VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Taking the measure: a demographic-based study of non-metropolitan Surrey c. 1550-1750
Keywords: mortality
migration
agriculture
big data
Surrey
parish registers
population

This thesis offers an exploration in a sub-regional context of early modern England’s interconnected demographic and economic systems, revealing some of the patchwork of local experiences which made up the national picture. The study’s findings contribute to a number of discussions. It challenges or develops aspects of some current narratives including on the changing balance between pastoral and arable agriculture, on the 1550s and 1590s mortality crises and on differing patterns of male and female mortality. It also re-emphasises geographical characteristics of migration, though expanding understanding of the origins of London apprentices.
Taking a parish-level framework of analysis, it considers non-metropolitan Surrey (the majority of the historical county of Surrey excluding only those parishes which were in practice subsumed within Surrey’s neighbour, London) between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries. A mainly rural area with a varied terrain it contained several small or modestly-sized towns and a certain amount of industrial activity. Consideration is given to its population levels, its agriculture and other aspects of its economy, the mobility of its people and their patterns of mortality both in normal times and in periods of crisis. Finding both temporal and spatial similarities and differences between parishes and broader localities, significant influences identified include its towns, transport routes, proximity to London, soils and landscapes.
Methodologically, the study provides an innovative extension to previous studies. Taking a ‘big data’ approach, it uses large datasets of quantitative sources including parish registers, poor law records, apprenticeship records and probate documents supplemented by a variety of qualitative sources. It explores the direct evidence these sources contain and also the indirect, unwitting, evidence parish registers provide, showing how together such sources can be used to examine the demographic and economic lives of people across a wide area and over a considerable period of time, an approach with widespread applicability.
Observing the dark universe with weak gravitational lensing
Keywords: observational cosmology

We are now entering into an era of huge cosmological data sets, with observations testing the current paradigm to high accuracy. By combining different probes of cosmology, we can access new information about our Universe and investigate the systematic effects that plague our ability to measure cosmology accurately. In this thesis we use weak gravitational lensing as a tool to measure the large scale structure in the Universe.
First, we present the theoretical framework in which this thesis is set. We then detail the methodology required to measure the cross-correlation between galaxy weak lensing and cosmic microwave background (CMB) weak lensing data sets. In particular we highlight the impact of the complicated nature of galaxy weak lensing data and investigate ways to improve the signal-to-noise of the cross-correlation measurement using simulations.
We measure the CMB lensing/galaxy weak lensing power spectrum using the latest CMB lensing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and galaxy weak lensing data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS), making a detection at 5σ significance. We compare our measured cross-spectrum to the cosmological parameters inferred from the Planck and KiDS experiments. We then present fits for the mat- ter density and the amplitude of matter fluctuations, marginalising over the galaxy weak lensing systematic biases. We forecast the expected signal-to-noise using the next data release from ACT and use simulated fields to investigate the impact on estimating cosmological parameters with that data set.
Finally, we measure the masses of clusters selected from ACT CMB data via the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect using weak gravitational lensing data from KiDS, making a 20σ detection of the lensing signal. We present an estimate of the mass bias for a set of stacked clusters as well as the highest signal-to-noise individual clusters. We also describe tests of systematic effects and analysis choices.
Intracellular trafficking of the invasion-promoting cell surface proteinase MT1-MMP 
Keywords: invasion
intracellular trafficking
MT1-MMP
KIFs
cancer progression
rheumatoid arthritis

Membrane type-1 matrix metalloproteinase (MT1-MMP) is a type I transmembrane proteinase that has been shown to promote the progression of different diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and cancer, by enhancing cellular invasion. MT1-MMP promotes cellular invasion by degrading pericellular extracellular matrix (ECM) at the leading edge of migrating cells. MT1-MMP has been shown to localise to various motility-associated structures, including lamellipodia, filopodia, invadopodia, and podosomes. However, the molecular mechanisms of MT1-MMP localisation to these structures are not well- understood. Dr. Itoh’s research group and others have found that MT1-MMP cell surface exposure is achieved by intracellular trafficking of MT1-MMP-containing vesicles along microtubules and that kinesin superfamily motor proteins (KIFs) play a role. We have employed a siRNA library to screen for the responsible KIFs and found that the knockdown (KD) of four KIFs (KIF13A, KIF3A, KIF9, KIF1C) notably affected MT1-MMP-mediated cellular functions at the cell-matrix interface of human fibrosarcoma cells (HT1080). Interestingly, the KD of these KIFs did not affect the overall level of MT1-MMP at the cell surface, but it significantly influenced MT1-MMP localisation at the substrate-attached side of the plasma membrane. Live cell imaging experiments confirmed that KIF13A, KIF3A and KIF9 associate with MT1-MMP-positive vesicles. These experiments also showed that when cells are cultured atop a substratum, KIF13A and KIF3A collaborate to transport MT1-MMP within the central cytoplasmic areas. However, only KIF13A seemed to reach the cell periphery to deliver the proteinase to the tips of motility-associated structures. Bioinformatic analysis revealed that the expression profile of KIF13A and KIF9 is altered in several cancer types and that these two motor proteins might have cancer-specific roles, partially related to their involvement in MT1-MMP intracellular trafficking. Taken together these findings shed light on KIF-dependent MT1-MMP cell surface exposure and suggest KIF-driven MT1-MMP intracellular trafficking mechanisms as potential targets to control the un-wanted cell invasion that sustains the progression of diseases like RA and cancer.
MITF-dependent phenotypic plasticity regulates proton-coupled transport and controls lineage resistance to acidotic stress
Keywords: Melanoma
MITF
Acidosis
Phenotypic Plasticity
Proton Transporters

The lineage addiction oncogene, Microphthalmia-Associated Transcription Factor (MITF), mediates melanoma phenotypic plasticity – a pathophysiological process that underlies intratumoural heterogeneity, where melanoma cells interchangeably alter their phenotypes and transcriptomic gene signatures depending on the expression levels of MITF. This thesis characterised the presence and nature of MITF-dependent phenotypic plasticity in relation to melanoma resistance to acidotic stress. We show that the acid-resistant phenotypes in MITF-High and MITF-Low cells consisted of distinctly different mechanisms. Analysis of the melanoma proton transporter transcriptome, with experimental verification, showed that while MITF-High melanomas asymmetrically expressed ATP hydrolysis-coupled proton pumps, MITF-Low melanomas favoured the expression of solute carrier proton transporters. This molecular dichotomy was epitomised by the increased expression of Monocarboxylate Transporter 1 (MCT1) in cells following experimental MITF knockdown, which was associated with increased proton-coupled transport activities for monocarboxylic pyruvate, L-lactate, and β-hydroxybutyrate. Interestingly, acidotic resistance following stable MITF-knockdown could be selectively abrogated by reducing ambient pyruvate concentration, or by treatment with the small molecule MCT1 inhibitor, AR-C155858, leading to apoptosis in the acidotic cells with MITF-knockdown. Furthermore, combining AR-C155858 treatment with the BRAFV600E inhibitor, vemurafenib, showed additive effects on the induction of apoptosis in acidotic MITF-knockdown cells. This study thus identified a novel approach to achieve cytotoxicity in the subset of MITF-Low melanoma cells by exploiting their dependency on monocarboxylate transport for acidotic survival.
Comparative legal reasoning in strict liability
Keywords: strict liability
tort
no-fault
legal reasoning

The imposition of strict liability has long been and remains highly controversial. Legal systems rely on it to different extents and the arguments which are used to justify its imposition vary considerably within and across jurisdictions. The thesis compares the main justifications for strict liability as put forward in four legal systems, two common law (England and the United States) and two civil law (France and Italy). After explaining how strict liability is understood in the four laws and setting out the relevant contexts of strict liability, the thesis analyses comparatively the treatment that legal arguments receive across these legal systems. Some of these arguments are based on the notion of risk, while others relate to goals such as the avoidance of accidents, the protection of victims, or the redistribution of losses. By looking at how these arguments are used in each of the four legal systems, the thesis unearths a wide variety of patterns of reasoning, which reflect the different ways in which legal actors across the four laws think about strict liability. Moreover, the thesis assesses the justificatory weight of the arguments, showing that these can assume varying significance within and across the four laws and that such variations reflect different views as to the values and goals which should guide strict liability and inspire tort law more generally. Overall, the thesis seeks to improve our understanding of strict liability, to shed light on the significance and role of the justifications put forward for its imposition, and to enhance our comprehension of the different legal cultures featuring in the four legal systems studied.
Thailand during World War II: Impact and aftermath
Keywords: World War II
Greater East Asia War
Siam
Second World War
Japan
Thailand

Japan coordinated its invasion of Thailand to coincide with the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour. Small and with little choice, Thailand quickly joined the Axis. Despite this capitulation, Japanese occupation brought substantial economic loss and widespread social disruption. GDP contracted by a fifth. Japanese finance required that Thailand pay the costs of occupation and ship goods, mostly rice, to Japan while receiving little in return. Resulting shortages of consumer goods, swift money supply expansion and high inflation cut living standards, necessitated rationing and led to social unrest.
One main aim of my dissertation is to analyse the costs to Thailand of Japanese occupation. The dissertation’s other main objective is to examine the longer-term impact of occupation. Alone in Southeast Asia, post-World War II Thailand avoided revolution or civil war. The advantages of administrative continuity through occupation, buoyant rice exports and a non-strategic geographical location largely explain post-war stability. Furthermore, the wartime alliance with Japan avoided Thailand’s population being taken as comfort women or as forced labour on the Thailand-Burma railway.
Wartime macro-economic shocks helped to shape Thailand’s post-1945 economic development. Efforts towards industrialisation and import substitution were a response to wartime setbacks: the government directed resources towards producing goods which were scarce during the occupation. In reaction to wartime fiscal dislocation, the state strengthened its control of financial institutions, budgets, and currency. Exploring the connection between Thai experiences under the Japanese and during the early 1950s is crucial to fully understanding the legacies of the war.
Increasing police trust through normative alignment
Keywords: procedural justice
normative alignment
legitimacy
police trust

In this thesis, I examine the challenges that police encounter in building public trust. An action research design utilises community engagement in two U.S. communities to discern the values and behaviours that generate trust in the police and to explore how those values may be integrated into policing policies and processes. While there is general agreement that compliance emanates from the practice of the principles of procedural justice which are interrelated with trust, normative alignment, and legitimacy, it has proven to be to more difficult to test, translate, and embed these ideas in police organisations. With these factors in mind, I tested a process to increase trust and normative alignment between the community and police and to answer the primary question: How can police trust and legitimacy be increased? I conducted four phases of qualitative research and document analysis to determine which values community members desire in police officers, how police organisations can align their values with the community’s values, how to select police officers who possess the community’s values, and how police organisations can reinforce the community’s values in their officers.
I used focus groups, interviews, and document retrieval to gather the data and used content analysis, word coding, crosstabulation, curriculum mapping, and gap analysis to analyse the data. The results show that trust from community members can be increased if police officers are first characterised by Cultural Competence, Servant Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and High Character and then trained in the legal and technical skills necessary for the fulfilment of their policing duties. In other words, hire for character and train for competence. I also discuss definitions of a ‘good police officer’, compliance, procedural justice, trust, normative alignment, legitimacy, organisational considerations, and police officer selection.
Skills that predict reading in Korean primary school children at year 2
Keywords: transparent orthography
RAN
vocabulary
reading comprehension
Korean
phonological awareness

The present study explored the relationship between reading comprehension and the following predictors: vocabulary, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN). It is acknowledged that decoding skills exert an important influence in early reading while language skills take its place in later stages. However, the majority of studies on the predictors of reading comprehension have focused on children learning to read English, a deep orthography. Accumulated evidence on the development of reading comprehension in orthographies other than English suggest that underpinning reading skills may develop at a different pace for children learning to read Korean, a language with a highly transparent orthography and unique alphabet.
Forty-eight children in Year 2 were sampled from three schools in the suburbs of Taegu, South Korea. The children were assessed on reading comprehension, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Nonverbal intelligence and age in months were used as a covariate. It was hypothesized that if results of the data analyses showed vocabulary to be as important, or more important, than phonological awareness in predicting reading comprehension, it would suggest that decoding skills are reaching a ceiling and language skills are starting to exert an important influence on reading comprehension for the Korean children.
Results of the multiple regression analyses showed that vocabulary and phonological awareness had an equal effect in predicting reading comprehension scores, respectively explaining 15.8% and 13.3% of added variance after nonverbal intelligence and age in months had been controlled for. Rapid automatized naming did not have a significant predictive effect on reading comprehension with any of the statistical models. The findings support the emergence of oral language skills as an important determinant of early reading comprehension in Korean. The equal importance of phonological awareness suggests that phonological principles are of universal importance for early reading, regardless of the simplicity of the orthography. The findings of the effect of RAN added to the discrepancies in the literature.
How does the use of a geographic information system (GIS) engender spatial thinking in Year 8 geography students?
Keywords: MLT; MLT2018; Distinction; Geography

This research investigates the impact of using a geographic information system (GIS) on students’ spatial thinking. This was done through the design and implementation of two GIS-based schemes of work. Collaboration took place through the planning and teaching of both interventions to Year 8 geography students. This small-scale evaluation used qualitative methods to investigate students’ and collaborators’ views. Student work was also analyzed using a framework developed for the assessment of spatial thinking skills. The findings suggest that the use of a GIS does enhance, and in most cases improves students’ spatial thinking skills, but, that spatial thinking as a skill is hard to quantify and difficult to measure progress in. Another benefit that using a GIS affords the reflective practitioner is the creation of engaging, contemporary and interactive lessons, using real data, from which Year 8 students derive a lot of geographical value.
The post-mortal condition: being with the dead in the age of digital media
Keywords: Digital afterlife
Big data
Information ethics
Philosophy of information
Intergenerational justice
Political economy
Online death

The dead are increasingly present on the web. Within the next three decades alone, an estimated 2.2 billion people will die, many leaving behind a considerable volume of data, commonly referred to as digital remains. Despite the societal significance of this development, existing literature has mainly focused on lived experience, leaving macro-level concerns largely unexplored and under-theorised. As a first step in addressing this lacuna, the present thesis sets out to identify and critically interrogate the macro-ethical challenges that arise from the accumulation of digital remains. This objective is pursued in five distinct studies. The first two propose a critical framework to understand the ethically undesirable consequences of commercial and ideological interests in the management of digital remains. The following two studies use statistical modelling to project the accumulation of digital remains throughout the 21st century, and then identify a number of ethical risks associated with their curation. The last study provides an in-depth interrogation of the concept of presence as it relates to past individuals and digital technology, and unpacks some of the ethical implications. The integration of these five studies, I argue, illustrates the emergence of a new mode of being with the dead — referred to as the post-mortal condition — whereby the deceased are no longer separated from, but maintain a personal presence within, the domains of the living. I argue that this presence is more than merely a private matter for the bereaved. It is ultimately a concern for all of society — future, past, and present. Consequently, the challenge before us is to develop technological, regulatory, and economic systems that place the good of all humanity, rather than merely the share currently alive, at its centre.
Burnout in medicine: A novel approach exploring the impact of uncertainty and the use of biomarkers as a measurement tool
Keywords: medical workforce
uncertainty
medical education
burnout
biomarkers

Burnout constitutes a significant challenge for healthcare organisations not only in respect to individual wellbeing but also in terms of the catastrophic downstream implications to patient safety, patient satisfaction, and quality of care. This DPhil, divided into three parts, aims to explore burnout in healthcare professionals, an accelerating phenomenon that is hotly discussed but minimally understood, with a focus on the impact uncertainty has and an exploration into the novel use of neurohormones as potential biomarkers of wellbeing.
Part I: Exploration of concepts: burnout and uncertainty.
Chapter 1 presents a selective overview of the broad context of burnout in healthcare, reporting existing literature on the impact of burnout—to physicians, to patients, and to healthcare organisations—and considering the challenges that pertain to burnout research, particularly relating to challenges in measurement. Chapter 2 explores the presence of uncertainty in the healthcare environment looking at what impacts an individual’s tolerance of uncertainty and how the reaction affects provider- and patient-centred outcomes. Chapters 3 and 4 present two observational studies exploring drivers of satisfaction at work for faculty in an academic medical centre, with an analysis of the interplay between burnout and uncertainty in the clinical environment. Chapter 5 presents a study that looks at how language used in clinical hand-over affects sense of uncertainty in the receiving clinician, demonstrating how language variation can influence emotional perception of uncertainty.
Part II: Exploration of biology: exploration into use of biomarkers to measure burnout.
Chapters 6 and 7 explore the novel use of cortisol and oxytocin levels as potential biomarkers of stress and burnout in clinical faculty at a large teaching hospital.
Part III: Exploration of interventions to reduce burnout and strategies to embrace uncertainty.
Chapter 8 presents an interprofessional intervention study looking to reduce burnout through self-facilitated groups meeting monthly for three months. This study re-affirms the importance of the findings presented in this thesis and points to the need for more interventions aimed at enhancing trainee and faculty wellbeing. Chapter 9 synthesises current literature on tolerance of uncertainty alongside findings of the thesis, self-experience, and experience of colleagues and students in a narrative review to identify strategies to help clinicians thrive in the face of clinical uncertainty.
Finally, Chapter 10 presents an overview of the key findings from each study, their methodological strengths and limitations, directions for future research, and implications for clinical training, the measurement of wellbeing initiatives, and patient care.
France and Japan, 1850-1885 : an assessment of French influence and diplomacy
Keywords: diplomacy
nineteenth
relations
19th
Japan
century
France
foreign
influence

This thesis studies the encounter of France and Japan over a period of thirty-five years, during which Japanese influence on France was marginal, limited to artistic circles in Paris, whereas French influence in Japan was considerable.
By European standards Japan in the 1850s was a backward, feudal, and isolated country. Japan, unlike almost every other nation in Asia, was not colonised, Yet it would have seemed preposterous in the 1850s to imagine that Japan would become one of the world’s major powers. However, following the opening of the country in 1854, Japan experiences a major transformation that touches every aspect if its society.
The forces that propelled Japan into the modern world were indigenous, nonetheless in this transformation, Western influence and models were significant determining factors. Although the Japanese government at one time or another employed foreign instructors from numerous countries (including Holland, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Sweden, Austria, China, Korea and Canada), the four Western countries which were to have the greatest impact were Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States.
Continued in thesis ...