VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Augmentation strategies in rotator cuff repair
Keywords: Scaffold
Supraspinatus
Electrospun
Tendon
Rotator cuff

Rotator cuff repair surgery is commonly performed for symptomatic tears failing to resolve with conservative measures. This thesis investigated the healing rate following rotator cuff repair, and the influence of age and tear size. Patient tissue responses to 2 commercially available biological patches used in cuff repair were subsequently investigated. Finally, safety and efficacy of 2 novel biodegradable polymeric scaffolds to repair an ovine tendon defect, was investigated.
The overall rate of healing following rotator cuff repair was 58% at 1 year. Healing was influenced by age and tear size, however age was the predominant prognostic factor. A predictive model for healing was generated, demonstrating likelihood of healing as low as 17%. Patient supraspinatus tendon biopsies demonstrated an adverse response to dermal allograft and xenograft patches currently used in cuff repair augmentation, whereby significant extracellular matrix disruption was observed. One patient receiving the xenograft experienced a significant adverse immune response, characterised by extensive infiltration of pro-inflammatory cells. A novel biodegradable polydioxanone / polycaprolactone patch was investigated in an ovine tendon injury model. At 3 months, this patch induced tendon healing, without adverse systemic or tissue responses. Significant fibroblast infiltration and neovascularisation was observed within the scaffold. A biodegradable polydioxanone multifilament suture was also developed. This novel suture demonstrated bioactivity, inducing tendon healing without adverse systemic or tissue responses. Fibroblast infiltration and neovascularisation was observed when compared to monofilament polydioxanone control suture.
Healing following cuff repair remains a challenge. Current biological patches used to augment repair are not supported by clinical efficacy trials, and demonstrated a deleterious effect on the native tendon. Novel synthetic implants tailored for tendon repair successfully induced tendon healing in an ovine model. Future work will explore the safety and clinical efficacy of these implants for rotator cuff repair augmentation in humans.
Integrating logarithmic wide dynamic range CMOS image sensors
Keywords: wide dynamic range
CIS
ADAS
WDR
CMOS
image sensors

Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors are widely used in many applications such as consumer electronics, automotive and security. One of the key requirements in today’s imaging applications is the ability to capture natural scenes faithfully; a feature known as wide dynamic range (WDR). Current digital image sensors have a linear response that results in saturation and loss of details. Conventional CMOS image sensors with a logarithmic response attempt to address the limited dynamic range of the linear digital image sensors by exploiting the subthreshold operation of a transistor in a pixel. This results in CMOS pixels that are able to capture light intensities of more than six decades (120 dB). However, the approach comes at the expense of high fixed pattern noise (FPN) and slow response.
The work presented in this thesis describes a five all nMOS transistor (5T) pixel architecture that aims to achieve wide dynamic range. This feature is obtained using a time-varying reference voltage that is applied to one of the transistors of the pixel. The reference voltage varies in a logarithmic fashion in order to modulate the effective integration time of the pixel. This allows the pixel to avoid saturation; hence extending the dynamic range. In addition, the slope of the reference voltage that can be adjusted means the pixel response is adaptive and can be more robust towards temporal noise. To have a well-controlled pixel response, the pixel non-ideal effects such as source follower gain, body effect and subthreshold effect are characterised and included as an improved model to the reference voltage.
Measurement results from fabricated chips using UMC 180 nm technology are presented and analysed. A dynamic range of 80 dB with a logarithmic response of 600 mV/decade has been achieved. This is a significant improvement in comparison to that of conventional logarithmic pixel response (60 mV/decade). An analysis of the effect of chip variations that causes FPN has been conducted and correction methods that can reduce the illumination error to less than 2% have been proposed. In addition, the first experimental study comparing different dynamic range extension methods has been performed. In the study, a method to control the response of a WDR approach using a stepped voltage that has achieved a dynamic range of up to 120 dB is also presented. The result of the study leads to a modification to the reference voltage that allows an implementation of an analogue circuit to generate the reference voltage.
Immigration enforcement in the UK: how women experience detention, release and removal
Keywords: Women
Immigration Detention
Dignity
Imprisonment

In this dissertation I add nuance to our understanding of the experiences of immigration enforcement by exploring it in terms of the concept of 'dignity.' I draw on interviews with women who were either detained in an Immigration Removal Centre at the point I met them, or had been previously. I used interviews as the main method of data collection and my research spanned three research sites: Yarl’s Wood Removal Centre, The UK community, and Jamaica. I asked the participants about their experiences during and after detention, and for their own interpretations of the concept of dignity. I then used these definitions to make sense of their experiences. Resultingly, two key issues have been addressed in my research: how women subject to immigration control define dignity and the ways that immigration detention undermined it.
The experiences of women in this study were characterised by three key violations to their dignity. The first was vilification, where they were made to feel as though they were a threat to UK citizens, and that they were in some way dangerous and untrustworthy. The second was a lack of autonomy. All aspects of immigration enforcement restricted the women in this study from directing their own lives, from the uncertainty of indefinite detention, to their enforced dependence on the government or friends to survive in the community and finally when ultimately expelled from the country. The third was diminishment. Women felt lessened by the interaction between themselves and the Home Office through an apparent lack of care for their individual circumstances. Together, these factors undermined their sense of self worth, self esteem and self respect.
My work reinforces existing findings around immigration enforcement that are largely negative. I demonstrate throughout this dissertation that the self-worth of women in my study is deeply affected by their time in immigration detention and by what had happened to them after they left, and that these outcomes were linked to the way in which they were treated in relation to their sense of dignity.
Farmers and conservation in Post-Brexit Britain; perceptions among the farming community on a changing subsidy regime and implications for on- farm conservation
Keywords: Brexit
Conservation
Farmers
Basic Payment Scheme
Common Agricultural Policy
Biodiversity
Agri-environment schemes
Agriculture
On-farm conservation
Agricultural policy
UK
Sustainability
Subsidy
DEFRA

The UK’s 2016 decision to leave the European Union signals a departure from the Common Agricultural Policy. The current proposals for a post-Brexit agricultural policy describe a shift towards a model that subsidises producers for implementing environmentally beneficial practices, rather than high production levels. Studies on existing forms of this subsidy model demonstrate mixed results in terms of improving biodiversity, and studies on farmer’s uptake of such schemes and their attitudes towards them are similarly mixed. These results have implications for policy design given that farmers are the implementers of such schemes. This study will draw on the existing literature as a context through which to investigate the perceptions of farmers and farm managers regarding the proposed agricultural policy landscape they will potentially inhabit. We conclude that ensuring that future schemes are both evidence- based and are planned and implemented with the help of people with a background in agriculture is paramount to their success.
The relationship between science and religion in Kang Youwei’s Confucianism
Keywords: Confucianism
Kang Youwei
science and religion

In this thesis I analyse the relationship between science and religion in a non-Western and specifically Chinese context through an examination of the writings of Kang Youwei (康有爲1858–1927), a prominent reformer and Confucian thinker of the period of transition from Imperial to Republican China. Described by his followers as the ‘Martin Luther of Confucianism’, Kang envisioned a central social role for Confucianism as a state religion, championing the restoration of a ‘pristine’ religion of Confucius (Kongjiao孔教), by both modelling it after Christian practices and revitalizing the ancient Chinese belief in Shangdi 上帝 (as a universal concept, equated with ‘God’). He upheld the unitary nature of the concept of jiao (教) or ‘religion’, manifested in a variety of religions united by their shared moral aim and in their teachings on reverence for Divinity, the soul’s immortality, and compassion.
My research reveals that, before the rise of radical materialism and scientism, fully one generation before the acceptance by Chinese intellectuals of the ‘Conflict Thesis’, Kang had already sought to conceptualize the relationship between what are now generally categorized as science and religion. Expounding a holistic world-view founded upon a belief in the oneness of knowledge, Kang appropriated Western scientific concepts such as the ‘ether’ in his re-interpretation of the Confucian Classics. He saw no conflict between modern science and Confucian Religion, whose quintessential doctrines, in his view, contained the origins of scientific thought. Acknowledging that conflict with science might occur with other religions like Christianity, he admitted that certain religious doctrines required correction when scientific evidence made it imperative; no matter how far science advanced, however, it could never disprove the existence of God, whose infinite nature he believed lay beyond the grasp of finite—even if brilliant—scientific minds. Closer analysis of Kang’s conception of the complementary relationship between science and religion, I suggest, can contribute to a richer picture of Kang’s thought, a better understanding of the field of science and religion in China, and a more global account of the subject.
Estimates of the size-fractionated primary production of UK shelf seas from satellite
Keywords: ocean
adaptation
phytoplankton
photophysiology
marine environment
remote sensing
marine ecosystems
productivity

Estimates of size-fractionated (S-F) primary production are valuable to marine ecologists, biogeochemists and policymakers, as the productivity of individual fractions are important to populations of grazers and processes of nutrient cycling and carbon export. This thesis aims to provide a means to estimate S-F PP in UK Shelf Seas, using in situ measurements of photosynthesis-irradiance (PE) parameters to tune an existing remote sensing model of S-F PP. A large dataset from the Celtic Sea and the Western English Channel shows that photosynthetic rates of picophytoplankton are markedly higher than larger nano- and microphytoplankton, and that PE parameter values for this size fraction are higher than observed in open-ocean environments. This leads to picophytoplankton accounting for a greater proportion of shelf-sea PP than previously assumed. Bio-optical measurements conducted in the Celtic Sea allowed the correction of αBvalues and calculation of φmax using more representative S-F chlorophyll-specific absorption (aph*(λ)) spectra. However, a significant number of data gaps and lack of reliable microphytoplankton spectra necessitated using average or modelled values of aph*(λ). Testing approaches of estimating aph*(λ) revealed that using some modelled spectra produced reasonable estimates of water-column PP. However, the vertical distribution of PP changed considerably between model runs using different estimated spectra, which may hinder our ability to assess the shape of the PP profile and the contribution of subsurface populations to integrated PP.
This study provides a synthesis of the largest dataset of measured S-F chlorophyll concentrations, phytoplankton PE parameters, and absorption spectra for UK Shelf Seas, incorporating data from across a variety of shelf environments in multiple years, often at weekly resolution for Western English Channel sites, allowing us to explore the relationship between the photophysiology of shelf-sea phytoplankton and environmental variables. Developing a regionally-tuned model to map S-F PP in UK Shelf Seas from space represents a useful advance in the monitoring of ecology and biogeochemistry of shelf-sea systems.
λ
'When tuneful bards awak'd the song sublime': the bardic sublime in romantic poetry, 1750-1825
Keywords: Felicia Hemans
Welsh
Poetry
Romanticism
Celticism
Romantic art
Eighteenth-century literature
The Romantic period
Romantic literature
Eighteenth-century art
The sublime
Wales
Eighteenth-century
William Blake
Thomas Gray
Long eighteenth century
William Wordsworth
Bards
Edmund Burke
Druids
Landscape
Wales in literature
Cultural Memory
Eighteenth-century poetry
Romantic poetry

This thesis introduces my conception of the “bardic sublime” in the poetry of Thomas Gray, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans. I present the bardic sublime as a form of poetic rhetoric: one which foregrounds the affective qualities associated with the ancient Welsh bard – a figure revived in Gray’s poetry – who is depicted as the prototype of the modern bard or poet in Romantic verse. While nationalistic discourse of the early eighteenth century encouraged interest in antiquarian activity, the emphasis of my thesis is upon imaginative engagement with ideas of the bardic, framed in the rhetoric of the sublime, to articulate the wider poetics of each writer upon whom I focus.
My thesis spans the period 1750-1825. The earliest major texts considered are Thomas Gray’s “The Bard: A Pindaric Ode” – composed between 1754 and 1757 – which was published in 1757, the same year that Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful appeared in print. The last major texts considered are Hemans’ Welsh Melodies, published in 1821, and Wordsworth’s “Composed among the Ruins of a Castle in North Wales”, which was composed in September 1824, the year of Wordsworth’s last visit to Wales.
I consider four generations of poetry which engage with the bardic sublime. Chapter One considers the origins of the bardic sublime in the verse of Thomas Gray, affording specific attention to the “The Bard”: the text which is most commonly echoed in the writings of Blake, Wordsworth and Hemans, and which thrust the ancient bard to the forefront of the eighteenth-century literary stage. Chapter Two turns to the visual art and poetry of William Blake, exploring how visual responses to Gray’s Bard – including Blake’s own watercolour illustrations of Gray’s poems – served to shape the poetry that followed. I start in the 1790s with Blake’s Songs before turning to his prophetic books. In Chapter Three, I consider the works of William Wordsworth, emphasising the significance of the natural – as opposed to Blake’s psychological – landscape in his model of the bardic sublime. I assess his idea of the bard as an intermediary between human and landscape. Finally, in Chapter Four, I consider a female response to the ostensibly masculine categories of the bardic and the sublime in the work of Felicia Hemans. I demonstrate how Hemans’ affinity to the bardic and to the Welsh landscape as depicted in verse is – while in some ways similar to that of Wordsworth’s poetry – one which is ultimately predicated upon her own longstanding and personal attachment to Wales and to the figure of the ancient bard.
Free trade federalism in Australia and the European Union: Judicial delimitation of legislative competence
Keywords: Federalism
Comparative Law
Free Movement of Goods
European Union Law
Section 92 of Australian Constitution
Legal History
Free Movement of Services
Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)
Australian Law

The Commonwealth of Australia and the European Union were each formed, in large part, with the goal of creating an internal market spanning the territory of all the constituent States, but with the intention that those constituent States should continue to enjoy a considerable measure of legislative autonomy to pass diverse laws for their own polities. In each case, this was to be achieved by the establishment of a federal (or federal-like) structure with a constitutional document adopted by the constituent States, which established this internal market of free trade between the States, and entrusted the task of adjudicating the compliance with these provisions to a central, union-level court.
The High Court of Australia and the Court of Justice of the European Union have grappled with this task of how to balance the internal market against State legislative autonomy by evolving a strikingly similar jurisprudence – all the more noteworthy given the relatively limited judicial and scholarly exchange between the two systems. Both courts first ask whether the impugned law is such as to come within the scope of the free movement provisions, and then, if the law is within that scope, whether the law is nevertheless justified by reference to some legitimate purpose being pursued in a proportionate manner by the legislating State.
Over the decades, both Australia and the EU have seen contention as to the proper definition of the scope of free movement provisions, with discrimination analysis and trade restriction analysis struggling for dominance. In Australia, discrimination analysis now dominates; in the EU, the jurisprudence has been cleft into several parts, some under discrimination analysis, others under trade restriction analysis. On the question of justification, Australia and the EU have evolved a considerable jurisprudential similarity both in form and in content, with this element being less controversial than the question of scope.
In developing their jurisprudence of both scope and justification, the courts have played a significant role in determining the balance between the internal market and the preservation of State legislative autonomy in each system.
The experiences of university students diagnosed with dyslexia as they use assistive learning technologies for their studies
Keywords: Dyslexia
Assistive Learning Technologies
Higher Education
Assistive Technology

This study investigates ways in which assistive learning technologies shape the learning experiences of university students diagnosed with dyslexia. The research investigates the experiences of students from various backgrounds, studying different subjects, within numerous contexts at two institutions (a modern and traditional university). The study closely examines how these students use assistive learning technologies to support their studies as well as the wider influential strategies used in different institutional environments.
The research took an in-depth qualitative approach to examining academic and disability coordinators views and practices and students’ experiences through semi-structured interviews. In addition to the interviews, students were asked to record their daily use of technologies and to talk through their processes of using assistive learning technologies when completing an assignment. The research involved 10 university staff and 41 dyslexic undergraduate and postgraduate students.
The findings of the research showed that the majority of students, once they had developed confidence in the use of assistive learning technologies, were able to use them in order to enhance and adapt their learning to create a personalised and accessible university experience. The findings also indicated that students’ backgrounds, such as school and family, can influence their adoption of assistive learning technologies and coping strategies, but are also governed by their inner-capacity of being motivated and determined to succeed. The role of the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) and the university were instrumental in providing support and provisions that included funding for a diagnosis, face-to-face tuition and assistive learning technologies. Additionally, students regular contact time with tutors was identified as being beneficial in both accommodating their needs and providing extra support. With the integration of assistive learning technologies, the findings identified that students less experienced in the writing process and with a greater cognitive weakness followed a more structured scaffold approach. Finally, through the adoption of multi-modal methods of enablement and engagement with assistive learning technologies, students were able to reduce working memory stress and increase their independence of learning.
The role of windblown dust from ephemeral river valleys in the fertilisation of the Benguela Upwelling System
Keywords: Namibia
geomorphology
dust sources
dust
ocean fertilisation
atmospheric transport
Benguela Upwelling System
mineral aerosols
ephemeral rivers
Aeolian
ocean dust deposition

The deposition of dust on the global ocean provides essential nutrients for biological primary production. Research into aeolian dust has focused on dust sources identified at the global scale by the emission of mineral aerosols a minimum of one kilometre into the atmosphere. The deflation origins of these global hot-spots of dust are major topographical pan features providing paleolacustrine sources of fine, desiccated sediment that is highly susceptible to wind erosion. However, small-scale geomorphological features are being increasingly identified as significant emitters of dust. Namibia’s twelve western ephemeral river valleys are known to regularly produce dust but have remained largely overlooked as a regionally significant source of dust and as a contributor to ocean fertilisation. The depositional area of the river valley dust is the adjacent marine Benguela Upwelling System which hosts one of the highest primary production rates in the world’s oceans. In this research correlation between terrestrial airborne dust concentrations, aeolian dust and oceanic chlorophyll levels is assessed and the fertilisation potential of dust from three river valleys is investigated. The results provide the first direct evidence of the contribution of river valley dust to ocean fertilisation within the highly productive Benguela upwelling system. The research further shows that Namibia’s river valleys provide an enriched source of aeolian nutrients, most importantly for bioavailable iron, with windblown dust and source sediments having a higher fertilisation potential than either of southern Africa’s major pan dust source areas. These enriched sediments in the dust-emitting lower regions of the three river valleys are shown to occur irrespective of upper catchment rainfall, land use or geology. This suggests that similarly enriched dust source sediments would be common to all twelve valleys, resulting from comparable geomorphological processes, and the river valleys are therefore a regionally significant source of ocean fertilising dust. This research demonstrates the impact that small-scale dust sources can have and that riverine dust sources can be a source of highly fertile mineral aerosols that warrant increased research attention.