaches, such as my own, which provide women with fundamental—and yet often lacking in the original text—voices of representation. In this thesis, I focus on female characters who are mothers; as is so keenly promoted by the patriarchal society of which they find themselves a part, motherhood is an important role which provides social security. Each of these characters—Hagar, Lot’s daughters and Tamar—can be said to be in an individually complicated position, where their decision to transcend their low social position leaves them with a choice to either remain at the mercy of the patriarch in their lives or commit an act which may either appear counter-intuitive or in some cases abhorrently immoral. Upon first inspection, the actions taken by each woman appear to far outweigh the immediate threat which they are under; however, in each case, the gravity of the negative circumstances that each character must feel that they are condemned to is illuminated by the drastic risk which they take. The birth of a child in each instance spares women from their situation and goes beyond promising a secure life, but promises them their legacy
Unpacking expectancy in digital interventions for mental well-being
Full text linkAlthough there are many digital interventions specifically designed for Mental Well-Being (MWB) support, low engagement and high dropout rates are commonly reported (Borghouts et al. 2021; Baumel et al. 2019). As people often bypass specialized tools in favour of general-purpose technologies for MWB, this thesis draws on expectancy as a lens to understand what impedes their uptake and use in practice, and to inform new design interventions. Across three empirical studies and an exploration of a design prototype, the thesis explores how expectancy shapes whether, in MWB contexts, digital technologies feel approachable or burdensome, relevant or misaligned and therefore frustrating. This thesis uncovers that expectancy narrows or broadens with MWB states and mediates how users interpret digital technology through effort and performance expectancy. Rather than creating new specialised applications from scratch, through the design prototype Chatty, the thesis also demonstrates how scaffolding by adding a lightweight mediating layer, can help better align general-purpose technologies with users’ needs and expectancies. By foregrounding expectancy as a mediating mechanism and a design principle, the thesis contributes both theoretical and practical insights and offers some crucial design implications
Leveraging new forms of data for human-centric urban analytics
Full text linkUrban environments are becoming increasingly diverse, dynamic, and complex ecosystems. This transformation is driven by global urbanisation, rising population densities, and technological advancements. Understanding urban environments is becoming both essential and challenging due to their rapid evolution and inherent dynamism. Traditional methods often struggle to meet such demand. Therefore, there is a growing need to leverage new forms of urban data that can capture contextual and behavioural insights at a higher frequency to facilitate timely and responsive decision-making within urban environments.
In recent decades, the widespread use of smart devices, data-sharing platforms, and improvements in computational hardware have facilitated the continuous generation of new forms of urban data. Advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning models, along with such data, have opened up significant opportunities for developing cost-effective and scalable applications that enhance our understanding of urban environments from new perspectives. This thesis makes three complementary contributions to the field of human-centric urban analytics.
First, it presents an innovative approach for building height estimation by leveraging ubiquitous mobile signals. The proposed approach provides a cost-effective, globally accessible, and efficient solution for creating 3D maps, which requires no dedicated equipment beyond consumer-level mobile phones. Second, the thesis contributes humancentric research to support humans in cities. It demonstrates the effectiveness of UltraWideband (UWB) signals for fine-grained human activity recognition, further emphasising its cost-effective, non-intrusive, and reliable potentials. Additionally, the thesis analyses urban pedestrian disorientation in complex city environments based on survey data from the Greater London Area. The research identifies and quantifies factors leading to disorientation, employing expert-led Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and data-driven regression methods. Both studies offer insights for designing more inclusive and navigable urban spaces. Third, this thesis addresses an often-overlooked issue in the development of deep learning models for positioning: temporal bias in visual urban datasets. Using cross-view geo-localisation (CVGL) as a case study, this thesis evaluates the performance of two state-of-the-art CVGL models on an original benchmark dataset and a custom dataset spatially aligned with the benchmark. Our findings reveal significant degradation in model performance due to temporal variations between two datasets. Semantic segmentation and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) explainability framework are used to further illustrate how temporal visual changes affect model reliability.
In summary, this thesis presents an effective framework for urban analytics that prioritises human-centric approaches. It covers the collection and creation of custom datasets in new formats, as well as the development of novel sensing methods at various scales. The research offers valuable insights aimed at improving positioning and navigation services, while also expanding humans’ understanding of urban environments. Importantly, it identifies hidden biases in urban data applications. Overall, this work demonstrates how emerging data sources and analytical techniques can improve our ability to model, understand, and design smarter and more inclusive urban environments
Controlling cell behaviour: the connection between topography and mechanical properties of biomaterials
Full text linkCells respond to their mechanical environment in vivo, which can be separated into the stiffness and topography of the environment. It drives the cell phenotype. The topography within a range of 100 nm is of special interest because it falls within the size range of protein adhesions. Thus, it is replicated in vitro in fabricated biomaterials to study the effect of the mechanical environment. This thesis aims to investigate the response of the preosteoblast cell line MC3T3 as a well-studied standard cell line to its mechanical environment, with a focus on morphological profiling and traction force microscopy. We analyse the phenotype based on the morphology of the cells using the Cell Painting method. The cell response is dependent on the mechanotransduction pathway. Using activators and inhibitors of the mechanotransduction pathway in combination with 100 nm diameter nanopits showed a mechanotransduction response over time, from an initial Ca2+ signalling to a decrease in intracellular tension and adhesion after four days, and ultimately to senescence and commitment to osteogenic differentiation, as indicated by decreased filopodia and lamellipodia formation. The nanopits have a diameter of 100 nm, a depth of 100 nm, and a centre-tocentre spacing of 300 nm in both square and hexagonal arrays, with and without controlled disorder. We analyse 78 different types of nanopits with varying diameters, disorder, and pitch, as well as six gratings with depths of 200 nm and widths ranging from 200 nm to 10 µm, to have an in-depth analysis of the correlation between phenotype and topography parameters. The gratings cause a substantially different cell morphology compared to the nanopits. They need to be smaller than 5 µm to influence cell morphology. The disorder has the strongest correlation with changes in morphology from the studied topography parameters. We aim to combine the nanotopography with the material stiffness of the biomaterial in the analysis and study the effect of varying nanotopographies on cellular traction forces. However, we are unable to study it due to the challenging fabrication of the required hierarchical micropillars with nanopits on top. We successfully created polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) micropillars with a diameter of 5.93 ± 0.15 µm and a height of 18.61 ± 0.28 µm using a SU-8 master. We measured a traction force of 10 nN, which aligns with the traction forces reported in the literature for smaller diameter pillars with lower spring constants
Explicit object-centric video prediction with deep learning models
Full text linkVideo prediction is a crucial task for intelligent agents such as robots and autonomous vehicles, it enables them to anticipate and act early on time-critical incidents. Many state of-the-art video prediction methods typically model the dynamics of a scene jointly and implicitly and seeing it as a single entity, without any explicit decomposition into separate objects. This is sub-optimal, as every object in a dynamic scene has their own pattern of movement, typically somewhat independent of others. Therefore, we hypothesize that explicit modelling of moving objects is crucial for video prediction in limited data and compute scenarios.
We first investigate video prediction with multiple moving and interacting objects in a static camera setting within the context of a latent-transformer as the video predictor. We conduct detailed and carefully-controlled experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets; our results show that decomposing a dynamic scene leads to higher quality predictions compared with models of a similar capacity that lack such decomposition. We then investigate the trajectory prediction of occluded objects and scenes with background motion which is a common phenomena in real-world scenarios. We introduce explicit motion information, depth map and point flow, to assist the prediction model we proposed previously. We investigate this approach in both synthetic and real-world scenarios. The experimental results shows that with the integration of explicit motion information, the predicted trajectory of dynamic objects is more accurate. We finally investigate the case of deformable objects such as scenes in garment manipulation tasks. We introduced a diffusion variant of our proposed video prediction model to better handle the motion prediction of fully deformable objects because of its continuous nature compared to transformer based architectures. By testing it on a garment manipulation dataset, we find that our diffusion-based variant outperformed our transformer-based models.
Our findings suggest that for video prediction models to accurately model motion patterns inside a dynamic scene, scaling up holistic models are inefficient and recourse consuming. In contrast, decomposition of objects and modeling with their explicit motion information can be a better and more efficient alternative compared to monolithic models with same capacity. Furthermore, this setting implies that it can be more useful in closed-world settings like robotic manipulation tasks where limited objects are in the scene
Dissecting the molecular and evolutionary mechanisms of amphibian colour variation
No full textAbstract not currently available
Vernacular name motivations of British birds
Full text linkDespite assertions to the contrary in the wider literature, a number of the vernacular names of British birds remain undeciphered or insecurely resolved. Some, like Avocet, are found to be borrowings from other languages, at which point etymologists end their enquiries; others, like Barnacle, have remained seemingly intractable because their word-history is convoluted and confused. Still others have been interpreted over long periods of time by folk-etymology, a powerful, persistent and obscuring force which tries to make sense of opaque or obsolete lexical items. The reputed ‘rolling’ flight of the Roller, the apparent predilection of the Missel Thrush for mistletoe berries, the supposed fondness of the Chaffinch for husks, and the presumed ‘foolishness’ of the Dotterel may be classic cases of this type, where plausible errors have endured, in some cases, for hundreds of years.
In this thesis the dataset consists of 51 vernacular bird names whose origins are described by the OED and other authorities as uncertain, unknown or obscure, or where the current motivations, in my view, are insecurely resolved. I have re-analysed the evidence, including the etymologies of the OED, Lockwood, Desfayes and others, and have taken into account the panoply of synonyms in English and Scots dialects and in related European languages, uncovering their underlying naming motivations to provide context.
In each case I have been able to anchor the motivations more securely in the evidence, or suggest new and more accurate motivations based on a reappraisal of linguistic elements in synthesis with a sound ornithology. An approach which balances both viewpoints is demonstrated here.
I have created a system of categories and more finely-tuned sub-categories which has enabled me to tabulate and graphically illustrate my findings. I draw conclusions from these results, for example that naming motivations are often combinations, reflecting the myriad impression made on the senses by observation of the bird in its habitat.
Finally I have set out some limitations in the thesis, which I hope will serve as a platform and a stepping stone to further research
The threat of Trump: the religious rhetoric of the Trump administration and the threat it poses to LGBTQ+ people and their existence
Full text linkThis dissertation researches the role of religious rhetoric of the Trump administration and the implications of this on the LGBTQ+ community in the United States. This discussion unveils the motives of the Republican party and how the political division in the U.S. has been driven deeper. As a result of this religious rhetoric, the LGBTQ+ community faces discrimination and the stripping of their legal protections.
The document’s argument surrounds the current political and cultural paradigm shift happening in the United States. Donald Trump is using religion to gain popularity with Christian conservatives while giving a platform for extreme leftist political beliefs. Trump is shifting the political window to an unprecedent moment in American history that allows for discrimination of vulnerable people. Anthony Kwame Appiah’s work on moral revolutions is considered in his book The Honor Code. Appiah argues that moral revolutions and cultural shifts come from the honor that is placed on individuals. In these circumstances, the moral shift is going back in time and changing American people’s acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community negatively. Pope Francis’s writing and statements on LGBTQ+ people are examples of how religion can be a more positive intervention. Religion does not have to be a threat to LGBTQ+ people’s lives rather an inclusive community.
The dissertation includes government documents outlining laws surrounding LGBTQ+ legal protections and definitions of LGBTQ+ identities. Donald Trump’s Executive Orders are used as data surrounding the discrimination of LGBTQ+ people. Data was collected from the Pew Research Center about U.S. electoral polls, U.S. religious affiliations, and opinions surrounding the LGBTQ+ community. Along with this, data was collected from studies that research the impact of Trump’s legal actions on the LGBTQ+ community. The various sources are incorporated to discuss the religious rhetoric of conservative Christians and how they have strengthened their political base. I argue that this has been accomplished through using religion as a uniting force for conservative Christians for politicians to gain re-election and push their agendas.
This research points to the importance of separation of state and church in the U.S. government. As well as the need for diverse education, legislation and cultural norms that encourage inclusion. The research also points to the dangerous political divide in the United States that includes conservative Christians and their ideas surrounding a traditional America. Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ campaign paired with religious undertones is a political strategy to strengthen his political base to be re-elected in 2024. The result is detrimental to America’s democracy and vulnerable people’s legal protections
Habitat use and abundance of mesocarnivores and deer along Eastern Loch Lomond
Full text linkHabitats play a crucial role in the lives of every animal, providing the necessary resources for a species to live and reproduce. For mesocarnivores, a diverse group of predatory species with wide variation in diet and social behaviours, habitat requirements for feeding and reproduction may vary. In Scotland, woodlands are often favoured by mesocarnivores, in contrast, Scotland’s native deer are more flexible in their habitat use, occurring in woodland and open moorland, which are suitable for grazing. The aim of this study was to investigate habitat use and abundance of mesocarnivores and deer along the Eastern side of Loch Lomond with the goal of identifying favoured habitats and to estimate population density. This was undertaken by the deployment of camera traps in three different locations from April-June 2024. Results showed that mesocarnivores (badger, pine marten, red fox) did not favour any specific habitats, but roe deer were more frequently recorded in broadleaf woodlands and red deer in moorland compared to other habitats. Using random encounter models (REMs), estimated population densities for all species were within the range of previous estimated abundance across other regions of Scotland. In conclusion, this study demonstrates effective methods of examining the habitat use and abundance of mammals within a localized area of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. These field and analytical methods could be applied in future to a wide geographical area to provide useful information for the conservation and management of these species
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