As processed of globalisation are seen to undermine traditional understandings of political democracy, much analysis and hope in academia currently rests on ideas of deliberation and post-national democratic practices - the roots of a 'global civil society' - that has taken force as not just an analysis of social and political change, but as a normative project. I argue that counter to much academic discussion, the very notion of a civil society needs to be subjected to rigorous critique given that so much of the discussion is based on an implicit, but problematic; account of changing conditions, not least within the media. In this thesis, I argue that advocates of 'global civil society' rest in an understanding of the media, especially the news, as playing a central role in three different, but overlapping, way: firstly, to transform political communities and provide the basis for 'global citizenship'; secondly, to provide the resources necessary for public deliberation in a 'global public sphere'; and thirdly, to facilitate the influence of non-elites by representing 'global public opinion'. This thesis interrogates this understanding of media developments by presenting original empirical research of different kinds of news organisations that all play a key role in the discussion on global civil society - global satellite news networks, traditional national/local news outlets, as well as 'alternative' online news sites - and argues that developments in news media do not sustain such an understanding. These assumed functions of the media are undermined by evidence that news practices are shaped by not only economic and strategic considerations rooted in specific cultural contexts, but also by a continuous nation-state defined world-view that rests on dominant political rhetoric and the activities of a narrow group of political and social elites. What is more, it argues that new 'alternative' media does not necessarily challenge these practices and may indeed exacerbate the individualisation and privatisation of public deliberation, fragmenting any unifying 'global moral order'. I present the argument that this misapprehension of developments in news practices highlights the difficulties the concept of global civil society has with taking account of the power relations of actually existing democracy and I also challenge the broader appeal to a global 'space' of politics in such circumstances.

The changing media landscape in China has created a diverse society where young audiences often suffer from confusing and conflicting values. There is an increasing concern that young people‘s sense of citizenship is in decline, suggesting a lack of awareness that may be indicative of an alienation towards news. The purpose of this study is to enhance scholarly understanding of the relationship between Chinese young citizens and news. The research was conducted in Beijing, involving 12 focus groups and 40 semi-structured interviews with teenagers, and 10 in-depth interviews with their parents and teachers. Evidence obtained highlights that young citizens have a general negative view towards national news media regarding news objectivity, balance, and depth. Results also suggest that young citizens struggle to understand the top-down form of news in China. The gaps between young people and news raise questions about their relative grasp of news literacy, and their perspectives on what counts as good journalism. Briefly, the analysis reveals that: a) while news plays an important role in providing young citizens with information in their daily lives, consistent consumption of news does not necessarily result in enhancing their news literacy; and b) young citizens‘ perspectives on news are shaped by both foreign news concepts and domestic news stereotypes. The study reaffirms that multiple dimensions of citizenship and cultural traditions in different social contexts need to be integrated when examining the relationship between young citizens, news and news education. Looking to the future, the thesis presents a strong case for a new approach to help reduce the gap between young people and national news, offering specific recommendations for better developing news literacy education strategies best suited for China.

Challenging established academic and techno-scientific enclosures of interdisciplinary or boundary research between art and other disciplines, the thesis provides an analysis of a series of critical research projects undertaken since 2004. The author argues that through critical forms of artistic research, new forms of knowledge production are possible that operate beyond current enclosures. Using Office of Experiments' (est. 2004) publicly exhibited works, research databases and publications, a body of evidence is described that represents a sustained contribution to artistic and academic discourse through collaborative and collective practice. This research and the formation of The Office of Experiments by White, provides the basis for the argument that artists are becoming engaged in ‘instituent’ forms of practice (Raunig) that are indirectly beginning to challenge the monopoly of established and hegemonic institutional spaces; the Museum and the University, gallery and the archive. In the context of interdisciplinary research, the concept of boundary objects (Gieryn and Borgdorff), an expanded field of art (Krauss), are discussed in relation to the author's concerns with critical and social practices. Using examples such as Artist Placement Group and The Center for Land Use Interpretation, it is argued that there needs to be a greater consideration and concern afforded to knowledge production developed in rigorous forms beyond the academic realm in order to fully interrogate emerging contexts of technology and science, new moral and ethical dimensions, new politics and antagonisms. It is argued that in essence, stemming from a frustration with limiting processes in academia, the published research of The Office of Experiments led by White provides examples of critical knowledge as developed by a new form of parallel institution. It is argued that such practices, when critically engaged with existing institutions of knowledge and culture, create new antagonistic spaces in which productive epistemic encounters can take place. In addition to the written thesis, the published research is presented through a browser to allow the reader to navigate documentation and traces of exhibitions, digital archives and artist publications, along with the full text of referenced citations of these works from major catalogues and published articles and journals. The database itself reflects a key dimension in the critical research practice that has attempted to present knowledge within an open model for dissemination purposes.

The hand is often considered as one of the most natural and intuitive interaction modalities for human-to-human interaction. In human-computer interaction (HCI), proper 3D hand tracking is the first step in developing a more intuitive HCI system which can be used in applications such as gesture recognition, virtual object manipulation and gaming. However, accurate 3D hand tracking, remains a challenging problem due to the hand’s deformation, appearance similarity, high inter-finger occlusion and complex articulated motion. Further, 3D hand tracking is also interesting from a theoretical point of view as it deals with three major areas of computer vision- segmentation (of hand), detection (of hand parts), and tracking (of hand). This thesis proposes a region-based skin color detection technique, a model-based and an appearance-based 3D hand tracking techniques to bring the human-computer interaction applications one step closer. All techniques are briefly described below. Skin color provides a powerful cue for complex computer vision applications. Although skin color detection has been an active research area for decades, the mainstream technology is based on individual pixels. This thesis presents a new region-based technique for skin color detection which outperforms the current state-of-the-art pixel-based skin color detection technique on the popular Compaq dataset (Jones & Rehg 2002). The proposed technique achieves 91.17% true positive rate with 13.12% false negative rate on the Compaq dataset tested over approximately 14,000 web images. Hand tracking is not a trivial task as it requires tracking of 27 degreesof- freedom of hand. Hand deformation, self occlusion, appearance similarity and irregular motion are major problems that make 3D hand tracking a very challenging task. This thesis proposes a model-based 3D hand tracking technique, which is improved by using proposed depth-foreground-background ii feature, palm deformation module and context cue. However, the major problem of model-based techniques is, they are computationally expensive. This can be overcome by discriminative techniques as described below. Discriminative techniques (for example random forest) are good for hand part detection, however they fail due to sensor noise and high interfinger occlusion. Additionally, these techniques have difficulties in modelling kinematic or temporal constraints. Although model-based descriptive (for example Markov Random Field) or generative (for example Hidden Markov Model) techniques utilize kinematic and temporal constraints well, they are computationally expensive and hardly recover from tracking failure. This thesis presents a unified framework for 3D hand tracking, using the best of both methodologies, which out performs the current state-of-the-art 3D hand tracking techniques. The proposed 3D hand tracking techniques in this thesis can be used to extract accurate hand movement features and enable complex human machine interaction such as gaming and virtual object manipulation.

This thesis comprises the first comprehensive narrative account of the history of classical music radio in the UK between 1945 and 1995, from before the launch of the Third Programme until after the launch of Classic FM. It describes and analyses the rich range of output across all relevant radio stations in this period, rebutting the conventional assumption that this aspect of British radio was simply about the Third Programme and Radio 3. At almost all times during the second half of the 20th Century, those stations were not the majority providers of classical music radio. Classical music radio over these years was marked by a series of high points, when the provision of elite and popular output combined to open the genre to a wide range of listeners; and then by a series of retreats from those summits. During three spells – the late Forties, the late Sixties and the early Nineties – a multi-channel offering of both highbrow and middlebrow music, linked and presented in an accessible way, achieved broad appeal and wide audiences, and realised the potential for this public good. The classical music programming of Independent Local Radio between 1973 and 1990 did the same in individual localities, to a previously unappreciated extent. This new narrative history of classical music radio in the UK highlights and is dominated by the dialectic between highbrow and popular culture, between elite and demotic taste, and between a class-based and a classless approach to radio broadcasting. Original audience data demonstrate a consistent potential audience for classical music radio of some five to six million throughout these years, provided listeners felt they were allowed to listen in. Original content analysis demonstrates a canonic repertoire of classical music radio, arrived at and maintained on a reflexive basis between the producers and the consumers of this genre, centred on the works of 19th Century European composers. That canon has remained largely unchallenged except at the popular margins, in contrast to modern approaches to the literary canon, and distinguishes classical music from other art forms. This account illustrates a particular aspect of listening, whereby classical music radio can validly be both foreground and background. The influence of individuals, and therefore the relevance of biography within this history, is shown to be significant, but overall less important than the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the radio services operated, and which shaped their output. Classical music radio is an archetypal element of public service radio broadcasting. This narrative shows that it has been provided during this period by stations outside the main cultural cohort, even from 1973 outside the BBC. As such, it challenges institutional definitions of public service broadcasting, and demonstrates how relationships between the producers of radio and its consumers can operate at many levels, testifying to the multi-threaded tapestry of UK cultural life as a whole in the second half of the 20th century.

Insects are common in our world, such as ants, spiders, cockroaches etc. Virtual representations of them have wide applications in Virtual Reality (VR), video games and films. Compared with the large volume of works in biped animation, the problem of insect animation was less explored. Their small body parts, complex structures and high-speed movements challenge the standard techniques of motion synthesis. This thesis addressed the aforementioned challenge by presenting a framework to efficiently automate the modelling and authoring of insect locomotion. This framework is inspired by two key observations of real insects: fixed gait pattern and distributed neural system. At the top level, a Triangle Placement Engine (TPE) is modelled based on the double-tripod gait pattern of insects, and determines the location and orientation of insect foot contacts, given various user inputs. At the low level, a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) controller actuates individual joints by mimicking the distributed neural system of insects. A Controller Look-Up Table (CLUT) translates the high-level commands from the TPE into the low-level control parameters of the CPG. In addition, a novel strategy is introduced to determine when legs start to swing. During high-speed movements, the swing mode is triggered when the Centre of Mass (COM) steps outside the Supporting Triangle. However, this simplified mechanism is not sufficient to produce the gait variations when insects are moving at slow speed. The proposed strategy handles the case of slow speed by considering four independent factors, including the relative distance to the extreme poses, the stance period, the relative distance to the neighbouring legs, the load information etc. This strategy is able to avoid the issues of collisions between legs or over stretching of leg joints, which are produced by conventional methods. The framework developed in this thesis allows sufficient control and seamlessly fits into the existing pipeline of animation production. With this framework, animators can model the motion of a single insect in an intuitive way by specifying the walking path, terrains, speed etc. The success of this framework proves that the introduction of biological components could synthesise the insect animation in a naturalness and interactive fashion.

This thesis charts the historical evolution of the ‘personal’ radio interview, in order to understand its use as a speech device, a social relationship and a communicative genre. Four contrasting styles of interviewing have been chosen to illustrate key moments and to illuminate significant shifts in the history of UK broadcasting: Desert Island Discs (1942-1954), The Radio Ballads (1958-64 & 2006), the confessional style phone interview format on independent local radio (1975) and Prison Radio projects (1993-present). These cases draw together an assortment of live and pre-recorded material, across a variety of genres that encompass over seventy years of production output, granting an opportunity to demonstrate the specificities of each example, whilst also identifying any overarching themes or differences. Primary research has been carried out using an assortment of audio content and written archive, comprising of scripts, memos, letters, diaries, training documents, contracts, policies and guidelines, which give us a further sense of how this method of talk has developed over the decades. Power dynamics permeate all levels of broadcasting, so particular emphasis has been placed on how both ‘on air’ and ‘backstage’ interaction has been experienced by an institution, an interviewer and an interviewee. For instance, how might the interview have been used to serve, restrict or benefit the needs of a particular group, an individual or an institution? The different types of interaction that has taken place between participants before, during and after an interview exchange provide clues about the purpose, motivations and agendas of those who contribute towards on-air talk. So, while this thesis values the significance of broadcast audio and historical documentation, it also honours the experiences of individual figures, and seeks to highlight the relationship dynamics within production teams; all of which have an impact on the on-air interview exchange. As a result, research interviews have been conducted with industry practitioners, including editors, engineers, presenters, producers and phone operators. This study will not only start to develop our knowledge of the contextual history of interview production on commercial, public service and community radio in the UK, but also begin to lay the foundation for an expansion of our wider knowledge concerning the use of the mediated interview across other disciplines and throughout other countries. This thesis suggests that the on-air incarnation of interview talk, its ‘backstage’ production, and its principal position within speech radio genres all over the world, should be viewed as a powerful barometer of institutional, individual and national cultural hopes, desires and identities.

This study looks into the way India's 1991 general election was portrayed in the newspapers of India and Britain. The thesis stipulates that while the elections generated a keen interest in the Indian press, it kept a low profile in the British press. However, the British press' attention was heightened when the former Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was assassinated during the same election campaign, which failed to invoke a substantial and appreciable amount of coverage. While the Indian newspapers, after providing an extensive coverage to the themes related to the assassinated leader for one week, returned to emphasise the campaign and other contemporary issues, the British newspapers relentlessly continued to fill their pages with the same themes even over three weeks after the event had happened. The thesis also argues that the British press accentuated far more than its Indian counterpart the issue of violence in India during the 47-day long campaign. It clearly emerges from the findings that during an election, the campaign agenda is formed by the journalists rather than by the political parties/leaders. While the newspapers of both the countries carried more media-initiated stories than party- initiated, the British press outnumbers its Indian counterpart. It shows that the sacerdotal role the British journalists are known to play in the coverage of the election in their own country is dissolved when they report election in a Third World country. Discussed in this thesis is also the fact that the powerful political actors and parties are referred to more than the minor parties and their leaders. Nevertheless, the basic and development issues like inflation, poverty, unemployment, education, rural development etc. - notwithstanding their inclusion in the manifestos of virtually all the Indian political parties - get a low priority in the press.

The DNA immediately flanking the human Xp:Yp telomere exhibits a high level of sequence polymorphism and strong linkage disequilibrium, resulting in a limited number of highly diverged haplotypes. The sequence divergence suggests that these haplotypes are ancient. Orthologous sequences in chimpanzees and gorillas are more diverged than between synonymous sequences at other loci. Balancing selection may have contributed to the maintenance of the highly diverged haplotypes flanking the human Xp:Yp telomere and may explain the high sequence divergence in closely related species. A system has been developed to assay the distribution of telomere and variant repeats within the proximal 120 repeats of Xp:Yp telomeres to create a telomere map. The distributions of these repeats is highly polymorphic with estimated heterozygosities in excess of 99%. The mutation rate underlying this variation was measured directly as 6.25x10.;-3 per gamete. Alleles were grouped by similarities in their telomeremaps, these groups of alleles also share the same haplotype in the telomere flanking DNA. This suggests that these alleles have evolved along haploid lineages and that the predominant mutational mechanisms influencing the evolution of sequences at the proximal end of this telomere must be of an intra-allelic nature. Comparison of alleles suggests that most of the differences could be accounted for by small localised replication-slippage like events. Analysis of the chimpanzee and gorilla sequences orthologous to the human Xp:Yp telomere revealed that a telomere was not present at the same location in these species. Instead, two small interstitial blocks of telomere-like repeats were present in gorilla and an array of chimpanzee and gorilla specific subterminal satellite was present in chimpanzees. Therefore, the location of the Xp:Yp telomere is unique to the human lineage and may therefore be relatively new in evolutionary terms.

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