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A Foucauldian analysis of the discourses of quality and its relationship to tools of surveillance in early learning and childcare in Scotland
Get PDFThe concept and pursuit of quality in the early years sector in Scotland is highly significant to the Scottish Government, wider policy actors such as the OECD, SSSC, the Care Inspectorate and Education Scotland, and most importantly early years practitioners and managers. The pursuit of quality is foregrounded in the plethora of current Scottish Government guidance and frameworks and is the ‘golden thread’ running through core policy the Blueprint for 2020: The Expansion of Early Learning and Childcare in Scotland, Quality Action Plan (Scottish Government (2017:2). I argue that quality, as presented in the policy, frameworks, standards, and inspection is something objective, real, and knowable – something that is presented, measured, regulated, and inspected through a neoliberal discourse. I am concerned that as practitioners and managers strive to be ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ their autonomy, subjectivity, and agency as professionals is diminished and the criteria and standardised categories become tools of surveillance and power. Children and childhood in this discourse becomes datafied. Through the use of 1-1 interviews, my research explores practitioners' and managers’ lived experiences of, compliance with, and possible resistance to, current policy discourses and processes of conceptualising quality. I argue that the current, dominant discourse of quality – control, predictability, measurement – disregards the complexity and plurality of early learning and childcare in Scotland. I utilise Foucault’s (1978) theory and perspectives on discourse, power, and its relationship to subjectivity as particularly apt for my study. Foucault’s power/knowledge ideas help to unsettle current dominant discourses and taken-for-granted assumptions present in early learning and childcare through the speaking of other ‘truths’ such as those spoken by the participants in this study. In this study I propose that there are alternative ways of being, those that value diversity and plurality, and that although the early learning and childcare sector in Scotland has undergone many recent policy changes and is considered to be in a fragile state (Audit Scotland, 2023) the practitioners and managers working in the sector know the quality they value and can find a way to have their voices heard
Do choirs have accents? A sociophonetic investigation of choral sound
Get PDFMany UK cities, including Glasgow, have a long history of choral singing, with recordings dating back to the 1920s (for example, the Glasgow Orpheus Choir). Choirs have a ‘sound’ which is both musical and linguistic. Speakers from different localities can be said to have an accent. Is there such as thing as a regional choral ‘accent’? Neither phoneticians, singers, nor choir directors have a clear understanding of how such choral sound–accents are achieved, how they arise, and are maintained. The main research questions for this thesis are:
1. Is there evidence of regional differences between Glasgow and Cambridge, in the phonology of vowels, rhoticity, and word-final /d/?
2. Is there evidence of a common choral accent uniting Glasgow and Cambridge in the phonology of vowels, rhoticity, and word-final /d/?
3. What changes have taken place in the phonology of choral singing over time?
(a) Are the changes linked with changes in spoken phonology over the relevant time period?
(b) Are the changes linked with changes in aesthetic conventions of choral singing?
(c) Are the changes linked with individual properties of the choir directors?
To answer these research questions, two time-aligned electronic corpora were constructed in LaBB-CAT containing 26 hours of commercially-released recordings of British classical choral singing of choirs from two different regions, Glasgow and Cambridge. 1. Recordings of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge (1949–2019). 2. Recordings of the Glasgow Orpheus and Phoenix choirs (1925–2016).
This thesis presents the analysis of three different variables. Analysing the front vowels I found a shared front vowel phonology and realisation. The consonant variable rhoticity (e.g. car) was selected to investigate impact of spoken dialect. Word-final /d/ (e.g. lord) was selected to investigate aesthetic–stylistic differences between the two corpora.
In a Bayesian analysis of acoustic measures F1 and F2, I found that the vowels KIT, DRESS and TRAP (over 14,000 tokens) demonstrate a pattern of lowering over time consistent with a change in a spoken prestige accent e.g. from Received Pronunciation to Southern Standard British English. The analyses also support separate TRAP and BATH phonemes in both Glasgow and Cambridge, which we would not expect based on spoken vowel phonology. These findings suggest an emerging standard ‘accent’ of choral singing that has changed over time, following the pattern presented by Received Pronunciation. However, the realisation of the GOOSE vowel differs between Glasgow and King’s, perhaps relating to the sociolinguistic salience of GOOSE in Scottish English.
Rhoticity (auditory coding of 8,407 tokens) differs between the Glasgow choirs and King’s, as we might expect, based on regional accent phonology. The Glasgow choirs produce postvocalic /r/ in all contexts, though there is a reduction over time; they also produce alveolar trill realisations in initial position 50% of the time in the Orpheus Choir early recordings directed by Hugh S. Roberton (1925–1945), perhaps indicating that the variable was enregistered as part of a distinctly Scottish choral sound.
The realisation of word-final /d/ (auditory coding of 3,213 tokens) also differs between the two corpora, with King’s producing more affricated variants and more shadow vowel (epenthetic schwa) variants in pre-pausal contexts. The /d/ findings confirm a change in style suggested by musicological literature (Day, 2000). Phonetic affrication at King’s increases over time as the choir sings more frequently with orchestral accompaniment, likely to improve audibility, and this was carried over into the choir’s unaccompanied singing (Day, 2018).
This thesis is the first to provide a quantitative acoustic analysis of choral sound and explore the sociolinguistics of classical choral singing in a UK context. I have found evidence that supports a non-regional standard British classical choral singing vowel phonology and regional differences based on the phonology of the spoken accent of the singers and their choir directors. Future research is needed to explore the perceptual salience of the findings reported in this thesis and whether recordings of other regional choirs support the pattern of non-regional standard vowel phonology
Accountability for the right to health of female tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka
No full textThis study focuses on a particular human right- the right to health in the tea plantation sector. This study sets out an ethnography study for a developing new form of an account of health in a tea plantation company. Drawing from Bourdieu’s practice theory to understand the way in which corporate accountability for the right to health is practised day-to-day in the tea plantations and how these practices impact the workers, this study takes a Sri Lankan tea plantation company and analyses the accounting and accountability practices of the company. This research uncovers the underlying structures of symbolic violence in the tea plantation field and misrecognition in the forms of progressive movements for human rights
The adaptive diversity of Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) in Scotland
No full textAbstract not currently available
On the real world practice of Behaviour Driven Development
Get PDFSurveys of industry practice over the last decade suggest that Behaviour Driven Development is a popular Agile practice. For example, 19% of respondents to the 14th State of Agile annual survey reported using BDD, placing it in the top 13 practices reported. As well as potential benefits, the adoption of BDD necessarily involves an additional cost of writing and maintaining Gherkin features and scenarios, and (if used for acceptance testing,) the associated step functions. Yet there is a lack of published literature exploring how BDD is used in practice and the challenges experienced by real world software development efforts. This gap is significant because without understanding current real world practice, it is hard to identify opportunities to address and mitigate challenges. In order to address this research gap concerning the challenges of using BDD, this thesis reports on a research project which explored: (a) the challenges of applying agile and undertaking requirements engineering in a real world context; (b) the challenges of applying BDD specifically and (c) the application of BDD in open-source projects to understand challenges in this different context.
For this purpose, we progressively conducted two case studies, two series of interviews, four iterations of action research, and an empirical study. The first case study was conducted in an avionics company to discover the challenges of using an agile process in a large scale safety critical project environment. Since requirements management was found to be one of the biggest challenges during the case study, we decided to investigate BDD because of its reputation for requirements management. The second case study was conducted in the company with an aim to discover the challenges of using BDD in real life. The case study was complemented with an empirical study of the practice of BDD in open source projects, taking a study sample from the GitHub open source collaboration site.
As a result of this Ph.D research, we were able to discover: (i) challenges of using an agile process in a large scale safety-critical organisation, (ii) current state of BDD in practice, (iii) technical limitations of Gherkin (i.e., the language for writing requirements in BDD), (iv) challenges of using BDD in a real project, (v) bad smells in the Gherkin specifications of open source projects on GitHub. We also presented a brief comparison between the theoretical description of BDD and BDD in practice. This research, therefore, presents the results of lessons learned from BDD in practice, and serves as a guide for software practitioners planning on using BDD in their projects
Navigating the discomfort of change: perceptions and experiences of reducing meat and/or dairy consumption
Get PDFAcross three projects, I aimed to explore the role of habits, social norms, and identities in the transition towards reducing one’s meat and/or dairy consumption from a self-control perspective and what other factors promote or hinder reduction efforts. I also aimed to examine perceptions of vegans, through stereotypes and meta-stereotypes about vegans, to examine how these influence people’s motivation to maintain dietary changes and their experiences of reduction more broadly.
In Chapter 2, I reported a qualitative survey study with 80 meat and/or dairy reducers who predominantly held environmental motives for reducing. Through open-ended questions, I explored the role of habits, identity, and social norms, from a self-control perspective and analysed the data using reflexive thematic analysis.
In Chapter 3, I conducted a quantitative survey through two studies to assess whether vegans (N = 200) and reducers (N = 272) hold stereotypes about vegans and believe that omnivores stereotype vegans (meta-stereotypes). I assessed whether meta-stereotypes were associated with vegan identity, vegan’s outgroup regard of omnivores, and explored the strongest predictor of maintaining a vegan diet. I also examined whether negative meta-stereotypes were associated with the motivation to maintain dietary changes.
In Chapter 4, I analysed responses from five open-ended questions as part of Study 2 of Chapter 3 (N = 272) using reflexive thematic analysis. These questions related to perceptions from participants on the most important barrier to their reduction efforts. Questions also related to perceptions of vegans that participants, and others in their social circle, held, and how these perceptions influenced them or others who are reducing their meat and/or dairy consumption.
Overall, findings from empirical chapters suggest that situational cues triggered conflicting experiences, including motivational, cognitive, and affective conflict. When conflict was detected, this often prompted the need for self-control and motivations to control efforts. Additionally, holding negative meta-stereotypes reflected social polarisation. I did not find evidence that meta-stereotypes were linked to people’s motivation to maintain dietary changes, yet initial evidence pointed to meta-stereotypes playing a role in choices of identity labels. Finally, I highlighted the complex interplay of factors that underlie reducing meat and/or dairy consumption, from people’s psychological capability (e.g., self-control) or internal cues (e.g., habits), motivations (e.g., desires and goals that are often incompatible) as well as opportunity from the social or physical environment (e.g., social pressure, availability) that influence avoiding consuming meat or dairy depending on situation in which the behaviour is performed.
In Chapter 5, I reviewed findings from previous chapters, linking my findings to the wider theoretical frameworks in behavioural and identity research, such as grounded cognition theories of desire and motivation as well as the unified model of vegetarian identity. I also suggested practical implications, limitations, and future directions that would support the transition to consuming less meat and/or dairy
Exploring ethnic variations in lifestyle and diabetes: using evidence from UK Biobank Data
Get PDFType 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is an important public health problem, with prevalence rapidly rising in the last decade by 65% in the United Kingdom. Those with type 2 diabetes carry twice the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and premature mortality amongst adults. The UK population is now ageing and the number of multi-ethnic populations in UK is increasing, the burden of T2DM is of prime importance.
Improved lifestyle behaviours could significantly prevent the onset and also improve the effect of diabetes disease. However, the underpinning evidences have largely been obtained from studies of populations of white European descent. It is unclear whether these recommendations are appropriate for other ethnic groups. The prevalence of T2DM, it's impacts and controls differ between ethnic populations. T2DM is more common, more severe, develops at an earlier age as well as develops at lower obesity levels in the non-white minority population living within the United Kingdom compared with the majority White population. Therefore, more inclusive epidemiological information is critical for effective planning and designing of interventions to improve population health, particularly amongst non-white minority groups.
The aim of this thesis was to assess and analyse epidemiological data on the ethnic differences in sex, adiposity and lifestyle factors on T2DM risk among middle-aged adults in the United Kingdom with focus on European white, South Asians (people originating from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), Blacks (Black African and Black Caribbean) and Chinese descent populations
Agile intelligent antenna system for industry 4.0 and beyond
Get PDFThe next-generation industrial paradigms such as Industry 4.0 and beyond require ultra-high reliability, extremely low latency, high throughput, and fine-grain spatial differentiation for wireless communication, sensing, and control systems. Traditional industrial wired networks suffer from impediments such as expensive installation and maintenance costs, wear and tear, reduced flexibility, and restricted mobility in dynamic industrial environments. Moreover, the conventional sub-6 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) wireless bands such as 2.4 and 5 GHz are not able to fully meet the requirements of high bandwidth, high data rate, and low latency for emerging industrial wireless applications.
To overcome the aforementioned challenges, the utilization of the 60 GHz millimeter-wave (mmWave) license-free ISM band, spanning from 57–71 GHz, is being considered as a potential solution for advancing next-generation industrial wireless communication and sensing applications, as well as for future technologies of beyond fifth-generation (5G) and sixth-generation (6G). This spectrum offers a large bandwidth of 14 GHz and experiences low spectral congestion. However, its effectiveness is hindered by significant path loss and high signal attenuation caused by oxygen absorption, posing additional challenges to design wideband, high-gain, compact, and cost-effective antenna solutions.
This thesis encompasses three antenna design solutions offering high-performance metrics, aimed at next-generation mmWave industrial wireless applications and 6G technologies. The first antenna design is a compact and wideband 64-element planar microstrip array based on a hybrid corporate-series network. The array has the size of 2 cm × 3.5 cm × 0.025 cm and offers -10 dB impedance bandwidth over the entire 57–71 GHz, 1 dB gain bandwidth of 13 GHz from 57–70 GHz, low side lobe levels, and above 70% radiation efficiency in the whole band of interest. The inherent phase shift across the operating frequency in the series-fed antenna elements is leveraged to achieve frequency beamscanning over a scan range of 40° with less than 1 dB scan loss.
The second antenna design is a compact, low-cost, high-gain, and planar 16-element linear array using the corporate feed technique. This design provides squintless high directional beamstowards the broadside over 7 GHz of bandwidth (57–64 GHz), and 1 dB gain -bandwidth of more than 3 GHz. This makes it a suitable candidate for industrial fixed wireless access communication scenarios that require large bandwidth and multi-gigabit data rate, such as highdefinition video signal transfer. An antenna with a broad 1 dB gain bandwidth can find various applications across different sectors. Primarily, such an antenna could be utilized in wireless communication systems where reliable and high-speed data transmission is essential. spans across mobile communication networks, enhancing signal strength and coverage for improved data throughput, and seamless connectivity for IIoT applications, enabling efficient data exchange in various settings such as critical industrial automation scenarios. Additionally, in radar systems, a broad 1 dB gain bandwidth antenna could improve target detection and tracking accuracy, enhancing situational awareness in surveillance applications. Overall, the broad frequency coverage provided by the 1 dB gain bandwidth antenna makes it versatile for a wide range of applications requiring robust and reliable wireless communication capabilities.
The third proposed antenna solution is the hallmark of this thesis. A fully programmable electronically beamsteerable dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) is designed and tested for the first time at 60 GHz band, thereby marking a significant milestone in advanced mmWave beamforming metasurface antennas. The 16-element linear DMA is based on novel digital complementary electric inductive capacitive (CELC) metamaterial elements whose radiation states can be dynamically controlled through a high-speed field programmable gate array (FPGA). The smart DMA can synthesize narrow beams, wide beams as well as multiple beams from a single aperture by generating different digital coding combinations. The proposed DMA is a low-cost and low-power smart beamforming antenna applicable to a diverse range of mmWave communication, sensing, and imaging avenues for smart wireless industries and 6G networks with agile beam-switching having a delay of less than 5 ns.
The proposed DMA boasts striking features, including compact size, meticulously designed PCB, and software control via binary coding from a high-speed FPGA. Operating within the high-frequency mmWave ISM band, it encompasses a diverse range of license-free mmWave applications. The designed DMA achieves key performance metrics, boasting a bandwidth exceeding 2.16 GHz around 60 GHz, a high gain of above 9 dBi for most beamforming codes, and a radiation efficiency surpassing 60%. Additionally, it offers a versatile beam synthesis capability, enabling the generation of narrow pencil beams, wide beams, and multiple beams from a single DMA aperture.
The proposed antenna solutions were fabricated, and tested through an in-house designed measurement setup which is elucidated in this thesis. Eventually, the striking futuristic applications of mmWave antennas, and their associated open research challenges are highlighted
Synthesis of organic materials for optoelectronic applications
Get PDFOrganic electronics have seen a rapid development of research in this area in both academia and industry due to being lighter, more flexible and less expensive than conventional inorganic materials. This thesis describes the synthesis and characterisation of novel organic materials with the aim of optoelectronic applications.
The first chapter provides an introduction to organic semiconductors, focussing on their working principle from both a chemical and physical perspective. This is followed by a discussion on a few recent technologies developed in this field including some exemplar materials.
The second chapter describes the design and synthesis of spiro-OMeTAD based polymers for application in perovskite solar cells. Spiro-OMeTAD is the benchmark hole transporting material for these devices due to its high performance on doping. Preliminary conductivity measurements determine the potential for these polymers to act as additives in perovskite solar cells. One of the polymer materials was incorporated into a device and the key parameters discussed.
In chapter three, the development of green chemistry inspired materials for perovskite solar cells were outlined. Initially, the design and synthesis of several imine-based small molecules were discussed. The optical, electronic and thermal properties are extensively studied. The triphenylamine derivatives were further studied in the later section of this chapter to determine their potential as hole transporting materials in perovskite solar cells.
Two flavin-fused truxenes are presented in chapter four. First, details of the successful synthesis and characterisation of these molecules are discussed before a variety of applications were attempted for these materials including organic light emitting diodes, organic field-effect transistors and sensors.
Finally, the last chapter describes a variety of fluorescent bio-mimetic materials based on either the flavin moiety or green fluorescent protein chromophore. The chapter is separated into two parts to discuss these individually. Flavins are natural redox-active molecules which have good stability and structural versatility. Green fluorescent proteins have been studied due to their good photoluminescence, photostability and sustainable production. Therefore, both have the potential for applications in optoelectronics
Crop mapping using deep learning and multi-source satellite remote sensing
Get PDFCrop mapping is the prerequisite process for supporting decision-making and providing accurate and timely crop inventories for estimating crop production and monitoring dynamic crop growth at various scales. However, in-situ crop mapping often proves to be expensive and labour-intensive. Satellite remote sensing offers a more cost-effective alternative that delivers time-series data that can repeatedly capture the dynamics of crop growth at large scales and at regularly revisited intervals. While most existing crop-type products are generated using remote sensing data and machine learning approaches, the accuracy of predictions can be low given that misclassifications persist due to phenological similarities between different crops and the complexities of farming systems in real-life scenarios. Deep neural networks demonstrate great potential in capturing seasonal patterns and sequential relationships in time series data in the context of their end-to-end feature learning manner. This thesis presented a comprehensive exploration of advanced deep learning methodologies for large-scale agricultural crop mapping using multi-temporal and multi-source remote sensing data. Focusing on Bei'an County in Northeast China, the research developed and evaluated innovative frameworks to produce accurate crop-specific map products, addressing challenges such as optimal satellite-based input feature selection, imbalanced crop type distribution, model transferability, and model learning visualisation. This research has effectively addressed these challenges in complex agricultural environments by introducing advanced deep learning architectures that utilise multi-stream models and multi-source data fusion. The classification frameworks developed through this thesis have shown improved performance in accurately mapping crops, particularly in terms of evaluating model generalisability for inference of unseen area, model spatial and interannual transferability across different test sites, and model interpretability for unveiling the model decision process that contributes to a deeper understanding of model learning behaviours for temporal growth patterns of crops. The findings highlight the importance of temporal dynamics, the integration of various data sources, and the effectiveness of ensemble learning in enhancing the accuracy and reliability of crop classification. A deep learning framework using radar-based features was developed, achieving F1 scores for maize (87%), soybean (86%), and other crops (85%) on an imbalanced crop dataset. This approach was extended by integrating Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data, resulting in an overall accuracy of 91.7%, with F1 scores of 93.7%, 92.2%, and 90.9% for maize, soybean, and wheat, respectively. Furthermore, the spatiotemporal transferability of pre-trained models was systematically evaluated across two test sites, resulting in overall accuracies of 96.2% and 90.7%, mean F1 scores of 92.7% and 88.6%, and mean IoUs of 86.9% and 79.7% for site A and site B, respectively