This thesis concentrates on investment decision-making and wants, by examining the impact of religion and morals. In addition, the study also considers the role of personality traits and education as secondary factors. Each of these characteristics will be studied separately and collectively to clearly understand the extent of significance each plays. Furthermore, the study will assess investor needs and the importance of expressive and emotional benefits. The role of these aspects falls under the scope...

This thesis builds on agency theory and income smoothing hypothesis to link two lines of earnings management research, which are: (i) downward earnings management, and (ii) real earnings management (REM). Although earnings management is a well-researched area in the literature, downward REM around operating activities is widely overlooked. Based on that, and using a large sample of UK listed firms over the period of 2010-2019, this thesis aims at investigating four main research questions, being:...

Tweets using #leadersdebate hashtag collected during ITV Leader's Debate on 2nd April 2015 in the lead-up to the 2015 UK General Election. 100 tweets were requested from the Search API every 30 seconds, beginning at the start of the debate and continuing for approximately 90 minutes afterwards. Retweets were excluded. 772 tweets (every 20th message) were analysed and are provided here. Due to licensing restrictions, only the tweet IDs can be made available. Users of...

This file includes the interview guides from the EPSRC-funded Charting the Digital Lifespan project [PI: Moncur. EPSRC Reference EP/L00383X/1]. This project investigated digital personhood and digital experience at the life transitions of leaving secondary school, becoming a parent, and retiring from work in the UK. This file contains three Interview guides, used to structure interviews with individuals at each life transition point. The guides set out questions and also notes (including types of internet activity...

Anonymised data collected from a one-day Inventor Kits workshop held as part of the EPSRC Hacking for Situated Civic Engagement projects. The dataset includes transcripts of interviews held with participants and researchers after the event. Further information about this work can be found in: Taylor, N., Clarke, L., Skelly, M. and Nevay, S. (2018). Strategies for engaging communities in creating physical civic technologies. Proceedings of CHI 2018.

The ability to invade its surrounding tissue is one of the acknowledged hallmarks of cancer. This complex multi-scale process is affected by many players of the tumour microenvironment (TME), including the extracellular matrix (ECM) and various stromal cells such as macrophages. One of these key processes is the secretion of matrix degrading enzymes that enables the degradation of the neighbouring ECM and cell-matrix adhesion. By varying the strength of cell-matrix and multiple cell-cell adhesions, cancer...

Background: Saudi Arabian higher education institutions are facing major problems in retaining nursing faculty members. The reasons for this are unclear and there is limited literature specific to the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. Methods/Design: This current study adopted a mixed methods approach (sequential, explanatory) to understand the factors that contribute to the retention of nursing staff in higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia. This research was carried out in four phases–two scoping and a...

Being able to communicate in the natural environment and sufficiently meet daily communication needs is the essence of communication. The majority of the population in the world does not think about the mechanics required to communicate effectively. However, there is a significant number of people who experience difficulties in communication due to speech and/or cognitive impairments. Alternative methods of communication can be used to help people with disabilities to maximise the competence of communication. These...

Bacteria are among the most common living organisms; some are beneficial to humans, while others are harmful. Serratia marcescens, an opportunistic Gram-negative bacteria, causes many deadly diseases by attacking the human body and infecting the respiratory system, urinary tract, or skin. It uses protein secretion, which is the controlled transport of selected proteins across the cell envelop to the bacterial cell’s exterior. Protein secretion is carried out by six types of antibacterial nano-weapons known as...

Critical minerals are essential in addressing today's global challenges, like technology advancement, transport, and security, with climate change at the forefront as they play a crucial role in the energy transition. However, criticality assessments have primarily evaluated and classified minerals as ‘critical’ based on their utility in the global north (developed countries), limiting their considerations to supply risk and economic importance. This has left out concerns pertinent to the global south (developing countries), which this...

This thesis sought to validate the Self Concept Questionnaire (SCQ) created by Stipek and colleagues (1990) and investigate the previously documented relationships between mirror self-recognition and social and cognitive factors with that of the SCQ, a broader measurement of self-awareness. The overarching aim was to identify the developmental antecedents and consequents of self-awareness. Chapter 1 offers a comprehensive review of what it currently known about the development of self-awareness, highlighting the methodological and theoretical emphasis...

One of the biggest global challenges is to achieve sustainable water, energy and food security simultaneously while enhancing ecosystems integrity and climate change resilience. This challenge is more critical in semi-arid regions of developing countries where water resources are subject to increasing demands and unplanned urban associated with fragmented sectoral policies require complex trade-offs between resources and degrading environment. In India, due to lack of accountability of resources stocks and flows, for example, water losses...

There is substantial literature on how museums make visible dominant historical narratives. The structures of history proposed through display and interpretation in museums are traditionally designed to instil hierarchies, a sense of progression, capitalist/imperial power structures and enact disciplinary power mechanisms. Less well investigated are the processes that occur prior to display and interpretation. I argue that there is something significant to be learned from looking smaller, that the conventions of choice, record keeping and...

Argument mining (AM) is the process of identifying argument structure contained within a text. It involves segmenting arguments into elementary discourse units (EDUs), distinguishing argumentative units from non-argumentative units, classifying argument components into classes such as premise and claim, identifying and labeling argument relations between the components, and identifying argument schemes. AM approaches from the literature depend on a specific representation formalized based on an underlying set of argumentation theory and structure conventions. The smallest...

Objectives: The aim of this thesis is to modernise the use of sulphonylureas (SU), in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The hypothesis is that low dose SU will prime beta-cells to the effect of endogenous incretins and promote incretin-mediated insulin secretion, thus avoiding hypoglycaemia. Furthermore, that low dose SU will have enhanced efficacy when used in combination with a DPP4 inhibitor (DPP4i). Methods: Two clinical studies recruited patients with T2DM, controlled with diet or metformin...

The past year I have investigated storyboards and the processes of visual narration. I have also looked at illustration, and the first experiment in photo-etching. I see visual narration as influenced by the camera's framing, and through the use of the imaginary camera, I have drawn storyboards and made many pages of compositions.

This thesis focuses on how “Fit for Purpose” the use of innovative methodologies including the use of selected standard indicators can be in measuring the performance of large-scale mining and the consequential impact of mining at the local level in Ghana. Considering the variations in location, scope, activities, minerals being mined, and operational size, the effect of mining on communities can better be assessed using the standardised indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The...

Electricity networks are critical national infrastructure throughout the world, delivering vital energy services and supporting interdependent assets such as transport and hospitals. The network corridors are inspected and refurnished regularly to remain useful. Due to the high number of components and the geographical spread of electricity networks, operating costs can be very high. Inspection parameters include vegetation encroachment, sagging lines, tower paintwork defects and numerous components on the towers. There are over fifty inspection parameters...

The rapid changes in the financial intermediation landscape have significantly impacted the sources of funding available for infrastructure projects. While commercial banks used to dominate the funding sources for project finance, their ability to provide the long-term financing needed for infrastructure projects has been restricted due to the new capital and liquidity requirements introduced by Basel III. This was counterbalanced by an increasing appetite for institutional investors to provide such financing. The increasing participation from...

Generally, earnings management is found to lead to adverse outcomes in corporations all over the world. Prior studies explicitly conducted in the Saudi Arabian market reveal that earnings management is one factor that can lead to the failure of corporations in the country. However, the specific details of how corporate governance can contribute to earnings management have not yet been focused on in the research. For that reason, this thesis investigates two research questions: Research...

Aortopathies as a group of diseases are heterogenous – comprising of both thoracic and abdominal aortic aneurysms across many different clinical phenotypes. Together, they confer an increased risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, primarily from the risk of aortic dissection. This risk which was previously thought to be linear over time, is now understood to be less so and in fact there remains a degree of unpredictability with aortic aneurysm growth both for thoracic and...

Reaction-diffusion systems continue to attract increasing attention from the scientific community, with investigators seeking insights into the patterns that occur in living organisms, in ecological systems, in geochemistry, and in physiochemical systems. Cross-diffusion is a special case of reaction-diffusion system and refers to the phe- nomenon in which a gradient in the concentration of one species induces a flux of another species. Pattern formation is a sub-area of complexity science, where non-linear spatial process dynamics...

According to the World Health Organization, dementia is now the fifth largest killer in the world, although dementia is the number one killer in some wealthier countries. Globally, 50 million people suffer from this disease, but due to an aging population, this number is expected to increase to 130 by 2050 million. The 2020 dementia study on Chinese people over 60 years old shows that there are approximately 15.07 million people with dementia among Chinese...