Most Popular Books by Brendan James

Cabin 6444 is a one-act play for 4 actors. It tells the story of two strangers on an overnight ferry from England to Spain who spark up a conversation which leads to one plotting to blackmail the other by using his own stepdaughter as bait without her knowledge.

Tom Gibbs is about to take a two week annual holiday from the mansion house where he is employed. As usual, he needs to arrange a replacement security guard to cover his duties while he is away. The employment agency sends Martin Phillips. Tom escorts Martin on a tour of the house to show him the ropes. All is well until they reach the cellar, where events take a dramatic turn.

Through a study of its natural environment and irrigation system, this dissertation investigates the evolution of the landscape of Egypt''s Fayyum depression across sixteen centuries, from the third century BCE to the thirteenth century CE. From the evidence of Greek papyri, Arabic fiscal documentation, early modern travel literature, archaeology, and contemporary scientific work, I chart the changes in human relationships with earth and water over time, changes which constantly altered the inhabited and cultivated regions of the Fayyum. My main argument throughout is that it was local agency and not state governments that continuously remade the landscape. The history of the Fayyum after the fourth century CE has long been viewed by ancient historians as one of decline from its ancient heights due to the failure of the late Roman and Muslim successor states to properly manage its irrigation system. I locate the genesis of this narrative within nineteenth century perceptions of the docility of nature and the belief that ancient governments had achieved centralized control over the Nile and the Egyptian environment. This anachronistic retrojection of the characteristics of the modern irrigation system has had a considerable afterlife in historical scholarship on Egyptian irrigation. Eschewing a narrow focus on the state, this dissertation argues that that nature is a potent agent in its own right. Ancient farmers could not control nature so they adapted to it, creating four distinct irrigated sub-regions in the Graeco-Roman Fayyum, each tailored to the particulars of the local environment. Our papyri stem from only one of these sub-regions, the water-scarce margins, which lay at the tail end of the irrigation system. Here, inadequate irrigation and fertilization progressively led to soil salinization and degradation, which helped to spur the eventual abandonment of these areas. By the medieval period, only the central floodplain remained inhabited. Only here was sustainable agriculture under the regime of premodern technology possible. Although the Roman state coordinated local labor on the canals, nothing could bind Fayyum villagers to the degrading margins in perpetuity. Fourth century papyri hint that some cultivators had moved to other nomes and were prospering. Still later documents of the sixth to eighth centuries CE reveal greatly increased settlement density in the central Fayyum. Thus, it was local cultivators who made and remade the landscape of the Fayyum over the centuries according to their own needs. Government could both guide and benefit from this local labor but it could never fully control it.

Mischievous Freddie Butler is a bit of a handful, who likes nothing more than to cause disruption at school - much to the annoyance of his teacher, Miss Brushforth. Being the apple of his bumper car operator father''s eye means the only person who is able to keep Freddie on the straight and narrow is his long-suffering mother, whose only recourse is to threaten a temporary ban of his train spotting hobby.Freddie''s dream is to drive one of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway steam locomotives when he grows up, but the occasional trip in the meantime would suit the eight-year-old down to the ground. But occasional trips cost money, and money doesn''t grow on Butler trees. When the Bradshaw twins move to the village, Freddie sees an opportunity to capitalise on their naivety and ride his beloved train all the way from Dymchurch to the end of the line at Dungeness. He devises a plan. But will the five-year-old twins be persuaded to travel with him?

"Mammalian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a maternally inherited, multi-copy, small circular genome approximately 16 kb in size that codes for 13 polypeptides of the mitochondrial respiratory chain. Typically, mtDNA is present as only one genotype in a cell, a state known as homoplasmy. In rare circumstances, two or more mtDNA sequence variants can be present in a cell, a state known as heteroplasmy, and these sequence variants can segregate during mitosis and meiosis. In this thesis, I have investigated the basis for a novel tissue-specific segregation of mtDNA in a heteroplasmic mouse model that had been previously constructed from two inbred strains (NZB/BinJ and BALB/c mtDNA). In these mice, four tissues showed directional selection for an mtDNA genotype: in the liver and kidney for the NZB mtDNA genotype; and in the spleen and blood for the BALB mtDNA genotype. I investigated the mechanism responsible for selection of NZB mtDNA, focusing on the liver which showed the strongest effect. In this tissue, selection for the NZB mtDNA genotype is constant with time, independent of allele frequency and does not appear to be mediated through an advantage of respiratory chain function or replication rate of mtDNA. To identify the genetic basis for this mtDNA selection, I set up an intersubspecific intercross and used quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping to map three QTL in F2 mice that are strong gene effects in the liver, kidney, and spleen. These QTLs, Smdq-1 (liver), Smdq-2 (kidney), and Smdq-3 (kidney & spleen) (s&barbelow;egregation of m&barbelow;itochondrial D&barbelow;NA Q&barbelow;TL-#) map to chromosome 5, 2, and 6 respectively. Smdq-1 was a dominant QTL in the liver that mapped to a 2 LOD support interval of approximately 1 cM and accounted for 34% of the variation in the trait. To reduce the interval size of Smdq-1 and confirm the map position, BALB chromosome 5 interval-specific congenic mice lines are being generated across a 20 cM interval. This is the fir" --

Missing data is a common problem for researchers. Before one can determine the best method to be used in handling missing data, one must first examine why the data is missing. That is, one must identify the missingness mechanism. Failure to discern an ignorable from a nonignorable missingness mechanism can greatly influence parameter estimates, standard errors and create other biases in statistical analyses. This study examined the efficiency and accuracy of a MNAR multivariate imputation by chained equations framework (miceMNAR) model proposed by Galimard et al. (2016). By applying their method to a real dataset (2018 National Survey of Children''s Health) the efficacy of the miceMNAR model was examined. Imputations and parameter estimates using the miceMNAR method were compared to more commonly used methods for handling missing data: complete case analysis and multivariate imputation using chained equations (MICE). Overall, the miceMNAR approach provided very large standard error estimates compared to both complete case analysis and MICE and demonstrated difficulty in providing accurate parameter estimates under MNAR conditions. Further research is recommended on the miceMNAR method before applying it to real data with potential MNAR mechanisms. The results from this study will help inform researchers on potential best practices for dealing with missing data when the mechanism is unknown.

Sitting in his rented Black Country room, reflecting on his thankless teaching job and miserable love life, Gerard Philey courageously decides to abandon his humdrum existence and embark on a quest for Euro-fulfilment, fun and fitness on the Continent. After a shaky start in Brussels, events manoeuvre him to Amsterdam where chance encounters shift his world well and truly into fifth gear. He samples the trials and tribulations of new relationships, alongside managing a sex shop in the city''s Red Light Area - on top of the challenges of fat-free living and international travel! Through his bittersweet diary, we see how Gerard steers a laugh-out-loud course through farcical episodes and fanciful characters...and how entanglements from past and present draw him unwittingly into a criminal underworld where events ultimately take their toll.

Globally it is estimated that 35 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2012. Unprotected sexual transmission of HIV accounts for the majority of all new infections, with semen acting as a vector. HIV levels in blood of an HIV-infected individual is the best-defined predictor of transmission risk, however, as blood is not often a factor during sex, this association likely reflects the level of HIV RNA in semen. It has been shown that while blood viral load reaches a set point during chronic untreated infection, semen can remain highly variable. Factors responsible for this heterogeneity have not fully well characterized. Furthermore, while highly active antiretroviral therapy has been associated with suppression of blood and genital viral loads, some men continue to shed HIV in their semen, despite undetectable viremia, a phenomenon called isolated semen HIV RNA shedding (IHS). In my doctoral thesis I evaluated the impact of semen collection method on viral load measurements, correlations between antiretroviral therapy intensification and its effect on immune activation, viral load and IHS as well as factors contributing to semen viral load variability in drug naive men. Overall, I found that semen collected directly into transport medium had a large impact on the measurement of viral load, evidencing a 0.42log10 increase in viral load over neat collection. Initiation of intensified antiretroviral therapy was shown to decrease viral load in blood and semen faster than a standard regimen. Intensification, however, did not resolve the occurrence of ISH, nor did it reduce systemic immune activation faster then a conventional therapy. It was observed that men on longer durations of ART had no evidence of IHS, suggesting the phenomenon is transient and may resolve with longer duration of therapy. Finally I explored factors that may be linked to the variability seen in semen viral load in drug naive men. Of all parameters examined, the macrophage-associated cytokine IL-8 was the only factor independently predictive of semen viral load (aside from blood viral load) in longitudinal studies. This suggests IL-8 as a common pathway linking clinical causes of high semen HIV levels in therapy-naive men.

"... reviews current knowledge on the impacts on yield of widening row spacing for crops including wheat, barley, canola and lupins in southern Australia. Widening of row spacing has accompanied the adoption of conservation cropping systems with no-till and stubble retention. Row space widening has allowed sowing machinery to operate in stubble with minimal blockages caused by the retained stubble."--Foreword.

National trade preference schemes are an integral component of North-South trade relations. Yet the varying degree of trade liberalization across different preference schemes is considerable, especially in the case of the EU. This thesis attempts to find what factors can account for the differing amount of trade liberalization between the EU''s trade preference schemes. To do this, both process tracing and the congruence method are used to analyze two different instances of European trade and development policy--the EU''s 2012 revision of GSP and the EU''s Economic Partnership Agreement with the Caribbean. I find the liberalization of EU trade preferences is driven primarily by three factors: (1) Domestic commercial interests; (2) EU concerns about global economic competitiveness; and (3) Desires for WTO compatibility. I also find NGOs to represent the main opposition for the EU''s current trade and development agenda rather than import-competing sectors as "conventional" trade theory would predict.