93 research outputs found
Greek Tragedy as a Window on the Dispossessed
No full textIn this article Steve Wilmer discusses adaptations of Greek tragedy that highlight the plight of the displaced and the dispossessed, including Janusz Glowacki's Antigone in New York, Marina Carr's Hecuba, and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlenen, which is notably emblematic among appropriations of ancient Greek plays in referencing the problems facing refugees in Europe. He considers how this latter play has been directed in a variety of ways in Germany and Austria since 2013, and how in turn it has been reappropriated for new dramatic performances to further investigate the conditions of refugees. Some of these productions have caused political controversy and one of them has even been physically attacked by a right-wing group. Steve Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. He is the co-editor of ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages (2016), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016), and Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He also edited a special issue of Nordic Theatre Studies in 2015 titled ‘Theatre and the Nomadic Subject’.</jats:p
Products of their Past? Cleavages and Intra-Party Dissent Over European Integration. IHS Political Science Series Paper No. 118. February 2009
No full textWhat explains contemporary intra-party dissent on EU issues? This article develops a cleavage theory model of internal party dissent over European integration. Drawing on Lipset and Rokkan’s classic model of political cleavages and on its applications to party positioning on European integration, I argue that if one seeks to understand when, where, and to what extent internal divisions manifest themselves, one must look to the particular historical vulnerabilities of political parties. Using expert survey data, I demonstrate that the ease with which political parties are able to assimilate the issue of European integration is influenced by the legacy of past political tensions and the extent to which the economic and political aspects of the EU reactivate pre-existing cleavages
Uncharted waters in a new era : an actor-centered constructivist liberal approach to the East China Sea disputes, 2003 - 2008
No full textThis thesis examines the deep bilateral tensions surrounding the East China Sea (ECS) disagreements between Japan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the period from August 19th 2003 to June 18th 2008 from an actor-centred constructivist liberal viewpoint. The East China Sea disputes could be described as a conflicting difference of opinion over a) the demarcation of maritime territory and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in which potentially significant energy deposits exist and b) the ownership of the strategically important and historically sensitive Pinnacle (Senkaku/Diaoyu) Islands. This research addresses the question of why, given the fact that China and Japan have a strong interest in co-operation and stable relations with each other, small incidents in the ECS blow up into larger problems, cause approaches to the East China Sea to wax and wane, and move the relationship in a direction that goes against preferred national objectives? In attempting to unravel this puzzle, this work argues that domestic politics and popular negative sentiment have been the major issues that have greatly amplified and politicised the ECS problems and have significantly affected positive progress in negotiations aimed at managing and stabilising these disputes. By examining these, the thesis addresses the question of why China and Japan have been so constrained in their attempts to find a workable bilateral agreement over disputed energy resources and demarcation in the East China Sea. It also indirectly deals with the question of why the conflicting legal complexities surrounding these disagreements contributed to both states so fervently maintaining and defending their claims
Group art therapy as an adjunctive treatment for people with schizophrenia: a randomised controlled trial (MATISSE).
No full textOBJECTIVE: To examine the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of referral to group art therapy plus standard care, compared with referral to an activity group plus standard care and standard care alone, among people with schizophrenia. DESIGN: A three-arm, parallel group, single-blind, pragmatic, randomised controlled trial. Participants were randomised via an independent and remote telephone randomisation service using permuted blocks, stratified by study centre. SETTING: Study participants were recruited from secondary care mental health and social services in four UK centres. PARTICIPANTS: Potential participants were aged 18 years or over, had a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia, confirmed by an examination of case notes, and provided written informed consent. We excluded those who were unable to speak sufficient English to complete the baseline assessment, those with severe cognitive impairment and those already receiving arts therapy. INTERVENTIONS: Group art therapy was delivered by registered art therapists according to nationally agreed standards. Groups had up to eight members, lasted for 90 minutes and ran for 12 months. Members were given access to a range of art materials and encouraged to use these to express themselves freely. Activity groups were designed to control for the non-specific effects of group art therapy. Group facilitators offered various activities and encouraged participants to collectively select those they wanted to pursue. Standard care involved follow-up from secondary care mental health services and the option of referral to other services, except arts therapies, as required. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Our co-primary outcomes were global functioning (measured using the Global Assessment of Functioning Scale - GAF) and mental health symptoms (measured using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale - PANSS) at 24 months. The main secondary outcomes were level of group attendance, social functioning, well-being, health-related quality of life, service utilisation and other costs measured 12 and 24 months after randomisation. RESULTS: Four hundred and seventeen people were recruited, of whom 355 (85%) were followed up at 2 years. Eighty-six (61%) of those randomised to art therapy and 73 (52%) of those randomised to activity groups attended at least one group. No differences in primary outcomes were found between the three study arms. The adjusted mean difference between art therapy and standard care at 24 months was -0.9 [95% confidence interval (CI) -3.8 to 2.1] on the GAF Scale and 0.7 (95% CI -3.1 to 4.6) on the PANSS Scale. Differences in secondary outcomes were not found, except that those referred to an activity group had fewer positive symptoms of schizophrenia at 24 months than those randomised to art therapy. Secondary analysis indicated that attendance at art therapy groups was not associated with improvements in global functioning or mental health. Although the total cost of the art therapy group was lower than the cost of the two comparison groups, referral to group art therapy did not appear to provide a cost-effective use of resources. CONCLUSIONS: Referring people with established schizophrenia to group art therapy as delivered in this randomised trial does not appear to improve global functioning or mental health of patients or provide a more cost-effective use of resources than standard care alone. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN 46150447. FUNDING: This project was funded by the NIHR Health Technology Assessment programme and will be published in full in Health Technology Assessment; Vol. 16, No. 8. See the HTA programme website for further project information
New algorithms and applications of chemical-shift water-fat magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy on different types of adipose tissues
No full textPh.D.White adipose tissue (WAT) especially at the abdominal level is commonly used as an indicator or measuring variable to study the relationship between lipids and obesity-related diseases. Its main function is to store excessive energy in adipocytes in the form of subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) and visceral adipose tissue (VAT). Chemical-shift water-fat magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been widely used to quantify WAT based on the characteristic of different chemical shift frequency in water and fat protons. In addition, magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is a technique that measures the spectra of metabolites included methylene (CH₂) groups from lipid molecules. Its relative signal to the spectrum of water peak has been used as an alternative to measure internal lipid such as intrahepatic triglyceride. Using water-fat MRI and proton MRS, volume of WAT and fat-fraction of internal organs could be quantitatively measured; however, the existing MRI clinical software is not able to differentiate the sub-groups of WAT which include SAT, VAT and a special type called brown adipose tissue (BAT). The latter is usually intermixed with WAT at the interscapular and supraclavicular regions.To accurately separate abdominal SAT and VAT, and to extract BAT from intermixed WAT, two algorithms have been developed to these ends. The first algorithm (Study 1) utilized the feature of the narrow connecting regions between SAT and VAT. A spoke-like template created by the Bresenham’s Line algorithm and Midpoint Circle algorithm was applied to search for such feature on the fat-only images to achieve the separation. The second algorithm (Study 2) aimed to extract BAT using the features of lower fat-fraction and T2* intensities in BAT compared to those in WAT. Both signals acquired from chemical-shift water-fat MRI were being fitted into a Gaussian mixture model using expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm. The clustering of BAT was based on the joint fat-fraction and T2* intensities. Results showed that the proposed methods were comparable with existing literatures and semi-automatic method.With the above two proposed algorithms, further applications on the study of the relationship between different types of adipose tissues have been carried out. In study 3, a group of patients with morbid obesity who were candidates for bariatric surgery were recruited. They all underwent baseline MRI before their scheduled surgery to capture water-fat images of their body trunks using water-fat mDixon sequence and liver fat spectrum using proton MRS. Two follow-up scans using the same MRI protocol were performed in 6-month and 12-month intervals after operation. The longitudinal data of SAT, VAT, BAT, liver and pancreatic fat-fraction and related blood tests for liver function, glucose and lipid profile of the subjects were compared to evaluate the efficacy of bariatric surgery on patients with morbid obesity. Results demonstrated that bariatric surgery significantly reduced white adipose tissues at the abdominal level, liver and pancreatic fat-fraction while brown adipose tissue remained unchanged.From the previous study in which intrahepatic triglyceride is evaluated, it has been observed that there is strong signal contrast between left and right liver lobes on the water-fat images in obese individuals. In the last study (Study 4), the hypothesis of lipid storage in preference to the right liver lobe was tested in a group of normal and obese individuals using body mass index as a cutoff. The analysis was further split into adult and teenager groups to test whether age plays any role in the storage of hepatic triglyceride as well as hepatic iron deposition. Results suggested that in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver, fat-fraction was significantly higher in the right liver lobe but no difference was observed in healthy subjects. For iron deposition, it was also significantly higher in the right in adults but not in teenagers independent from the live fat level.This thesis is related to study of lipid content in human bodies, which is consisted of both technical development of new algorithms for image processing and their clinical applications. The proposed method for quantification of brown adipose tissue using Gaussian mixture model is an innovative concept and design while the other method proposed for the separation of subcutaneous and visceral adipose tissues is tailor-made aiming to provide quick, automatic and objective measurement of specific types of adipose tissues. The above techniques have further applied on clinical research in the field of obesity and diagnostic radiology.腹部白色脂肪組織被廣泛的應用於脂肪與肥胖相關疾病之間的關係。腹部白色脂肪組織由皮下脂肪組織和內臟脂肪組織組成，其主要作用在於存儲過多的能量。水脂分離磁共振成像（water-fat MRI）基於水和脂肪質子中不同化學位移頻率（chemical-shift）的特徵，已被廣泛用於量化分析白色脂肪組織。另外，磁共振波譜（MRS）利用化學移位頻率來測量脂質分子中包含亞甲基（CH₂）組的代謝物光譜，其與水峰頻譜的相對信號已被用作測量內部脂質，如肝內甘油三酯。使用水脂分離磁共振成像和磁共振波譜學，可以定量的分析白色脂肪和內臟脂肪。然而現有的磁共振軟件不能區分皮下脂肪組織，內臟脂肪組織和特殊的棕色脂肪組織。其中，棕色脂肪通常在肩胛間和鎖骨上區與皮下脂肪組織混合。在研究一、二中，本文提出了兩種基於磁共振的影像處理處理算法，以準確地分割腹部皮下脂肪組織和內臟脂肪組織，並從混合脂肪組織中提取棕色脂肪組織。第一個算法針對皮下脂肪組織和內臟脂肪組織之間狹窄連接區域的特徵，應用Bresenham''s Line算法和Midpoint Circle算法建立的輪狀模板，在磁共振脂肪圖像上搜索此類特徵從而進行分割。第二個算法基於觀察到棕色脂肪組織在脂肪比例（fat-fraction）和T2*均具有較低信號強度，利用Expectation–maximization（EM）及高斯混合模型（Gaussian mixture model）將水脂分離磁共振成像進行分割。基於上述兩種算法，對不同脂肪組織及肥胖相關疾病的關係進行了分析。研究三採集了一組患有病態肥胖症且進行了減肥手術的患者的信息。該組患者在手術前接受MRI影像，包括水脂分離序列以獲得軀幹部水脂影像，以及磁共振波譜以獲得肝臟脂肪譜。之後，在術後6個月和12個月使用相同的MRI序列進行兩次隨訪掃描。該研究比較了皮下脂肪組織，內臟脂肪組織，棕色脂肪組織，肝臟和胰腺脂肪含量的縱貫數據，並通過血液檢查獲取血糖和血脂譜以分析受試者肝功能，以評估減肥手術對病態肥胖患者的療效。之前對肝內甘油三酯研究觀察到在肥胖個體的水脂圖像上左右肝葉之間存在強烈的信號對比。在最後，研究四通過比較肥胖和對照組，檢驗了脂肪傾向存儲於右側肝葉的假說。其中，受試者以體重指數（BMI）進行分類到肥胖組和對照組及成人組和青少年組做進一步的研究分析，以測試年齡在肝甘油三酯儲存和肝鐵沉積中的作用。本論文對人體脂質含量進行了研究，包括提出了新的影像處理算法，並應用於臨床分析中。本文所提出的使用高斯混合模型來量化棕色脂肪組織的算法是一種創新概念和設計，而另一種用於分離皮下和內臟脂肪組織的算法提供了快速、自動和客觀的定量脂肪組織分析方法。本文所提出的新技術可以進一步應用於與人體肥胖有關的臨床研究中。Hui, Cheuk Ngai Steve.Thesis Ph.D. Chinese University of Hong Kong 2018.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-133).Abstracts also in Chinese.Title from PDF title page (viewed on 9 June, 2021)
Informing the development of services supporting self-care for long term mental health conditions: A mixed method study of community based mental health initiatives in England
No full textBackground
Supporting self-care is being explored across health care systems internationally as an approach to improving care for long term conditions in the context of ageing populations and economic constraint. UK health policy advocates a range of approaches to supporting self-care, including the application of generic self-management type programmes across conditions. Within mental health, the scope of self-care remains poorly conceptualised and the existing evidence base for supporting self-care is correspondingly disparate. This paper aims to inform the development of support for self-care in mental health by considering how generic self-care policy guidance is implemented in the context of services supporting people with severe, long term mental health problems.
Methods
A mixed method study was undertaken comprising standardised psychosocial measures, questionnaires about health service use and qualitative interviews with 120 new referrals to three contrasting community based initiatives supporting self-care for severe, long term mental health problems, repeated nine months later. A framework approach was taken to qualitative analysis, an exploratory statistical analysis sought to identify possible associations between a range of independent variables and self-care outcomes, and a narrative synthesis brought these analyses together.
Results
Participants reported improvement in self-care outcomes (e.g. greater empowerment; less use of Accident and Emergency services). These changes were not associated with level of engagement with self-care support. Level of engagement was associated with positive collaboration with support staff. Qualitative data described the value of different models of supporting self-care and considered challenges. Synthesis of analyses suggested that timing support for self-care, giving service users control over when and how they accessed support, quality of service user-staff relationships and decision making around medication are important issues in supporting self-care in mental health.
Conclusions
Service delivery components – e.g. peer support groups, personal planning – advocated in generic self-care policy have value when implemented in a mental health context. Support for self-care in mental health should focus on core, mental health specific qualities; issues of control, enabling staff-service user relationships and shared decision making. The broad empirical basis of our research indicates the wider relevance of our findings across mental health settings
ALT-C 2011 Abstracts
No full textThis is a PDF of the abstracts for all the sessions at the 2011 ALT conference. It is designed to be used alongside the online version of the conference programme. It was made public on 1 September, with a "topped and tailed" made live on 2 September
The Christian Right and US Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century
No full textThe thesis discusses the role of the Christian Right in the US foreign policy decision making process. The research revealed that the Christian Right has long been fascinated with some international issues in general and US foreign policy in particular. The Christian Right’s interest in international issues increased markedly during years of the George W. Bush presidency. It successfully widened its activities from domestic social conservative issues to foreign policy issues by participating in, articulating and lobbying for its religious version of American foreign policy. In assessing the role of the Christian Right in US foreign policy making, this dissertation examines three aspects of US foreign policy, namely Israel, international religious freedom and global humanitarianism. Based on these aspects, the Christian Right is seen as skilled in framing and defining issues. The Christian Right seems effective in selecting and prioritizing international issues that have a reasonable chance of being selected by foreign policy decision makers, especially in Congress. Moreover, the Christian Right has shown its maturity in seeking engagement and cooperation with other organizations, secular and religious, in order to advance its international goals. Finally, in pursuing and conveying its international agenda, the Christian Right has adopted a more moderate and less overtly religious approach. Instead of using its traditional religious rhetoric, the Christian Right has successfully projected its foreign policy preferences into the conventional realist discourse of American foreign policy that is largely based on the objective of national interest and national security. Nevertheless, this study does not, in any way, conclude that the Christian Right was able to influence or determine the direction of US foreign policy and its outcomes; however, it does suggest that the Christian Right did contribute and have an impact on the formulation of some US foreign policy. As such, the research contends that the role of the Christian Right is similar to other interest group lobbies and that its perceived influence on US foreign policy should not be exaggerated. Finally, the research suggests that the emergence of the Christian Right as an actor in asserting its global agenda through US foreign policy can possibly provide an example of how religious beliefs and values can become a potential source of “soft power”. Together with the “climate of opinion” of the American public during the Bush administration, the “soft power” at domestic level could serve as a valuable new explanatory variable in understanding how the US foreign policy was formulated in the early 21st century
Fast and low loss flexoelectro-optic liquid crystal phase modulator with a chiral nematic reflector
No full text© 2019, The Author(s). In this paper, we demonstrate a flexoelectro-optic liquid crystal phase-only device that uses a chiral nematic reflector to achieve full 2π phase modulation. This configuration is found to be very tolerant to imperfections in the chiral nematic reflector provided that the flexoelectro-optic LC layer fulfils the half-wave condition. Encouragingly, the modulation in the phase, which operates at kHz frame rates, is also accompanied by low amplitude modulation. The configuration demonstrated herein is particularly promising for the development of next-generation liquid crystal on silicon spatial light modulators
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