An Irish apostle: articulating and actualising apostolicity in the early Irish church

This thesis examines the earliest extant Latin Lives of Brigit and Patrick; Cogitosus’s Vita Brigidae and Muirchú’s Vita Patricii as evidence for a seventh-century debate on Irish apostolicity. While often dismissed as mere propaganda, this thesis shows they are highly sophisticated demonstrations of the continuing connection that Kildare and Armagh had to their patron saints and their authority. It examines the importance of this connection for concepts of ecclesiastical organisation, teaching authority and episcopal succession against the backdrop of the seventh-century Easter question in the Insular Church. This will show that apostolicity was considered to be intrinsically linked with orthodoxy and universality. A textual focus brings forth general patristic themes and ideas that Irish hagiographers evoked through specific words and phrases. The thesis contextualises hagiographical material using evidence from Hiberno-Latin and early Insular exegetical commentaries, referring to major patristic exegetes such as Origen, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great as support. The introduction discusses the importance of apostolic ideology for the seventh-century Irish Church, and outlines a methodology for examining such abstract themes. The first chapter looks at how developments in apostolic ideology led to ideas of apostolic primacy seen in the Insular material. Chapters two, three, and four examine metaphors of food and feeding, the fountain and the stream, and the head and the body, as significant articulations of apostolicity. Chapter five examines how corporeal relics were understood as the visible proof of this continuity and preserved a saint’s authority for their episcopal heirs. Chapter six looks at how Muirchú engaged with Patrick’s connection to the universal Church and his self-professed lack of disciplina to reconcile his apostolicity with seventh-century norms. Chapter seven places the issues considered thus far in a thoroughly Insular context by examining how the earliest English sources present the Irish legacy in Northumbria after the synod of Whitby. Chapter eight looks at how the text of Patrick’s Confessio in the Book of Armagh relates to a wider seventh-century campaign by Armagh to rehabilitate Patrick’s apostolicity. The conclusion briefly summarizes the thesis, and suggests further avenues for researching this topic in the Insular material

Scientism and instrumentalism After the Bomb: Dr Strangelove, End Zone, Crash and The Wire

This thesis argues that through the prism of America’s Cold War, scientism has emerged as the metanarrative of the postnuclear age. The advent of the bomb brought about a new primacy for mechanical and hyperrational thinking in the corridors of power not just in terms of managing the bomb itself but diffusing this ideology throughout the culture in social sciences, economics and other such institutional systems. The human need to mitigate or ameliorate against the chaos of the universe lies at the heart of not just religious faith but in the desire for perfect control. Thus there has been a transference of power from religious faith to the apparent material power of science and technology and the terra firma these supposedly objective means supply. The Cold War, however was a highly ideologically charged opposition between the two superpowers, and the scientific methodology that sprang forth to manage the Cold War and the bomb, in the United States, was not an objective scientific system divorced from the paranoia and dogma but a system that assumed a radically fundamentalist idea of capitalism. This is apparent in the widespread diffusion of game theory throughout Western postindustrial institutions. The inquiry of the thesis thus examines the texts that engage and criticise American Cold War methodology, beginning with the nuclear moment, so to speak, and Dr Strangelove’s incisive satire of moral abdication to machine processes. Moving on chronologically, the thesis examines the diffusion of particular kinds of masculinity and sexuality in postnuclear culture in Crash and End Zone and finishing up its analysis with the ethnographic portrayal of a modern American city in The Wire. More than anything else, the thesis wishes to reveal to what extent this technocratic consciousness puts pressure on language and on binding narratives.

Within the carnal: re-reading Merleau-Ponty through the language of drawing

In order to present visual art as a paradigm for philosophy, Merleau-Ponty investigated the creative processes of artists whose work corresponded closely with his philosophical ideas. His essays on art are widely valued for emphasising process over product, and for challenging the primacy of the written word in all spheres of human expression. While it is clear that he initially favoured painting, Merleau-Ponty began to develop a much deeper understanding of the complexities of how art is made in his late work in parallel with his advancement of a new ontology. Although his ontology remains unfinished and only exists as working notes and a manuscript entitled The Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty had begun to appreciate the fundamental role drawing plays in the making of art and the creation of a language of expression that is as vital as the written or spoken word. Through an examination of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished manuscript and working notes my thesis will investigate his working methods and use of materials and also explore how he processed his ideas by using my own art practice as the basis of my research. This research will take the form of an inquiry into how the unfinished and incomplete nature of text and artworks, while they are still ‘works in progress’, can often reveal the more human and carnal components of creative processes. Applying my experience as a practitioner and a teacher in an art school, I focus on the significance of drawing practice for Merleau-Ponty’s later work, in order to rebalance an overemphasis on painting in the literature. Understanding the differences between these two art forms, and how they are taught, can offer an alternative engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s later work and his struggle to find a language to express his developing new ontology. In addition, by re-reading his work through the language of drawing, I believe we gain new insights which reaffirm Merleau-Ponty's relevance to contemporary art making and aesthetics.

Reviewing the European North/South Divide under the Prism of Beck’s ‘Risk society’ Thesis

Reviewing the European North/South Divide under the Prism of Beck’s ‘Risk society’ Thesis
Southern European political cultures have been viewed as extremely disadvantageous terrains for the development of a civic culture compatible to the requirements of a modern polity. Trust confined to the local and the familial, weak civil societies, violation of the law in the absence of supervision are some of the elements combined to draw an extremely negative picture of southern European political cultures in the relevant literature. These are very well entrenched perceptions that dominate all studies dealing with social aspects the southern European nations. Recent works produced by students of environmental mobilisations have argued that the environmental problematique has operated as a catalyst that, at least, forces us to re-examine the aforementioned perspectives if not to outright dismiss them.

This paper argues that although these challenging perspectives are not immune from criticisms, they have put forward a strong case that deserves further attention. A careful reading of Beck’s ‘risk society’ thesis suggests that mistrust to expert authorities and defensive reactions by social actors against them are not confined to specific national contexts but are now characteristics of countries previously held to be exemplary cases of civicness. Following that observation the paper proceeds by posing a number of related questions:

1) Can we argue that we are witnessing a general ‘Mediterranisation’ of European political culture or by arguing that we essentially accept what was idealistic evaluations of post-war European cultures determined by specific political conceptions?

2) Is there still any role for the use of a north/south divide in the cross-national study of social processes and to what extent?

The hydrodynamics of small seabed mounted bottom hinged wave energy converters in shallow water:PhD thesis

This thesis investigates the hydrodynamics of a small, seabed mounted, bottom hinged, wave energy converter in shallow water. The Oscillating Wave Surge Converter is a pitching flap-type device which is located in 10-15m of water to take advantage of the amplification of horizontal water particle motion in shallow water. A conceptual model of the hydrodynamics of the device has been formulated and shows that, as the motion of the flap is highly constrained, the magnitude of the force applied to the flap by the wave is strongly linked to the power absorption.

An extensive set of experiments has been carried out in the wave tank at Queen’s University at both 40th and 20th scales. The experiments have included testing in realistic sea states to estimate device performance as well as fundamental tests using small amplitude monochromatic waves to determine the force applied to the flap by the waves. The results from the physical modelling programme have been used in conjunction with numerical data from WAMIT to validate the conceptual model.

The work finds that tuning the OWSC to the incident wave periods is problematic and only results in a marginal increase in power capture. It is also found that the addition of larger diameter rounds to the edges of the flap reduces viscous losses and has a greater effect on the performance of the device than tuning. As wave force is the primary driver of device performance it is shown that the flap should fill the water column and should pierce the water surface to reduce losses due to wave overtopping.

With the water depth fixed at approximately 10m it is shown that the width of the flap has the greatest impact on the magnitude of wave force, and thus device performance. An 18m wide flap is shown to have twice the absorption efficiency of a 6m wide flap and captures 6 times the power. However, the increase in power capture with device width is not limitless and a 24m wide flap is found to be affected by two-dimensional hydrodynamics which reduces its performance per unit width, especially in sea states with short periods. It is also shown that as the width increases the performance gains associated with the addition of the end effectors reduces. Furthermore, it is shown that as the flap width increases the natural pitching period of the flap increases, thus detuning the flap further from the wave periods of interest for wave energy conversion.

The effect of waves approaching the flap from an oblique angle is also investigated and the power capture is found to decrease with the cosine squared of the encounter angle. The characteristic of the damping applied by the power take off system is found to have a significant effect on the power capture of the device, with constant damping producing between 20% and 30% less power than quadratic damping. Furthermore, it is found that applying a higher level of damping, or a damping bias, to the flap as it pitches towards the beach increases the power capture by 10%.

A further set of experiments has been undertaken in a case study used to predict the power capture of a prototype of the OWSC concept. The device, called the Oyster Demonstrator, has been developed by Aquamarine Power Ltd. and is to be installed at the European Marine Energy Centre, Scotland, in 2009.

The work concludes that OWSC is a viable wave energy converter and absorption efficiencies of up 75% have been measured. It is found that to maximise power absorption the flap should be approximately 20m wide with large diameter rounded edges, having its pivot close to the seabed and its top edge piercing the water surface.

Forgoing primacy: Damaging democratic policing in the West Bank

Since the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993, the international community has supported civil policing programmes. It has done so as part of its development commitments to Palestinian state-building. Such programmes were, until the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, largely regarded as successful in terms of supporting the establishment of a Palestinian civil police (PCP). Such programmes were essentially Western imported models which loosely mixed community and public order policing approaches. With re-engagement in the Palestinian security sector (PSS) in the West Bank in 2007, the international community has once again sought to play a major role in PSS reform. This role includes supporting rehabilitation and retraining of the PCP as a principal institution of state-building. Such activities alongside the so-called transformation efforts within the wider realm of the PSS have re-established as their goal law and order. Within the transformation agenda, there are inherent demands with respect to Israel and the Palestinian National Authority's security and counterterrorism agendas. This analysis examines these activities, and accompanying political intent to contend that such approaches are undermining principles of democratic policing including civil police primacy (CPP). CPP reinforces police universality and means supporting rule of law by putting security under governmental control with proper mechanisms of accountability. This article argues that support to the security sector in the West Bank has increasingly only paid lip service or sought to subvert normative approaches to democratic policing.

Knowledge Management Techniques to Augment Textual CBR (PhD Thesis)

The past decade had witnessed an unprecedented growth in the amount of available digital content, and its volume is expected to continue to grow the next few years. Unstructured text data generated from web and enterprise sources form a large fraction of such content. Many of these contain large volumes of reusable data such as solutions to frequently occurring problems, and general know-how that may be reused in appropriate contexts. In this work, we address issues around leveraging unstructured text data from sources as diverse as the web and the enterprise within the Case-based Reasoning framework. Case-based Reasoning (CBR) provides a framework and methodology for systematic reuse of historical knowledge that is available in the form of problemsolution
pairs, in solving new problems. Here, we consider possibilities of enhancing Textual CBR systems under three main themes: procurement, maintenance and retrieval. We adapt and build upon the stateof-the-art techniques from data mining and natural language processing in addressing various challenges therein. Under procurement, we investigate the problem of extracting cases (i.e., problem-solution pairs) from data sources such as incident/experience
reports. We develop case-base maintenance methods specifically tuned to text targeted towards retaining solutions such that the utility of the filtered case base in solving new problems is maximized. Further, we address the problem of query suggestions for textual case-bases and show that exploiting the problem-solution partition can enhance retrieval effectiveness by prioritizing more useful query suggestions. Additionally, we illustrate interpretable clustering as a tool to drill-down to domain specific text collections (since CBR systems are usually very domain specific) and develop techniques for improved similarity assessment in social media sources such as microblogs. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we illustrate the improvements that we are able to
achieve over the state-of-the-art methods for the respective tasks.

The Structure of Design Processes: ideal and reality in Bruce Archer’s 1968 doctoral thesis

The paper centres on a single document, the 1968 doctoral thesis of L Bruce Archer. It traces the author’s earlier publications and the sources that informed and inspired his thinking, as a way of understanding the trajectory of his ideas and the motivations for his work at the Royal College of Art from 1962. Analysis of the thesis suggests that Archer’s ambition for a rigorous ‘science of design’ inspired by algorithmic approaches was increasingly threatened with disruption by his experience of large, complex design projects. His attempts to deal with this problem are shown to involve a particular interpretation of cybernetics. The paper ends with Archer’s own retrospective view and a brief account of his dramatically changed opinions. Archer is located as both a theorist and someone intensely interested in the commercial world of industrial design.

Thesis abstract. Applying species distribution modeling for the conservation of Iberian protected invertebrates

This article outlines the approaches to modeling the distribution of threatened invertebrates using data from atlases, museums and databases. Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are useful for estimating species’ ranges, identifying suitable habitats, and identifying the primary factors affecting species’ distributions. The study tackles the strategies used to obtain SDMs without reliable absence data while exploring their applications for conservation. I examine the conservation status of Copris species and Graellsia isabelae by delimiting their populations and exploring the effectiveness of protected areas. I show that the method of pseudo‐absence selection strongly determines the model obtained, generating different model predictions along the gradient between potential and realized distributions. After assessing the effects of species’ traits and data characteristics on accuracy, I found that species are modeled more accurately when sample sizes are larger, no matter the technique used.