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This thesis presents an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) inspired analysis of sheep scab in Scotland. Sheep scab is caused by scab mites, and it has a long history in terms of its legislation and available treatments in the UK. In 2010 it became a notifiable livestock disease again in Scotland. Even though sheep scab is studied by natural scientists and economists, it remains unclear how scab is understood by sheep practitioners. This means that the stories, practices and knowledges of sheep practitioners who work at the forefront of sheep scab (in terms of its recognition, diagnosis, treatment and notification) remain absent from the political arena. However, their activities shape how rules and regulations are used. An ANT approach proved helpful for this research, because it allows the researcher to follow connections. The connections followed are sheep scab stories and practices. This research therefore has the following main question: How are multiple sheep scab situations enacted in Scotland? Multi-sited ethnography is the methodology used for this research, and semi structured interviews and field observations were done to get in-depth information about sheep scab situations in Scotland. In total 47 interviews, and 14 observations were done from 2013-2014 with diverse respondents ranging from farmers, veterinarians, slaughterhouse employees and natural scientists. This thesis contributes empirically and theoretically to human-animal studies (HAS). The empirical findings are that the notification legislation for sheep scab is rarely used; sheep scab diagnoses are rarely done; and finally, sheep practitioners trust their own situated knowledges of sheep scab. The theoretical contribution is a reworking of ANT to make it more suitable for studying sheep scab. In particular I rework ANT's confusing terminology; its tendency to reduce entities to their effects; and I include concepts from livestock disease literature that proved particularly helpful.

This dissertation addresses the question of the creation of scientific knowledge, in the con- text of an online question-and-answer forum: Stack Overflow. The project starts from the claim advanced in the philosophy and sociology of science that Nature is not sufficient to settle disputes; for a fact to be created by being accepted as true, it must be justified in discourse. Actor-Network Theory claims that this justification occurs through the mo- bilisation of resources, which are marshalled to make a truth-claim unassailable without also defeating all the supporting resources. I adapt ANT’s claim to the methods of Social Network Analysis. In network terms, the facticity of a claim is measured by its indegree — the number of other claims which are justified by it — and its outdegree measures the count of the resources which justify it. I first consider answers to Stack Overflow questions, because they are the most straight- forward to describe, and the closest object to what previous analyses of citation networks of academic papers have considered. The central question is how an answer is made to be true, where I find that the more other answers an answer links to, the higher its indegree. In fact, when the measure of outdegree is expanded to include the resources which resources themselves link to, this association is higher still. While referring to users doesn’t matter in itself, referring to users’ posts does, as does having more code. The best predictor of indegree is the number of users linked to. I also find that although more modalised answers matter more, black-boxed answers which are not modalised at all matter the most. Finally, while more resources make an answer more likely to be edited, they do not make it more likely to be defeated and deleted entirely. But Stack Overflow is also (and primarily) made of questions to which these answers respond, and questions are less addressed by existing theory. The basic conflict is between whether questions are just transparent references to answers, or whether they make their own independent contributions to knowledge. Having established that the network of questions is structurally distinct from the network of answers, I find that questions’ indegree and outdegree are also correlated, but less so than for answers. I find that linking to answers matters, especially when the appropriateness of the answers to the question is taken into account. However, the contributions that questions make independently of their answers, topicality and uniqueness, do not generally matter. Like answers, questions can also be closed rather than answered, and I find that questions that are closed for different reasons have different patterns of answering. In the final chapter, I consider how the techno-social infrastructure of the site encourages the creation of knowledge. The chapter is spent studying the existence and nature of a Matthew Effect on Stack Overflow, going beyond the results for the distribution of reputation to examine the mechanisms involved in assigning reputation. Both the distributions of posts’ upvotes and the attachment kernel indicate a rich-get-richer effect, but they suggest that the effect is not proportional as in common models of the phenomenon. However, it also seems like the reason for attributing more upvotes to users with higher reputation is not solely due to their higher reputation: a regression discontinuity design on displayed user reputation produces a null result, suggesting that the reputation-rich are good, and the good get richer.

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In this paper, there are three policy scenarios that are explored and discussed. The first scenario comes from a dataset where little information is known about individual nodes and connection weights are placed based on the economic theory of increasing or constant returns. The second dataset was derived by taking a group of academic researchers (without any knowledge beyond co authorship alliances) working on a joint venture and exploring what combined research ventures would be most beneficial for future research outputs. More information concerning individual nodes and connections is given in this dataset, but the weights on connections are still developed according to rules of economic theory. The final set of data is developed by viewing the same co-authorship alliances as in the second scenario, but instead the data is examined more thoroughly and more accurate maps of authors connection weights are generated.

River deltas are dynamic ecosystems of environmental, ecological, and societal importance. In coastal Louisiana, land loss and increased nutrient loading are altering the eco-geomorphic equilibrium, raising concern for the environmental concerns associated with climate and anthropogenic change. Over the last 100 years, nearly 5000 km2 of wetlands have been submerged due to a variety of environmental and anthropogenic forces. Wetland drowning and costal retreat is predicted to continue, threatening both human and environmental interests. As a result, mitigation efforts in the form of planned river diversions designed to build new land by natural delivering sediment to the once-leveed floodplains have been proposed. Denitrification in coastal wetlands has the potential to limit the risks of hypoxia and related eco-geomorphic issues by reducing the nitrogen export to receiving waters. The goal of this research project is to understand and quantify to propagation of environmental fluxes through a delta distributary system. Water fluxes in the delta distributary network are not solely propagated within the distributary channels and interdistributary areas, taking the form of inundated island interiors surrounded by subaerial levees, are hydrologically important. At Wax Lake Delta (WLD) in coastal Louisiana, roughly 50% of the flow is exchanged to the island swamps, suggesting that significant portions of nutrients are transported to the island interiors. The hydraulic residence times (HRTs) of the islands are estimated to be 15 – 29 hours and 11 – 18 hours on Mike and Pintail Islands, respectively; both being well below HRT estimates for significant denitrification. Spatial variability in network structure, specifically channel width and frequencies of confluences and bifurcations, influences the transport dynamics within the delta. However, flow partitioning in major distributary channels at WLD is relatively constant with time, supporting the hypothesis that network structure controls flux dynamics. / text

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The thesis provides an account of the development and the eventual elimination of the illegal horserace gambling market. Prior to the introduction of totalisators in 1870 bookmakers (bookies) provided the only option for legal on-course horserace gambling. Using an Actor-Network approach (Latour 1986) I track the transformations of totalisators across times and places to provide a historical account of the development and the co-existence of both legal and illegal horserace gambling markets, documenting the 100 year struggle by racing clubs and successive Governments to remove illegal bookmakers from horserace gambling markets. My argument is that the illegal gambling market survived for as long as it did because bookmakers' constructed extensive actor-networks that enabled them to provide a faster and more accessible betting service to punters. A significant feature in their survival was also the public and police tolerance of their presence. I argue that no one actually 'kills the bookies'. At each stage in the transformation of the scale and operation of totalisators, punters gradually began to use the services provided by a legal market. I document how the drift of legislation, coupled with technological changes and the establishment of new legal gambling sites, led to the expansion of global legal gambling markets that included sport bookmakers and legal horse racing bookmakers. These developments, especially computerisation, enabled the legal market to expand and reconfigure networks providing flexible, real and online access points for betting. These developments ultimately eliminate the comparative advantages of the local illegal bookmakers and bring to an end the illegal horserace gambling market.

An examination of the environmental policy process provides insight into the mechanisms of decision-making that create and implement policies, which in turn affect planning outcomes and development directions. Such in-depth scrutiny has rarely emerged in the East African context, with few studies providing an analysis of the entire policy process and the actor network involved. This study offers a thick, descriptive narrative of the environmental policy arena in Nairobi, where rampant environmental degradation due to unconstrained development is occurring despite the existence of an environmental regulatory framework. The effects of newly implemented constitutional and strategic development reforms in this rapidly evolving African metropolis are also interrogated. The study lens shifts from the macro-level perspective of the policy system and context, to the micro-level of the institutional and individual actors, examining their roles, authority, and the interconnections between them. A qualitative case study approach is utilized, consisting of 25 semi-structured interviews conducted with environmental policymaking leaders in Nairobi. Both deductive (themes are applied to the data) and inductive (themes are derived from the data) analyses are applied to examine the research data in detail. The primary data is supplemented with numerous secondary sources, which provide a practical grounding for the primary analysis. The narrative that coalesces around the data themes uncovers the underlying causes for poor environmental regulation thus far, prominent among them being a lack of institutional capacity in state agencies; corrupt and nepotistic governance; and the splintering of the environmental mandate among numerous state institutions, leading to competition and conflict among them. Adam and Kriesi’s Network Approach (2007) is then critically adapted and applied, revealing the concentration of power in state authorities and disproportionate distribution of influence among non-state actors in the environmental policy subsystem. This policy network analysis shows how these conditions create the potential for low to moderate incremental policy change going forward.

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