The recent improvements and developments on Intelligent Agents (IA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 3D visualisation, coupled with an increasing desire to integrate interactivity within virtual spaces bring concerns in regard to the articulation of narratives in such environments.

The amount of textual information available electronically has made it difficult for many users to find and access the right information within acceptable time. Research communities in the natural language processing (NLP) field are developing tools and techniques to alleviate these problems and help users in exploiting these vast resources. These techniques include Information Retrieval (IR) and Information Extraction (IE). The work described in this thesis concerns IE and more specifically, named entity extraction in Arabic. The Arabic language is of significant interest to the NLP community mainly due to its political and economic significance, but also due to its interesting characteristics. Text usually contains all kinds of names such as person names, company names, city and country names, sports teams, chemicals and lots of other names from specific domains. These names are called Named Entities (NE) and Named Entity Recognition (NER), one of the main tasks of IE systems, seeks to locate and classify automatically these names into predefined categories. NER systems are developed for different applications and can be beneficial to other information management technologies as it can be built over an IR system or can be used as the base module of a Data Mining application. In this thesis we propose an efficient and effective framework for extracting Arabic NEs from text using a rule based approach. Our approach makes use of Arabic contextual and morphological information to extract named entities. The context is represented by means of words that are used as clues for each named entity type. Morphological information is used to detect the part of speech of each word given to the morphological analyzer. Subsequently we developed and implemented our rules in order to recognise each position of the named entity. Finally, our system implementation, evaluation metrics and experimental results are presented.

In early modern England (after 1707, Britain), there was an argument that war at sea, especially war in Spanish America, was an ideal means of warfare for England. This argument, whose origin can be traced back to the glorious memory of Elizabethan maritime war, revived at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession. This thesis examines this pro-maritime war argument, by focusing on its connection with its supposed economic advantages, and investigates its impact on British politics and naval policy during the war, and changes after the war. It reveals that this argument received support from politicians of different political stances because of its alleged economic advantages; colonial maritime war was expected to damage enemy financial resources while enriching Britain, and help to recover the Spanish American market where French merchants were making a rapid advance. At the same time, it makes clear that different political affiliations of the supporters created two types of pro-maritime arguments with different political functions. The thesis also shows that the supporters of colonial maritime war in the government as well as in the opposition tried to implement pro-maritime war policy by naval operations such as capture of Spanish silver fleets and colonial expeditions, and by legislation such as the American Act of 1708. However, their attempts were frustrated by diplomatic considerations, incapacity of naval administration, and by conflicting interests between several groups concerned in the West Indian colonies and Spanish American trade. After the South Sea expedition planned by the South Sea Company in 1712 did not materialise due to similar difficulties, the government focused on protection of the Spanish American trade, and refrained from taking aggressive action against Spanish colonies partly because of considerations for the interests of the company which started the Asiento trade. On the other hand, by the late 1720s the opposition, which championed the interests of private merchants, gradually came to advocate pro-maritime war policy, which eventually led up to propaganda campaigns against the Walpole ministry in the period of the War of Jenkins’s Ear.

This is a thesis about knowing, working and migrating in a complex and fluid world. Through an analysis of biographic-narrative interviews with migrants working in 'knowledge intensive' roles, as well as with those employed in jobs normally considered 'low-skilled', arguments about knowing, working and migrating in the 'new knowledge economy' are developed. Foregrounding an active and embodied understanding of knowing as a socially embedded and fluid phenomenon allows for a reconceptualisation of the relationships between knowing, migrating and working, raising questions about our normative understandings of both the 'knowledge' economy and divisions of migrant labour. This thesis seeks to illustrate how everyday practice and the interaction of complex (and often competing) 'forces' have acted to produce powerful ideas about what kind of jobs are suitable for which types of migrants, and how these ideas become accepted as normal – as 'common sense' assumptions. Furthermore, such productions of knowledge about migrants, also impacts on how, what and where we know. That is, the processes and performances of knowing are both constitutive of, and constituted by, the structures of power which shape our lives. Thus the 'power to know' is contextual, fluid and yet fundamental to the constitution of our everyday lives.

The rapid growth of the Chinese economy is reflected in the global expansion of Chinese enterprises. While a lot of attention has been devoted to the expansion of foreign owned enterprises in China since 1978, the interest of this study has extended to Chinese owned service firms which are venturing abroad, with a particular focus on a Chinese hotel chain-Guangdong (International) Hotel Management Limited. This research undertakes an exploratory study - based on inductive and evaluative approach - to generate new, analytical insights into the social phenomenon of a Chinese hotel chain's internationalisation. In entering in international hotel marketplace, Mainland Chinese companies face a very competitive environment in which most of the major players have already achieved strong market positions. Based on consideration of theories and analysis of the empirical evidence, this study develops a theoretical framework of the internationalisation of Chinese hotel companies which is linked to the specific characteristics of the country in transition from a centrally-planned economy to a market economy.

This thesis is an exploratory study on how people of African descent in the UK use blogs as social, cultural and counterhegemonic practice and is positioned within the theoretical frameworks of alternative media and critical race theory (CRT). The research questions at the centre of this study are what motivates African Caribbean people in the UK to become bloggers; what gratification they experience through authoring blogs; how they use blogs to address issues of representation in the mainstream media and their perceptions of the social impact of their activities as bloggers. The findings reveal that motivation for blogging is linked to voice, visibility and empowerment and gratification is linked to voice, knowledge sharing, knowledge acquisition and social interaction. While voice, as a motivational factor and gratification for some participants is linked to interests in creative writing and journalism, for many others motivation and gratification are driven by a complex set of factors linked to issues of race and representation. These stem from feelings of being voiceless, invisible and marginalised as African Caribbean people in British society and blogs function as an assertive strategy and medium for self-representation. The constructed narratives of the bloggers who participated in this study reveal their experience of subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination perpetuated through dominant discourses in the mainstream media and marginalisation in the wider society. The findings demonstrate that race and ethnicity are inextricably linked to motivation and gratification and influence blogging practice and content production. This thesis expands on current literature by documenting how African Caribbean people have appropriated blogs to harness social and cultural capital, to mediate against racism and marginalisation within British society and to empower themselves and their communities.

Capturing, recreating and representing a high fidelity virtual representation of the dynamic human form has long been a target for a diverse range of applications including tele-presence, games, film and TV special effects. The complexity of the challenge, to achieve a lifelike, faithful and believable representation, is such that a wide range of techniques and approaches have been developed. These are both due to research lead curiosity and requirements to address specific objective for particular problems. This work starts from a novel standpoint: that the processes of surfacing, tessellation and texturing, commonly used in 3D reconstruction, are computationally expensive and un-necessary. This work argues that by integrating the reconstruction and rendering processes into a single process that is aligned with the architecture of modern graphics hardware, a lightweight component solution can be achieved that is suitable for application on the end user systems within the many application domains. In order to achieve this aim the research undertaken seeks to both define an appropriate technique and develop detailed understanding of the reconstruction process pipeline and impacting factors. This is achieved through a complementary investigation of the tools and frameworks that are necessary to support iterative development of the approach with reliable, repeatable objective assessment. This reasons that by understanding the nature of the capture, reconstruction and presentation pipeline and by objective evaluation of the emerging reconstruction techniques this research will define an approach for 3D video based reconstruction that effectively utilises the processing potential of a single system to deliver acceptable levels of performance (speed) and fidelity (visual quality) for a componentised, multi-purpose 3D reconstruction and rendering solution. This thesis describes the research that has driven the evolution of technique and documents the iterations made. It presents a novel framework for experimentation and evaluation of the techniques and demonstrates how the use of these tools has enabled both rapid prototyping of approach and objective evaluation of improvement. The work concludes with a review of the approach taken and identifies approaches for evaluation of performance (speed) and fidelity (visual quality) that enable both repeatable experimentation within the research pipeline and reliable comparison of the end-to-end process against other techniques.

End-User privacy concerns surrounding use of Social Networks present new and complex problems for research. Specifically, a phenomenon known as “the Privacy Paradox” has been observed where end-users stated concerns, attitudes and intended behaviour are not consistent with the actual behaviour within the network. Numerous causes have been proposed as potentially being the root of the problem of this paradoxical phenomenon including a lack of user awareness of privacy issues, a low level skill in using technology or a lack of privacy salience within the social network itself. However, the role of the User Interface (UI) in contributing to, and potentially providing a solution to, poor privacy behaviour is under-explored. A potentially fruitful avenue of enquiry given that behaviour is considered to be a reaction to environmental stimulus and the UI provides the environment within which the user is interacting. This thesis implements a two phase approach to furthering understanding of privacy behaviour in social networks. First, a survey is implemented exploring the relationship of concepts within the privacy paradox identifying that users stated needs are not being met by their observable behaviour. Secondly, two experiments are implemented in order to explore this behaviour as an interaction with the network; these questions are answered to build a social network profile and can be grouped according to their potential sensitivity. A model of social psychology, the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), is used to develop such experiments in order to examine the cognition behind these interactions. Each of the salient influencers defined by the TPB is used to inform a series of UI treatments and form the basis for experiment groups. An initial experiment explores the method and is used to inform the design of the second, which also introduces a factorial design to explore the relationships between treatments. These experiments show that participants within the treatment groups disclose less information than the control, with statistical significance. Within the first experiment this non-disclosure took place across all questions sensitivities, possibly due to limitations in the experimental method. However, participants in experiment two appear far more selective in their disclosure, choosing not to answer more sensitive questions suggesting that they thought of their privacy while interacting with the system. Findings within this thesis suggest that the UI plays an important role in influencing end-user behaviour as it can inform the context of the interaction as it happens.

One of the challenging issues in Next Generation Wireless Systems (NGWS) is seamless Vertical Handover (VHO) during the mobility between different types of technologies (3GPP and non-3GPP) such as Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and Long Term Evolution (LTE). Therefore, the telecommunication operators are required to develop an interoperability strategy for these different types of existing networks to get the best connection anywhere, anytime without interruption of the ongoing sessions. In order to identify this problem accurately, the research study presented in this thesis provides four surveys about VHO approaches found in the literature. In these surveys, we classify the existing VHO approaches into categories based on the available VHO techniques for which we present their objectives and performances issues. After that, we propose an optimised VHO approach based on the VHO approaches that have been studied in the literature and take into consideration the research problems and conclusions which are arisen in our surveys. The proposed approach demonstrates better performance (packet loss, latency and signaling cost), less VHO connection failure (probability of minimising VHO reject sessions), less complexity and an enhanced VHO compared with that found in the literature. It consists of a procedure which is implemented by an algorithm. The proposed procedure of loose coupling and Mobile Internet Protocol version 4 (MIPv4) provides early buffering for new data packets to minimise VHO packet loss and latency. Analysis and simulation of the proposed procedure show that the VHO packet loss and latency are significantly reduced compared with previous MIPv6 procedures found in the literature. The proposed algorithm is composed of two main parts: Handover Initiation and Optimum Radio Access Technologies (RATs) list of priority. The first part includes two main types of VHO and gives priority to imperative sessions over alternative sessions. III This part is also responsible for deciding when and where to perform the handover by choosing the best RATs from the multiple ones available. Then, it passes them to the decision phase. This results in reducing the signaling cost and the inevitable degradation in Quality of Service (QoS) as a result of avoiding unnecessary handover processes. The second part defines RATs list of priority to minimise VHO connection failure. Analysis and simulation based performance evaluations then demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional algorithms in terms of: (a) the probability of VHO connection failure as a result of using the optimum RATs list of priority and (b) the signaling cost and the inevitable degradation in QoS as a result of avoiding unnecessary handover processes.

The manor of Epworth in the Isle of Axholme experienced protracted resistance to drainage and enclosure schemes in the seventeenth century. The thesis places the disputes in the context of the wider social and economic development of the manor during the period, while also comparing the experiences of the manor's member parishes. The history of the drainage is outlined in the introduction. Chapter one surveys the economy and demographic history of the manor, concluding that the wealth of local resources and flexible agrarian system protected the manor from subsistence crises. In chapter two, wills, church court records and parish registers are used to investigate marriage and the role of family, neighbours and kin in forming and sustaining households. The third chapter makes use of wills to examine inheritance strategies as a means of providing for the perpetuation of viable households. Inheritance patterns varied with wealth and proved an important mechanism for social mobility in the manor. Chapter four shows how the flexibility of the manor's economy and inheritance strategies allowed social mobility, resulting in growing social differentiation and some differences between parishes. The fifth chapter explores the religious history of the manor via the church court records, noting the different experiences and reactions to religious change in each parish and revealing something of the unity or divisions among their leading groups. Chapter six details the course of the drainage disputes in the context of changing patterns of social relations within the manor. The conclusion discusses the concentric, intersecting and overlapping communities of the manor, within which the drainage disputes produced their own shifting alliances and loyalties, impinging on other solidarities and cleavages and contributing to the diverging experiences of the manor during the century.