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...

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.

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...

There seems a natural connection between human bodies, animal bodies, and books, not least because they are all containers, vessels of knowledge and experience. So I explored this year many materials that have skin-like qualities. And I began to think about how fabrics are like a second skin, worn to cover the human skin underneath. And I investigated how these exploratory materials might become something like prosthetics, or barriers and protection from anything touching the...

LGBT+ people are evidenced globally as being negatively impacted by the criminal justice system and face specific challenges within custodial settings due to their sexual orientation or gender identity, in what are inherently heteronormative and overtly masculine spaces culturally, and where hard lines between sex and gender are actively enforced and even reified in policy and practice at the institutional level. This dissertation sought to explore the experience of LGBT+ people in UK prisons relative...

Meiotic recombination underpins both applied plant breeding and gene mapping in fundamental research. However, in large-genome crops such as cereals (including barley; Hordeum vulgare), recombination generally occurs close to the telomeres with around 30% of the genes rarely, if ever, recombining. Understanding recombination in cereals is therefore crucial. So far, most meiotic research in plants has focused on understanding mechanistic aspects of the formation of crossovers (CO), but little has been centred on the effect...

Some of the worlds most devastating plant pathogens are those with broad host ranges (Kamoun et al., 2015, Dean et al., 2012). Yet there has been little investigation into the molecular mechanisms that enable broad host range (Mbengue et al., 2016). Phytophthora capsici is an oomycete plant pathogen with a broad host range and is well placed to become a model organism for the investigation of the mechanisms of host range and dynamic adaption in...

In recent years, the surge in wearable devices amplified the need for advanced computer vision techniques to analyse video gathered by cameras efficiently. This thesis investigates machine learning methods to extract information from video data acquired by wearable cameras. More specifically, we leverage contextual information from egocentric video data that can be used to support language prediction. Our motivating application is a voice output communication aid that provides speech predictions for users with communication disabilities...