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Fantasy Proneness and Imaginary Companions as Predictors of Psychosis-Like Experiences
No full textOverview: This thesis investigated the relationship between fantasy proneness and psychosis-like experiences. The systematic literature review focused on the specific manifestation of fantasy proneness of having an imaginary companion and its association with psychosis-like experiences while the empirical research paper investigated the relationship between psychosis-like experiences and fantasy proneness more generally. Chapter 1, Systematic Literature Review: A systematic literature review was performed to identify and review quantitative studies reporting on the relationship between having an imaginary companion and psychosis-like experiences. Ten papers were eligible for inclusion in the review. Evidence of a relationship between having an imaginary companion and some form of psychosis-like experience was found in all studies, with effect sizes ranging from small to large. Chapter 2, Empirical Research Paper: A quantitative cross-sectional study was carried out which investigated the relationship between fantasy proneness and psychosis-like experiences in a non-clinical student sample of 200 participants. Fantasy proneness correlated positively with psychosis-like experiences with a moderate effect size. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis found that fantasy proneness was a statistically significant predictor of psychosis-like experiences after relevant demographic variables and known predictors of dissociation and self-concept clarity were controlled for. However, the effect size of this relationship was small after accounting for the effects of demographic factors, dissociation and self-concept clarity. Dissociation was the strongest predictor of psychosis-like experiences. Chapter 3, Critical Appraisal: Conclusions from the systematic literature review and empirical research paper are provided along with a further discussion of strengths and weaknesses of both papers. Reflections on key decisions and challenges in the process of both research papers are provided, along with suggestions for future research directions. Chapter 4, Ethics Application: The university ethics application is provided along with supporting documents
Nitrogen partitioning between plant species and soil microbes in alpine heath
No full textNitrogen is rapidly taken up by plants and microbes, but questions remain as to which forms are preferred. Using in situ stable isotope labelling (13C and 15N), we show that co-existing plant species of alpine heath mainly take up ammonium and nitrate, passing 15N from root to shoot over time, leading to accumulated nitrogen in the shoots (over 10-fold increase compared with roots), with more complex organic nitrogen forms such as amino acids taken up to a lesser extent. Conversely, soil microbes preferred amino acids, potentially as a side-effect of satisfying their carbon requirements to build cellular structures. We show that competition for nitrogen can be alleviated by differing growth rates in plants and varying microbial preference of nitrogen forms
Do the Poor Gain More? : The Impact of Secondary-Care Expenditure on Health Inequality
No full textBackground: Quasi-experimental studies of mortality variation and trends among large administrative areas of England in the 2000s and early 2010s have suggested that more deprived populations gain larger mortality benefits from marginal increases in public expenditure on secondary care. Objective: To identify causal effects of marginal changes in expenditure on mortality variation in 2018 among 32,784 more and less deprived small areas of England, with a mean population of 1700, allowing more fine-grained measurements of deprivation and mortality. Methods: We used cross-sectional data on secondary-care funding allocated to 195 National Health Service administrative areas in England in 2018/19 and employed a well-established instrumental variable approach based on the “distance from target” component of the funding formula, which generates quasi-exogenous variation in funding based on historical factors unrelated to current need for secondary care. Results: We found an inverted U-shape pattern of mortality gains by deprivation group, whereby the middle group gained significantly more than others. However, we could not reject the null hypothesis that the two more deprived groups received the same mortality gain as the two less deprived groups. These findings were robust to extensive sensitivity analysis using different levels of analysis, control variables, mortality outcomes, functional forms, first-stage regression specifications, and exclusions, and our preferred specifications all satisfied standard instrumental variable diagnostic tests. Conclusions: We found that the poor do not always gain more from marginal increases in public expenditure on secondary care and, conversely, might not always bear the largest share of the health opportunity costs of cost-increasing programmes
A hybrid physics-informed neural network for predicting fatigue life of axially loaded grouted connections for offshore wind turbine structures
Get PDFAs a critical component of an offshore wind turbine foundation, grouted connections are susceptible to fatigue failure under long-term loading conditions, which makes the assessment of their fatigue behaviour essential for the overall structural integrity and maintenance. Compared to costly experimental characterization and computationally expensive numerical modelling, there is a high demand for developing a fast, efficient and accurate surrogate model to predict fatigue life. This paper develops a novel hybrid Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) model that integrates both simplified physical constraints and hidden physical laws to predict the fatigue life of axially loaded grouted connections, where the physical knowledge is the relationship between fatigue life and fatigue-related parameters. The results show that the developed hybrid PINN model achieves superior prediction accuracy compared to the current codes of practice, the conventional Deep Neural Network (DNN) model, the PINN model integrating simplified physical constraints (S-PINN), and the PINN model integrating hidden physical laws (H-PINN). To enhance the interpretability of the model, Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) analysis and physical consistency analysis are conducted to assess the contribution of each feature to the fatigue life and to investigate the distribution of predictions with respect to physical consistency. It’s found that the new hybrid PINN model produces predictions that exhibit a higher degree of physical consistency than the purely data-driven DNN model, demonstrating the reliability and robustness of the model
Measurement of single charged pion production in charged-current -Ar interactions with the MicroBooNE detector
Get PDFWe present flux-averaged charged-current cross-section measurements on argon for final states containing exactly one and no other hadrons except nucleons. The analysis uses data from the MicroBooNE experiment in the Booster Neutrino Beam, corresponding to protons on target. Total and single-differential cross-section measurements are provided within a phase space restricted to muon momenta above 150 MeV, pion momenta above 100 MeV, and muon-pion opening angles smaller than 2.65 rad. Differential cross sections are reported with respect to the scattering angles of the muon and pion relative to the beam direction, their momenta, and their combined opening angle. The differential cross section with respect to muon momentum is based on a subset of selected events with the muon track fully contained in the detector, whereas the cross section with respect to pion momentum is based on a subset of selected events rich in pions that have not hadronically scattered on the argon before coming to rest. The latter has not been measured on argon before. The total cross section is measured as at a mean energy of approximately 0.8 GeV. Comparisons of the measured cross sections with predictions from multiple neutrino-nucleus interaction generators show good overall agreement, except at very forward muon angles
Why are you telling me this? : The availability and timing of relevance inferences
Get PDFPart of successful communication involves recognising the purpose of, or the intentions underlying, what speakers choose to say. Often, such pragmatic inferences are studied with an emphasis on informativity. The present work however moves beyond the types of inferences typically studied in prior work and instead investigates inferences from more naturalistic utterances, specifically those whose triviality may invite addressees to reason about why a speaker would have made such a discourse contribution. We present four studies (total N = 777) using offline and online methods to investigate how and when listeners derive relevance inferences from trivial utterances. We manipulate speaker knowledge, speaker style, and linguistic properties of the utterances to show that, even in the absence of explicit emphasis cues, trivial utterances such as “the library walls are blue” are likely to be understood as conveying more than what is stated explicitly (e.g. that the walls used to be a different colour), and that these inferences are more likely to arise when produced by a speaker who is knowledgeable about the situation and who does not typically talk a lot. Our results suggest that comprehenders have pervasive expectations of cooperativity which, when seemingly violated by a speaker’s trivial utterance, prompt reasoning about a speaker’s motivation for speaking to determine how the communicated content is relevant. We then turn to the processing costs of computing triviality-driven inferences and find evidence that there may be a cost to deriving relevance inferences. These findings extend previous work on inferencing, which typically targets specific classes of words that give rise to inferences and demonstrates that broader, systematic inferencing that can arise when addressees reason about speaker goals even in the absence of cues to pragmatic enrichment
Marxist International Relations and Turkish Foreign Policyvis-à-vis the Gulf Countries
No full textBeginning in 2002, the AKP presented its efforts to enhance political, economic, and military relations with the Gulf countries as a demonstration of its “proactive” foreign policy. Nevertheless, the same “proactive” foreign policy has fuelled geopolitical rivalries and economic competition between and among Turkey, the Gulf countries, and Western countries while contributing to relations of dependence among them. This chapter borrows from Marxism/historical materialism in order to explore the Turkish foreign policy vis-à-vis the Gulf countries in accordance with antagonistic class relations and contradictions of capital accumulation. In this sense, it examines the AKP’s “proactive” foreign policy as a form of sub-imperialism pursued by a country that represents the periphery of the world capitalist system
Q&A with Benjamin Dalton: Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film
No full textQ&A with Benjamin Dalton about his new book, which journeys through philosophy, literature, film and (neuro)science to discover how our bodies and brains transform throughout life
International Law as a Driver of Confrontation? UNCLOS and China’s Policy in the South China Sea
Get PDFCould international law contribute to interstate maritime conflicts? A close tracing of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) policies in the South China Sea suggests so. China’s early interactions with the emerging maritime legal order in the 1970s expanded the scope of its interests from disputed island territories to comprehensive jurisdiction over vast swathes of maritime space. Ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1996 prompted Beijing to develop new bureaucratic and enforcement capabilities designed to realize sweeping claims inspired by, though not limited to, UNCLOS entitlements. When these capabilities came to fruition in the mid-2000s, they enabled a sustained, increasingly coercive push for control over the PRC’s maritime periphery, which has continued to the present. Four representative cases of China’s new and ongoing patterns of behaviour demonstrate in specific detail how China’s interactions with the legal regime have contributed to its confrontational on-water behaviour. In short, the PRC’s campaign to control vast swathes of East Asian maritime space was rooted in the party-state’s internalization of concepts of maritime rights through the UNCLOS process, coupled with a rejection of its corresponding limitations
A hybrid spatial-temporal data model for indoor dynamic path planning in a 2D/2.5D environment
No full textAs building structures grow increasingly complex and demands for indoor navigation rise rapidly, representing dynamic indoor environments has become an urgent necessity for indoor path planning. Nevertheless, the majority of existing indoor data models still lack the capacity to depict the changing elements of indoor objects. In this paper, a hybrid data model (NRDM) that combines a node-relation graph (NRG) model and raster map is proposed to represent the temporal information of indoor objects. The spatial, attribute, and semantic information are extracted from a building information model (BIM) to define the subspaces and construct the NRDM. Meanwhile, a door-to-door (D2D) D* Lite algorithm is also proposed to plan the optimal path in a 2D/2.5D dynamic indoor environment for the humanoid robot with the semantic information derived from the BIM. The NRDM and D2D D* Lite algorithm were tested using two datasets (data from a single-story residential building (Dataset 1) and a multi-story office building (Dataset 2)) under two scenarios (door state changes (S1) and indoor fire propagation (S2)). The experimental results show that the NRDM can effectively represent dynamic information in an indoor space. The path lengths obtained by the D2D D*Lite algorithm using Dataset 1 under S1 and S2 are 49.87 m and 27.62 m respectively, and those obtained using Dataset 2 are 93.96 m and 38.73 m respectively. Although the lengths of the paths are longer than those of the two comparative algorithms D* Lite and LPA* in most cases, the paths obtained by D2D D*Lite algorithm can effectively avoid and stay away from obstacles, making the paths safer