VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
You died. Play again? Examining the fictional content of videogames
Keywords: Videogames
Video Games
Fiction
computer game
Kendall Walton
Fictional truth

Videogames are often overlooked in philosophical discussions of art. But as philosophy of art has expanded over the years to include not only traditional arts like music, theatre, and painting but also contemporary arts like film and television, each has brought different challenges and opportunities to expand the way we think, and videogames present many such opportunities of their own. The focus of this work will be to examine the way in which videogames' interactive and player-centric nature can present distinctive types of fictional content. Videogames present a few unusual challenges to establishing what is fictionally true in them, and they also provide a few forms of fictional truth not commonly found in other works. I will examine these challenges and special forms of fictional truth in order to help establish videogames as an interesting and unique form of narrative art, worthy of the attention of philosophers not only for the fictional content which they present, but also for the way in which they present it.
The accidental pilgrimage of a rich beggar: the account of tshong dpon Kha stag ʼDzam yag’s travels through Tibet, Nepal, and India (1944-1956)
Keywords: Trade in Pre-modern Tibet
Tibetan Social History
Pilgrimage in Pre-modern Tibet

The Tibetan literary corpus offers a wide array of (auto)biographical accounts; Tibetans have been recollecting – and narrating – life stories in earnest since the "later diffusion" (Tib. phyi dar) of Buddhism in the 11th century. The hybrid essence of life writing, suspended between fact and fiction, finds a perfect expression in the text at the core of the present dissertation, i.e. the journal (Tib. nyin deb) of a 20th century Khams pa trader, Kha stag 'Dzam yag. The text records the events, travels, and impressions experienced by the author between 1944 and 1956; structured like a diary, this autodiegetic text, originally written in a scroll-paper format, was later edited and finally published in India in 1997.
Two different heuristic devices, i.e. narratology and socio-economic analysis, are used in the present dissertation to analyse the structure and content of the nyin deb, as well as the author's idiosyncrasies emerging from the process of narrativisation. Whereas the narratological approach allows the identification of the interplay of memory, self, and culture in the socio-historical context of mid-20th century Tibet, the socio-economic analysis reflects on the nyin deb as a form of social history rather than personal narrative. The identification of "true", historical facts confirms the author's claims to factuality, thus providing unique information and insight regarding the political and economic role of Khams pa traders in 1940s-1950s Tibet, as well as the development of new pilgrimage rituals and the emergence of forms of "spiritual tourism" in modern India.
The banishment of Beverland: sex, scripture, and scholarship in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic
Keywords: History of Sexuality
Original sin
Humanism
Hadriaan Beverland (1650-1716)
Early Modern History
Dutch Republic

Hadriaan Beverland (1650-1716) was banished from Holland in 1679. Why did this humanist scholar get into so much trouble in the most tolerant part of Europe in the seventeenth century? In an attempt to answer this question, this thesis places Beverland’s writings on sex, sin, Scripture, and scholarship in their historical context for the first time.
Beverland argued that lust was the original sin and highlighted the importance of sex in human nature, ancient history, and his own society. His works were characterized by his erudite Latin, satirical style, and disregard for traditional genres and hierarchies in early modern scholarship.
Dutch theologians disliked his theology and exegesis, and hated his use of erudition to mock their learning, morality, and authority. Beverland's humanist colleagues did not support his studies either, because they believed that drawing attention to the sexual side of the classics threatened the basis of the humanist enterprise. When theologians asked for his arrest and humanist professors left him to his fate, Dutch magistrates were happy to convict Beverland because he had insolently accused the political and economic, as well as the religious and intellectual elite of the Dutch Republic, of hypocrisy. By restricting sex to marriage, in compliance with Reformed doctrine, secular authorities upheld a sexual morality that was unattainable, Beverland argued. He proposed honest discussion of the problem of sex and suggested that greater sexual liberty for the male elite might be the solution.
Beverland’s crime was to expose the gap between principle and practice in sexual relations in Dutch society, highlighting the hypocrisy of a deeply conflicted elite at a precarious time. His intervention came at the moment when the uneasy balance struck between Reformed orthodoxy, humanist scholarship, economic prosperity, and patrician politics, which had characterized the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, was disintegrating, with unsettling consequences for all concerned. Placing Beverland's fate in this context of change provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual environment of the Republic in the last decades of the seventeenth century.
Changing contours of sociality: youth, education, and generational relations in rural Gujarat, India
Keywords: Education
Gujarat
India
Youth
Employment
Rural

This thesis draws on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork to examine the everyday lives of young people aged between 16 and 30 years in rural Gujarat, India. It is shaped around four standalone articles that examine the spatial aspects of young men and women's secondary and higher education, and employment strategies. Taken both individually and collectively, the articles employ a conceptual framework of relationality in order to critically examine the complexity of young people’s everyday lives. Relationality crosses spatial scales, from the individual body though to intersecting with processes of globalization. My analysis interrogates these scalar connections within and across different spaces, and the ways in which these spaces produce, reinforce, and transform relations of power, difference, and identity. In doing so it makes a series of critical contributions to ongoing debates about educated unemployed youth, geographies of friendship, youth transitions and imagined futures, and young people’s mobilities. The thesis reflects on "the everyday" as a locus of social change and continuity, focusing on a first generation of formally educated young men and women from socioeconomically marginalized Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Caste, and Scheduled Tribe populations in rural Gujarat. Among this demographic, and in part a consequence of ongoing structural transformations to India’s education sector, families are increasingly prolonging the formal education of their offspring as they pursue projects of social reform. In a context where education manifestly cannot guarantee a smooth transition into secure employment, a relational approach that places an emphasis on the quality and nature of connections and relationships provides a valuable framework for understanding young people's lives.
My work forwards three broader arguments in relation to this emergent generation of educated young people from marginalized communities. Firstly, I argue for greater empirical and theoretical attention to young people's movements within and across space in order to fully theorize age as a social relation. Related to this my analysis supports the case for a multi-sited methodological approach in order to locate young people within the significant social relations that shape their everyday lives. Secondly, the scale of the everyday offers productive insights into how the political and economic changes associated with liberalization in contemporary India are affecting marginalized populations. Rather than focusing on processes occurring within educational institutions, the thesis takes a broader focus to examine how young people conceive of, value, and mobilize their formal education in their daily lives. Finally, attention to both inter- and intra-generational relations as significant and influential to young people’s everyday lives foregrounds the breadth of social relations that bear down upon the social, cultural, and economic aspirations of youth in contemporary rural India.
Optimisation, design, development, and trial of a low-cost solar oven with novel concentrator geometry
Keywords: Solar Thermal
Solar Oven
Solar Power
Solar Cooking
Solar Concentrator
Solar Cooker

A promising and novel solar concentrator design has been thoroughly investigated and optimised. A prototype concentrator based on this novel geometry was validated using ray tracing techniques. This ray tracing demonstrated the comparative performance of this novel concentrator in regards to equivalent parabolic dishes. The effect of mirror surface normal errors on performance was established using Monte-Carlo based ray tracing code, which agreed well with the optical performance of this prototype which was determined experimentally.
A need for low-cost solar cookers to replace bio-mass worldwide was identified, and the concentrator design was then developed as a low-cost solar oven. Despite existing in some number, no current design is able to achieve high performance at low-cost. An industrial partner, Dytecna, was initially involved in the process of this development of the system as a solar cooker.
In support of a field trial for the solar cooker developed with Dytecna, a detailed thermal model of the oven was developed. A low-cost lightmeter was constructed and calibrated in order to measure the direct normal irradiance during the field trial in Italy. Laboratory work provided baseline results for the heating of various thermal masses in the oven.
The Italian field trials provided a wealth of feedback into the design of the system and many valuable results. The solar cooker was able to bring 0.75L of water to the boil in 33 minutes with an average heat throughput of 203W. Important benchmark results and practical experience of several competing receiver materials was obtained; further lab testing provided more accurate measurements of the receivers' performances.
The experiences of the Italian field trial were fed back into the design of a subsequent prototype, intended for a much larger field trial in Tanzania. Improvements in the hotplate, receiver material, and the oven were all incorporated into the design. Additionally, the structure of the solar cooker was redesigned to incorporate a low-cost wooden construction. Supporting work was conducted for the month long trial in which 8 solar cookers would be distributed to families in Tanzania.
The field trial in Tanzania provided a wealth of user feedback into the design. At the same time the new solar cooker exceeded previously established performances in Italy. The new design was able to provide an average of 246W of heat to 1kg of water, which was brought to boiling point in 25 minutes. This represents a heating efficiency of 66% compared to the incident solar flux on the hotplate. In response to findings during the Tanzanian trials, further laboratory work was conducted into establishing the reflectivities of low-cost candidate mirror materials.
Throughout all phases of the project the design of the solar cooker was refined and improved with the goal of a solar cooker design that could reach price-point, performance, and usability standards which would ensure market success.
Experiments in postcolonial reading: music, violence, response
Keywords: J. M. Coetzee
Steve Reich
colonial/imperial university
Philip Glass
Philip Miller
memory/memorialisation
minimalism
truth and reconciliation
trauma

This thesis is a response to a lacuna in musicology, namely the near absence of postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies. Employing both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, it provides a historical overview of the institutional positioning of musicology as an academic discipline founded on structures of expectation and exploitation indebted to Western imperialism. This longer historical view is accompanied throughout by an examination of ethics in its institutionalised forms, specifically in the domains of knowledge production and the university. The thesis maintains that while such ostensibly ethical underpinnings may promise redress on the basis of the violence inflicted by an imperialist past, the discourse employed in its application in fact serves to strengthen the ideological hold of Western hegemony and, in so doing, betrays the promise of reparation that ethics is ordinarily understood to encompass.
The thesis examines different aesthetic and epistemological manifestations of the postcolonial, considering at length Steve Reich’s string quartet, Different Trains (1988), Philip Glass's opera, Waiting for the Barbarians (2005), and Philip Miller’s choral work, REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony (2006). Both content and style weave these works together as they engage, by means of a post-minimalist aesthetic, stream-of-violence narratives intimately bound up with the postcolonial condition. Of particular importance in the consideration of these musical texts is the urgent necessity for epistemological transformation, marked in musicology as the lack of post- and decolonial perspectives. Finally, the thesis grapples with the (im)possibility of complicit scholarship that must, through its very expression, wound its subject.
Migrating bodies: the effects of transnational movement on women's bodily practices in later life
Keywords: Body
Transnationalism
Migration
Ageing
Italian Studies

When approaching old age, women’s bodies face functional, esthetical, and reproductive changes that can represent a source of discontinuity in their lives. Moreover, women are constantly exposed to the social pressure of compelling stereotypes regarding their body image and functionality: from media to medical pamphlets, the feminine body is subjected to deep social observation and regulation. Given that the relationship between ageing and the body is socially mediated, how does the encounter with a different culture have an impact on it? In this research, migration has been employed to analyse the cultural aspects of bodily practices. Migration can be described as an embodied experience, in which a body is first displaced and then emplaced in two social locations–the community of origin and the culture of destination–a circumstance known as transnationalism.
Interviews were carried out with women aged between 59 and 74, divided in three groups:
RESIDENTS: women who were born in an Italian village and had lived all their lives there;
MIGRANTS: women who moved from the same village to London and are still living in England;
RETURNED: migrants who moved back to the village permanently after living in London.
Four dynamics were identified to regulate the interplay of ageing, bodily practices, and migration:
Assimilation: encountering and integrating with the new community;
Acculturation: observing, learning, and sometimes adopting norms and values of the culture of destination;
Acceptance: the binding agent between body and self during the recognition of ageing;
Adjustment: the set of changes in their habits that women put in place in order to accommodate transformations in their bodies and maintain social inclusion.
Moreover, a new conceptualization of transnationalism is proposed, which helps to frame how, after many years of negotiation between the culture of origin and the one of settlement, migrants disengage from social normativity, gaining an augmented sense of agency.
A study of longitudinal Hadronic shower leakage and the development of a correction for its associated effects at √s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector
Keywords: Jet punch-through
ATLAS
Calorimeter
Energy Calibration
QCD
Jets
LHC
Large Hadron Collider

In the high energy environment of the Large Hadron Collider, there is a finite probability for the longitudinal tail of the hadronic shower represented by a jet to leak out of the calorimeter, commonly referred to as longitudinal hadronic shower leakage, or jet “punchthrough”. This thesis prescribes a method for identifying such “punch-through” jets via the use of muon activity found behind a jet in the ATLAS muon spectrometer, finding an occurrence rate of up to 18% in the worst affected regions. “Punch-through” jets were found to degrade the measured jet energy scale by up to 30%, and jet energy resolution by a factor of 3. A correction to remove these effects was developed in Monte Carlo and validated in data, with associated systematic uncertainties derived. The correction was found to negate the degradation of the measured jet energy scale, improving the jet energy resolution by up to 10% in the worst affected regions, and up to 1.6% overall. The correction was integrated into the final 2012 ATLAS jet energy calibration scheme as the fifth step of the Global Sequential corrections. The prescription developed in this thesis to derive the correction is currently being used by ATLAS in Run II of the Large Hadron Collider.
Modelling the optical properties of semiconducting nanostructures
Keywords: tight binding
exciton
excited state
Bethe Salpeter
optical properties
colloidal nanostructure

In this thesis we describe the development of a real-space implementation of the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) and use it in conjunction with a semi-empirical tight-binding model to investigate the optoelectronic properties of colloidal quantum- confined nanostructures. This novel implementation exploits the limited radial extent and small size of the atomic orbital basis to treat finite systems containing up to &Tilde;4000 atoms in a fully many-body framework.
In the first part of this thesis our tight-binding model is initially benchmarked on zincblende CdSe nanocrystals, before subsequently being used to investigate the electronic states of zincblende CdSe nanoplatelets as a function of thickness. The band-edge electronic states are found to show minimal variation for a range of thicknesses and the results of our tight-binding model show good agreement with those predicted using a 14-band k·p model for a nanoplatelet of 4 monolayers (ML) in thickness. Optical absorption spectra were also computed in the independent-particle approximation. While the results of the tight-binding model show good agreement with those of the 14-band k·p model in the low-energy region of the spectrum, agreement with experiment was poor. This reflects the need for a many-body treatment of optical absorption in nanoplatelet systems.
In the second part of this thesis we apply our tight-binding plus BSE model to study the excitonic properties of CdSe nanocrystals and nanoplatelets. Simulations performed on CdSe nanocrystals examined an approximation of the BSE equivalent to configuration interaction singles (CIS), and found that both the optical gap and the low-energy spectral features were unaffected by the approximation. A comparison of exciton binding energies with those predicted by CIS demonstrates the sensitivity of results to the exact treatment of dielectric screening and the decision of whether or not to screen exchange. Our model predicts optical gaps that are in strong agreement with average experimental data for all but the smallest diameters, but was not able to reproduce low-energy spectral features that were fully consistent with experiment. This was attributed to the absence of the spin-orbit interaction in the model.
Simulations performed on CdSe nanoplatelets investigate the optical gaps and exciton binding energies as a function of thickness. Exciton binding energies were found to reach &Tilde;200 meV for the thinnest system, however, optical gaps were slightly overestimated in comparison to experiment. This is attributed to the reduced lateral dimensions used in our simulations and our bulk treatment of dielectric screening. A two-dimensional treatment of dielectric screening is expected to further increase binding energies. Calculations of the excitonic absorption spectrum reproduce the characteristic spectral features observed in experiment, and show strong agreement with the spectra of nanoplatelets, with thicknesses ranging from 3 ML to 5 ML.
Data-level privacy through data perturbation in distributed multi-application environments
Keywords: Data privacy
Data aggregation
Wireless Sensor Networks
Differential Privacy

Wireless sensor networks used to have a main role as a monitoring tool for environmental purposes and animal tracking. This spectrum of applications, however, has dramatically grown in the past few years. Such evolution means that what used to be application-specific networks are now multi application environments, often with federation capabilities. This shift results in a challenging environment for data privacy, mainly caused by the broadening of the spectrum of data access points and involved entities.
This thesis first evaluates existing privacy preserving data aggregation techniques to determine how suitable they are for providing data privacy in this more elaborate environment. Such evaluation led to the design of the set difference attack, which explores the fact that they all rely purely on data aggregation to achieve privacy, which is shown through simulation not to be suitable to the task. It also indicates that some form of uncertainty is required in order to mitigate the attack. Another relevant finding is that the attack can also be effective against standalone networks, by exploring the node availability factor.
Uncertainty is achieved via the use of differential privacy, which offers a strong and formal privacy guarantee through data perturbation. In order to make it suitable to work in a wireless sensor network environment, which mainly deals with time-series data, two new approaches to address it have been proposed. These have a contrasting effect when it comes to utility and privacy levels, offering a flexible balance between privacy and data utility for sensed entities and data analysts/consumers.
Lastly, this thesis proposes a framework to assist in the design of privacy preserving data aggregation protocols to suit application needs while at the same time complying with desired privacy requirements. The framework's evaluation compares and contrasts several scenarios to demonstrate the level of flexibility and effectiveness that the designed protocols can provide.
Overall, this thesis demonstrates that data perturbation can be made significantly practical through the proposed framework. Although some problems remain, with further improvements to data correlation methods and better use of some intrinsic characteristics of such networks, the use of data perturbation may become a practical and efficient privacy preserving mechanism for wireless sensor networks.