The study of matter at extreme conditions has been of great importance for modern society. A correct understanding of materials and environments subject to high pressures and temperatures enabled the development of car and jet engines, manufacture of goods, energy production and space travels among other human milestones. Discoveries in magnetism, geology, chemistry, and crystallography have been reported in literature as well, illustrating relevant contributions of this research area. Science at extreme conditions constantly requires to innovate instruments and characterisation methods. Sophisticated proficiencies are needed to explore and reproduce conditions of interest for this field. Since the 1990s, high pressure instruments for neutron scattering have boosted the study of compressed matter. The design and subsequent improvement of the Paris-Edinburgh (PE) press and toroidal anvils successfully impacted this area, currently being the most extensively used instrument for high pressure neutron scattering, commonly used for pressures of the order of 10 GPa. Recent incorporation of toroidal anvils made of Zirconia Toughened Alumina (ZTA) has opened new experimental possibilities. Neutron transparency and mechanical resistance are key properties of this ceramic material. At this point it is essential to understand ZTA anvils design and working conditions in order to increase experimental capabilities and access new frontiers in compressed matter. Computer-based modelling technique Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been a recent ally for instrumentation design and optimisation. Phenomena such as mechanical stress, deformations, and thermal distributions can be modelled in an object, gathering information regarding its mechanical stability, behaviour and failure. Although this method is popular in industrial and engineering design and applications, it has not been widely employed in high pressure research due to scarce information in material properties under extreme conditions, as well as in innovative ceramics and metallic alloys introduced in these types of scientific devices.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-336).

Ecumenism and Theological Convergence: A Comparative Analysis of Edinburgh 1910 and the Lausanne Movement." This thesis evaluates the Edinburgh 1910 World Mission Conference, the ecumenism that flowed from Edinburgh 1910, and its relationship to the ecumenical trends that exist within the Lausanne movement. Additionally, this thesis determines how ecumenism has attributed to a theological convergence, and then examines the impact of such theological convergence on the global church through parachurch organizations. It begins by laying the foundation for any theological convergence that existed at Edinburgh 1910. It then examines ecumenism within the Lausanne movement, theological significance of ecumenism, and its impact on the global church. Finally, the thesis explores the theological convergence within select parachurch organizations since Lausanne 1974 and analyzes the impact of theological convergence on the global church. The researcher of this thesis has surveyed several sources to determine the originality of this topic through search engines World Cat, World Cat Dissertations, Dissertations, Article First, ATLA Religion, Humanities Index, Humanities Abstract, Christian Periodical Index, Worldscope, and also significant works about Lausanne 1974. The search revealed nothing substantial concerning Lausanne’s impact on the Global Church through parachurch organizations, the researcher deems this thesis to be an original work. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / D. Th. (Missiology)Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology

Ecumenism and Theological Convergence: A Comparative Analysis of Edinburgh 1910 and the Lausanne Movement." This thesis evaluates the Edinburgh 1910 World Mission Conference, the ecumenism that flowed from Edinburgh 1910, and its relationship to the ecumenical trends that exist within the Lausanne movement. Additionally, this thesis determines how ecumenism has attributed to a theological convergence, and then examines the impact of such theological convergence on the global church through parachurch organizations. It begins by laying the foundation for any theological convergence that existed at Edinburgh 1910. It then examines ecumenism within the Lausanne movement, theological significance of ecumenism, and its impact on the global church. Finally, the thesis explores the theological convergence within select parachurch organizations since Lausanne 1974 and analyzes the impact of theological convergence on the global church. The researcher of this thesis has surveyed several sources to determine the originality of this topic through search engines World Cat, World Cat Dissertations, Dissertations, Article First, ATLA Religion, Humanities Index, Humanities Abstract, Christian Periodical Index, Worldscope, and also significant works about Lausanne 1974. The search revealed nothing substantial concerning Lausanne’s impact on the Global Church through parachurch organizations, the researcher deems this thesis to be an original work. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / D. Th. (Missiology)Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology

This thesis studies peri-urban landscapes (the landscape between the rural and urban setting), which has until recently gained little attention in academia and even less in planning practice and policy. This is largely due to a general view of these landscapes as something transient that will be developed in the future. However, some research has recognised these landscapes as important for the leisure and recreation of urban and suburban dwellers. Thus, this thesis is concerned with the current state of the peri-urban landscape, its characteristics and drivers of change with a focus on accessibility. Accordingly, the interest of the study lies in exploring people’s landscape perceptions and uses in relation to the accessibility of periurban areas and how they change over time. The focus of this thesis is Ljubljana and Edinburgh; these two cities have been selected as the case studies in order to elucidate the spatial and social patterns of the space on the edge of the city. The thesis centres on the perspective of inner-city dwellers’ perceptions, use of, and accessibility to peri-urban green spaces. Guided by the sense of place theory and the landscape planning approach, empirical work is at the heart of this research. A mixed-method approach, comprising questionnaire and focus groups with inner-city dwellers, interviews with authorities and planners and GIS-based analysis, is applied to gain new knowledge of inner-city dwellers’ relationship with periurban green spaces. The research found that people greatly value the established peri-urban green spaces, which have a variety of meanings for them, varying according to people’s socio-demographic and cultural characteristics. Furthermore, the appreciation of extensive semi-natural green spaces and green corridors has been shown to be universal and may imply some clues for further spatial planning of these areas. Conversely, people in general did not use the areas with low intrinsic value that are perceived as messy, ambiguous, etc. It appears that these spaces have lost their sense of place and therefore they are under threat of further development. Their future should thus be considered within long-term planning goals, in order to ensure environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive development.

It was not until after the mid-eighteenth century that the masonic lodges in Edinburgh became common meeting ground for the social and intellectual elite. While there are examples of these types of men joining before 1750, it was after this watershed date that some of the key men associated with enlightenment thinking in Scotland became members of Edinburgh lodges. Robert Adam, Hugh Blair, Lord Monboddo, James Gregory, Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart are only a few examples of men who made a dual contribution to both freemasonry and the enlightenment. 'Freemasonry in Edinburgh, 1721-1746 : institutions and context' is an examination of freemasonry in Edinburgh before the dramatic influx of the elite. It was during this period that three major developments occurred: existing lodges began the slow transition from traditional operative lodges to the more modern, accepted lodges; lodges were being founded with little or no connection to stonemasons or stoneworks; and, the Grand Lodge of Scotland was established, creating a definite masonic community both within and outwith Edinburgh. This thesis charts the progress of the transition in nine Edinburgh lodges by examining both the histories and membership of these lodges, and considers the influence of the Grand Lodge of Scotland on this process. The key element in this transitional process was the membership. A total of 785 men are known to have joined, or belonged to, these lodges during this period. These men represented occupations from the advocate to the humble wine cooper's servant, and social circumstances from the baronet to the indweller. This membership analysis was the most important area of research because it illustrated the transition in the lodges. Using 30 November 1736, the date that the Grand Lodge Roll began, as a watershed date, it is possible to establish the membership of the lodges during the entire period of study, and to compare the membership of pre-Grand Lodge lodges both before and after the establishment of the Grand Lodge of Scotland.

The use of technology-supported teaching and learning in higher education has moved from a position of peripheral interest a few years ago to become a fundamental ingredient in the experience of many if not most students today. A major part of that change has been wrought by the widespread introduction and use of ‘virtual learning environments’ (VLEs). A defining characteristic of VLEs is that they combine a variety of tools and resources into a single integrated system. To use a VLE is not just to employ a single intervention but to change the very fabric of the students’ experience of study and the university. Despite this, much of the literature on VLEs has concentrated on producing typologies by listing and comparing system functions, describing small scale and short duration applications or providing speculative theories and predictions. Little attention has so far been paid to analysing what effects a VLE’s use has on the participants and the context of use, particularly across a large group of users and over a substantial period of time. This work presents the evaluation of a VLE developed and used to support undergraduate medical education at the University of Edinburgh since 1999. This system is called ‘EEMeC’ and was developed specifically within and in support of its context of use. EEMeC provides a large number of features and functions to many different kinds of user, it has evolved continuously since it was introduced and it has had a significant impact on teaching and learning in the undergraduate medical degree programme (MBChB). In such circumstances evaluation methodologies that depend on controls and single variables are nether applicable or practical. In order to approach the task of evaluating such a complex entity a multi-modal evaluation framework has been developed based on taking a series of metaphor-informed perspectives derived from the organisational theories of Gareth Morgan(Morgan 1997). The framework takes seven approaches to evaluation of EEMeC covering a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. These are combined in a dialectical analysis of EEMeC from these different evaluation perspectives. This work provides a detailed and multi-faceted account of a VLE-in-use and the ways in which it interacts with its user community in its context of use. Furthermore, the method of taking different metaphor-based evaluation perspectives of a complex problem space is presented as a viable approach for studying and evaluating similar learning support systems. The evaluation framework that has been developed would be particularly useful to those practitioners who have a pressing and practical need for meaningful evaluation techniques to inform and shape how complex systems such as VLEs are deployed and used. As such, this work can provide insights not just into EEMeC, but into the way VLEs are changing the environments and contexts in which they are used across the tertiary sector as a whole.

This thesis examines the appointment of the Commissaries of Edinburgh, the court over which they presided, and their consistorial jurisdiction during the era of the Scottish Reformation. It is argued that the Commissaries of Edinburgh were appointed by Mary, Queen of Scots, in February 1563/4 as a temporary measure following the suppression of the courts of the Catholic Church in Scotland during the Wars of the Congregation. The Commissaries’ jurisdiction was substantially that of the pre-Reformation Officials centralized into a national jurisdiction administered from Edinburgh. The Commissaries of Edinburgh’s jurisdictional relations with the inferior Commissaries, the Lords of Council and Session, the suppressed courts of the Catholic Church and the Lords Interpreters of the Law of Oblivion are examined, whilst their relations with the tribunals of the Protestant Kirk are given particular attention. The thesis argues that despite the complex constitutional, legal and religious legacy of the spiritual jurisdiction in Scotland, the Commissaries and Kirk achieved a high degree of jurisdictional harmony, despite occasional conflicts. The Commissaries continued to administer the Canon law of the medieval Church in consistorial matters, with the prominent exception of the innovation introduced into Scotland by the Protestant Kirk from 1559 concerning divorce and remarriage on the grounds of adultery. Through an analysis of sentences and decreets pronounced by pre-Reformation Officials, the Commissaries of Edinburgh, and the tribunals of the Protestant Kirk, it is argued that this reform was essentially a reform of divorce a mensa et thoro using concepts and formulas borrowed from pre- Reformation sentences of annulment. The result was a type of divorce unique to Scotland, where the innocent party was immediately freed to remarry, whilst the guilty party remained bound to the failed marriage until freed to remarry by the death of their innocent spouse. An analysis of consistorial litigation before the Commissaries of Edinburgh is used to explain and illustrate the Romano-canonical procedure used in their court and the documentation generated during litigation. Litigants’ gender, domicile and social status are also analysed, together with their use of procurators and the expenses incurred during litigation.

This thesis examines the transformation of the clergy in the late sixteenth century Scotland in which ministerial training had a crucial role to play both in the academia and in the Kirk. In order to demonstrate this transformation attention will be focused on the training of ministers at the Town College, Edinburgh and then following the unfolding of their ecclesiastical career including the ‘exercise’. The foundation of the ‘Tounis College’ in Edinburgh is placed within the broader context of the expansion of higher education throughout Europe. A college project had been in the mind of the Edinburgh Town Council since 1561 and had been resurrected from time to time until its final realisation in 1583. The newly-erected college was headed by Robert Rollock, a young and ambitious scholar from St Andrews, who was first the Professor of Divinity and then the Principal. Under his leadership both as a theologian and a churchman the institution became a place of higher learning that shaped the development of the different Scottish professions in general and the transformation and the emergence of the protestant clergy as a new professional elite, in particular. This thesis also provides a detailed analysis on the early career patterns of the College’s ministerial graduates by examining a) their family background, especially those who came from clerical families b) their way into ministry in the Kirk including the “gap-years” spent in another professions or elsewhere upon graduation c) their dissemination through central Scotland. Particular attention is given to the role of the ‘exercise’, as one of the most important functions of the presbytery, in examining and admitting candidates to their charges as well as providing other presbytery members with further training in preaching and theology.

This thesis adopts a primarily process-based methodology to put a museum in its place as a site of knowledge-making. It examines the practices of space which were productive of a government-funded (‘national’) museum in Edinburgh. Taking a spatial perspective, and recognising that place is both material and metaphorical, the thesis explores how the Museum’s material and intellectual architectures were produced over the period 1854-1939. The thesis is concerned to bring into focus the dynamic processes by which the Museum was in a continual state of becoming; a constellation of tangible and intangible objects constantly being produced and reproduced through mobility of objects, people and ideas. Its concern is to chart the flows through space which produced the Museum. The thesis comprises nine chapters. An introduction and a literature review are followed by chapters concerned, respectively, with the built space of the museum and with the people who worked there. A further three chapters consider the nature of that work and the practices of space which constituted the processes of collecting, displaying, and educating, whilst another focuses on visiting. The final chapter discusses how the analysis has constructed the museum as constituted through a complex diversity of material and metaphorical settings on a variety of geographical scales. This critical scrutiny of the museum has, in turn, brought to the fore the place of the Museum in contributing to civic and national identity. Through a case-study of a particular museum, the concern has been to explore how critical geographies of science may be applied to the examination of a museum. In particular the thesis examines how contextual concepts developed largely in conscribed sites such as laboratories apply to a public site such as a museum. The thesis suggests that the ordering terms ‘space’ and ‘place’, combined with a focus on practice and performance, may have more general application in constructing an historical geography of museums as sites of production and consumption of scientific knowledge.