Estimation of time since death is an important variable when investigating legal cases involving decomposing human remains; however it has been sparsely studied in controlled environments. Decomposition rates are largely influenced by external factors with temperature being the most critical factor. The decomposition rates can also be influenced by insect infestation, chemical residues, and burial, yet little research has been conducted to document how various factors alter the rate and process of decomposition. A common occurrence at human remains recovery sites is the deposit of residues from criminal activities such as gunpowder and explosives. This experiment will look at gunpowder residue’s effects on porcine remains and the insect infestation after exposure. This study was conducted in two phases: the 1st experiment being conducted in the late spring and the 2nd in the early fall. For each experiment two carcasses were covered with gunpowder residue while one carcass served as a control (no residue). The physical decomposition processes as well as ambient temperature were documented for each carcass. The results for the study showed variable findings between the control and experimental subjects. The insect infestation of the remains was consistent with the data from previous entomological studies conducted from areas of similar climate and terrain. Factors that may have influenced the results are discussed in reference to the effects of the gunpowder residue on the decomposing remains.

Among the numerous taphonomic influences that can impact biological remains, agricultural activity has one of the most widespread effects. The present research examines the impacts of agricultural activities on buried skeletal remains, both in archaeological and medicolegal contexts. Juvenile pig (Sus scrofa) skeletons were utilized to simulate buried juvenile human aged 3 to 5 years to test the influence of original burial depths and different plowing intervals on the dispersal and the degree of damage caused by an offset disk plow. Ten juvenile pig skeletons were buried in relatively anatomical position, five at a bottom depth of 15 cmbs (cm below the surface) and five at 22 cmbs. They were subjected to different intervals of plowing with one burial at each depth subjected to a single, three, five, seven, or ten plow passes. The disturbed area was surveyed for surface material, and the plow furrows were excavated in 1 m by 1 m units. The excavated soil was screened using a ¼" mesh screen, except for two burials that were screened using a nested ¼" and ⅛" mesh screen to test the differences in recovery between the two screen sizes. The recovered skeletal material was inventoried and assessed for damage. The results of this research showed that while original burial depth had some effect on distribution of bone and the degree to which bone was damaged, the relationship was not statistically significant. The number of plowing intervals did have a significant effect on the distribution and degree of damage. The damage caused to bone by the offset disk plow would be distinguishable from perimortem trauma in dry bone. Comparison of the recovery rates of ¼" and ⅛" mesh found that ⅛" contributed to a higher recovery of juvenile remains at least 3 to 5 years of age in soil with a high gravel content.

Research report presented to the Unisa School of Business Leadership / This study looks at five cases of organisational change and considers how the respondents have perceived the implementation of change within their organisations. / Graduate School of Business Leadership / MBA

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-66). / Introduction: Research on the metallurgy of archaeological artifacts has focused primarily on the examination of objects to reveal their design, their composition, the properties of the material people selected to achieve the design, and the fabrication processes used in managing the metal to produce the end product. Recently that focus has begun to broaden, and archaeologists are taking a step back to investigate the earliest stages of prehistoric metal processing that precede object manufacture, namely ore mining and extractive metallurgy. However, little archaeological work on mining and extraction has been accomplished to date, in part because so few metal processing sites have been identified. These sites are very difficult to find because of the lack of standing architecture, particularly smelting installations. Prehistoric smelting furnaces tend to be small and are either excavated beneath the ground surface or are above ground but made of impermanent materials. / by Antonella I. Alunni. / S.B.

Roma in former Czechoslovakia have historically experienced economic and political marginalisation and been treated and portrayed as inferior to ethnic Czechs and Slovaks. Roma thereby became perceived as different from non-Roma citizens, as not belonging to the Czech or Slovak nation, as an 'exception'. The post-socialist transition produced economic precarity, new inequalities, and a climate of rising nationalist sentiments in Central and Eastern Europe. The perception of Roma as not having the same rights as ethnic Czechs or Slovaks to access state care became even more salient than during the socialist period. Following the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, Roma are now able to move freely across EU borders and to find employment and settle in the United Kingdom. Migration to the UK, including Leeds, offered Roma new economic opportunities as well as the promise of escaping ethnic stigmatisation. It seemed to offer the possibility to lead what I refer to as a 'normal life' as equal citizens. This thesis is based on ethnographic research among Czech and Slovak Roma in Leeds. It reveals the processes that contribute to Roma becoming defined as an exception after migrating to Leeds, and looks at the ways in which Roma resist this. It recounts the interactions that Roma have with different aspects of state care, namely welfare provision, services and projects aimed at improving the well-being of Roma, and with non-Roma Czech and Slovak interpreters. Some Roma in Leeds have converted to a Roma Pentecostal Church, the Life and Light. In this thesis I argue that by providing material support to Roma, both converts and non-converts, and through a narrative that Roma are a lost tribe of Israel, the Church constructs Roma as a moral collectivity and subverts their position of inferiority and 'exceptionality'. The Church provides a way for Roma to be respectable, to live with dignity and to have what they understand to be a 'normal' life, whilst retaining their Roma identity.

There are currently 820,000 people in the United Kingdom living with dementia and around 670,000 partners, family members, and friends providing them with support. The behavioural disturbances and memory loss that typify dementia can make the role of caregiver extremely challenging. The consequent burden that many carers experience is closely associated with the care receiver’s admission into institutional care. Due to the UK’s ageing population, the number of people with dementia is set to rise to over one million by 2021. Consequently, the UK government is keen to explore different options to support carers, and to meet the increasing demand on care services. One such option is telecare, which uses information and communication technology to help manage the risks of community living for people with dementia, and to support care delivery. This thesis presents a hybrid simulation model, TeleDem, which explores the influence of telecare on the number of people with dementia able to remain living in their own homes. Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is a widely used Operational Research (OR) tool for modelling complex stochastic systems, and its successful use in healthcare applications and care pathways has been well documented. The hybrid approach used in this thesis enhances the capability of DES by combining it with elements of Agent Based Simulation (ABS) in order to capture the complexity of this human centric system. Statecharts, a key component of ABS, are used to convert the passive entities associated with traditional DES into autonomous beings (or agents) whose behaviour is determined by their environment and their interactions with other elements of the system. In the TeleDem model these transformed entities are better equipped to reflect the human beings they represent; capturing each person’s disease progression, level of dependency, and their informal carer’s level of carer burden. These factors then govern the person’s movement through the social care system. The TeleDem Simulation models the potential experiences of thousands of hypothetical telecare service users. This enables the exploration of a range of scenarios to inform planning decisions for the provision of telecare services for people with dementia.

The field of Prognostics and Health Management is becoming ever more important in the modern maintenance era, with advanced techniques of automation and mechanisation becoming increasingly prevalent. Prognostic technology has promising abilities to forecast remaining useful life and likely future circumstances of complex systems. However, the evolution of data processing and its critical impact on remaining useful life predictions continually demand increasing development so as to meet higher performance levels. There is often a gap between the adequacy of prognostic pre-processing and the prediction methods. One way to reduce this gap would be to design an adaptive data processing method that can filter multidimensional condition monitoring data by incorporating useful information from multiple data sources. Due to the incomplete understanding on the multi-dimensional failure mechanisms and the collaboration between data sources, current prognostic methods lack the ability to deal effectively with complicated interdependency, multidimensional condition monitoring information and noisy data. Further conventional methods are unable to deal with these efficiently. The methodology proposed in this research handles these deficiencies by introducing a prognostic framework that allows the effective use of monitoring data from different resources to predict the lifetime of systems. The methodology presents a feed-forward neural network filtering approach for trajectory similarity based remaining useful life predictions. The extraction of health indicators is applied as a type of dynamic filtering, in which the time series having full operational conditions are used to train a neural network mapping between raw training inputs and a health indicator output. This trained network function is evaluated by repeating condition monitoring information from multiple data subsets. After the network filtering, the training trajectories are used as baselines to predict the future behaviours of test trajectories. The similarity between these data subsets compares the relationship between the historical performance deterioration of a system's prior operating period with a similar system's degradation behaviour. The proposed prognostic technique, together with dynamic data filtering and remaining useful estimation, holds the promise of increased prediction performance levels. The presented methodology was tested using the PHM08 data challenge provided by the Prognostics Centre of Excellence at NASA Ames Research Centre, and it achieved the overall leading score in the published literature.

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In this thesis human skeletal remains believed to be the victims of the Batavia Mutiny of 1629 were subjected to DNA analysis. So far the remains of 10 individuals (of which 9 were available for this study) have been exhumed from Beacon Island, in the Houtman’s Abrolhos, off the coast of Western Australia. The remains are now stored in the Western Australia Maritime Museum (WAMM) in Fremantle. In this research an attempt is made to type ancient DNA (aDNA) from the remains of the Batavia Mutiny, which are almost 400 years old. Previous anthropological studies have been performed on these remains in order to assign sex, age and stature. The aim of the present project is to study the familial relationships of the remains and to determine their sex based on molecular genetic analysis. In order to protect the invaluable museum specimens and minimise the risk of contamination from exogenous contemporary DNA, a tooth sample from each available individual (designated A15507, A16316, A15831, M3901, SK5, SK6, SK7, SK8 and SK9) was subjected to DNA extraction. Comparison and optimisation of DNA extraction methods from more recent teeth samples was performed in order to determine the most suitable method for the DNA extraction of the ancient teeth samples. Three types of genetic markers were analysed in an attempt to study the familial relationships and determine the sex of each individual. Multiplex primers (Hummel, 2003) which simultaneously amplify the HV1 and HV2 regions of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) were used in this research to analyse familial relationships. These primers were selected because of their ability to amplify small fragments (131bp, 168bp and 217bp) of DNA template, which suit the nature of aDNA samples. Primers published by Sullivan et al.(1993), which amplify a 106bp region on chromosome X and 112bp on chromosome Y of the amelogenin gene, were used to determine sex. In addition, short tandem repeat (STR) marker were also analysed to determine familial and sex using the AmpFlSTR®Profiler PlusTMPCR kit from Applied Biosystems. The PCR conditions of all primers were optimised before usage on the Batavia remains. As aDNA analysis is prone to contamination, stringent precautions were undertaken throughout this research. Despite this, contamination is suspected in some of the mtDNA sequences obtained (particularly from SK5, SK7, A15507 and A15831), which most probably came from the positive control used in the optimisation analysis. For these samples the sequences for the HV2 region were poor and polymorphisms relative to a reference were similar to each other and to the positive control profile. However, some conclusions have been made on other individuals (SK8, SK9, M3901, A16316) based on the HV1 and HV2 sequences obtained. Based on two or more different polymorphisms observed in the individuals it was concluded that it is likely there is no maternal relationship between individuals A16316 and SK8, SK9 and M3901 and between individuals SK8, M3901 and SK9. However these results require repetition for confirmation. The attempt to type the amelogenin gene on chromosomes X and Y was unsuccessful most likely due to the poor preservation of the remains. It is apparent from this research that although it was possible to extract aDNA (especially multicopy mtDNA) from teeth material that were almost 400 years old, the main hurdle in this aDNA analysis was contamination and DNA degradation.