VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Building mounds: Viking-late Norse settlement in the North Atlantic c. AD800-1200
Keywords: Settlement mounds
Midden
Orkney
Viking settlement

The subject of this study is Viking-Late Norse settlement (c. AD800-1200) in the North Atlantic, focusing on Orkney and on longhouse complexes constructed on mounds. For the first time these mound settlements are investigated as a group and as deliberately constructed mounds. Settlement mounds in Orkney are also closely associated with nearly 40 Skaill ON skáli ('hall') place-names, which place-names linked the sites with the social and economic networks of Orkney's peripatetic leaders. This association is examined more closely. The analysis also demonstrates that constructing settlements on mounds required particular building techniques, which relied heavily on the use of midden-type material.
Those techniques are examined using new and freshly analysed material from published and grey literature-published excavations and surveys of sites from the Viking-Late Norse period in Orkney and elsewhere. Three core data-sets were established to provide the evidential basis: the first, also drawing on site-visits, looking broadly at mound landscapes and skáli-areas in Orkney; the second at the building techniques and materials used on settlement mounds; and the third, also requiring site-visits, at all the skáli place-name sites. The possible origins of settlement mound living in the settlers' Scandinavian homelands are investigated, then the extent to which mound living was also followed in Shetland, Caithness and the Western Isles, and finally in previously unoccupied lands, using Iceland as a case study.
The mound-sites, their archaeology, mound architecture, place-names and landscape setting are also analysed in a new theoretical framework to reach fresh understandings of Viking-Late Norse settlement in Orkney. The analysis thus considers the wider cultural significance of constructing and living on settlement mounds, and what that communicated about Viking-Late Norse society. The thesis argues that Viking-Late Norse groups chose prominently-placed sites for their visual dominance and commanding views, but also that the rebuilding of mound structures in one spot, and building out and up of the mound itself using midden material, set strong cultural messages about stability, continuity and association with the surrounding landscape. The mounds were complex features of culturally meaningful architecture.
At the frontier of precision QCD in the LHC Era
Keywords: Higgs
Perturbative Calculations
Precision QCD

This thesis discusses recent advances in precision calculations of quantum chromodynamics and their application to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physics program and beyond.
The first half of the thesis is dedicated to the study of vector boson fusion Higgs (VBF) production; fully differential at the next-to-next-to-leading order level (NNLO), and inclusively at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO). Both calculations are performed in the structure function approximation, where the VBF process is treated as a double deep inelastic scattering. For the differential calculation a new subtraction method, "projection-to-Born", is introduced and applied. We study VBF production in a number of scenarios relevant for the LHC and for Future Circular Colliders (FCC). We find NNLO corrections after typical cuts of 5 − 6% while differential distributions show corrections of up to 10 − 12% for some standard observables. For the inclusive calculation we find N3LO corrections at the order of 1 − 2‰.
The second half of the thesis presents recent results on the matching of fixed order calculations with parton showers. We first present the POsitive Weight Hardest Emission Generator (POWHEG) method for matching next-to-leading order (NLO) calculations with parton showers. We then proceed to apply it to the case of vector boson fusion ZZjj production and discuss the results for scenarios relevant for the LHC and a possible FCC. In order to present the matching of a NNLO calculation with a parton shower, we next discuss the Multi-Scale Improved NLO (MiNLO) procedure. By applying a reweighting procedure to MiNLO improved Drell-Yan production, we obtain a generator which is NNLO accurate when integrated over all radiation while providing a fully exclusive description of the final state phase space. We compare the calculation to dedicated next-to-next-to-leading logarithm resummations and find very good agreement. The generator is also found to be in good agreement with 7 and 8 TeV LHC data.
The future of indigenous protected areas in Australia
Keywords: Australia
rights-based paradigm
Indigenous Protected Area (IPA)
Indigenous peoples
fortress paradigm
co-management
conservation

An Indigenous Protected Areas (IPA) is an area of land and/or water that an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander group has decided to voluntarily declare and manage through a mixture of legal and other effective mean in line with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) protected area (PA) guidelines. The Australian Government’s IPA program supports the declaration and management of IPAs. Currently, there are 72 IPAs covering over 65 million hectares, making up more than 44 per cent of the national PA network. IPAs represent the first time a PA has been established with the informed consent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The IPA concept and program have been in effect for 20 years; however, despite national and international recognition as an approach that surpasses the constraints of collaborative forms of conservation, the Government have not made a commitment to continue funding IPAs post-2018.
To date, there is limited critical analysis of the IPA concept and program. This thesis aims to fill this gap in the literature by utilising an original analytical framework – addressing the role of Indigenous recognition, the role of language, bureaucracy, territoriality, accounting and accountability, and asymmetrical relations of power – to investigate the form and function of the IPA concept and program, against principles of the established 'fortress' (Brockington et al., 2008a) and emerging rights-based paradigms for conservation. The analysis highlights that the concept and program reinforce a number of the principles of both paradigms. Nonetheless, the concept and program have in some respect evolved beyond the principles by further grounding the IPA concept and program in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples’ conception of their relationship to country. The future of IPAs is not only in the guarantee of long-term funding but also in how they continue to evolve and adapt.
Creation and study of matter in extreme conditions by high-intensity free-electron laser radiation
Keywords: opacity
laser
plasma
matter in extreme conditions
free-electron
intense radiation
spectroscopy
electronic structure
X-ray
high energy-density

The recent development of free-electron lasers operating at XUV and X-ray wavelengths are proving vital for the exploration of matter in extreme conditions. The ultra-short pulse length and high peak brightness these light sources provide, combined with a tunable X-ray wavelength range, makes them ideally suited both for creating high energy density samples and for their subsequent study. In this thesis I describe the work done on the XUV free-electron laser FLASH in Hamburg, aimed at creating homogeneous samples of warm dense matter through the process of volumetric XUV photo-absorption, and the theoretical work undertaken to understand the process of high-intensity laser-matter interactions. As a first step, we have successfully demonstrated intensities above 1017 Wcm−2 at a wavelength of 13.5 nm, by focusing the FEL beam to micron and sub-micron spot sizes by means of a multilayer-coated off-axis parabolic mirror. Using these record high intensities, we have demonstrated for the first time saturable absorption in the XUV. The effect was observed in aluminium and magnesium samples and is due to the bleaching of a core-state absorption channel by the intense radiation field. This result has major implications for the creation of homogeneous high energy density systems, as a saturable absorption channel allows for a more homogeneous heating mechanism than previously thought possible. Further, we have conducted soft X-ray emission spectroscopy measurements which have delivered a wealth of information on the highly photo-excited system under irradiation, immediately after the excitation pulse, yet before the system evolves into the warm dense matter state. Such strongly photo-excited samples have also been studied theoretically, by means of density functional theory coupled to molecular dynamics calculations, yielding detailed electronic structure information. The use of emission spectroscopy as a probe for solid-density and finite-temperature systems is discussed in light of these results. Theoretical efforts have further been made in the study of the free-free absorption of aluminium as the system evolves from the solid state to warm dense matter. We predict an absorption peak in temperature as the system heats and forms a dense plasma. The physical significance of this effect is discussed in terms of intense light-matter interactions on both femtosecond and picosecond time-scales.
Analysis of the human B cell repertoire following vaccination
Keywords: Adjuvant
Antibody
Influenza
ACWY
Repertoire
B cell
BCR
VDJ
Hepatitis B

A diverse B cell repertoire is essential for recognition and response to infectious and vaccine antigens. High-throughput sequencing of B cell receptor (BCR) genes can now be used to study the B cell repertoire at a depth which reflects its true diversity. As a relatively new technology, there is little information on the structure of the repertoire at baseline, whether antigen-specific changes can be detected from the total repertoire following antigen stimulus, and what the potential clinical applications of BCR repertoire sequencing are.
In this thesis, robust laboratory and bioinformatic techniques were developed for studying the BCR repertoire. These were then applied to healthy participants to assess inter- and intra-individual variation in the repertoire. Hepatitis B vaccination was then used as a model system to determine how the repertoire responded to both primary and booster vaccination. Tracking repertoire dynamics following booster vaccination identified the presence of time-limited changes in the total BCR repertoire following stimulation. Cell sorting and sequencing of vaccine-specific cells in addition to sequencing the total repertoire allowed deconvolution of the vaccine- specific response from background repertoire fluctuations. Studying the response to primary vaccination showed the same time-limited changes, and revealed that a surprising number of the B cells activated appear to be derived from memory cells, and activated by the vaccine in a cross-reactive manner. More specific applications of BCR repertoire sequencing were then investigated in the context of meningo- coccal and influenza vaccine studies. These were able to distinguish the different cell subsets activated in response to meningococcal polysaccharide and conjugate vaccines, and shed light on how the AS03 adjuvant increases pandemic influenza vaccine immunogenicity.
In summary, presented in this thesis are some of the first BCR repertoire data following Hepatitis B, meningococcal and influenza vaccination. These data have increased our fundamental understanding of the BCR repertoire, and how this responds to vaccination. Insights from these data raise promise for the application of this technology to clinical settings for vaccine evaluation, disease diagnostics and monitoring, and therapeutic antibody discovery, and have provided a foundation for many further studies.
Introspective classification for robot perception and decision making
Keywords: autonomous car
semantic mapping
pedestrian
perception
mapping
robotics
introspection
road sign
traffic light
planning
detection
classification
autonomy
autonomous vehicle
computer vision
image

In robotics, a classifier is often a core component of the decision-making framework. Precision and recall have been widely adopted as canonical metrics to quantify the performance of a classifier, but for applications involving mission-critical decision making, good performance in relation to these metrics is insufficient. The use of a classification framework which produces scores with inappropriate confidences will ultimately lead to the robot making bad decisions, thereby compromising robot or user safety. In order to select a classifier which will make decisions reflecting the nature of the costs, we should pay careful attention to the ways in which it generates scores. We introduce and motivate the importance of a classifier's introspective capacity: the ability to give an appropriate assessment of confidence with any test case. Classification made confidently must be correct, and mistakes should be made with high uncertainty. A classifier's capacity to do so must remain consistent despite unusual or surprising test cases. We propose that a key ingredient for introspection is a classifier's potential to increase its uncertainty with the distance between a test datum and its training data.
We define the ideal introspective behaviour, and derive idealised classifiers which serve to benchmark a number of commonly used classification frameworks in a variety of decision-making tasks. We show that classifiers that offer predictive variance at test-time are more cautious and less over-confident than those which consider a single hypothesis or discriminant. However, in high-cost (or high-risk) decision making, none of the classifiers evaluated in this thesis are sufficiently introspective to prevent all potential catastrophic mistakes. We show that in sequential decision-making, when the mapping from score to class is explicitly stated, a classifier's ability to behave consistently despite non-stationary test data is of primary importance.
Assessing cardiotoxicity in randomised trials of anthracycline chemotherapy
Keywords: Chemotherapy - side effects
Anthracyclines
Cardiotoxicity

Chemotherapy has improved survival in many types of cancer. However, it can lead to a range of toxic side effects that can occur while the patient is on treatment but may also appear months or years later. One of the more serious harmful side-effects of chemotherapy is heart disease and anthracycline chemotherapy is particularly implicated in this. Observational studies have shown that the risk of congestive heart failure in anthracycline treated patients rises rapidly after cumulative doses of about 400 mg/m2, but that there is also some risk below this dose.
This thesis explored several methodological issues that affect meta-analyses of harms. First meta-analyses of harms often include terms for those harms in their search strategies. Evaluation of a trial search including cardiac terms against the trial list maintained by the Early Breast Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group showed that only 48% of their trials were found. After cardiac terms were removed from the search strategy, 87% of the EBCTCG trials were found. Second, anthracycline cardiotoxicity is often not reported in a manner that enables data to be extracted for meta-analyses. To address this, risk of outcome reporting bias in trials included in this thesis was assessed. There was a high risk of outcome reporting bias for cardiac morbidity in 50% of trials, and 35% of trials had high risk of outcome reporting bias for cardiac mortality. Third, previous meta-analyses of anthracycline cardiotoxicity included only a limited number of trials. In order to increase the amount of information about anthracycline cardiotoxicity available for meta-analysis, a method was devised for including confounded trials in the meta-analysis, taking into account prior knowledge as to the likely effect of other drugs on cardiotoxicity.
Finally, published and individual patient data meta-analyses of cardiac death in randomised trials of anthracycline versus not were undertaken. The published data meta-analysis included 32 trials, 9 of which were unconfounded, and found a 36% (95% CI 1-83%) increased risk of cardiac death in anthracycline-allocated patients compared to those not allocated to anthracycline. No conclusions could be drawn about the effect of confounder drugs on the risk of cardiac death. A meta-analysis grouped by lower and higher dose showed that there was a statistically significant increase in risk of cardiac death in anthracycline allocated patients compared to those not allocated anthracyclines in the higher dose group only (OR=1.74, 95%CI 1.15 – 2.62).
In conclusion, this thesis has generated new insights into the methods used for meta-analyses of harms. It has also produced a new risk estimate of cardiac death in anthracycline-treated patients that clinicians can use to inform their treatment decisions.
Public priorities and public goods: the drivers and responses to transitions in flood risk management
Keywords: insurance
agent based models
Partnership Funding
agent-based modelling
flood risk management
decision making
social feasibility
Prospect Theory
social contract theory
multiagent systems
Flood Re

This thesis examines the role of the public in Flood Risk Management (FRM) service provision at a time when the perceptions of the distribution of beneﬁts provided by FRM interventions are in ﬂux, and the role the public should play in FRM highly contested among stakeholders. Two schemes have marked the revised role of the public in FRM – Partnership Funding and Flood Re – both of which challenge existing judgments of the excludability and rivalry of beneﬁts delivered by FRM interventions. The Partnership Funding scheme allocates capital for FRM projects proportionately to the public beneﬁts they provide, allowing communities to top-up grants through local contributions. In comparison, by increasing accessibility to affordable insurance through cross-subsidies and pricing signals, Flood Re highlights a growing recognition that the distribution of gains as a result of widespread insurance uptake is greater than the beneﬁts received by the policyholder alone. Following the identiﬁcation of these schemes, we tested their social feasibility, examining both the scale and distribution of beneﬁts. Due to the different stages of implementation of each scheme at the time of writing this thesis, two distinct methods were developed. The Partnership Funding Chapter used ﬁeld data to examine how public-private funding of ﬂood defences has changed service provision and the public acceptance of this transition. Whereas the Flood Re chapter used computer-based experiments to hypothesize how Flood Re may make the purchase of insurance a more or less attractive investment for different types of consumer. We found that Partnership Funding enabled more FRM projects to go ahead, raised public awareness of ﬂood risk, and improved collaboration between stakeholders, but encouraged lower-cost projects, which, in the longer term, could transfer the expense of managing residual risk to the householder. In comparison, Flood Re provided peace of mind to householders struggling to afford rises in insurance premiums, but disproportionately beneﬁted those who annually purchased insurance. Combining this proposed inequity in Flood Re with increasing residual risks, we identify a gap in service provision for the public who cannot afford household mitigation measures. We propose that loss mitigation and ﬂood defence should become increasingly collaborative in line with the complexities of ﬂooding within a community. We seek a move away from the information asymmetry which currently exists between insurance providers and policyholders, and yet simultaneously call for local authorities to recognise the capacity of the public to participate in FRM, and sustain resilience in the face of rising ﬂood risk.
Moving towards an evidence-base of democratic police training: the development and evaluation of a complex social intervention in the Israeli border police
Keywords: protests
democratic policing
evidence-based practice
police training

The centrality of the police in everyday life means police officers are in position of power to actively support or threaten democratic activities (Sklansky, 2008) for example during protests. In democracies, policing duties should be performed in ways that sustain democratic values, rather than undermine them (Loader, 2006), yet that is not always the reality. Police training is one of the tools for aligning officers' behaviour with societal norms; it is considered a protection against the possibility that police officers abuse the wide-ranging powers they hold (Manning, 2010). Training programs are therefore a basic feature of all police forces' organizational approach. Despite its centrality, training has not received extensive academic attention; there is a pressing need to understand the impact of training on police behaviour and the mechanisms thorough which it operates (Skogan & Frydl, 2004).
This thesis attempts to advance the evidence-base of democratic police training following the Medical Research Council's framework for the development and evaluation of complex social interventions (Craig et al., 2008). The Israeli Border Police was chosen as the context to examine the potential of training to advance democratic norms. The three stages of the research project included: theoretical modelling of the existing complex training intervention to assess its alignment with existing evidence; participatory development and piloting of a training curriculum on policing of protests in a democracy that used an Adult Education approach and introduced Procedural Justice-related components; and a pilot quasi-randomised study to evaluate this training. Analysis and reporting are carried out in a way that allows assessment of prospective scale-up and generalisability.
Flowing from the empirical work, four strands of theoretical contributions are put forward. First, a theoretical model of police training is proposed, drawing on social psychology constructs. Second, contact theory, which originates in peace education, is proposed as a possible platform for designing both police training and their evaluation studies. Third, four factors limiting the efficacy of Procedural Justice & Legitimacy based training interventions in deeply divided societies are outlined. Fourth, the Border Police case study is used to substantiate the value of participatory research methods for advancing knowledge translation and evidence-based policing.