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Class politics and ideology in revolutionary Egypt
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 273-306.1. A theoretical foundation -- 2. State development, class, and ideology in early capitalist Egypt -- 3. Sadat and the origins of Egyptian neoliberalism -- 4. Mubarak 1981-2004: the neoliberal state takes shape -- 5. Mubarak II, 2004-2011 -- 6. Revolution and counter-revolution -- 7. Sisi triumphant -- Conclusion.Egypt's revolution of 2011 has attracted a significant degree of scholarly attention in the years following the dramatic events since Mubarak's ousting. Attempts to explain these events have come from a variety of theoretical standpoints, with a recent wave of Marxist explanations leading the radical interpretations of the events. These works identify the material conditions that ordinary Egyptians were subject to as one of the most significant explanatory factors in their analyses, but tend to downplay discussion of ideology. This thesis looks to the theory of Antonio Gramsci to explain the alarming continuity of authoritarian rule in Egypt, and places current events in a longer history of Egyptian capitalism. By focussing on the dialectical interconnection of the economic structures and the ideological superstructures, this thesis analyses how the dominant ideologies from Egypt's early integration in the world capitalist system have been reproduced, diluted, and systematically perverted by the regimes of republican Egypt. Separating class groups on the grounds of ideological affiliation, rather than strictly on their place in the nation's relations of production, allows for the contest between various political blocs under the leadership of competing fractions of the bourgeoisie to be at the core of the analysis. As such, while accepting that the uprising against Mubarak's rule was an organic expression of popular revolt against his rule, this thesis argues that the revolution was quickly subverted by a counter-revolutionary pushback by the bourgeoisie in its various guises. The ensuing contest between three fractions of the capitalist class, divided on ideological lines rather than economic, has demonstrated the enduring relevance of nationalism and the notion of a moral economy between state and workers. Ultimately, by looking at Egypt as an integral state- in which there is a dialectical unity of civil society and political society, we gain a fuller understanding of the disheartening outcome of the Tahrir revolution1 online resource (306 pages
Temporal and spatial variability of phytoplankton fluxes in the Australian and New Zealand Sectors of the Southern Ocean
No full textThesis by publication.Bibliography: pages 302-324.Chapter One. General introduction -- Chapter Two. Biogeochemical flux and phytoplankton succession : a year-long sediment trap record in the Australian sector of the Subantarctic zone -- Chapter Three. Diatom and coccolithophore flux assemblages from the Subtropical Front region, east of New Zealand -- Chapter Four. Reviews and syntheses : diatom and coccolithophore fluxes from temperate to polar southern hemisphere sediment traps -- Chapter Five. Diversity and taxonomic identification of Shionodiscus spp. in the Australian sector of the subantarctic zone -- Chapter Six. General conclusion -- Appendix.Phytoplankton are key to global carbon cycling, and critical to understanding a changing climate. Phytoplankton such as diatoms remove CO2 from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, of which one fifth is exported to the deep ocean in a process termed the “Biological Pump”. In opposition to the Biological Pump, the “Carbonate Counter-Pump” releases CO2, driven by calcifying phytoplankton such as coccolithophores. Thus carbon export depends upon phytoplankton community composition, quantified with sediment traps, which preserve a time series of sinking particles. Sediment trap deployments are patchy in the Subantarctic and Subtropics and little work has been done quantifying the phytoplankton. This thesis quantified assemblages and flux of diatoms and coccolithophores from Australian and New Zealand deployments, were not previously well characterized, and discusses their role in export.Subantarctic Australian traps captured among the highest coccolith fluxes of the southern hemisphere, while diatoms were the main silica-exporters. Species-level phytoplankton seasonal ecological succession was also reported for the first time in the Australian region. Scanning Electron Microscopy culminated in a taxonomic study describing the poorly-known diatom genus Shionodiscus, improving our understanding of key Australian taxa.In Subantarctic New Zealand, a 48-day “pulse” bloom of Pseudo-nitzschia diatoms comprised 98%of annual diatom flux. New Zealand Subtropical traps exhibited strong coastal and benthic phytoplankton input, providing evidence for significant particle advection as a result of local oceanography, the Wairarapa Eddy system. Finally, diatom and coccolith fluxes from 46 sediment trap deployments were mapped from the Subtropics to Antarctica, revealing a broad trend of increasing diatom flux from 30° S to the coast of Antarctica, which will potentially inform future trapping efforts. Records of phytoplankton seasonality and abundance are key to understanding the physical and chemical drivers of regional differences in the Biological Pump, and how carbon cycling may experience regional change in the future, under future climate change. The work undertaken for this thesis provides a valuable record against which future studies may compare, and makes a compelling argument for the continuation of sediment trap studies.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xiv, 220 pages) illustrations (some colour), map
The role of personality on spatial behaviour in merino sheep (Ovis aries)
No full textThesis by publication.Bibliography: pages 47-58.Animal personality research has yielded personality-dependent spatial behaviours in many species. However, much of this research is focused on dispersal and foraging patterns. This ignores many other aspects of animal spatial behaviour, such as movement patterns, that occur on a daily basis. Our research investigates travel distances and patterns of paddock exploration in merino sheep to determine if they are influenced by personality traits. We combined assays of two traits, boldness and exploration, quantified in captivity, with high resolution GPS data of freeranging sheep over three months. We found evidence for boldness and exploration tendency as personality traits, but did not find inter-individual repeatability in distance travelled per day or time taken to explore 3km2. Consequently, we found no personality-dependent space use in merino ewes. This expands our understanding of what influences space use in gregarious species, like sheep, and suggest a stronger role of external environment on movement rather than personality.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (58 pages) illustration
Manager professional background: impact on performance and style
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 53-57.1. Introduction - 2. Institutional background of the Chinese mutual fund industry -- 3. Empirical predication -- 4. Sample and data -- 5. Empirical results and analysis -- 6. Robustness checks -- 7. Fund manager professional experience and new money growth -- 8. Conclusion.The prior professional experience of a manager is important for investors to be able to evaluate the opportunity and risk associated with them. Using a sample of funds and managers taken from Chinese open-ended mutual funds from February 2002 to December 2017, we find that managers with diverse professional experience perform differently and manage their funds in a variety of styles. Managers from government and research backgrounds have a higher risk-adjusted return while facing less market risk. Further detailed analysis shows that managers with government and research backgrounds have efficient investment skills, although market timing measurements suggest that the source of their informational advantage may differ. In contrast, managers with an investment background have higher raw returns generated by following ordinary investment strategies and taking higher systematic risk. Fund managers from a banking background make more money growth on their funds and compensate for their lower performance in generating returns. These results are robust after controlling time and fund fixed effects. In summary, we provide a possible explanation for the mechanism of the impact of prior professional experience on fund performance, whereby managers use the comparative advantage accumulated along career to retrieve informational advantage and generate abnormal return.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (viii, 57 pages) graphs, table
A novel course for South Creek catchment
No full textThesis by publication.Bibliography: pages 41-45.The traditional goal of restoration ecology to return ecosystems to their historical conditions is increasingly unfeasible due to high levels of disturbance and ongoing threatening processes such as climate change. A new approach to restoration, termed ‘renewal ecology,’ has been proposed, recognising the need to harmonise biodiversity with human infrastructure, for the benefit of both.This project uses the renewal ecology framework to examine how a degraded ecological riparian community could be transformed into a novel community with high human amenity and biodiversity values.Five sites along creeks in Western Sydney were surveyed to provide benchmark data for the proposed restoration. Measurements at each location included vegetation characteristics and bird diversity as an indicator of biodiversity value and habitat quality of each site. Surveys were also distributed to the Western Sydney community to investigate the attitudes to, and preferences of, local residents to green space.This project thus had three complementary objectives. First, the data collected on the composition of the vegetation communities will inform restoration and management practices for the degraded riparian sites. Second, the relationship of bird diversity to habitat structure will indicate the suitability of native and novel vegetation communities as habitat along riparian corridors. Third, linking the outcomes from the ecological studies with the landscape preferences of Western Sydney residents will inform the design of recreational spaces that will not only benefit biodiversity but also have high value to the local community.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (45,10,3,1 pages) colour illustrations, colour map
A preliminary investigation using unnatural amino acids to stabilise peptide radiotracers
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 51-56.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Results and discussion - synthesis -- Chapter 3. Results and discussion - enzymotic stability -- Chapter 4. Conclusions and future directions -- Chapter 5. Experimental -- Chapter 6. References -- Chater 7. Appendices.Peptide-based radiotracers are a valuable tool for diagnostic and therapeutic applications in nuclear medicine. However, some peptide-based radiotracers exhibit low metabolic stability and are rapidly degraded by proteolytic enzymes in vivo. This rapid degradation contributes to insufficient accumulation and high background radioactivity, ultimately leading to poor diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities.Previous work has shown that peptide-based radiotracers with unnatural amino acids linking the radioisotope and the peptide can improve the metabolic stability of the peptide. A promising unnatural amino acid linker that has demonstrated improvement in metabolic stability of peptides, but is still relatively underexplored, is the β-amino acid.A series of aliphatic and aromatic β-amino acids and their isostere conjugates, linked via their carboxyl groups to the amine group of glycine ethyl ester, were synthesised to assess their comparative metabolic stability. A range of synthetic strategies were performed to obtain the conjugates, which were fully characterised by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. Preliminary in vitro incubation studies with porcine liver esterase (as a model of human esterase) provided some evidence for the aromatic β-amino acid-glycine ethyl ester conjugate being more stable than its α-amino acid analogue, but further studies are needed for more conclusive results.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (viii, 63 pages) diagrams, graphs, table
Context-aware trustworthy service evaluation and recommendation in social internet of things
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 52-61.1. Introduction -- 2. Literature review -- 3. Problem statement and metrics of contextual trust -- 4. Mutual context-aware trustworthy service management in SIoT environments -- 5. Simulation and experiment -- 6. Conclusion.In Social Internet of Things (SIoT) environments, to share SIoT-based services, a large number of users and Internet of Things (IoT) based devices are connected to each other. IoT-based devices establish social relations with each other according to the social relations of their owners in Online Social Networks (OSNs). In such an environment, a big challenge is how to provide trustworthy service evaluation and recommendation. Currently, the prevalent trust management mechanisms employ QoS-based trust and social-relation based trust to evaluate the trustworthiness of service providers. However, the existing trust management mechanisms in SIoT environments do not consider the different contexts of trust. Therefore, dishonest SIoT devices, based on their owners' social relations, can succeed in advertising low-quality servicesor exploiting maliciously provided services.In this thesis, we first propose three contexts of trust in SIoT environments including statusand the environment of devices, and the task type. The experiments demonstrate that our models can select the most trustworthy services with high quality and recommend them with high accuracy to service-consuming devices.1 online resource (61 pages
Histopathological breast-cancer image classification based on machine-learning techniques
No full textThesis by publication.Bibliography: pages 285-317.1. Introduction -- 2. Involvement of machine Learning for breast-Cancer image classiffica-tion : a survey -- 3. Histopathological breast-cancer Image classiffication by Deep Neural Network Techniques guided by local clustering -- 4. Histopathological breast-image classiffication with image enhancement by convolutional neural network -- 5. Local and global feature utilisation for breast-image classiffication by convolutional neural network --6. Frequency-domain information along with LSTM and GRU methods for histopathological breast-image classiffication -- 7. Histopathological breast-image classiffication using local and frequency domains by convolutional neuralnNetwork -- 8. Histopathological breast-cancer Image classiffication with restricted Boltzmann machine along with back propagation -- 9. Histopathological breast-cancer Image classiffication with feature prioritisation -- 10. Conclusion and future work -- 11. List of abbreviations -- References.Machine-Learning (ML) techniques bring a new paradigm which has generated a revolutionary momentum and wrought changes in every day of our modern lives, ranging from autonomous lifestyles to decision-making scenarios. Among the different branches of ML activities, the medical field is notable, covering the field of detection and monitoring as well as the present status of diseases. Among the different medical diseases cancer is a serious threat. In particular, breast cancer is always a serious threat to women. Proper identification and then proper management and monitoring help the patient to recover from the disease, or at least help them to lead a better life. Proper identification and the current status of cancer largely depend on biomedical image analysis, a complex area of understanding. The analysis of these images requires special knowledge. The autonomous finding of Benign and Malignant information based on the images and making a Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system provide both the patient and the doctor with a second layer of confidence and allow them to make a more reliable decision. For the autonomous identification and detection of cancer, digital ML techniques have provided a revolutionary improvement. The recent development of the Deep Neural Network (DNN) and the logic-based algorithm make it possible to detect the target form the image more reliably. In this thesis we have investigated the performance of the DNN-based biomedical image classiffer as well as the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost)-based image classiffierfor the autonomous CAD system.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xxxii, 317 pages) diagrams, graphs, table
Robust reinsurance contracts with risk constraint
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 65-73.Introduction -- 1. Review of the literature -- 2. Methodology -- 3. Formulation -- 4, Robust proportional reinsurance contract -- 5. Special cases -- 6. Expected utility loss of a suboptimal reinsurance contract -- 7. Numerical examples -- 8. Concluding remarks and further research -- Appendices -- Bibliography.This thesis investigates a class of optimal reinsurance contract problems in continuous time. We use the principal-agent framework to incorporate the bargaining between the insurer and the reinsurer. To this end, we extend the reinsurer's relative safety loading factor which is usually a pre-specified constant in the traditional expected value principle to be time-varying and to represent the reinsurance premium.Since the insurance companies should satisfy the regulators' capital requirements and the computation of capital requirements is based on Value-at-Risk (VaR) under Solvency II regime, we introduce the dynamic version of VaR andimpose a dynamic VaR constraint on the insurer. As for the reinsurer, we assumethat she is ambiguity-averse and aims to maximize the expected utility of herterminal wealth under the worst-case scenario of the alternative measures. The dynamic programming technique is applied to derive the principal's Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman-Isaacs (HJBI) equation and the agent's Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman(HJB) equation. Additionally, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions are utilized to settle the constrained optimization problem of the agent. Explicit expressions for the optimal retained proportional of the claims, the optimal reinsurance premium and the corresponding value functions of the insurer and the reinsurer are derived.Finally, we analyze several numerical examples to illustrate economic intuition. Our results show that the reinsurer's ambiguity aversion and the insurer's risk constraint increase the optimal reinsurance premium, which decreases the optimal reinsurance demand of the insurer.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (vi, 73 pages) graph
Behavioural and biological responses of Australian water dragons (Intellagama lesueurii) to urbanization
No full textTheoretical thesis.Thesis by publication.Includes bibliographical references.1. Street fighters: bite force, injury rates and population density of urban Australian water dragons (Intellagama lesueurii) -- 2. Bold new world: urbanisation selects for boldness in a lizard -- 3. Runners and fighters: clutch effects and body size drive innate antipredator behaviour in hatchling lizards -- 4. Anthropic selection: human-altered landscapes drive the development of divergent morphology in an urbanised lizard -- 5. Comparability and repeatability of three commonly used methods for measuring endurance capacity -- 6. Running through the concrete jungle: performance capacity and trade-offs in an urban-living lizard.One of the strongest driving forces of evolution is environmental change. Within the modern era, some of the most rapid environmental change has occurred as a result of urbanisation. As such, recent research aims to understand how species are adapting to urban landscapes (urban evolution) and how natural selection is operating in unnatural environments (anthropic selection). This goal was the cornerstone of my thesis research, using Australian water dragons (Intellagama lesueurii) to examine how the selective forces within urban environments may shape their natural histories and alter their evolutionary trajectory. I took a multidisciplinary approach to explore water dragon urban evolution, by examining traits related to their behavioural ecology (social interactions and spatial organisation, behavioural traits, and innate antipredator responses; Chapters I, II, & III respectively), morphology (body length and size; Chapter IV), and physiology (performance capacity; Chapters V & VI), using both field observations and laboratory experiments. The basis of most of this thesis' research involved contrasting traits of lizards living in, or originating from, populations varying in their levels of urbanisation (urban, semi-natural, and natural). I also examined the mechanisms that may have caused urban-derived divergence of morphological and behavioural traits (i.e., heritable traits vs phenotypic plasticity). My research identified several urban-derived divergent phenotypes, including increased rates of aggressive encounters, increased boldness, decreased body size paired with increased limb and head size, and decreased endurance capacity. My research also identified that both divergent behavioural (boldness) and morphological (body length and size) traits have a genetic origin, suggesting they are heritable and may be adaptive. Overall, this thesis provides insight into the urban evolution of water dragons in the Sydney region, and provides a framework for using a multidisciplinary approach to rigorously examine mechanistic urban ecology and evolution.1 online resource (188 pages : illustrations, maps