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    A mathematical, classical stratification modeling approach to disentangling the impact of weather on infectious diseases: A case study using spatio-temporally disaggregated Campylobacter surveillance data for England and Wales.
    (Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2024-01-18) Lo Iacono G; Cook AJC; Derks G; Fleming LE; French N; Gillingham EL; Gonzalez Villeta LC; Heaviside C; La Ragione RM; Leonardi G; Sarran CE; Vardoulakis S; Senyah F; van Vliet AHM; Nichols G; Vega N
    Disentangling the impact of the weather on transmission of infectious diseases is crucial for health protection, preparedness and prevention. Because weather factors are co-incidental and partly correlated, we have used geography to separate out the impact of individual weather parameters on other seasonal variables using campylobacteriosis as a case study. Campylobacter infections are found worldwide and are the most common bacterial food-borne disease in developed countries, where they exhibit consistent but country specific seasonality. We developed a novel conditional incidence method, based on classical stratification, exploiting the long term, high-resolution, linkage of approximately one-million campylobacteriosis cases over 20 years in England and Wales with local meteorological datasets from diagnostic laboratory locations. The predicted incidence of campylobacteriosis increased by 1 case per million people for every 5° (Celsius) increase in temperature within the range of 8°-15°. Limited association was observed outside that range. There were strong associations with day-length. Cases tended to increase with relative humidity in the region of 75-80%, while the associations with rainfall and wind-speed were weaker. The approach is able to examine multiple factors and model how complex trends arise, e.g. the consistent steep increase in campylobacteriosis in England and Wales in May-June and its spatial variability. This transparent and straightforward approach leads to accurate predictions without relying on regression models and/or postulating specific parameterisations. A key output of the analysis is a thoroughly phenomenological description of the incidence of the disease conditional on specific local weather factors. The study can be crucially important to infer the elusive mechanism of transmission of campylobacteriosis; for instance, by simulating the conditional incidence for a postulated mechanism and compare it with the phenomenological patterns as benchmark. The findings challenge the assumption, commonly made in statistical models, that the transformed mean rate of infection for diseases like campylobacteriosis is a mere additive and combination of the environmental variables.
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    Impressions of war : the private propaganda of Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Anderson, Miranda
    In this thesis I will explore the relationship between modernist fiction, the world wars, and British war propaganda, with its foundational distinction between soldier and civilian experience. This exploration will focus on the novels of two modernist authors who seem to fall on either side of this distinction: Ford Madox Ford, a soldier, veteran, and propagandist, and Virginia Woolf, a self-proclaimed anti-war civilian. Existing scholarship on Ford and Woolf has served to reinforce British war propaganda’s guiding distinction between experience on the war front and the home front by examining Woolf as an apolitical female civilian and Ford as a conventional soldier writer. However, this binary fails to acknowledge the full spectrum of war experience, which unfolds both on the front and at home in similar ways, resonating in the lives of both soldier and civilian figures within and beyond fiction. This thesis examines these resonances and challenges existing critical accounts of Ford and Woolf through a comparative representational analysis of Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade’s End (1924-28), and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Between the Acts (1941), revealing that these novels challenge the state-sanctioned opposition between soldier and civilian experiences. Through the analysis of three “formal-experiential constellations” central to these novels—cyclical temporality, fragmentation, and stream of consciousness—I will argue that Ford and Woolf’s fictional representations of war experience, and the modernist devices they use to capture these experiences, serve both to evoke the lived experience of war, and to undermine the false propagandist model of war experience. Together, these devices communicate a model of war experience that more closely aligns with a lived experience that is often cyclical, fragmentary, and intersubjective. In this process they create a pluralistic, shared, and distinctly modernist vision of war: a kind of private propaganda.
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    Katherine of Aragon : a "pioneer of women's education"? : humanism and women's education in early sixteenth century England : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2016) Croon Hickman, Leanne
    In 1548, Eaton School headmaster Nicolas Udall stated that “it was now a common thing to see young virgins so trained in the study of good letters, that they willingly set all other vain pastimes at naught, for learning sake.”1 What led to English women becoming educated enough to garner such an observation? The purpose of this study is to consider the changing attitudes towards the education of women that began with a proliferation of works written on the subject, by humanist scholars in 1520s England. It will be shown that during the 1520s a burgeoning number of works featuring theories on female learning were produced primarily in reaction to the need to educate Princess Mary as the only heir to the throne. As the driving force behind the writing of many of these works, Katherine of Aragon has been called “a pioneer of female education in England”. It will be considered whether this label is accurate and what other influences affected female education. This research will also provide an overview on the effects of these flourishing views on female education and how women were showing their learning in practice through iconography, book ownership and the writing activities that women engaged in.
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    Treason, manhood, and the English State : shaping constitutional ideas and political subjects through the laws of treason, 1397-1424 : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2016) McVitty, Eva Amanda
    Debates about treason are inherently constitutional conflicts. By defining treason and naming the entities against which traitors offend, the state delineates the nature and limits of its own authority. By implication, treason is integral to shaping loyal political subjects. This thesis uses legal records alongside a range of other sources to examine how the relationship between the English state and its political subjects was being negotiated through the laws of treason during the politically turbulent period between 1397 and 1424. Previous studies have asserted that between the mid-­fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the legal scope of treason remained static and the crime continued to be viewed primarily in traditional terms as an attack on the king’s person. By contrast, this thesis demonstrates that while customary and chivalric definitions remained relevant, by the early fifteenth century they were being subsumed by constructions of treason as a crime against the nation, the public good, and the English people. This had significant constitutional repercussions. It fostered the alignment of political subjecthood with ethnicised national identity; it introduced into English law the idea of treason as an insult to the abstract public authority of the state; and it enabled significant expansions in the scope of treason to encompass verbal and written expressions of political dissent, and other offences. By considering the content of sources but also their multilingual character, this thesis illuminates rhetorical and linguistic strategies used to construct or to resist allegations of treason, and demonstrates how the vernacular functioned both to authorise and to subvert the state’s prosecution narratives. This thesis also presents a new interpretation of significant changes in the treatment of treasonous speech by showing that this was facilitated by a cultural conjunction between the gendering of particular speech acts and the perceived material effects of men’s words. This created the justification for men's words to be punished as treasonous deeds, but also generated means by which the accused could assert resistant identities as loyal subjects and 'trewe men'.
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    Statistical tools for spatio-temporal epidemiology, with application to veterinary diseases : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Statistics at Massey University, Palmerston North
    (Massey University, 2015) Richards, Kate
    In epidemiology we are concerned with disease occurrence and its associated explanatory factors. Through analysis of the patterns in disease spread, in space and/or time, we are able to obtain information about possible risk factors and transmission mechanisms. The main focus in spatial epidemiology has been human health. However, economic costs and the concern about zoonoses has fuelled a growing field of veterinary epidemiology. Veterinary epidemiology has the added complication of the `human effect'. For a disease to be recorded we require humans to detect and report the disease, and once reported human intervention is generally applied. This can lead to the true level of disease being under-represented with the loss of information impeding modelling and model predictions. The reliability of statistical analyses depends on the quality of the underlying data. Anomalies could introduce significant bias and lead to inappropriate decision making. Residual analysis is often used to detect anomalous data, but with hierarchical models (common within epidemiology) the highly exible representation of variation can mask outliers. We propose the use of exceedance probabilities as a tool for identifying and assessing anomalous data in spatio-temporal models for routinely collected areal disease count data. We illustrate this methodology through a case study on outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Viet Nam for the time period 2006 to 2008. The exceedance probabilities identify several provinces where the number of infected communes was unexpectedly low. These findings are particularly interesting as these provinces are located along major cattle movement pathways within Viet Nam. With epidemic data, the primary interest is the understanding of the transmission of the disease and the effectiveness of intervention strategies. While epidemic curves provide an excellent representation of the temporal patterns, we propose the additional use of a new graphical tool, the `cluster curve' to summarise the changes in spatial clustering through time. The cluster curve is based on the inhomogeneous K-function, and provides a means for summarizing the progression of clustering in infectious disease outbreak data taking into consideration spatial variation in the underlying population. We look at the application of the cluster curve to two outbreaks of FMD in England (2001) and Japan (2010) and to the 2007 epidemic of Equine Influenza (EI) in Australia. By comparing our knowledge of the actual course of the outbreak with the insight provided by the cluster curve we are able to showcase the effectiveness of our tool. Throughout the progression of the outbreak several time windows obtained small sample sizes. Therefore, we also look at the inclusion of significance indicators to definitively differentiate between true clustering and noise due to these small sample sizes. The epidemic outbreaks studied all had intervention methods applied. The impact of intervention strategies was investigated through the simulation (via InterspreadPlus) of five intervention methods on outbreaks of FMD in two geographical regions. Using the cluster curve, we found that intervention methods that created buffer zones were found to have particular characteristics of spatial spread. We found that non-buffer methods were less effective in controlling local spread. This is most likely due to infection transmission prior to clinical signs. This kind of analysis demonstrates the practical importance of having effective tools for describing changes in the spatial patterns of disease during an epidemic outbreak.
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    Reading regionalism : objects, words and spaces: reflections of regional realism at the museum of Liverpool : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Museum Studies at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2015) Constantine, Vanessa Ann
    This thesis examines how museums and galleries can reflect regionalism through their objects and words and in the spaces (exterior, interior and symbolic) that these words and objects occupy. It also observes the scope and application of regionalism as a genre through which museums can narrate the stories and realities of their regional communities. In Northern England, urban regeneration initiatives have resulted in stimulating a renaissance of cultural industries, in particular a rejuvenation of city museums as the arts and culture sentries of their region’s material heritage. There is much evidence in the North demonstrating that regional identity is progressively celebrated in its museums and galleries and it is the recent popularity in representations of northern experience that deems this area of research significant. However, an initial literature review highlighted a lack of accompanying or documenting museum literature. Furthermore, although regional objects are exhibited as community or cultural signifiers, regionalism is not defined as an applicable museological concept. This thesis perceives regionalism as a multifaceted notion with permeable boundaries. It is positioned within a conceptual framework that is extracted predominantly from ideas of place and space, human geography and critical regionalist theory, which are subsequently applied to museological contexts. A visual method, photo-documentation, is utilised to collect evidence from a contemporary purpose-built museum, the Museum of Liverpool, purely dedicated to regionalism: the region and its people. Photo-documentation captured not only the tangible context of place but the sensory relationship between human inhabitants and their regional space while object case studies demonstrate the viability of regionalism. This thesis aims to show that the application of regionalism in museums is critical, significant and socially inclusive because spaces of regionalism can accommodate performability: regional voice, consciousness and participation.
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    Environmental management in medieval London : was London a 'filthy city'? : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2013) Rouse, Barbara
    The BBC series “Filthy Cities” presented medieval London as knee deep in muck, with rivers of butchers’ waste washing into streams and chamber pots emptied on the heads of hapless passers-by. This thesis asks whether medieval London was really a “filthy city”. It also investigates medieval attitudes towards the London environment, as a living space, pollution sink and a source of sustenance. The evidence for the state of the environment in medieval London and how the environment was managed is contained in a variety of primary sources, largely court records, ordinances, complaints and directives to abate pollution. In order to provide a framework for analysis, this study examines whether environmental models currently used to manage and monitor the environment might provide a useful method for assessing the state of the environment in medieval London. A modified Driver-Pressure-State-Impact Response environmental reporting framework is proposed, taking account of the data limitations and the paucity of data on the environment per se. The selection of indicators for drivers and pressures on the environment is based on available information on the medieval economy, demography, housing, and industrial processes from documentary and archaeological sources. The key drivers are economic, cultural and demographic and give rise to pressures related to population, density, consumption, and associated resource demands and waste disposal problems. Records of regulations and complaints provide information on both pressures and responses to environmental problems. Building on and considerably extending previous work, this study provides a detailed analysis of the Assize of Nuisance court records. It focusses on cases of environmental nuisance and supplements these with information on ordinances and cases from the Mayor’s Court. As shown in the modified DPSIR framework, responses may be precipitated by environmental problems, or that have spin-off environmental benefits. This thesis assesses public infrastructure and services, and private activities, serving to reduce environmental effects. It also looks at how the city managed the Thames, and in particular the conflicts between various uses. Overall, the evidence suggests that the city’s environment was well managed other than in times of crisis such as the plague epidemics, given the resources and technology available. The inhabitants of medieval London may have tolerated a dirtier smellier environment than inhabitants of modern-day western cities, but beyond a certain threshold, they were highly intolerant of pollution of their immediate environment.
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    False knights and true blood : reading the traitor's body in Medieval England : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2011) McVitty, Eva Amanda
    From the late thirteenth century, traitors in England were subjected to spectacular rituals of public execution that could include drawing, hanging, disembowelling, beheading, quartering and bodily display. These executions took place within a context in which the human body was saturated with significance. The body of Christ, the body politic imagined through the body of the king, and the whole and perfect body of the perfect knight were all central constructs in medieval thought. This thesis considers the polyvalent cultural meanings and responses that could be generated when the traitor’s broken and divided body was read in relationship to these other, idealised bodies. The ritualised processes of the traitor’s execution were intended to send a message about hegemonic power, particularly the king’s power over the bodies and lives of his subjects. However, the public and performative nature of these spectacles meant that they could provoke unpredictable and unexpected interpretations. Through a close analysis of documentary accounts of a number of high-profile executions that took place in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, this study explores the ways the traitor’s body could work to destabilise and subvert dominant notions and relationships of status, gender, and political authority that the ritual of execution was intended to reinforce. The work that follows is structured around three thematic chapters. In Chapter Two, it examines the ways the trial and punishment of traitors made manifest deep uncertainties surrounding the social status of ‘knighthood’, in the process publicly exposing cultural and political conflicts over claims to power. Chapter Three turns to the challenges the traitor posed to the construction of aristocratic masculinity. Beginning from a premise that the categories of ‘knight’ and ‘traitor’ were ostensibly wholly oppositional but in reality mutually constitutive, it examines the potential for slippage from the masculine ideal of knighthood to the monstrous feminised inversion represented by the traitor. Chapter Four considers the complicated relationship that could develop between the traitor’s body to the bodies of Christ and the martyrs. It analyses a number of accounts that actively engage with the Passion topos in ways that invite alternative interpretations and resistant responses to acts of spectacular public execution.
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    Endothelial function and insulin sensitivity during acute non-esterified fatty acid elevation: Effects of fat composition and gender
    (Elsevier, 14/03/2015) Newens KJ; Thompson AK; Jackson KG; Williams CM
    Background and aims We have reported that adverse effects on flow-mediated dilation of an acute elevation of non-esterified fatty acids rich in saturated fat (SFA) are reversed following addition of long-chain (LC) n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), and hypothesised that these effects may be mediated through alterations in insulin signalling pathways. In a subgroup, we explored the effects of raised NEFA enriched with SFA, with or without LC n-3 PUFA, on whole body insulin sensitivity (SI) and responsiveness of the endothelium to insulin infusion. Methods and results Thirty adults (mean age 27.8 y, BMI 23.2 kg/m2) consumed oral fat loads on separate occasions with continuous heparin infusion to elevate NEFA between 60 and 390 min. For the final 150 min, a hyperinsulinaemic-euglycaemic clamp was performed, whilst FMD and circulating markers of endothelial function were measured at baseline, pre-clamp (240 min) and post-clamp (390 min). NEFA elevation during the SFA-rich drinks was associated with impaired FMD (P = 0.027) whilst SFA + LC n-3 PUFA improved FMD at 240 min (P = 0.003). In males, insulin infusion attenuated the increase in FMD with SFA + LC n-3 PUFA (P = 0.049), with SI 10% greater with SFA + LC n-3 PUFA than SFA (P = 0.041). Conclusion This study provides evidence that NEFA composition during acute elevation influences both FMD and SI, with some indication of a difference by gender. However our findings are not consistent with the hypothesis that the effects of fatty acids on endothelial function and SI operate through a common pathway. This trial was registered at clinical trials.gov as NCT01351324 on 6th May 2011.