Background: The connections between music and wellbeing are well recognised. In the current climate of economic austerity, there is a growing demand for more robust evidence of the benefits of music-based interventions to make the best use of limited arts and health resources. Aims: To explore the connections between participatory music activity and self-defined wellbeing concepts. In particular, this study seeks to identify mechanisms that connect specific types of group music activity with specific wellbeing outcomes for people with mental health issues and/or learning disabilities. Research question: What are the mechanisms that connect music and wellbeing for people in challenging circumstances? What works, for whom and in what circumstances? Design: A Realist Evaluation approach was used to identify and explore generative mechanisms in social music programmes that give rise to specific wellbeing outcomes. Two music programmes were investigated and a focus group was carried out with a third programme for validation purposes. Participant-observation and semi-structured interviews were used to identify programme theories (theories that explain outcomes), which were further developed and refined through iterative data accrual. Findings: Six programme theories were identified. Song writing and recording projects that involved both technical and artistic choices had an engaging effect, leading to outcomes of praise, hope and self-advocacy (with a corresponding sense of empowerment). Forms of musical improvisation tended to affect energy levels and consequently mood and perception, yielding both immediate effects (expressed as a sense of ‘balance’) and subsequent effects (described here as resilience). Activities involving pre-existing songs or styles (e.g. cover versions) engaged notions of identity and memory, which affected mood and increased wellbeing. Conclusion: The programme theories identified here have the potential to inform and improve music for health programmes in other contexts. Useful similarities and significant differences between service user groups were identified, enabling more specific questions to be asked of music programmes and indicating directions for future inquiry. These findings may enable similar interventions to be better tailored to their client base, making them more effective and more cost-effective.

This thesis interrogates the various constructions of the gendered body within the rebooted Doctor Who (1963- ). To do this, this thesis contends that Doctor Who occupies something of a contradictory position with regard to gender and the body, seemingly acknowledging the need for equality and feminism as ‘common sense’ whilst simultaneously denying true realisation of these aims by retreat to universal (patriarchal) concepts of goodness, humanity, and benevolence. In addition to this, whilst, at present, our definitions of the gendered body appear to be becoming ever more fluid and abstract, something that is aided by the increasing encroachment of technology in our everyday lives, there remains a limit to this bodily fluidity, a limit heavily informed by recourse to the ‘natural’ and, therefore, the ‘acceptable’. Science fiction’s interest in the body is clear and well documented; science fiction landscapes are frequently populated by bodies that have been mutated, enhanced and cloned. Hence, there is scope for a mutually beneficial discourse between theoretical constructions of the body, evolving technology and science fiction narratives, a discourse that this thesis will ground within the narrative of Doctor Who. In doing this, this thesis will intervene within these debates by deconstructing representations of the gendered body within the rebooted Doctor Who, constructing a continuum of ‘acceptable’ bodily expressions that will offer insight into the limits of our apparent gendered bodily fluidity. Using a methodological approach that involves textual analysis informed by social, cultural, and technological theory, this thesis begins by foregrounding the mutual areas of interest between the various theoretical concepts. From this, the thesis contains three broad thematic chapters discussing the topics of reproduction, monstrosity and technology with the selection of these topics being attributable to them representing convergence points of interest for the given theoretical areas. These themes are then grounded and discussed within Doctor Who, with the programme’s popularity, longevity, long form narrative structure, and political reflexivity all making it an appropriate lens for analysis. This thesis argues that these debates are ones Doctor Who both acknowledges and embodies, yet Who appears to remain hamstrung by a resort to tradition that prevents true radicalism and subversion. By using Doctor Who as an accessible point of reference for these potentially abstract and emotive debates, this thesis aims to question the extent to which we are now, or may ever consider ourselves, truly ‘postgender’; whether our ‘choices’ are as freely made as they appear, or whether we remain constricted by residual patriarchal mores.

Introduction: My ten published papers focus on two domains of the quality agenda, patient safety and patient experience, concentrating on how quality improvement can reduce the occurrence of serious consequences of patient harm and poor patient experience. Aims: My goal was to design, test and discover how to make improvements in clinical practice in four areas: sleep deprivation, infection prevention, falls prevention and pressure ulcer prevention. Literature Review: There was limited evidence of successful strategies for change to improve quality. Common quality improvement challenges were within the complex critical care environment and an urgency to act without the focus on well-designed methods. Design and Methodology: A broad range of research methods was applied to evaluate the implementation of improvement interventions in critical care. These included: observational designs to uncover understanding on patient experience, activities and processes; before and after design; stepped cluster design and longitudinal time series design, utilised to increase confidence with attributable effect from the interventions. Results: My appraisal of my ten publications showed quality varied. Process and outcome measures were used to determine the success, and I received national and local recognition for some of my work. Discussion My three main knowledge contributions were: · practical ways to help nurses assess and improve patients’ sleep · risk assessment approaches · translation and implementation of improvement methodology in critical care. I discovered four cross-cutting themes which add to quality improvement knowledge and I developed an enhanced model for improvement. The four themes are: · clinical leadership at a programme and local level · using a bundle of technical and non-technical interventions · undertaking patient risk assessment to guide interventions · the value of data measurement and feedback Conclusions & Recommendations: My work has improved patient experience and patient safety knowledge. With further testing this knowledge could greatly benefit other areas of healthcare.

The goal of this work is to introduce the phenomenon of compassion from the aspect of psychology. The theoretical part of the diploma thesis presents efforts made up to now to define compassion from a psychological point of view. The theoretical part of this work deals with the description of compassion in terms of evolutionary, social psychology and neuroscience. Based on the theoretical assumption that the relationship of a person towards himself or herself and towards other people is interconnected, this work also focuses on a description of a psychological construct of self-compassion. The empirical part of the diploma thesis is devoted to the translation of a new self-evaluation questionnaire called the Multidimensional Compassion Scale from USA, and the verification of the psychometric characteristics of the questionnaire and its convergent and discriminant validity. For the sake of questionnaire verification, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) was used, as well as the Interpersonal reactivity Index (IRI), a dimension called Compassionate reaction to one's own experiences from the Self-compassion Scale (SCS-26-CZ) questionnaire, and a dimension called Nonjudging intrapsychic experiences from the Five Aspects of Mindfulness Questionnaire (DPAV). Items of low difficulty were found within...

E-business is defined as the use of ICT and internet related technologies to create new ways of conducting business activities. It has been identified as an innovative approach for construction organisations to gain substantial benefits and to improve productivity and efficiency of processes. However, the uptake of ebusiness in the construction industry has been comparatively limited and ineffective. There is a need of a tool to evaluate and review construction ebusiness process execution and performance for further improvements. This research aims to develop a capability maturity model to systematically identify current status of e-business processes as a method of enhancing process efficiency in construction organisations. In order to achieve this aim, a multi-method qualitative research design was adopted. Initially an analysis of existing construction process maps were carried out to establish a conceptual construction process categorisation. Then two rounds of Delphi based expert forum interviews were conducted to verify the conceptual process categorisation. In the second stage of research design, an analysis of existing process maturity models were carried out to identify construction e-business process maturity characteristics. These characteristics were verified through an expert forum and further ratified using three case studies. In the third stage, Construction E-Business Capability Maturity (CeB-CMM) and its user interface were developed using verified construction process categorisation and ratified construction e-business process maturity characteristics. Finally, CeB-CMM was validated by applying it to four construction organisation using CeB-CMM user interface. This research contributed to the existing body of knowledge by developing CeB-CMM and its user interface. Furthermore, this research established a construction process categorisation and determined the construction e-business process maturity characteristics. It is anticipated that the developed tool can be used by construction organisations as a tool to systematically evaluate their current ebusiness process maturity and provide them a pathway to further improve those processes.

Recent advances in machine intelligence, particularly Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO), have introduced conceptually advanced technologies that can be utilised for financial market share trading analysis. The primary goal of the present research is to model short-term daily trading in Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index (FTSE 100) shares to make forecasts with certain levels of confidence and associated risk. The hypothesis to be tested is that financial shares time series contain significant non-linearity and that ANN, either separately or in conjunction with PSO, could be utilised effectively. Validation of the proposed model shows that nonlinear models are likely to be better choices than traditional linear regression for short-term trading. Some periodicity and trend lines were apparent in short- and long-term trading. Experiments showed that a model using an ANN with the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) model features performed significantly better than analysis in the time domain. Mathematical analysis of the PSO algorithm from a systemic point of view along with stability analysis was performed to determine the choice of parameters, and a possible proportional, integral and derivative (PID) algorithm extension was recommended. The proposed extension was found to perform better than traditional PSO. Furthermore, a chaotic local search operator and exponentially varying inertia weight factor algorithm considering constraints were proposed that gave better ability to converge to a high quality solution without oscillations. A hybrid example combining an ANN with the PSO forecasting regression model significantly outperformed the original ANN and PSO approaches in accuracy and computational complexity. The evaluation of statistical confidence for the models gave good results, which is encouraging for further experimentation considering model cross-validation for generalisation to show how accurately the predictive models perform in practice.

In line with technological developments, there is almost no limit to collect data of high dimension in various fields including bioinformatics. In most cases, these high dimensional datasets contain many irrelevant or noisy features which need to be filtered out to find a small but biologically meaningful set of attributes. Although there have been various attempts to select predictive feature sets from high dimensional data in classification and clustering, there have only been limited attempts to do this for regression problems. Since supervised feature selection methods tend to identify noisy features in addition to discriminative variables, unsupervised feature selection methods (USFSMs) are generally regarded as more unbiased approaches. The aim of this thesis is, therefore, to provide (i) a comprehensive overview of feature selection methods for regression problems where feature selection methods are shown along with their types, references, sources, and code repositories (ii) a taxonomy of feature selection methods for regression problems to assist researchers to select appropriate feature selection methods for their research (iii) a deep learning based unsupervised feature selection framework, DFSFR (iv) a K-means based unsupervised feature selection method, KBFS. To the best of our knowledge, DFSFR is the first deep learning based method to be designed particularly for regression tasks. In addition, a hybrid USFSM, DKBFS, is proposed which combines KBFS and DFSFR to select discriminative features from very high dimensional data. The proposed frameworks are compared with the state-of-the-art USFSMs, including Multi Cluster Feature Selection (MCFS), Embedded Unsupervised Feature Selection (EUFS), Infinite Feature Selection (InFS), Spectral Regression Feature Selection (SPFS), Laplacian Score Feature Selection (LapFS), and Term Variance Feature Selection (TV) along with the entire feature sets as well as the methods used in previous studies. To evaluate the effectiveness of proposed methods, four different case studies are considered: (i) a low dimensional RV144 vaccine dataset; (ii) three different high dimensional peptide binding affinity datasets; (iii) a very high dimensional GSE44763 dataset; (iv) a very high dimensional GSE40279 dataset. Experimental results from these data sets are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Compared to state-of-the-art feature selection methods, the proposed methods achieve improvements in prediction accuracy of as much as 9% for the RV144 Vaccine dataset, 75% for the peptide binding affinity datasets, 3% for the GSE44763 dataset, and 55% for the GSE40279 dataset.

This thesis explores how the nature of engagement in formal volunteering by older adults is shaped by experiences across the lifecourse and into older age. It utilises the Total Social Organisation of Labour theoretical approach to situate volunteering within the wider work context, looking at how volunteering is undertaken alongside other work commitments - paid and unpaid - at different times across the lifecourse. This synthesis of TSOL and lifecourse approaches allows this research to take a holistic approach to understanding volunteering by older adults; rather than approached in isolation, the nature of volunteering in older age is considered in context. Analysis of this was undertaken through qualitative semi-structured interviews with 26 older volunteers who engage with voluntary and community organisations in England. This data was used to develop further a heuristic proposed by Davis Smith and Gay (2005), which presents three categories of older volunteer lifecourse; constant, serial and trigger volunteers. In doing so, the differences in lifecourse experiences between individuals in the three categories are explored, and differences examined. This allows for the impulses to engage in formal volunteering in older age to be explored in light of these differences, and this thesis looks at how internal and external impulses to engage in formal volunteering are shaped by previous life experiences. It concludes by arguing that, while all volunteers have unique pathways to engagement and unique reasons for engaging, in understanding the different categories of older volunteer we can better understand how previous life experiences affect the ways in which older adults engage in formal volunteering.

Smartphone take-up has grown exponentially, a growth that far exceeds any consumer technology in history. The growth of these technologies has created a cultural shift. Users are accessing, storing and retrieving digital information on more portable devices and doing so on the move. This cultural shift away from the stationary context (at home or at work) to a more mobile 24/7 way of accessing and consuming information is creating challenges. Today’s developers and shapers of digital information (businesses, marketers, advertisers and web agencies, to name a few) need their applications to be workable to support the consumer in all contexts; at home, at work, in the lift, on the bus. When developing applications for these kinds of situations, changeable technological configurations and contexts are crucial to support the user experience and device interaction. In the early days of mobile computing researchers and usability professionals identified a range of challenges facing a tester’s ability to accurately map a mobile users experience. Testing strategies have stood the test of time, working extremely well in many lab-based configurations, but how do they fare in an increasingly mobile information society? This Professional Doctorate aims to support and contribute to the mobile testing evolution and will adapt some existing practices to help keep pace with the phenomenon. This research will present a strategy that explores the development of new a framework (via a systematic review) to inform mobile testing. The framework builds upon themes within Human Information Behavior (HIB) and Mobile Human Computer Interaction (Mobile HCI). The research takes an interpretivist approach to investigate how this framework is applied to build and contextualise methods informing testing methodology in the mobile arena.

In the 21st century, increasing demand for energy stimulated by high rates of economic development has pushed China to increase imports, leaving the country highly dependent on foreign energy sources. China’s energy security is therefore under threat from the constant risk of supply falling short of demand. Historically, various approaches have been proposed to attempt to resolve or, at least relieve, this security issue but those discussions focus on either competition or cooperation. The combined approach, co-opetition has been applied in business and this research has attempted to combine these two approaches when dealing with energy security issues, thus the original contribution of this research is to take a unique approach, combining the co-opetition approach with the added benefits of a traditional Chinese philosophy known as ‘Hehe culture’. In addition, the ‘Chinese characteristics’inherent in the energy security strategy, advocated by the Chinese government, has contributed a specific viewpoint in the academic field. Moreover, this research employs the PARTS model from game theory, an analytical tool originally applied in the field of business and economics, to build a framework for evaluating Chinese co-opetition in energy relations. Three case studies of China’s energy co-opetition with Japan, Russia and Africa are analysed according to the framework, revealing how co-opetition affects China’s energy security. The findings of this research include the prerequisites for successful co-opetition, and the value and function of incorporating Hehe culture into co-opetition. The research identifies the impact of thesen prerequisites on the strategic value of co-opetition, generating a new model for Chinese energy security, which will allow for accurate determination of the best approach to the game of energy co-opetition with different players.