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\"Higher Education providers face enormous challenges in an increasingly competitive and globalised environment. It is perhaps obvious to those engaged in teaching and research that academia is both a competitive and a collaborative endeavour. Many national systems now assume in their legal or governance frameworks competitive rather than co-operative behaviour and increasingly regulate based on that assumption. Institutional leaders and educators wrestle with the issues around the commoditisation of learning and the pressure to treat students as customers. In tandem, students themselves are experiencing cuts in public financing and a transfer of the cost burden to them as the perceived private beneficiaries of a product.00This book asks whether there is an alternative approach to this now transnational competitive logic. Can collaboration and partnership (re-)emerge as an antidote to the consumerist and competitive approaches taken by governments toward regulating their higher education systems? The question of competition, collaboration and community is addressed here at three levels of analysis. The macro-level or the international system level, observes competition and collaboration between countries and between institutions. The meso-level, includes competition and collaboration between academics and students, and at inter- and intra-disciplinary levels across organisational boundaries. Finally, competition and collaboration at the micro-level considers the interface between individual academics, and between academics and students as learners.\"---Cover page 4.

In this study, the PennyLane quantum device simulator was used to investigate quantum and hybrid, quantum/classical physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for solutions to both transient and steady-state, 1D and 2D partial differential equations. The comparative expressibility of the purely quantum, hybrid and classical neural networks is discussed, and hybrid configurations are explored. The results show that (1) for some applications, quantum PINNs can obtain comparable accuracy with less neural network parameters than classical PINNs, and (2) adding quantum nodes in classical PINNs can increase model accuracy with less total network parameters for noiseless models.

Problematising 'who' is recognised in widening participation and equalities policy, Samuel Dent presents an Institutional Ethnographic study, involving 16 students at a research-intensive UK University, and collected over two years, to gain further insight into the institutional experiences of students who care for children while studying.

Fuelbreak placement is an important consideration in fire management. Historically, strategies for placing fuelbreaks have fallen on the experience of fire managers such as by following ridgelines, and recent searches for a formal placement strategy have struggled to scale to large areas. Here we present a basic strategy utilizing equal graph partitioning and quantum computing to efficiently determine placements. By posing partitioning as a quadratic constrained binary optimization problem, D-Wave’s hybrid quantum optimization tool could complete the task in seconds. Results for the examined area show two alternatives to the ridgeline method in a so-called worst-case fire scenario: one with 2.9% improvement in land separation equality while clearing 76 less acres, and another with a 12.4% improvement by clearing 19 more acres. In a selected subsection, D-Wave’s hybrid solver performed faster than the SCIP solver but slower than the CPLEX solver, with the prospect for increased speed-up on larger problems. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of equal graph partitioning for fuelbreak placement and the potential of D-Wave’s hybrid solvers. Fuelbreaks are treated areas of land that mitigate the spread of wildfires. Dent and colleagues present a method for determining optimal placement using network science and partitioning through optimization with the D-Wave hybrid quantum solver.

The present paper examines a method of generating an orthonormal basis for L2(R) by producing a wavelet through a multiresolution analysis and a method of generating an orthonormal basis for L2(K) for a fractal K by producing a wavelet through a set of contracting similitudes.

In UK higher education (HE), different groups of students have moved into and out of the focus of policy and practice, under the headings of widening participation and the single Equality Act (2010). This often-changing focus has the potential to lead to inequitable experiences for those students who do not fit into any of the traditional student typologies. In this thesis, I seek to further explore inequities in HE, specifically through considering the experiences of Students who Care for Children while Studying (CCS Students). This group does not fall directly within the lens of educational policy focus and is often discussed only broadly in terms of gender and age – thus missing the unique barriers and experiences attached to caring for children. My research, therefore, contributes to a small body of existing literature into student parents. I present an Institutional Ethnographic (IE) study (Smith, 2006) involving 16 CCS students at a research-intensive UK University, collected over two academic years. Interviews with six members of staff from different areas within the institution are also used to gain further insight to the institutional context of this study. I find that the experiences of CCS students can be complex, variable and related to individual personal circumstances. However, three recurrent themes are presented in the data, suggesting that: firstly, CCS students experience ‘othering’, whereby their difference from other students is made clear through a range of behaviours from subtle micro-aggressions to explicit hostility toward their needs as carers; secondly, CCS students experience ‘individualisation’, which frames these students as being in deficit and personally responsible for the barriers they face due to the ‘choice’ to be both students and carers; thirdly – and, as a result – this ‘othering’ and ‘individualisation’ leads to ‘passing’ behaviours, whereby students seek to or are actively encouraged to hide their caring status, conforming to a more institutionally accepted homogeneous conception of ‘student’ and their needs. Finally, I conclude, in analysing these three recurrent themes through Fraserian theories of recognition (1997, 2001, 2003), that the principal cause of inequity in the CCS student experience is a cultural misrecognition of their right to be students because of their caring status. Hence, I end by making recommendations which could address the inequity at an institutional and wider sector HE sector level. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge in the following ways: by contributing to literature on UK CCS students and how their experiences are shaped on the ground within an HE institution; by adopting an Institutional Ethnographic (Smith, 2006) methodological approach in a UK HE context, I expand IE’s usage, as existing IE research is usually based in the USA and is rarely applied to HE and the equity issues which exist there; finally, by adopting the use of Fraser’s theories of recognition (Fraser, 2003), I expand the use of this theoretical approach in HE from questions of ‘access’ (Burke, 2013; Morrison 2015), to those of ‘participation’.