VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
‘Apprendre à voir’: the quest for insight  in George Sand’s novels
Keywords: vision
nineteenth-century novel
George Sand
insight

This thesis examines the novels of George Sand (1804-1876) and analyses representative examples from her entire œuvre. Its overall aim is to re-evaluate Sand’s standing as a writer of intellectual interest and importance by demonstrating that she is engaging with a cultural and intellectual phenomenon of particular relevance to the nineteenth century: the link between different ways of seeing and knowledge or understanding, which I term ‘insight’.
The visual dimension of Sand’s novels has so far been overlooked or reduced to a rose-tinted view of the world, and my study is the first to examine vision in her work. I argue that Sand demonstrates a continuous commitment to ways of engaging with the world in visual terms, incorporating conceptual seeing, prophetic vision, as well as physical eyesight. Contesting the prevailing critical view of Sand’s œuvre as one which declines into blandness and irrelevance after the 1850s, this thesis uncovers a model of expansion in her writing, as she moves from her focus on the personal in her early novels, privileging internal vision, to wider social concerns in her middle period in which she aims to reconfigure reality, to her final period in which she advocates the physical observation of the natural world.
Rejecting the perception of Sand as a writer of sentiment at the expense of thought, this study argues that her writing constitutes a continuous quest for understanding, both of the physical world and the more abstract, eternal ‘vérité’. I show that Sand transcends binary divisions between science and art, the detail and the whole, the material and the abstract, and that she ultimately promotes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the world. This also enables me to reassess Sand’s poetics by arguing that her rejection of the mimetic model is founded on her conception of the world as multiple and constantly evolving.
Hybrid technologies for remediation of recalcitrant industrial wastewater
Keywords: metalworking fluid
remediation
Fenton
zerovalent iron
biodegradation
ozone

In metal machining processes, the regulation of heat generation and lubrication at the contact point are achieved by application of a fluid referred to as metalworking fluid (MWF). This has the combined features of the cooling properties of water and lubricity of oil. MWFs inevitably become operationally exhausted with age and intensive use, which leads to compromised properties, thereby necessitating their safe disposal. Disposal of this waste through a biological route is an increasingly attractive option, since it is effective with relatively low energy demands when compared to current physical and chemical options. However, biological treatment is challenging since MWF are chemically complex, including the addition of toxic biocides which are added specifically to retard microbial deterioration whilst the fluids are operational. This makes bacterial treatment exceptionally challenging and has stimulated the search and need to assess technologies which complement biological treatment. In this study the remediation, specifically of the recalcitrant component of a semi-synthetic MWF, employing a novel hybrid treatment approach consisting of both bacteriological and chemical treatment, was investigated. Three chemical pre-treatment methods (Fenton’s oxidation, nano-zerovalent iron (nZVI) oxidation and ozonation) of the recalcitrant components followed by bacterial degradation were examined. The synergistic interaction of Fenton’s-biological oxidation and nZVI-biodegradation led to an overall COD reduction of 92% and 95.5% respectively, whereas pre-treatment with ozone reduced the total pollution load by 70% after a post-biological step. An enhancement in biodegradability was observed after each of the chemical treatments, thus facilitating the overall treatment process. The findings from this study established that the use of non-pathogenic microorganisms to remediate organic materials present in MWF wastewater is a favourable alternative to energy demanding physical and chemical treatment options. However, optimal performance of this biological process may require chemical enhancement, particularly for those components that are resistant to biological transformation.
A reassessment of the interaction between complement C3d and complement receptor CD21 SCR1-2
Keywords: drug screening
crystallography
complement
NMR
C3d
CD21

Biophysical characterisation of protein – ligand interactions can provide vital information to dissect complex biochemical binding mechanisms. C3d has been shown to interact with a number of different protein ligands, namely CD21 SCR1-2, S. aureus Efb-C, S. aureus Ehp, S. aureus Sbi and complement regulatory protein factor H. Although much is known about the relationship of C3d and CD21 in the induction of humoral immunity, the structural aspects of this interaction remained controversial until very recently. The aim of this thesis was to gain a detailed understanding of the C3d/CD21 SCR1-2 interaction using different biophysical methods and to identify potential low molecular weight inhibitors of the interaction.
A crystal structure of the C3d/CD21 complex solved by Szakonyi et al. in 2001 indicated the C3d binding site on CD21 was in the SCR2 domain. It did not agree with mutagenesis studies and recent NMR titration experiments show that only residues from the SCR1 domain of CD21 appear to mediate binding under physiologically relevant ionic strength. In the current work, NMR was employed to monitor ligand binding to C3d and to provide residue specific information that reflects a physiologically relevant binding mode to complement the crystallographic model solved by van den Elsen and Isenman in 2011. Microcalorimetric analysis on the site-directed mutagenesis studies also supported a model of hydrophobically- and electrostatically-driven protein-protein interaction for C3d and CD21 SCR1-2.
Complement C3d forms a non-specific thioester linkage with antigen, which then binds to CD21 SCR1-2 and coligates with membrane immunoglobulin of the B cell receptor. While the interactions triggers B cell activation and hence the production of antibody under normal circumstances, it has been demonstrated that the interactions also lead to undue B cell activation and auto-antibody production. There is a well established collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) mouse model to support the significance of C3d and CD21 in disease susceptibility. To this end, a high-throughput SPR-based screening platform was set up to screen a fragment library against C3d, so as to identify low molecular weight compounds that could serve as a starting point for drug development programme. Unfortunately, the work did not yield C3d-binding inhibitors and future work could include screening large fragment libraries that are designed to target protein-protein interfaces.
Fleets and manpower on land and sea: the Italian "classes" and the Roman Empire 31 BC - AD 193
Keywords: Roman Empire
Roman Navy
Roman Government
Roman History

This thesis re-evaluates the nature and roles of the Italian classes (fleets) of the Roman empire between 31 BC and AD 193. Studied through the prism of naval history, the classes have been portrayed either as ineffective forces left to decay, or maritime institutions supporting military logistics. By starting from the position that the classes cannot easily be compared to other fleets, I argue that they should be regarded as a flexible manpower pool, placed in the same broad category as other soldiers in the Roman empire, who were drawn upon to perform a range of tasks on land and sea to the benefit of the Emperor, and who were integrated into systems supporting the functioning of the empire, which I term imperial organics. Chapter One discusses primarily epigraphic evidence for the classis servicemen, to argue that they considered themselves and were considered as milites who were trained to row, and who could be given tasks suitable to their abilities and places of deployment. Chapter Two, building on earlier discussion of the origins of the servicemen, examines second century AD papyrological evidence for recruitment from the Egpytian Fayoum. It posits recruitment systems which relied on several elements outside the control of Roman authorities, but which nonetheless ensured that the Italian classes were a well supplied manpower pool, perhaps because they did not rely on the so-called gens de mer. Chapter Three re-examines the main “naval bases” of the classes at Misenum and Ravenna, arguing that rather than purely military ports they should be understood as sites concentrating imperial resources to aid imperial activity in regions where concentrations of imperial property are attested. Drawing on arguments in the previous chapters, Chapter Four considers three case-studies for the functions of the Italian classes: their role in Roman military mobilisation and redeployment systems, their involvement in imperial communications, and their possible place in a coastal system on the western coast of Italy suggestive of imperial authority and benefaction. In all three it seeks to present evidence for imperial organics, low-level systems, possibly engendered by imperial activity, but which could persist of their own accord and which were essential to the workings of empire.
Automatic learning of British Sign Language from signed TV broadcasts
Keywords: Sign Language
computer vision
image processing
machine learning
pattern recognition

In this work, we will present several contributions towards automatic recognition of BSL signs from continuous signing video sequences. Specifically, we will address three main points: (i) automatic detection and tracking of the hands using a generative model of the image; (ii) automatic learning of signs from TV broadcasts using the supervisory information available from subtitles; and (iii) generalisation given sign examples from one signer to recognition of signs from different signers. Our source material consists of many hours of video with continuous signing and corresponding subtitles recorded from BBC digital television. This is very challenging material for a number of reasons, including self-occlusions of the signer, self-shadowing, blur due to the speed of motion, and in particular the changing background. Knowledge of the hand position and hand shape is a pre-requisite for automatic sign language recognition. We cast the problem of detecting and tracking the hands as inference in a generative model of the image, and propose a complete model which accounts for the positions and self-occlusions of the arms. Reasonable configurations are obtained by efficiently sampling from a pictorial structure proposal distribution. The results using our method exceed the state-of-the-art for the length and stability of continuous limb tracking. Previous research in sign language recognition has typically required manual training data to be generated for each sign, e.g. a signer performing each sign in controlled conditions - a time-consuming and expensive procedure. We show that for a given signer, a large number of BSL signs can be learned automatically from TV broadcasts using the supervisory information available from subtitles broadcast simultaneously with the signing. We achieve this by modelling the problem as one of multiple instance learning. In this way we are able to extract the sign of interest from hours of signing footage, despite the very weak and "noisy" supervision from the subtitles. Lastly, we show that automatic recognition of signs can be extended to multiple signers. Using automatically extracted examples from a single signer, we train discriminative classifiers and show that these can successfully classify and localise signs in new signers. This demonstrates that the descriptor we extract for each frame (i.e. hand position, hand shape, and hand orientation) generalises between different signers.
Cardiovascular impact of preeclampsia on mother and offspring 
Keywords: Offspring
Mother
Aortic stiffness
Cardiac function
Preeclampsia
Child
Endothelial function
Flow mediated dilatation

Preeclampsia is one of the leading causes of maternal and fetal mortality and morbidity. Furthermore, women who have had preeclampsia have an increased risk of cardiovascular events over the next 10-15 years. Indeed, preeclampsia is associated with a four-fold increase in the risk of hypertension and double the risk of fatal and non fatal ischaemic heart disease and stroke.
In addition, offspring born to preeclampsia are more likely to have higher blood pressure from childhood and stroke in later life. The risk to mother and offspring is greatest when preeclampsia is diagnosed at an earlier gestation, suggesting a more severe form of preeclampsia.
As the long term cardiovascular risk to both mother and child is known from delivery, the main interest of my research was to identify key phenotypic variations in mothers and children during the years between the episode of preeclampsia and emergence of established cardiovascular disease, which might explain the link between the two conditions. This information could then be used to devise ways to identify subjects at greatest risk of later cardiovascular disease and to establish intermediate endpoints for future preventative interventions.
Therefore, in a case control study, women diagnosed with preeclampsia between 1998 and 2003 and their offspring were recruited and underwent comprehensive cardiovascular and metabolic phenotyping. Furthermore, young adults born preterm to hypertensive pregnancy were also investigated in their twenties.
The research demonstrates that early-onset preeclampsia, diagnosed before 34 weeks gestation, is associated with blood pressure patterns in mothers 6-13 years after pregnancy that are distinct from those seen following later-onset disease. Furthermore, there is evidence of distinct differences in cardiac, vascular and metabolic profiles in these individuals with women having evidence of increased arterial stiffness, changes in cardiac function and reduced capillary density. Preterm offspring of hypertensive pregnancies similarly have higher blood pressure than seen in those born following late-onset disease and, in young adult life, have reduced endothelial function and changes in cardiac size proportional to this dysfunction.
This research demonstrates adverse cardiac and vascular remodelling after preeclampsia in mothers and offspring that are evident before the development of clinical cardiovascular disease. The identified differences in cardiac and vascular function may be useful as surrogate endpoints in future preventive trials.
Pattern formation in neural circuits by the interaction of travelling waves with spike-timing dependent plasticity
Keywords: spike-timing dependent plasticity
cortex
vision
STDP
retinal wave
neural circuit
travelling waves
refinement
development
direction selectivity
receptive field
pattern formation
V1
superior colliculus
Turing instability

Spontaneous travelling waves of neuronal activity are a prominent feature throughout the developing brain and have been shown to be essential for achieving normal function, but the mechanism of their action on post-synaptic connections remains unknown. A well-known and widespread mechanism for altering synaptic strengths is spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP), whereby the temporal relationship between the pre- and post-synaptic spikes determines whether a synapse is strengthened or weakened. Here, I answer the theoretical question of how these two phenomenon interact: what types of connectivity patterns can emerge when travelling waves drive a downstream area that implements STDP, and what are the critical features of the waves and the plasticity rules that shape these patterns? I then demonstrate how the theory can be applied to the development of the visual system, where retinal waves are hypothesised to play a role in the refinement of downstream connections. My major findings are as follows. (1) Mathematically, STDP translates the correlated activity of travelling waves into coherent patterns of synaptic connectivity; it maps the spatiotemporal structure in waves into a spatial pattern of synaptic strengths, building periodic structures into feedforward circuits. This is analogous to pattern formation in reaction diffusion systems. The theory reveals a role for the wave speed and time scale of the STDP rule in determining the spatial frequency of the connectivity pattern. (2) Simulations verify the theory and extend it from one-dimensional to two-dimensional cases, and from simplified linear wavefronts to more complex realistic and noisy wave patterns. (3) With appropriate constraints, these pattern formation abilities can be harnessed to explain a wide range of developmental phenomena, including how receptive fields (RFs) in the visual system are refined in size and topography and how simple-cell and direction selective RFs can develop. The theory is applied to the visual system here but generalises across different brain areas and STDP rules. The theory makes several predictions that are testable using existing experimental paradigms.
'Ambushed by victory': allied strategy on how to win the First World War
Keywords: Strategy
Permanent Military Representatives
Supreme War Council
Inter-Allied Transport Council
Italy
Allied and Associated Powers
Allied Maritime Transport Council
France
World War
United States
First World War
Inter-Allied Munitions Council
1914-1918
Great Britain

This study examines the Allied notion of victory and how it was expressed in the depth of Allied strategic planning in 1918 for a campaign in 1919. Using the Supreme War Council (SWC) as a lens this study's arguments are threefold.
The first is that, with the creation of the SWC, the Allies pursued a notion of victory that was focused on a decisive military defeat of the German army. Their timeline to victory over the enemy was affected by their perception of the enemy’s strength, their assessment of the difficulties inherent in overcoming the military advantage offered by the Central Powers' interior lines, their appraisal of the European members' morale to continue the war, and their ability to gather the necessary superiority in material and manpower resources.
The second argument is that, through the SWC, the Allies were able to successfully coordinate strategy and resources. This study analyses the workings of the SWC as an international body and an early example of modern alliance warfare, comparing the perspectives of the British, French, American and Italian representatives in their willingness and unwillingness to coordinate national needs with alliance ones, arguing that the coalition did form a unified policy and strategy for the campaign in 1919. The abrupt ending of the war has obscured historians' understanding of coalition warfare in the First World War, as they have not sufficiently considered the serious planning that took place for 1919.
Third, it argues that at the SWC level, the coalition members recognized the interdependent nature of the theatres, and thus the importance of all them for the conduct of the war.
A closest point penalty method for evolution equations on surfaces
Keywords: Partial differential equations

This thesis introduces and analyses a numerical method for solving time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) on surfaces. This method is based on the closest point method, and solves the surface PDE by solving a suitably chosen equation in a band surrounding the surface. As it uses an implicit closest point representation of the surface, the method has the advantages of being simple to implement for very general surfaces, and amenable to discretization with a broad class of numerical schemes.
The method proposed in this work introduces a new equation in the embedding space, which satisfies a key consistency property with the surface PDE. Rather than alternating between explicit time-steps and re-extensions of the surface function as in the original closest point method, we investigate an alternative approach, in which a single equation can be solved throughout the embedding space, without separate extension steps. This is achieved by creating a modified embedding equation with a penalty term, which enforces a constraint on the solution.
The resulting equation admits a method of lines discretization, and can therefore be discretized with implicit or explicit time-stepping schemes, and analysed with standard techniques. The method can be formulated in a straightforward way for a large class of problems, including equations featuring variable coefficients, higher-order terms or nonlinearities.
The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated with a range of examples, drawing from applications involving curvature-dependent diffusion and systems of reaction-diffusion equations, as well as equations arising in PDE-based image processing on surfaces.
Optimal decisions in finance: passport options and the bonus problem
Keywords: passport options
stochastic optimal control
bonus

The object of this thesis is the study of some new financial models. The common feature is that they all involve optimal decisions. Some of the decisions take the form of a control and we enter the theory of stochastic optimal control and of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations. Other decisions are "binary" and we deal with the theory of optimal stopping and free boundary problems.
Throughout the thesis we will prefer a heuristic and intuitive approach to a too technical one which could hide the underlying ideas.
In the first part we introduce the reader to option pricing, HJB equations and free boundary problems, and we review briefly the use of these mathematical tools in finance.
The second part of the thesis deals with passport options. The pricing of these exotic options involves stochastic optimal control and free boundary problems. Finally, in the last part we study the end-of-the-year bonus for traders: how to optimally reward a trader?
Port economies and maritime trade in the Roman Mediterranean: 166 BC to AD 300
Keywords: Roman economy
Roman maritime trade
Roman archaeology

This thesis focuses on the economies of Roman ports and their role in the facilitation and organization of maritime trade, combining both terrestrial and maritime archaeological evidence as well as literary and epigraphic material. The first half of the thesis examines Mediterranean ports from a panoptic level in order to address questions of systems of trade, connectivity and economic development. In doing so, I focus on three particular areas of material culture: ceramics, shipwreck cargoes (typically composed of amphorae, metal ingots or stone) and epigraphy.
The second half of the thesis focuses on two case studies, southern Turkey and southern France. For each region, I explore the economic factors which led to the development of each region and the ways in which ports enabled this development. I consider the impact of landscape, the usage of natural resources and the extent of production for both local consumption and export. Importantly, I examine the regional connections of the two regions and their interactions within the wider Mediterranean. I develop a model for the development of ports along each coastline and their degree of integration into the trading network of the Roman Mediterranean. Building on this, it becomes possible to assess the extent and scale of extra-regional interaction and market integration.
From the evidence presented in this thesis, I argue that ports were at the core of the Roman market economy and that the development of a port network allowed for the integration and interdependence of Mediterranean markets. This allowed for regional economic growth through the specialization in the production of goods for which a region had a comparative advantage.