VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Regulation of utilities in developing countries
Keywords: institutions
development
regulation

The efficient operation and expansion of utilities in developing countries is crucial for growth and poverty reduction. However, recent reforms aimed at improving the performance of these sectors through privatization and the introduction of new regulatory regimes have had limited success. This thesis aims to consider the most pertinent problems for utility regulation in developing countries and how policy may need to be adapted appropriately.
The thesis begins by surveying the most recent empirical and theoretical work on the area. I argue that four key institutional limitations commonly found in developing countries must be considered when designing regulatory policy: Limited capacity, limited accountability, limited commitment and limited fiscal efficiency. The remainder of the thesis then focuses on two of these weaknesses – limited commitment and limited accountability – to develop further insights into how regulatory policy may be most suitably adapted.
In considering the effect of limited commitment, I pursue a theoretical approach. I first focus on the relationship between the government and the utility operator when the government cannot commit to a time-inconsistent policy of not expropriating investment. After building a model where reputation is used to sustain investment in equilibrium, I consider the model’s implications for policy. The thesis then builds a different model to consider the impact of governments’ inability to commit when trading electricity internationally. I focus on the resulting hold-up problem and the impact this has on investment levels within trading countries.
The effect of limited accountability is then investigated empirically through the analysis of data on electricity firms and regulators in Latin America. In particular, I consider how firms’ performance is affected by corruption, ownership and regulatory governance, looking in detail at interactions between these variables and attempting to break down regulatory governance into its various components.
Contemporary ecologies of expert knowledge: classic and novel conundrums across professional boundaries in the NHS
Keywords: knowledge
ambiguity
occupations
knowledge barriers
professionalism
NHS

Classic studies in the Sociology of the Professions have explored knowledge barriers across traditional forms of professionalism, quintessentially represented by medical doctors, lawyers, and university professors. Thus, the impact of distinctive professional identities and communal boundaries on processes of knowledge sharing have been well documented. More recently, however, many scholars have suggested that those classical analyses need to be revisited and reassessed (see for e.g. the recent call for papers of Teelken and colleagues at EGOS 2011, cf. also Evetts, 2006; Noordegraaf, 2007) in the light of three contemporary trends: a changing context of professional practice, the associated erosion of classic forms of professionalism, and the emergence of new forms.
While classical studies have laid the foundation of our understanding of the conditions that render knowledge sharing across more established forms of professionalism problematic, the processes and potential barriers across more novel and hybrid forms are less clear (cf. Noordegraaf, 2007). In order to address this gap, this thesis presents a comparative investigation of expert knowledgesharing across professional boundaries in four cross-occupational teams in the English National Health Service; two of them primarily composed of established professionals and two of hybrid professionals. By analysing these two types of cross-occupational teams, this thesis’ contribution is the identification of a different configuration of knowledge barriers affecting the sharing of knowledge within the two forms of professionalism.
These findings further highlight the existence of two very different ecologies of (inter) professional knowledge within established and hybrid forms of professionalism. First, distinctive knowledge bases underlie professional practice and interaction in established and hybrid forms of professionalism. For established forms knowledge is more substantive and disciplinary based, whereas for hybrid forms it is general and situated, and characterized by a syncretic use of different disciplines, theories, and information. Second, the types of indeterminacies that permeate the two types of ecologies also vary. While the more established forms of professionalism face higher levels of ambiguity (semantic indeterminacy), the more transient and hybrid forms of professionalism face higher levels of uncertainty (de re indeterminacy). Finally, the nature of professional boundaries is different between these two types. While in established forms of professionalism boundaries are relatively well defined, and hence recognizable; in hybrids forms they are vague and transient.
Exile and the political cultures of the Greek polis, c. 404-146 BC
Keywords: citizenship
exile
Ancient Greek politics
Ancient Greek political thought
refugees
civil war
political culture

This thesis uses the evidence for a wide range of phenomena relating to the exile of citizens, by judicial decision or through stasis, to investigate the political cultures of Greek poleis in the period c. 404-146 BC: the fundamental ideas about citizenship which were in circulation in poleis in that period. Political communication in the context of exile phenomena forced citizens to make explicit their fundamental assumptions about the criteria for civic inclusion and exclusion and about the extent and basis of civic obligation. Analysis of surviving evidence for that communication thus offers unique insights into prominent Greek ideas about citizenship. This method is applied, in chapters 1 and 2, to laws and discussions relating to, first, lawful expulsion and exclusion and, second, civic reconciliation and the reintegration of exiles; and, in chapters 3 and 4, to the political rhetoric, organisation and ideas of participants in exclusionary stasis and of exiled citizens. Wherever possible, ancient Greek philosophers’ arguments, rhetoric and assumptions are compared with those of non-philosophers.
Study of the four different bodies of evidence suggests that most poleis’ political cultures were distinguished by their extremes, paradoxes, indeterminacies and contradictions. In particular, many poleis’ political cultures included very significant, radical norms of civic voluntarism, encouraging citizens to exercise extensive voluntary initiative in political contexts. Moreover, most poleis political cultures were dominated by two coexisting, radically opposed basic paradigms of the good polis and of good citizenship: these are defined in the introduction and chapter 1 as a ‘unitarian teleological communitarian’ paradigm and a ‘libertarian contractarian’ paradigm.
In addition to revealing fundamental ideas of citizenship, some of the exile evidence enables study of the effects of those ideas in practice in this period: citizens’ political choices, claims and behaviour in relevant periods of stress, such as a bout of exclusionary stasis or a spell of political agitation while in exile, represent a well-defined and revealing case-study of the multiple, competing effects of those ideas on political interaction. It is argued that the exile evidence suggests that the same fundamental ideas of citizenship were conducive both to civic stability and flourishing and to destructive civic unrest.
Affective perception
Keywords: affect
emotions
philosophy
perception

This thesis aims to present and defend an account of affective perception. The central argument seeks to establish three claims. 1) Certain emotional bodily feelings (and not just psychic feelings) are world-directed intentional states. 2) Their intentionality is to be understood in perceptual terms: such feelings are affective perceptions of emotional properties of a certain kind. 3) These ‘emotion-proper properties’ are response-dependent in a way that entails that appropriate affective responses to their token instances qualify, ipso facto, as perceptions of those instances.
The arguments for (1) and (2) appeal directly to the phenomenology of emotional experience and draw heavily from recent research by Peter Goldie and Matthew Ratcliffe. By applying Goldie’s insights into the intentional structure of psychic feelings to the case of emotional bodily feelings, it is shown that certain of the latter—particularly those pertaining to the so-called ‘standard’ emotions—exemplify world-directed intentionality analogous to the perceptual intentionality of tactile feelings. Adapting Ratcliffe’s account of the analogy between tactile feelings and what he terms ‘existential feelings’, it is argued that standard emotional bodily feelings are at the same time intrinsically intentional world-directed perceptual states (affective perceptions) through which the defining properties of emotional objects (emotion-proper properties) are apprehended.
The subsequent account of these properties endorses a response-dependence thesis similar to that defended by John McDowell and David Wiggins and argues that tokening an appropriate emotional affective state in response to a token emotion-proper property is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for perception of that property (Claim (3)). The central claim is thus secured by appeal both to the nature of the relevant feelings and the nature of the relevant properties (the former being intrinsically intentional representational states and the latter being response-dependent in a way that guarantees the perceptual status of the former).
Moral religion: the later Ricoeur's hermeneutics of ethical life
Keywords: Kant
architectonic
philosophy of religion
hermeneutics
Aristotle
Ricoeur
Spinoza

This thesis engages with the later writings of Paul Ricoeur in order to understand his philosophy as a whole. A reconstruction of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of ethical life presents his significant contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion. This hermeneutics aims to elucidate a moral religion that binds humans together universally on the basis of the life they share as capable beings. To facilitate this hermeneutics, I will demonstrate that a selective reading of Ricoeur’s philosophy brings to light the pivotal role of his ‘little ethics’ in bridging his later and earlier works. The capable human (l’homme capable) in the later Ricoeur must be understood in relation to both the ‘little ethics’ and an architectonic of moral religion.
Elucidating the aim (telos) of ethical life and the norm (‘moral law’) of moral religion from the ‘little ethics’ points to the significant roles of Aristotle and Kant in Ricoeur’s architectonic. Ricoeur himself defines ‘architectonic’ in Kantian terms as a critical framework, while appropriating Spinoza’s metaphysical conception of a rational striving (
conatus) for life in its fullness. Core concepts taken from Spinoza, Aristotle and Kant are implicit in the present reconstruction of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Three dimensions of ethical life emerge in Spinoza’s metaphysics, Aristotle’s anthropology, and Kant’s moral philosophy, giving us Ricoeur’s architectonic.
For Ricoeur, the ethical aim is grounded on a metaphysics of human capability, and the demanding nature of ‘the law’ renders religion moral. This religion assumes that the good life is the goal of human striving. But crucially, the thesis will uncover ‘the arrow of the religious’ (la flèche du religieux) as it motivates the capable subject to embrace life with and for others in just institutions. In conclusion, life is revealed as the heart of Ricoeur’s moral religion.
Metabolic modelling of tomato fruit ripening
Keywords: metabolic modelling
flux balance analysis
tomato ripening

Tomatoes are the fourth most valuable commodity in agriculture after rice, wheat and soybeans globally with 151 million tonnes of fruit being produced in 2012. The tomato fruit is also a model system for fleshy fruit development. During ethylene-regulated fruit ripening there are complex changes in fruit chemical composition due to degradation and synthesis of a number of soluble and volatile metabolites. Ultimately, these changes control the composition of the ripe fruit and dictate its flavour and texture. It is known that ripening can proceed when mature green fruit are removed from the plant (and indeed this is standard commercial practice) but the extent to which metabolic changes are sustained when fruit are ripened in this way has yet to be established. A modelling approach such as constraints-based modelling can provide system-level insights into the workings of the complex tomato metabolic network during ripening. The first aim of this thesis was therefore to construct a genome-scale metabolic network model for tomato and to use this model to explore metabolic network flux distributions during the transitions between the stages of fruit ripening. The flux distributions predicted provided insight into the production and usage of energy and reductants, into routes for climacteric CO2 release, and the metabolic routes underlying metabolite conversions during ripening. The second aim of this thesis was to use the model to explore metabolic engineering strategies for increased production of lycopene in tomato fruit. The model predictions showed that rearrangement of dominant metabolic fluxes were required to cope with the increased demand for reductants at high lycopene accumulation, which came at a cost of a lower accumulation of other secondary metabolites. Overall the thesis provides an approach to connect underlying metabolic mechanisms to the known metabolic processes that happen during ripening.
Spatially motivated dialogue for a pedestrian robot
Keywords: spatial cognition
semantics
computational linguistics

In the field of robotics, there has recently been tremendous progress in the development of autonomous robots that offer various services to their users. Most of the systems developed so far, however, are restricted to indoor scenarios, non-urban outdoor environments, or road usage with cars. There is a serious lack of capabilities of mobile robots to navigate safely in highly populated outdoor environments. This ability, however, is a key competence for a series of robotic applications. We consider the task of developing a spatially motivated dialogue system that can operate on a robotic platform, where the purpose of such a robot is to aid pedestrians in urban environments to provide information about surrounding objects and services, and guide users to desired destinations.
In this thesis, we make a number of contributions to the fields of spatial language interpretation/generation and discourse modelling. This includes the development of a dialogue framework called HURDLE which builds on the strengths of existing systems, accompanied by a specific implementation for spatially oriented dialogue including disambiguating amongst objects and locations in the environment, and a natural language parser which combines an extension of Synchronous Context Free Grammars with a Part-of-Speech tagger. Our research also presents a number of probabilistic models for spatial prepositions such as ∈ontof′andbetween' that make significant advances in effectively utilising geometric environment data, encompassing visibility considerations and being reusable for both indoor and outdoor environments. We also present a number of algorithms in which these models can be utilised, most significantly a novel and highly effective algorithm that can generate natural language descriptions of objects that disambiguates on their location. All these components, while modular, operate in tandem and interact with a variety of external components (such as path planning) on the robot platform.
Characterization of CAP5.5 and CAP5.5V, atypical calpains in Trypanosoma brucei
Keywords: calpains
Trypanosoma brucei
trypanosomiasis

Calpains are a group of calcium-dependent cysteine proteases with roles ranging from cytoskeletal remodelling to signal transduction. In Trypanosoma brucei, the causal agent of African sleeping sickness, an unusually large number of calpain- like proteins exist, whose functions remain unknown. Recently, the procyclic form- specific cytoskeleton associated protein 5.5 (CAP5.5) and its bloodstream-specific paralogous variant, CAP5.5V were discovered to be essential for the proper morphogenesis of the parasite. However, precise functional roles of these proteins remain unknown. In this MSc thesis, I employed a two-pronged approach combining cell biology studies of CAP5.5 and CAP5.5V in T. brucei with in vitro assays of recombinant calpains expressed in Escherichia coli to further characterize CAP5.5 and CAP5.5V. To resolve whether the function of CAP5.5 and CAP5.5V is dependent upon proteolytic activity, I expressed and purified recombinant CAP5.5V’s catalytic domain. I demonstrated that this domain did not have any detectable autolytic activity or activity against universal protease substrates such as casein. Ectopic expression of CAP5.5::YFP::Ty in procyclic trypanosomes led to nuclear mis-positioning among other morphological defects. Additionally, I demonstrated a cell cycle dependency on incorporation of CAP5.5::YFP::Ty into the cytoskeleton and corroborate previous data that suggest that CAP5.5 is built in from the dynamic, posterior end of the cell. Investigation of the molecular determinants in CAP5.5’s sequence such as motifs or domains suggested that CAP5.5’s domain IV may be the domain mediating association with the sub-pellicular cytoskeleton.
A structural investigation of some compounds showing charge-transfer properties
Keywords: Charge-transfer
Paraquat
metallohalide anions
X-ray crystallography

Summary. The technique of X-ray diffraction has been used to investigate compounds which show charge-transfer properties in the solid state. It is shown how the results of structure determination can, under favourable conditions, give information about charge-transfer processes.
Two sets of compounds have been studied, both of which contain metal-chloride bonds. The first is a series of mixed-valence cobalt hexammine chlorocuprates in which the average oxidation state of the copper can take any value between 1 and 2. The structure of the single-valence (copper (I)) compound, [Co(NH3)6]4Cu5Cl17 was solved and data was also collected for a compound with Cu(I)/total Cu ~ 0.25. This was shown to have a structure to the single-valence copper (I) and copper (II) compounds and probable arrangements for the Cu(I) and Cu(II) ions are presented. It is shown that linear Cu-Cl-Cu bridges are almost certainly present and that these can account for the charge-transfer spectrum. A new chlorocuprate anion, [Cu5Cl
16]11- was discovered, which has 23(T) symmetry.[See thesis for continuation of summary].
Buying better governance: the political economy of budget reforms in aid-dependent countries, 1997-2007
Keywords: governance
political economy
budget reforms
foreign aid

The quality of governance and institutions is increasingly seen as a fundamental factor in shaping the development prospects of poor countries. As a consequence, donor agencies have increasingly allocated resources to providing technical assistance for improving governance standards in such countries, with mixed results. This thesis investigates the domestic and external factors affecting the outcomes of reforms aimed at improving the quality of government budget institutions across a sample of 16 aid-dependent countries. It provides a new definition of the quality of budget institutions, and develops an analytical framework that identifies the key factors at play in the political economy of budget reforms. The analysis starts with a medium-N ‘pattern finding’ approach, based on a new dataset tracking changes in the quality of budget institutions over the period 2001 to 2007. This is followed by a small-N ‘process tracing’ approach, with in-depth case studies of Mozambique and Burkina Faso (with additional evidence from Tanzania), looking at both overall reform trajectories and four specific budget reform areas. The results show that among domestic factors, economic and political stability are preconditions for successful budget reforms. A minimum degree of government leadership and commitment to reforms is also a very important factor shaping budget reform outcomes, alongside the centralisation of budget institutions. Surprisingly, among external factors, the level of technical assistance and the use of so-called programme aid modalities were less important than the overall fragmentation of aid flows and the ways in which technical assistance is delivered in influencing budget reform outcomes. Donors’ hopes of ‘buying’ better budget governance, therefore, are more likely to be enhanced not by additional resources, but by better behaviour. Moreover, such strategy is likely to work only in countries with enough capacity and interest in reforms.
Investigation into sub-cellular CD4 distribution in human embryonic stem cell derived macrophages and its role in HIV-1 infection
Keywords: macrophages
HIV-1
CD4
stem cells

Human macrophages are one of the main targets for HIV-1 infection, despite their moderately low surface expression levels of the main HIV-1 receptor, CD4. The site of HIV-1 fusion can occur at the surface or following uptake through an endosomal pathway and it might be anticipated that the site would affect the progress of HIV-1 through the cell to the nucleus. Previous pharmacological studies provide one line of evidence for an endosomal entry route which is dependent on Detergent Resistant Membranes (DRMs). However, these findings need confirmation using a genetic approach, as small molecules may have multiple non-specific effects. For this study, a novel genetic approach was developed to manipulate sub-cellular CD4 distribution and investigate whether it determines the HIV-1 entry pathway in macrophages. This was achieved by transducing human embryonic stem cells (hESC) with lentiviral vectors and differentiating these cells into homogeneous genetically modified macrophages. This cellular system by-passes the challenges posed by the refractoriness to direct genetic manipulation of heterogeneous primary macrophages. Firstly, as proof of principle, a short hairpin RNA targeting CD4 was expressed in hESC-macrophages, resulting in knockdown of CD4 and, as anticipated, strong inhibition of HIV-1 infection. Secondly, expression of LCK in hESC-macrophages effectively tethered CD4 at the cell surface, and sequestered HIV-1 into an unproductive pathway, presumably through surface fusion, rather than progressing successfully to the nucleus. Thirdly, endogenous CD4 was substituted with CD4 mutants designed to be excluded from DRMs, which resulted in reduced successful HIV-1 entry versus substituted control CD4. The results support the model in which the productive entry pathway of HIV-1 in macrophages occurs via fusion after a raft-dependent endocytic uptake pathway, and requires CD4 localization to lipid rafts.