Consistent evidence confirms that the addition of fluoride to achieve an optimal concentration in potable water supplies is both safe and effective in reducing community caries experience. While public acceptance and use of water fluoridation in Australia has been high for forty years, its implementation in Queensland remained low until December 2008. Political and social scientists have long recognised that the formation and maintenance of public policy in Australia is a complex interactive process involving inter alia government, bureaucracy, pressure groups and voters. However, explanations of the factors influencing the outcome of a proposal to fluoridate a municipal water supply remain inadequate. The long evolution of adjusted fluoridation has its genesis in pre-1930 North American concerns over the disfigurement associated with endemic dental mottling. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, many perceived this affliction as the visible manifestation of a public health problem: chronic fluoride intoxication. Reports of environmental contamination of the food chain from naturally over-fluoridated water and agrarian and industrial practices only increased community doubts about the accumulative and toxic potential of fluoride. For these and other reasons the public perception of fluoride was poor. Between 1937 and 1945, USPHS dental researcher and later Director of the National Institute of Dental Research HT Dean and co-workers emerged as the few who understood the fine line between fluoride therapy and toxicity. Their investigations involved not only specialised interpretations of human dental epidemiology but also multidisciplinary studies of human and animal fluoride exposure and homeostasis. However, decisions to implement water fluoridation had to come from the relevant government authorities. Here scientific knowledge faced political reality. Apart from perceived safety issues and resistance to the compulsory nature of water fluoridation, many other barriers to water fluoridation emerged: incompletely understood pharmacodynamics of fluoride; confounding issues in the initiation and propagation of caries; community acceptance of this epidemic; and political sensitivities regarding water. This scientific and social background explained why adjusted fluoridation was amenable to both challenge and misrepresentation. In the US, the constitutional, institutional and financial network provided the basis for an enduring culture of dental research that eventually provided the multidisciplinary evidence to endorse the safety and efficacy of water fluoridation. Although Australians did not experience a widespread human mottling problem akin to that in the United States, Australian fluoride advocates faced similar opposition. The Australian constitution, state parochialism and decentralisation compounded by vast distances fragmented the responsibilities for research, health and water treatment. Each state had limited resources and faced these responsibilities in its own way. Although there were several early attempts in some states at regional dental field studies, meaningful national dental epidemiology did not emerge until 1993. Hence, much of the supportive evidence for fluoridation in Australia had to be imported from North America. This background meant that wherever fluoridation was widely implemented in Australia, state authority played a role. In addition to the general social and scientific concerns about fluoride and fluoridation, before 1957 there were a number of unresolved scientific factors relating to naturally over-fluoridated ground water, climate, tea consumption and fluid homeostasis involving canecutters. These made Queensland different in the Australian context. After 1957, as these scientific concerns in Queensland diminished, the political landscape changed and provided new foundations for political hesitance and expedience. The timing and circumstances of the promulgation of the Fluoridation of Public Water Supplies Act (1963) influenced its nature to the extent that until 2008, this legislation with its link to various local government acts was unique within Australia. Although there were notable exceptions such as the decisions to fluoridate water supplies at Townsville and Mareeba, this legislative background established the “Queensland difference” as a fixture in fluoride debates across the state. When combined with inadequate state funding and a lack of political resolve from parliamentarians and councillors, prospects for fluoridation in Queensland were virtually paralysed. Nonetheless, while inquiry into the political reasons for the implementing or the failure to implement fluoridation remains thin, developments in Queensland after December 2007 lend significant weight to the finding that a politically resolute centralised authority with the responsibility for both health and water are key components in the outcome.

This dissertation treats a topic that has received increasing attention as of late, namely that of the environment and in particular increasing levels of CO2 emissions caused by transport. The aim of the dissertation is to explain how a shipper, through various measures, can reduce transport-related CO2 emissions when centralising a distribution system and how this affects the provision of cost efficient customer service. Earlier research has stated that this type of structural change is considered unfavourable from an environmental viewpoint as it increases the amount of transport work generated by the system and thereby transport-related CO2 emissions. The argument that is made in this dissertation, however, is that transport work is only one aspect to consider when evaluating how transport-related CO2 emissions are affected by this type of structural change. The reason for this being that a change in structure and management of the same can enable a shipper to make other changes within the distribution system that can prove beneficial from an environmental perspective as they decrease the amount of CO2 emissions per tonne kilometre. Theoretically, the dissertation has its foundation in two different areas in logistics research. The first area concerns logistics and the environment, where the frame of reference examines measures discussed in previous research with reference to how a shipper can reduce CO2 emissions related to transport. The second area treated in the frame of reference concerns how costs and service are affected by the structural change of centralising a distribution system and how this relates to the measures discussed in the first part of the framework. From a methodological viewpoint, the dissertation is based on case studies. These are presented in four appended manuscripts (a licentiate thesis and three papers), where the results of these studies are used as empirical input for the synthesising analysis that is led in the dissertation. A key deliverable from the research presented in this dissertation is a classification of measures that increase transport-related CO2 emissions and measures that decrease transport-related CO2 emissions when a distribution system is centralised. By presenting this classification, the dissertation extends previous research on the environmental impact of various logistics strategies, where centralised distribution is an example of such a strategy. With regards to this classification, it is concluded that a shipper that seeks to centralise its distribution system in a more CO2 efficient manner will aim to identify a structural configuration that minimises the increase in transport work. This is imperative as there is a close link between transport work and CO2 emissions. Hence, a CO2 efficient centralised distribution system will include more central warehouses than that advocated by earlier research on centralised distribution. This in turn implies that a shipper may not reach the full potential in economies of scale as advocated in earlier research. However, such a configuration will simultaneously lead to less transport work, whereby a shipper will be able to offset the increase in transport work by employing measures that decrease the amount of transport-related CO2 emissions per amount of transport work. The results also indicate that in addition to reducing transport-related CO2 emissions, some of these measures come with a cost incentive. By employing such measures, a shipper can come to compensate for the potential loss in economies of scale caused by employing a structural configuration that seeks to minimise the increase in transport work rather than to maximise economies of scale. By this means, the dissertation contributes to research on centralised distribution by considering how a reduction in transport-related CO2 emissions is interrelated with the provision of cost efficient customer service.

Ordinary desktop computers continue to obtain ever more resources – in-creased processing power, memory, network speed and bandwidth – yet these resources spend much of their time underutilised. Cycle stealing frameworks harness these resources so they can be used for high-performance computing. Traditionally cycle stealing systems have used client-server based architectures which place significant limits on their ability to scale and the range of applica-tions they can support. By applying a fully decentralised network model to cycle stealing the limits of centralised models can be overcome. Using decentralised networks in this manner presents some difficulties which have not been encountered in their previous uses. Generally decentralised ap-plications do not require any significant fault tolerance guarantees. High-performance computing on the other hand requires very stringent guarantees to ensure correct results are obtained. Unfortunately mechanisms developed for traditional high-performance computing cannot be simply translated because of their reliance on a reliable storage mechanism. In the highly dynamic world of P2P computing this reliable storage is not available. As part of this research a fault tolerance system has been created which provides considerable reliability without the need for a persistent storage. As well as increased scalability, fully decentralised networks offer the ability for volunteers to communicate directly. This ability provides the possibility of supporting applications whose tasks require direct, message passing style communication. Previous cycle stealing systems have only supported embarrassingly parallel applications and applications with limited forms of communication so a new programming model has been developed which can support this style of communication within a cycle stealing context. In this thesis I present a fully decentralised cycle stealing framework. The framework addresses the problems of providing a reliable fault tolerance sys-tem and supporting direct communication between parallel tasks. The thesis includes a programming model for developing cycle stealing applications with direct inter-process communication and methods for optimising object locality on decentralised networks.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / State practice and literature suggest that devolution of power can address the main challenges of underdevelopment, internal conflict and abuse of centralised power in developing states. However, this thesis advances the argument that the design features of devolved government for these purposes are not always compatible. Accordingly, while there are complementary and neutral design features in the three designs, trade-offs have to be made between the unique design features in order to ensure the effective pursuit of the three purposes through a single system of devolved government. Kenya, the case study for this inquiry, confirms the international trend as its major challenges over the last 50 years have been underdevelopment, internal conflict and abuse of central power. As such, development, ethnic harmony, and the limiting of central power featured prominently throughout the entire constitutional review process as purposes to be pursued by means of devolution of power. To this end, the devolution of state power is one of the central elements of the current constitutional dispensation in Kenya. There are trade-offs made in Kenya‟s devolution design in order to accommodate the three purposes of devolution. However, the overall result has been that the emphasis falls on development at the expense of conflict resolution and limiting central power. Nevertheless, regardless of the trade-offs and nature of the final design, the design‟s effectiveness or lack thereof may depend very much on factors external to the design. Lack of political will to make devolution work can negate the effectiveness of even the most perfect design; by same token, political will could make an apparently bad design effective. In practice, therefore, effectiveness depends on an array of other context-specific factors. / South Africa

The purpose of this dissertation is to consider whether centralised bargaining, through bargaining councils, is a suitable mechanism for determining minimum wages in South Africa. In addressing this issue, the minimum wage fixing mechanisms currently available in South Africa, the impact they have on the labour markets and whether there is a need for reformation of our labour laws relating to the setting of minimum wages will be considered. The dissertation focuses on the various philosophical perspectives on labour law, the international development of collective labour law, international wage-fixing mechanisms and the development of South African labour law from the Industrial Conciliations Act 11 of 1924 to the current Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995. The current levels of collective bargaining available in South African, focusing on the establishment and functioning of bargaining councils, the extension of and exemption from collective agreements, as well as the use of collective bargaining to set minimum wages are discussed. The advantages and disadvantages of our current minimum wage fixing mechanisms are also discussed. For the purpose of comparison, reference is also made to wage fixing though sectoral determinations, although the focus of the dissertation is on collective labour law. In the international comparison, the development and functioning of the Australian and French wage-setting regulations are discussed, as well as policies that could be considered for application in South Africa. Collective bargaining, and in particular centralised collective bargaining, plays a significant role in South African labour law. Since South Africa does not have a national minimum wage, centralised bargaining remains the main form of fixing minimum wages, apart from sectoral determinations. In the conclusion and recommendations, possible solutions to the shortcomings in our centralised ii bargaining system, as well as alternative means of setting minimum wages are considered. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Mercantile Law / unrestricted

Yes / This paper presents a mixed-methods study protocol that will be used to evaluate a recent implementation of a real-time, centralised hospital command centre in the UK. The command centre represents a complex intervention within a complex adaptive system. It could support better operational decision-making and facilitate identification and mitigation of threats to patient safety. There is, however, limited research on the impact of such complex health information technology on patient safety, reliability and operational efficiency of healthcare delivery and this study aims to help address that gap. We will conduct a longitudinal mixed-method evaluation that will be informed by public-and-patient involvement and engagement. Interviews and ethnographic observations will inform iterations with quantitative analysis that will sensitise further qualitative work. Quantitative work will take an iterative approach to identify relevant outcome measures from both the literature and pragmatically from datasets of routinely collected electronic health records. This protocol has been approved by the University of Leeds Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Ethics Committee (#MEEC 20-016) and the National Health Service Health Research Authority (IRAS No.: 285933). Our results will be communicated through peer-reviewed publications in international journals and conferences. We will provide ongoing feedback as part of our engagement work with local trust stakeholders. / National Institute for Health Research Health Service and Delivery Research Programme (NIHR129483)

With the increasing use of web services in everyday tasks we are entering an era of Internet of Services (IoS). Service discovery and selection in both centralized and decentralized environments have become a critical issue in the area of web services, in particular when services having similar functionality but different Quality of Service (QoS). As a result, selecting a high quality service that best suits consumer requirements from a large list of functionally equivalent services is a challenging task. In response to increasing numbers of services in the discovery and selection process, there is a corresponding increase of service consumers and a consequent diversity in Quality of Service (QoS) available. Increases in both sides leads to a diversity in the demand and supply of services, which would result in the partial match of the requirements and offers. Furthermore, it is challenging for customers to select suitable services from a large number of services that satisfy consumer functional requirements. Therefore, web service recommendation becomes an attractive solution to provide recommended services to consumers which can satisfy their requirements. In this thesis, first a service ranking and selection algorithm is proposed by considering multiple QoS requirements and allowing partially matched services to be counted as a candidate for the selection process. With the initial list of available services the approach considers those services with a partial match of consumer requirements and ranks them based on the QoS parameters, this allows the consumer to select suitable service. In addition, providing weight value for QoS parameters might not be an easy and understandable task for consumers, as a result an automatic weight calculation method has been included for consumer requirements by utilizing distance correlation between QoS parameters. The second aspect of the work in the thesis is the process of QoS based web service recommendation. With an increasing number of web services having similar functionality, it is challenging for service consumers to find out suitable web services that meet their requirements. We propose a personalised service recommendation method using the LDA topic model, which extracts latent interests of consumers and latent topics of services in the form of probability distribution. In addition, the proposed method is able to improve the accuracy of prediction of QoS properties by considering the correlation between neighbouring services and return a list of recommended services that best satisfy consumer requirements. The third part of the thesis concerns providing service discovery and selection in a decentralized environment. Service discovery approaches are often supported by centralized repositories that could suffer from single point failure, performance bottleneck, and scalability issues in large scale systems. To address these issues, we propose a context-aware service discovery and selection approach in a decentralized peer-to-peer environment. In the approach homophily similarity was used for bootstrapping and distribution of nodes. The discovery process is based on the similarity of nodes and previous interaction and behaviour of the nodes, which will help the discovery process in a dynamic environment. Our approach is not only considering service discovery, but also the selection of suitable web service by taking into account the QoS properties of the web services. The major contribution of the thesis is providing a comprehensive QoS based service recommendation and selection in centralized and decentralized environments. With the proposed approach consumers will be able to select suitable service based on their requirements. Experimental results on real world service datasets showed that proposed approaches achieved better performance and efficiency in recommendation and selection process.

This thesis explores Centralised Demand Information Sharing (CDIS) in supply chains. CDIS is an information sharing approach where supply chain members forecast based on the downstream member’s demand. The Bullwhip Effect is a demand variance amplification phenomenon: as the demand moves upstream in supply chains, its variability increases. Many papers in the literature show that, if supply chain members forecast using the less variable downstream member’s demand, this amplification can be reduced leading to a reduction in inventory cost. These papers, using strict model assumptions, discuss three demand information sharing approaches: No Information Sharing (NIS), Downstream Demand Inference (DDI) and Demand Information Sharing (DIS). The mathematical analysis in this stream of research is restricted to the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) forecasting method. A major motivation for this PhD research is to improve the above approaches, and assess those using less restrictive supply chain assumptions. In this research, apart from using the MMSE forecasting method, we also utilise two non-optimal forecasting methods, Simple Moving Averages (SMA) and Single Exponential Smoothing (SES). The reason for their inclusion is the empirical evidence of their high usage, familiarity and satisfaction in practice. We first fill some gaps in the literature by extending results on upstream demand translation for ARMA (p, q) processes to SMA and SES. Then, by using less restrictive assumptions, we show that the DDI approach is not feasible, while the NIS and DIS approaches can be improved. The two new improved approaches are No Information Sharing – Estimation (NIS-Est) and Centralised Demand Information Sharing (CDIS). It is argued in this thesis that if the supply chain strategy is not to share demand information, NIS-Est results in less inventory cost than NIS for an Order Up To policy. On the other hand, if the strategy is to share demand information, the CDIS approach may be used, resulting in lower inventory cost than DIS. These new approaches are then compared to the traditional approaches on theoretically generated data. NIS-Est improves on NIS, while CDIS improves on the DIS approach in terms of the bullwhip ratio, forecast error (as measured by Mean Squared Error), inventory holding and inventory cost. The results of simulation show that the performance of CDIS is the best among all four approaches in terms of these performance metrics. Finally, the empirical validity of the new approaches is assessed on weekly sales data of a European superstore. Empirical findings and theoretical results are consistent regarding the performance of CDIS. Thus, this research concludes that the inventory cost of an upstream member is reduced when their forecasts are based on a Centralised Demand Information Sharing (CDIS) approach.

There is approximately 14 million tonnes of biodegradable organic waste produced by households in the UK every year which must be treated or disposed of. The EC Directive on Landfill (1999/31IEC), is likely to lead to an increase in compo sting and anaerobic digestion as methods to treat the waste stream diverted from landfill. Householders play an important role in separating their waste, which, if not performed efficiently can lead to contamination of the organic waste stream, and hence the compost product. A survey is used to determine the attitude and behaviour of householders to waste issues. It was found that residents in the less affluent area were less likely to home compost and had a less favourable attitude towards environmental activities than residents in the affluent area. A comparison of compost from centralised composting schemes treating different organic waste streams found that compost derived from household waste was of a slightly poorer quality than that obtained from gardens/parks waste. As more waste is recycled as compost, it is becoming increasingly important to find alternative uses for compost. Leachability data are used to determine the environmental availability of Cd, Cu, Pb, and Zn contained in natural compost. Batch sorption data are used to determine uptake of additional Cd, Cu, Pb, and Zn by compost and assess its potential use in remediation work, as an alternative to natural materials such as peat. The relative binding of these additional metals to compost is found to be in the order Pb>Cu≈Cd>Zn. The sorption of metals on compost takes place, at least in part, by exchange of calcium bound to the compost and there is evidence that the sorption occurs in both the humic and non-humic sites in the compost. The use of compost to bind metals in remediation work is discussed.

The rapid growth of centralised social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has raised concerns about privacy and the concentration of power held by the companies behind these services. In response, decentralised social media platforms have emerged as alternatives, forming federations of various instances without a single owner. However, these decentralised platforms have faced challenges with centralisation, as users tend to gather on larger instances. This paper examines Mastodon, one of the most popular decentralised platforms, to explore whether its onboarding flow and website design can be modified to encourage less centralisation. The study maps Mastodon's onboarding flow and identifies potential modifications to mitigate centralisation. Additionally, a new design for the official website is proposed. User tests involving five participants were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of these changes. The results indicate that modifying the design can influence users to choose smaller servers. One effective modification is randomising the order in which servers are presented, eliminating the advantage of larger servers. Another proposed change is to improve user awareness about how feeds and interactions on Mastodon spans servers, enabling users to interact beyond their own server and removing a motivation for choosing a larger one. But the impact of this information on user behaviour remains inconclusive in the user tests. Overall, this research suggests that through design modifications, Mastodon can encourage users to select smaller servers and foster a more decentralised social media environment. / Den snabba tillväxten av centraliserade sociala medieplattformar som Twitter och Facebook har väckt oro över personlig integritet och koncentrationen av makt hos företagen bakom dessa tjänster. Som svar har decentraliserade sociala medieplattformar dykt upp, där plattformen består av en federation av olika instanser utan en enda ägare. Dessa decentraliserade plattformar har dock stött på utmaningar med centralisering eftersom användare tenderar att samlas på större instanser. Den här rapporten undersöker Mastodon, en av de mest populära decentraliserade plattformarna, för att undersöka om dess onboardingflöde och designen av deras webbplats kan modifieras för att uppmuntra mindre centralisering. Studien kartlägger Mastodons nuvarande onboardingflöde och identifierar potentiella ändringar som kan mildra centraliseringen. Dessutom föreslås en ny design för den officiella webbplatsen. Användartester med fem deltagare genomfördes för att utvärdera effektiviteten av dessa förändringar. Resultaten indikerar att den modifierade designen kan påverka användare och få dem att välja mindre servrar. En effektiv förändring är att randomisera ordningen i vilken servrar presenteras, vilket eliminerar fördelen större servrar har i hur synliga de är. En annan föreslagen förändring är att förbättra användarnas medvetenhet om att flöden och interaktioner på Mastodon sträcker sig över servrar, vilket gör det möjligt för användare att interagera utanför sin egen server och tar bort ett av motiven användare har för att välja en större server. Vilken effekt det här har på användarnas beteende när det gäller deras val av server var dock oklart i användartesterna som utfördes. Sammantaget tyder denna undersökning på att Mastodon genom designändringar potentiellt kan uppmuntra användare att välja mindre servrar och främja en mer decentraliserad miljö för sociala media.