VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Existing otherwise: from Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to a critical phenomenology of bodily otherness
Keywords: queer theory
otherness
feminism
critical race theory
jean-paul sartre
bodily otherness
crip theory
existentialism
phenomenology
critical phenomenology
maurice merleau-ponty

With their existential phenomenologies, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted upon a radical new conception of consciousness as embodied, in the world, and among other subjects. Their L’Être et le néant and the Phénoménologie de la perception have made perhaps the most lasting impression of any modern intellectual tradition on theories of the body and the social world, in philosophy as in the human sciences, in France as elsewhere. They have proven uniquely valuable for critical theorists of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and illness looking to give accounts of the lived experience of ‘bodily otherness’. In their will to rework French existential phenomenology to take stock of othering, violence, and oppression, accounts of this kind point at once to its shortcomings and its promise as a framework for making sense of such experiences. This thesis seeks to explore the depth of those shortcomings, in the first place, and the scope of that promise, in the second. Opening with a discussion of ‘bodily otherness’ and a comparative appraisal of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of the body and autrui, it moves through to critique their engagements with othering and oppression, positing that those engagements are circumscribed by a normativity that operates at the most basic level of their thought to foreclose the realisation of the very ideals that they themselves place at the heart of phenomenology. The thesis thus contends that existential phenomenology might yet illuminate the lived experiences of ‘others’, should it remain alive to, and refuse complicity with, its own normative biases. It closes by taking up that mantle, reading Sartre and Merleau-Ponty with and against one another to propose some elements of a critical phenomenology of ‘bodily otherness’, and to stress the imperative of empathy as a philosophical and political practice.
Fast adaptation via meta reinforcement learning
Keywords: Bayes-adaptive
reinforcement learning
meta reinforcement learning
meta learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a way to train artificial agents to autonomously interact with the world. In practice however, RL still has limitations that prohibit the deployment of RL agents in many real world settings. This is because RL takes long, typically requires human oversight, and produces specialised agents that can behave unexpected in unfamiliar situations. This thesis is motivated by the goal of making RL agents more flexible, robust, and safe to deploy in the real world. We develop agents capable of Fast Adaptation, i.e., agents that can learn new tasks efficiently.
To this end, we use Meta Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL), where we teach agents not only to act autonomously, but to learn autonomously. We propose four novel Meta-RL methods based on the intuition that adapting fast can be divided into "task inference" (understanding the task) and "task solving" (solving the task). We hypothesise that this split can simplify optimisation and thus improve performance, and is more amenable to downstream tasks. To implement this, we propose a context-based approach, where the agent conditions on a context that represents its current knowledge about the task. The agent can then use this to decide whether to learn more about the task, or try and solve it.
In Chapter 5, we use a deterministic context and establish that this can indeed improve performance and adequately captures the task. In the subsequent chapters, we then introduce Bayesian reasoning over the context, to enable decision-making under task uncertainty. By combining Meta-RL, context-based learning, and approximate variational inference, we develop methods to compute approximately Bayes-optimal agents for single-agent settings (Chapter 6) and multi-agent settings (Chapter 7). Finally, Chapter 8 addresses the challenge of meta-learning with sparse rewards, which is an important setting for many real-world applications. We observe that existing Meta-RL methods can fail entirely if rewards are sparse, and propose a way to overcome this by encouraging the agent to explore during meta-training. We conclude the thesis with a reflection on the work presented in the context of current developments, and a discussion of open questions.
In summary, the contributions in this thesis significantly advance the field of Fast Adaptation via Meta-RL. The agents develop in this thesis can adapt faster than any previous methods across a variety of tasks, and we can compute approximately Bayes-optimal policies for much more complex task distributions than previously possible. We hope that this helps drive forward Meta-RL research and, in the long term, using RL to address important real world challenges.
The royalist army in the first civil war
Keywords: Great Britain
Wales
army
England and Wales
royalist army
royalists
sixteenth century
17th century
civil war
military history

The army under discussion is that which was directly under Charles I's command, and was based at Oxford during the war, not the forces stationed permanently in the North or West. This army, the chief strength of the Royalists, was raised in the Midlands in the summer of 1642, by loyal nobility and gentry, who recruited volunteer regiments in the counties where their "interest" was greatest. Attempts to use the existing militia system were largely unsuccessful at this stage of rhe war. The prospect before the King at first seemed unhopeful, but improved as arms from the continent, private financial contributions and Welsh recruits reached him; the army at Edgehill was strong in infantry and was well-paid, but was short of personal weapons.
The Council of War became the chief executive and administrative committee for the organisation of the army. The King presided at its meetings, which dealt with a wide range of topics. The papers of the secretary-at-war, Edward Walker, help us to see it at work. Civilian and military elements were combined in the Council, and its mixed character allowed it to act successfully as a mediator in disputes between army units and the civilian population. Subcommittees of the Council were charged with specialist tasks.
Other committees were set up at Oxford. The defence of the city, in the absence of the King and the field army during the summer campaigns, was in the hands of a body known as the “Lords Commissioners". In 1644 the King summoned a counter-Parliament to Oxford, and this assembly, and the committee of its members it left behind when it was not in session, played some part in decision-taking.
Continued in thesis ...
Egyptian queens in the 18th dynasty up to the end of the reign of Amenhotpe III
Keywords: 18th dynasty
antiquities
Egypt
women
queens
Amenhotpe III
Egyptian queens

Much of the available material for this thesis is monumental and mostly concerned with the official view of "queenship", rather than the individual queen. Documents which might tell us something about the lives, characters and influence of these women are almost entirely lacking. It is possible that anomalies in the material which we have might supply some hints about the latter, but before any satisfactory examination can be made along these lines, we must first establish what the official position of the queen was; otherwise we cannot hope to pick out any unusual traits of a particular queen.
The first step in this study must be to identify the women we can consider as queens. The material shows that not only the king's chief wife (ḥmt nsw wrt) but also the king's mother (mwt nsw) are queens, while secondary wives (ḥmt nsw) are not. The titles "king's daughter" (s3t nsw) and "king's sister" (snt nsw) are not restricted to queens, but the first is only used by queens of royal birth, and the second by sisters of kings (section 1). This is helpful for establishing the genealogy of the 18th dynasty royal family, which is reconstructed in section 2 to provide a framework for the material.
In sections 3 and 4, I have made a systematic study of the iconography and titles of queens, to see if there is any distinction made in their use by queens, which might suggest a varying status among queens. For this purpose, I have divided the queens into three major types, and four minor ones each consisting of an individual queen in unique circumstances, on the basis of their use of the titles ḥmt nsw wrt and mwt nsw.
Continued in thesis ...
The fall of partnerships: a commercial decision or a tax decision?
Keywords: taxation
companies
tax reform
partnerships
LLPs
small business taxation
limited liability
business form selection

The fundamental question addressed in this thesis is: can the fall of the ordinary partnership be attributed to commercial (non-tax) considerations, or is it, at least in part, due to the distortionary effects of the tax system? The author seeks to establish, primarily using new empirical research, that the tax system is highly likely to have had a significant role to play in the demise of partnerships. That is not to say that genuine commercial considerations are irrelevant but, given that basic principles of good tax design require that taxation should not affect business form selection, the present situation must be regarded as unsatisfactory. The need for systemic reform, or at the very least steps towards it, is clear.
Chapter 1 presents the statistical background to the thesis. Chapter 2 considers the economic viability of the partnership as an alternative to incorporation for businesses involving more than one owner-manager, highlighting the limited liability illusion. Chapter 3 addresses the failing of the LLP, notwithstanding some initial optimism that the form would be highly attractive to businesses of all sizes. Chapter 4 explores the unfortunate truth that numerous acts of incorporation are, and have been, driven by tax considerations, rather than the sound commercial reasons discussed in Chapter 2. The availability of a double tax saving – perhaps exaggerated by artificial income splitting – in the corporate form for would-be partners leaves the partnership as the most vulnerable form for tax-motivated incorporation. Chapter 5 presents the case for a disincorporation relief as a way out for owner-managers locked into the company structure and concludes the thesis. Annexes A-D provide supplementary information, whilst Annex E provides a postscript on a more controversial proposal involving the decoupling business form and tax treatment.
Power-law phenomena in Bayesian nonparametrics
Keywords: privacy
nonparametric statistics
networks
Bayesian statistics
disclosure risk
power-law

Bayesian methods constitute a popular approach to perform statistical inference and predict phenomena of interest. Surely, part of the popularity of the Bayesian paradigm can be linked to their intuitive core idea: to take advantage of the user's prior knowledge and integrate it in the statistical procedure. The result of this synergy is the posterior distribution, focal point of Bayesian inference and instrument to quantify the uncertainty of the estimation. This thesis collects the work done as a research student on statistical models, built with the tools of Bayesian nonparametrics, to describe power-law distributed data. The motivation of the proposed models are to be found in two different fields of application: complex networks and privacy assessment.
After the introduction, in the first half of the thesis I concentrate on the proposal and analysis of models for networks, the mathematical objects that describe relations among entities by representing them as nodes connected through links. Power-laws usually appear in real-world networks as the distribution function of the degrees, namely the number of links of the nodes. The two pieces of work presented belong to the graphex process framework, a flexible generating process which allows to mimic empirically observed networks characteristics. Chapter 2 fits into this framework and extends the original proposal of Caron and Fox (2017) to provide a novel modelling approach to describe sparse networks with spatial structure or other covariates. An approximate inference strategy is provided and tested on simulated data. The paper presented in chapter 3 casts light on the asymptotic properties of networks generated under the graphex process, proving the desirable properties of sparsity, power-law degree distributions, clustering and two central limit theorems.
The second half of the thesis is devoted to the development of statistical methods to quantify the risk of disclosure, which arises whenever datasets with records of individuals are published: an intruder could match the data with prior information and disclose the identity, and therefore the sensitive features, of a person. Chapter 4 develops an estimator to quantify this risk using the Pitman-Yor process, a popular prior on probability distributions that has a distinguishable power-law tail. A closed form posterior distribution of the estimator is provided in a convenient mixture representation, and experiments on both simulated and real data show the effectiveness of the method. Chapter 5 deals with the estimation of the same risk under no distributional assumptions, using a fully nonparametric method. The estimator is extremely easy to understand, fast to compute and has provable guarantees of optimality.
Chapter 6 concludes the thesis with a final summary and some proposals to extend the current work towards new research directions.
Identification of a novel role for PARPs in replication stress recovery
Keywords: PARPs
cancer
ADP-ribosylation
break-induced replication
genome stability
POLD3
RAD52
synthetic lethality

The post-translational modification of proteins by ADP-ribosylation, catalysed by poly(ADP-ribose) polymerases (PARPs), forms a cornerstone of the human DNA damage response. Through the covalent attachment of ADP-ribose moieties to substrate proteins, PARPs coordinate the recruitment of repair factors to DNA lesions and promote damage resolution. First elucidated as sensors of single-strand breaks, PARPs bind and become activated by a variety of other lesions including double-strand breaks and dysfunctional replication forks. During prolonged replication stress, the dynamic remodelling of stalled forks is crucial for maintaining fork stability and generating substrates conducive for restart and/or repair through different recombination-mediated pathways. For example, existing models suggest RAD51 can facilitate restart by replisome reset, passive repair by fork fusion, or homologous recombination (HR)-dependent fork re-activation. Alternatively, RAD52 rescues forks through a break-induced replication (BIR) restart mechanism particularly active in the absence of canonical HR machinery. Here, having outlined the relative contributions made by PARPs to the maintenance of genome stability during replication stress, a novel role for PARP1 and PARP2 is described in regulating a RAD52-dependent replication fork recovery pathway. When disrupted, loss of this pathway elevates replication-associated damage and genome instability. Using degron technology to deplete BRCA1 in different genetic backgrounds, PARP1 and RAD52 are shown to function in the same pathway to maintain cell viability when HR is dysfunctional. Mechanistically, MRE11-dependent activation of PARPs promotes the assembly of RAD52 at replication forks in a BIR-like pathway required for effective recovery. Further, by exploiting mass spectrometry to map ADP-ribosylation sites, modification of two BIR proteins, MRE11 and POLD3 is identified during the replication stress response. Strikingly, the integrity of a single site in POLD3, S422, is required for its engagement to chromatin, BIR activity, and replication fork recovery. Overall, these data identify a critical role for MRE11-dependent PARP activation and site-specific ADP-ribosylation in regulating BIR by promoting POLD3-dependent DNA synthesis.
Strange usurped potentates: Elizabeth I, the papacy and the Indian summer of the medieval deposing power
Keywords: England
potentates
Elizabeth I
Anti-Catholicism
Great Britain
Foreign relations
medieval
papacy
sixteenth century
16th century

This thesis centres on a pivotal event in the development of religious antagonism in England - the papal excommunication and deposition of Elizabeth I - considering its origins and consequences, especially its effect on Protestant thought and writing (since the political thought of Elizabethan Catholics has undergone more recent study).
The event appears as a revival of a claim not so antiquated as it is sometimes seen. I survey the medieval precedents for the papal claim to depose secular princes, which have lacked an overall survey, and the (often exaggerated) sixteenth-century views as to its past influence. There was indeed an exceptionally acute sense of this aspect of history during the early English Reformation.
The effect of this was that the actual deposition in 1570 served only to confirm Protestants’ preconceptions. In their views of history, they tended towards a conspiracy theory whereby the influence of Pope and prelates lay behind most, if not all, opposition to English and European monarchies. In their views of contemporary foreign affairs, they had, since the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, constantly suspected the machinations of a (fictional) Catholic League, whereby Catholic powers, probably in conjunction with an internal rising, would combine to destroy Protestant England. This would be heralded by the constantly predicted papal sentence against Elizabeth.
Demonstrably, this was not the case. Disagreements among Catholic potentates precluded any such agreement in the early part of Elizabeth's reign; and ensured that, when Pius V did issue his sentence, it proved a dangerous embarrassment (in no way mitigated by Gregory XIII's qualification of it). It did serve a pivotal role in actual Catholic plans, which however were unable to overcome conflicting interests; the result was notoriety without efficacy. Nevertheless, a paranoid and pessimistic view predominated in Protestant England, diminishing only Slowly even when overt confrontation late in the reign began to be crowned with success. Constant alertness for conflict had proved something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A novel quantitative representation of the morphology of prostate cancer and a novel automated tool for advance requesting of immunohistochemistry
Keywords: computer vision
Gleason Score
digital pathology
deep learning
prostate cancer
immunohistochemistry
interpretable machine learning
morphological analysis

Prostate cancer is a disease affecting growing numbers of people, which can form metastases and cause death. The risk of mortality and complications from prostate cancer is assessed by visual inspection of tumour morphology in Haematoxylin & Eosin-stained tissue samples. The morphology of prostate cancer is highly heterogeneous: during tumorigenesis, the normal glands that traverse and branch through the prostate lose their structural organisation, and develop a range of aberrant morphological characteristics, such as smaller size, larger nuclei and loss of the layer of basal epithelial cells found in normal glands. Depending on the level of structural loss, and of dedifferentiation of the glands, tissue samples are assigned a Gleason Score from 4 to 10. A higher Gleason Score is indicative of increased clinical risk for patients, and it guides the decision on what type of treatment patients should receive. The Gleason Score suffers from considerable shortcomings, including a poor reproducibility that is due to its qualitative definition. In this work, we design an algorithm to extract a quantitative representation of the morphology of prostate cancer, based on the segmentation and morphological measurement of prostate glands. We validate the use of the representation by showing it automatically captures clinically relevant morphological classes, it is predictive of the Gleason Score, and it can be used to characterise different tissue specimen types used in prostate cancer diagnosis. The morphology of glands is used to diagnose prostate cancer. In some cases, the morphology may appear abnormal, but not to an extent to make a confident cancer diagnosis possible. Immunohistochemistry is then used to detect the lack of basal cells in glands, which is indicative of prostate cancer. We design an automated tool for advance requesting immunohistochemistry for such cases of ambiguous prostate morphology, and we estimate the temporal and monetary savings of introducing the tool into the clinical workflow.
A therapeutic reading of the A and B-theory of time
Keywords: Hans-Johann Glock
Peter Hacker
Wittgenstein and Waismann
a therapeutic reading of the A and B-theory of time
Ludwig Wittgenstein
therapeutic reading
Gordon Baker
Metaphysics of Time
Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects
pictures
aspect-switch
Gordon Baker's reading of Wittgenstein
A and B-Theory of Time
aspects
Rupert Read
craving for general explanation

Gordon Baker’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a novel way to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Baker’s Wittgenstein is interested in offering liberation from being beholden to ‘pictures’ – conceptions & ways of looking at things. Instead of advancing philosophical theses, liberation from dogma consists in providing alternatives pictures, making one conscious of the picture they are beholden to, and showing that there are other possible ways of looking at things. The
In the 20th and 21st century, there have been debates between ‘A-theorists’ and ‘B-theorists’ who take themselves to be advancing theses on the nature of time and temporal order. Their disagreements include whether the past is real, whether the present really changes, whether our experience of temporal passage is an illusion or objective, whether their opponent’s theory is coherent, etc.
This thesis is in three parts. In the first chapter, I outline the main commitments of Baker’s reading and defend it against its main critics. In the second chapter, I explicate the commitments of the A and B-theorist and examine some main areas of debate and disagreement. In the final chapter, I examine the debate between A and B-theorist on Baker’s reading, where the goal is for them to recognize their views as stemming from pictures (as opposed to how time must be). In other words, I advance a therapeutic reading of the A and B-theory of time.