The migration period was played out during 400-550 AD. This period has also been called the Norths golden era. This is because of the substantial number of gold and jewellery finds from this period. Archaeologists has since the 1930s been debating if the migration period was a time of crisis. This is because of all the discoveries that has been made and interpret as a crisis in Europe. Both the abandonment of the stone settlements and the ring-forts in Öland and Gotland has been used as evidence of a catastrophic crisis. The purpose of this essay is to present the most debated interpretations of the migration period. The questions for this essay is: How does the debate look like from it´s beginning to our present day? Has the debate had any changes? Could the archaeologists have been influenced by their own society? The essay is based on literature studies and presents the different scientists thoughts in the debate. Both the ring-fort and the abandonment of the settlements have had a significant role in the debate and therefore will be presented in this essay. This essay shows that the debate has taken a lot of changes through the years. The conclusion is that archaeologists have been influenced by both their present times and the existing archaeological theory.   Keywords: Migration period, iron age, debate, crisis, climate change, stone-house settlements, ring-fort.

The thesis is concerned with three so-called "incidents of intense violence" (gekka jiken) that occurred between late 1882 and late 1884: the Fukushima, Kabasan, and Chichibu incidents. All three revolts occurred simultaneous to, and were connected with, the rise and fall of the "freedom and popular rights movement" (jiyu minken undo), especially with its principal institutional expression, the Jiyuto or "Liberal Party." One of the most important of the connections between the revolts and the Jiyuto is that of their overlapping leadership. For the most part, local Jiyuto leaders served as the leaders of these three revolts. Due to this fact, and the other equally important one of the critical extent to which the local Jiyuto leaders embraced the ideological principles of the national Jiyuto—as opposed to the pragmatic, perhaps cynical, approach toward these principles taken by the national leadership—the "natural right" basis of the Liberal's ideology and its corresponding endorsement of the "right of revolution" filtered down to the farmers, hunters, day-labourers and others who participated in these incidents. Notions of "natural right" were used as guiding principles to govern the aims of their revolutionary organisations and as explanations to justify their attempts to overthrow the government. Popular songs, poems, the courtroom testimony of those participants arrested, the content of their revolutionary manifestos, their statements of aims as presented in their organisational charters, the content of lectures given in peasant villages, by local Jiyuto organisers, and the like attest to the beginnings of a strong liberal-democratic undercurrent existing in the early 1880's among Japan's common people (heimin). These findings call into question the conclusions regarding the early failure of democracy in Japan reached by such noted Western scholars as E. H. Norman, Robert Scalapino, and Nobutaka Ike. This is due partly to the fact that each of these scholars analysed Japan's politics of this period almost exclusively at the level of national, elite figures and thereby ignored the impact that the popular rights movement had upon local politics and rural folk. By neglecting local politics, the above-mentioned scholars prematurely drew the conclusion that Japan's common people acted as a collective Atlas who patiently bore the burdens of modernisation upon their peasant backs in obedient silence. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

In the latter half of the sixteenth century, Japan, which for almost one hundred years had been fractured into a great number of small domains ruled by daimyo, was in the process of being unified. Three important figures, of whom the first was Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), brought about that unification. Gda Nobunaga's role as a unifier of the Japanese state has been extensively studied by Japanese historians, but in those studies historians have usually misconstrued the nature and purpose of Oda's policies towards Buddhist institutions by portraying them as merely destructive, and have overlooked the most important effect of those policies. Oda Nobunaga's policies towards Buddhist institutions were not as sweepingly negative as has been generally asserted, and their effect was not the destruction of those institutions but a profound redefinition of the place of Buddhism in Japanese society. The greatest obstacle that Oda Nobunaga encountered in his efforts to unify the country was the Buddhist institutions which by the sixteenth century had come to possess great power. That power was of three types: many Buddhist institutions maintained armies of "cleric-soldiers" (so-hei) or "lay followers" (monto) that interfered in secular affairs and engaged in military campaigns; many owned vast stretches of land spread throughout the country; and many enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, independence, and extraterritoriality. By far the most powerful opposition to the realization of Oda's goal of a unified country was that put forward by the Ishiyama Honganji, the chief temple of the Honganji branch of True Pure Land Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu). The Ishiyama Honganji was the apex of a huge organization of monto. and it was also the hub of the anti-Nobunaga league that was made up of a number of Buddhist institutions, daimyo, and eventually the shogun Ashikaga Toshiaki. In order to unify the country Oda Nobunaga had to reduce the power of the Buddhist institutions, and to that end he pursued three policies, each one directed against one of the types of power enjoyed by those institutions: he eradicated the Buddhist armies of sphel and monto in a series of campaigns over the years from 1569 to 1582; he reduced the size of the Buddhist institutions' land holdings by confiscating many of their estates and by instituting a new land-ownership policy; and he denied their right to independence from the central administration. The result of Oda Nobunaga's policies was twofold: the power, land-holdings, and independence of Buddhist institutions was severely and permanently reduced; and more importantly, there was a redefinition of the place that Buddhism was to occupy in Japanese society in the centuries following the sixteenth. The classical definition of the role that Buddhism played in Japanese society was no longer accepted; Buddhism lost its influence on affairs of state as society underwent a process of secularization. Oda Nobunaga's policies were instrumental in ushering in a secular world. Oda Nobunaga's policies towards Buddhist institutions were investigated through an examination of a collection of 1461 documents, the vast majority of which are considered to have been issued by Oda between the years 1549 and 1582. Because the majority of the documents that were is sued by Oda deal with Buddhist institutions, it is possible to gain an understanding of his policies towards those institutions by a study of these documents. Much information on Oda's relations with Buddhist institutions is also contained in a biography of Oda, the Shincho K5ki. that was written by Ota Izumi no Kami Gyuichi in 1610, twenty-eight years after Oda's death. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

In 1868, the Meiji government decided to establish a military system that would improve not only the fighting capacity but also the military discipline of Japan's army. On the one hand the Meiji leaders rebuilt Japan's army with inspiration from Western models, initially the French. On the other hand they adopted from Western countries modern military justice system, that helped to shape gradually the Japanese navy and army in the 19th century.;This thesis delves deep into the introduction and evolution of the military justice system in the Meiji era, in an effort to explain how it helped reshape military discipline within the Imperial Japanese Army. Utilizing a range of primary sources, it studies the creation and enforcement of the military justice system from a military history rather than legal history perspective. It is hoped that this thesis reveals the crucial role that the military justice system played in Japan's military modernization during this period. The findings also explain why military discipline of the Imperial Japanese Army began to decline again after the Russo-Japanese War.

My dissertation, The Female Body, Motherhood, and Old Age: Representations of Women in Hell in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Japan, examines the literary and visual representations of women in hell in late medieval and early modern Japan, with particular attention to the female body, motherhood, and old age. My focus is the late Muromachi and early Edo periods, when a constellation of new hells began to be conceptualized that had serious ramifications for representation of women. I examine a group of otogizōshi texts and hell paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were disseminated widely through different media (picture scrolls, screen paintings, and narrative texts) and which generated a set of motifs representing women in the afterlife. I relate the emergence of these motifs to the larger history of the discursive construction of the female body and the evolution of representations of hell in premodern Japan. I argue that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, representations of women in hell in these texts and paintings shifted in their focus to domestic relationships, specifically mother-child and wife-husband relationships. This change is best exemplified by the late medieval set of gendered hells (The Hell of Barren Women, The Hell of Two Wives, and Children’s Limbo), which represent the body of the woman from three perspectives: 1) as infertile (as in the Hell of Barren Women), 2) as related to animals (such as the serpentine queen in Daibutsu no go-engi (The Venerable Origins of the Great Buddha) and the serpent-women in the Hell of Two Wives), and 3) as stigmatized or punished for excess desire/attachment in their mother-child and wife-husband relationships (as in the Hell of Two Wives). This dissertation also analyzes woman as erotic object, as mother, and as aging body from a comparative Japan-China perspective. By comparing similar motifs that emerged at approximately the same historical moments—the snake queen falling into hell in Daibutsu no go-engi with the snake queen in “Empress Xi turning into a python,” and Datsueba (Clothes-snatching Hag) with Meng Po (Lady of Forgetfulness)—I am able to highlight distinctive features of these new hells for women as well as compare the differing functions of hell shown by these Japanese and Chinese examples. In Chapter 1, “Women Falling Into Hell in Early Medieval Japan,” I analyze three early medieval tales of women journeying to and from Tateyama hell in the eleventh-century Dai Nihonkoku Hokkekyō genki and twelfth-century Konjaku monogatari shū in order to provide background for my later discussion on the new concerns for women that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I show how the salvation of the deceased female protagonists depended on the proper rituals being performed by family members and I make clear the significance that motherhood was accorded in early medieval Buddhist tales of women in hell. I then examine how representations of women evolved and became more complex in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the emergence of the Hell of Barren Women, where childless women are punished, and the Hell of Two Wives, in which two serpent women coil their bodies around a man with whom they had become involved in a triangular relationship. In Chapter 2, “Barren Women Hells and Daibutsu no go-engi (The Venerable Origins of the Great Buddha),” I show how the Hell of Barren Women stresses the reproductive responsibilities of women. The representations of the Hell of Barren Women, reflecting a growing female audience in the late Muromachi and early Edo periods, are clear evidence of a belief that it is motherhood that is a woman’s passport to salvation. In Chapter 3, I examine “The Serpentine Queen and the Chinese Tale of Empress Xi Hui Turning Into a Python.” A comparison with Daibutsu no go-engi shows that the Chinese stories about Empress Xi focus more on the feelings and observations of the living, while Daibutsu no go-engi stresses the accumulation and elimination of negative karma. Chapter 4, “The Hell of Two Wives: Transformed Women and the Jealousy of Joint-Wives,” examines the motif of the “transformed woman” found in the Lotus Sutra, the eleventh-century Hokke genki, and the mid-sixteenth century Dōjōji engi, showing how a negative connection between women and the dragon-serpent body was established, and how the animalized female body relates to the question of desire. The entwined threesome in the Hell of Two Wives not only exemplifies a domestic narrative of betrayal and resentment; it also shows a transition from a general stigmatization of the female body towards a more specific condemnation of lust, jealousy, and resentment—which are all gendered female. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women’s roles evolved to reflect a desire to maintain the stability of family. At the same time, these representations began focusing more on situations in which women’s efforts to control body or mind met with failure. Chapter 5, “Old Women as Keepers of the Borders: Datsueba and Meng Po,” analyzes two figures of hags in hell: Datsueba in Japan and Meng Po in China. While Datsueba watches over the dead as they descend to the depths of hell to receive judgment, Meng Po cares for them as they make their way out of hell to achieve reincarnation. I argue that both Datsueba and Meng Po reinforce the border of hell by depriving the deceased of their social identities, but while Datsueba punishes and purifies the deceased, Meng Po focuses on the transitional stage between death and the next life, and her memory-erasing function shows that, paradoxically, in Chinese hell deceased souls are not liberated from the basic Confucian relationships that are so important to the living.

The present research analyzed the influence of the soil structure interaction (SSI) in buildings, varying geotechnical parameters and height, considering 3 international codes. The responses obtained from the structures taking into account the SSI, were compared with the responses of fixed-base buildings, being the main control variables: the period and the drift. It was determined that the estimated range in which the period of the structure increases is from 30 to 98%, demonstrating the influence of considering soil flexibility. Due to the variability of the responses obtained, an adjustment factor is proposed to predict said amplification of the control variables, depending on the height of the building and the ground.

The cultural significance of effigy pipes among southeastern groups during the Mississippian period (A.D. 1000-1600) has yet to be fully understood. Recent studies, however, have provided new archaeological contexts for framing explanations of their possible use and distribution among such groups. Apart from conjectures about their use as ceremonial objects, selection for effigy pipes in the Mississippian Southeast was directly related to fluctuating environmental and demographic conditions under which such objects were manufactured and distributed. These conditions provided the appropriate context for their emergence as costly signaling devices through which elite or special interest groups advertised fitness levels, typically expressed in displays of power and prestige. As signaling devices, effigy pipes attained their widest distribution in the Southeast during a time of environmental and demographic stability. Their decline was primarily the result of increasing climatic instability and widespread demographic upheaval--events that precipitated major disruptions in commercial and economic relations.

Symptoms in patients receiving dialysis are common and associated with impaired quality of life. Symptoms are a top research priority because effective therapies are lacking and even with appropriate diagnosis and treatment, residual symptoms often persist. Clinical trials in the setting of kidney disease are challenging to conduct and as a result, nephrology lags behind other specialties regarding the degree to which clinical trials inform the care of patients with kidney disease, including those receiving dialysis. The studies in this thesis inform the design of randomized controlled trials with regards to run-in periods and the treatment of symptoms in patients with kidney disease. Chapter 2 describes a meta-epidemiologic study of the frequency, setting and purposes of run-in periods in parallel randomized controlled trials of self-administered medications for chronic diseases in adults. Chapter 3 is a study within a trial of an international randomized controlled trial that compares spironolactone to placebo for the prevention of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in dialysis. It compares the ability of a 3-week study visit in addition to a 7-week study visit during an active-run-in period to identify and exclude participants with non-adherence. Chapter 4 is a protocol for a randomized placebo controlled crossover trial of low fixed dose pharmacologic therapy for restless legs syndrome in hemodialysis that includes a placebo run-in period for adherence and tolerability. Chapter 5 is a survey of Canadian nephrologists regarding the use of cannabinoids for symptom management in patients with kidney disease and support for their use in clinical trials. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH) is a spondyloarthropathy traditionally defined as having spinal and extra-spinal manifestations. However its diagnostic criteria only allow the identification of advanced DISH and there is little consensus regarding the extra-spinal enthesopathies. In this project, individuals with DISH from the WM Bass Donated Skeletal Collection were analysed to investigate the pathogenesis of DISH and archaeological English and Catalan samples (3rd–18th century AD) were studied to investigate how diet might have influenced the development of DISH. From the individuals from the Bass Collection, isolated vertical lesions representing the early stages of DISH (‘early DISH’) were identified. Both sample sets showed that the presence of extra-spinal manifestations varies significantly between individuals and that discarthrosis and DISH can co-exist in the same individual. In all archaeological samples, the prevalence of DISH was significantly higher in males and older individuals showed a higher prevalence of DISH. In both regions, the prevalence of DISH was the lowest in the Roman samples, the highest in the early medieval ones and intermediate in the late medieval samples. While when using documentary resources and archaeological data, it was hypothesised that the prevalence of DISH in the English and Catalan samples might have been different, the results show no significant differences even if English samples tend to show higher prevalence of DISH than the Catalan samples. This possibly suggests that the development of DISH depends on a combination of dietary habits and, possibly, genetic predisposition might influence the development of DISH. The individuals from the Bass Collection showed high prevalence of metabolic and cardiovascular conditions. In contrast, no association was found between DISH and rich-diet associated conditions (e.g. carious lesions and gout) or deficiency-related conditions (e.g. scurvy, healed rickets). / Institute of Life Sciences Research from the University of Bradford

<p> Following the introduction to the field of lasers and the theories of laser oscillations in the light output, it is pointed out that calculations involving existing theories yield oscillation periods in excess of the period observed for our crystal. To account for this disagreement, the thesis proposes the inclusion of the additional loss terms of scatter and diffraction augmenting the transmission loss. The theory of Birnbaum Stocker and Welles (BSWl) is extended to include these additional loss mechan- isms and the oscillation period predicted, using the mea- sured values of these parameters is in good agreement with the. observed oscillation period. </p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)