VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Anaesthesia and cognition
Keywords: isoflurane
spatial memory
sevoflurane
anaesthesia
attention
propofol
neurotoxicity
fentanyl

Anaesthesia is an essential component of many clinical and scientific procedures. It is well-established that anaesthesia has short-term effects on cognition but an increasing body of work suggests that anaesthesia may have longer-term effects on learning and memory, beyond the point at which the drugs are eliminated from the body.
Experiments were conducted, in adult rats, to better understand the behavioural phenotype of anaesthetic-induced cognitive impairment. A two-hour exposure to isoflurane/nitrous oxide anaesthesia in the absence of surgery was sufficient to impair win-shift spatial memory on the radial arm maze, despite intact spontaneous spatial novelty preference, a candidate psychological process for radial maze performance. Impairment in attentional processing might also affect spatial memory. The same anaesthetic regime, but not an injectable anaesthetic combination of propofol/fentanyl, impaired some aspects of attention, as assessed with the 5-choice serial-reaction-time task and the sustained attention task (SAT). However, in contrast to the spatial memory impairment, the magnitude of attentional impairment was not increased following successive anaesthetic exposures.
A similar pattern of spatial memory impairment dependent on the number of anaesthetic episodes was seen in rats exposed to isoflurane during development and tested in adulthood. Developmental exposure to a similar anaesthetic, sevoflurane, did not impair attention in adulthood as assessed with the SAT and the intradimensional/extradimensional shift task.
With the aim of better understanding the neuronal mechanisms underlying the spatial memory impairment, laser confocal microscopy was used to examine the dendritic ultrastructure of hippocampal neurons from rats exposed to isoflurane/nitrous oxide during adulthood. Results did not provide compelling evidence for changes in dendritic ultrastructure.
These results highlight that anaesthesia is not benign and is a critical variable that should be considered when designing animal behavioural neuroscience experiments. In addition they contribute to a larger literature regarding the potential long-term effects of anaesthesia on human health.
Financial centres in global financial networks: a quantitative analysis of investment banking deals
Keywords: World city network
Underwriting syndicates
Financial centres
Global financial networks
Investment banking

This thesis is structured around two primary objectives. First, to contribute to the literature on the world city network and the emerging literature on global financial networks by developing and empirically testing a new methodological approach for modelling urban networks that would aid the development of empirical research in these related streams of literature. Second, to provide empirical evidence showing the effects of positioning within global financial networks on individual financial services firms as well as financial centres. To achieve these objectives, this thesis first develops a novel modelling approach for empirical analysis of urban networks, which draws on the concept of underwriting syndicate as the primary building block of global financial networks. It also considers the consequences of the network boundary specification problem in the context of studying urban networks and compares the modelling approach it develops to the Interlocking World City Network Model (Taylor, 2001) and Alderson and Beckfield (2004) ownership ties approach. The empirical analysis that follows relies on data on investment banking deals sourced from Dealogic databases. The dataset built for the purposes of this thesis spans the 1993 – 2016 period and covers more than 1 million capital market transactions worldwide.
To achieve the second objective of this thesis, I have built spatial econometric and dynamic panel data models to uncover the effects of positioning within GFNs on individual financial services firms and financial centres. The results of this thesis indicate that inter-cluster network ties that connect financial services firms located in different financial centres are particularly valuable and they benefit both the performance of individual firms and lead to higher resilience of financial centres to demand shocks. In contrast, localised network connections are not found to be statistically significant in either context. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, its methodological developments and empirical findings, it contributes to several related groups of literature, including the research on the world city network, global financial networks, underwriting syndicates and social network analysis. The implications of this thesis for public policy and corporate strategy relate primarily to the role of network connectivity in financial sector and the distinct role of syndication networks. I specifically relate this to contemporary issues including BREXIT, which as I discuss may have a material impact on the financial sector in the United Kingdom and beyond.
From Brady to Murphy: gun control polarization in the decades since the 103rd congress
Keywords: gun control
polarization
Congress
parties

Over the course of twelve Congressional sessions and twenty plus years since the passage of landmark gun control legislation (the Brady Bill and the Assault weapons ban) during the 103rd Congress, (1993-1994) polarization on the gun control issue between the Democratic and Republican parties has increased significantly. Applying mixed qualitative methods, this case study aims to explain the shift from moderate levels during the 103rd to near complete partisan polarization on the issue by the 115th Congress (2017-2018). It will demonstrate that this shift was the culmination of the dissolution of opposition groups (consisting of members who crossed the party line in their gun issue voting) within each party, with each party following its own unique polarization trajectory, as disparate factors influenced their respective shifts. For the Republican party, who united on the issue over a decade before the Democratic party, the key variables impacting the fading of party support for gun control were the decline in salience of crime as a priority political issue in the early 2000s and the transition from the general to the primary electorate as the more salient voting bloc in regard to gun control. For the Democratic party, the key variables impacting the fading of party opposition to gun control were a loss of Southern and rural seats, coupled with gun control being re established as an electorally valuable issue for the party nationally in the years after the Sandy Hook shooting in late 2012. The thesis will contest the prevailing narrative that changes in party voting patterns must occur through replacement by demonstrating evidence of conversion- as numerous members of both parties shifted positions on gun control to vote the party line as electoral pressures and incentives influencing opposition group member voting changed. Furthermore, the thesis’s findings bolster the utility of ‘partisan asymmetry’ as a lens through which to approach the study of partisan polarization in Congress.
Determinants of corporate tax behaviour and co-operative compliance: a comparative study of the UK and Colombia
Keywords: tax behaviour
taxation
comparative research
United Kingdom
cooperative compliance
tax compliance
Colombia
corporate tax
empirical research

This thesis seeks to analyse the impact that operating in jurisdictions with different socio-economic and legal contexts can have on taxpayer regulation. This is done by comparing large corporate taxpayers in the UK and in Colombia using empirical qualitative methods to examine the alignment between factors at different levels that can influence corporate tax behaviour, and the premises of the co-operative compliance. The main conclusion is that the factors present in Colombia are contrary to introducing this type of regulation. This is because critically-negative perceptions of the administration -particularly of its trustworthiness- corporate tax governance weaknesses, tax-risk prone social norms, and contextual factors like a high perception of corruption create an environment adverse to this model’s philosophy, which is highly dependent on interparty trust and taxpayer risk aversion and compliance-mindedness. Results from the UK show that co-operative compliance can contribute to improve taxpayer governance, strengthen risk-averse and/or compliance-minded taxation norms, and encourage perceptions of the administration that are favourable for voluntary compliance. However, the evidence also shows that operational difficulties can quickly erode taxpayer trust in the administration and on the value of collaboration, and jeopardise the progress made. This is the case with administrative business understanding, responsiveness, and providing of legal certainty while maintaining the model’s legitimacy and answering demands for fair and responsible outcomes. Accordingly, this thesis proposes policy measures designed to facilitate the conditions necessary for establishing co-operative compliance in contexts like Colombia’s, where shifting from adversarial, non-responsive regulation towards collaborative, responsive regulation could assist in improving voluntary compliance. Additionally, the author recommends policies for enhancing co-operative compliance’s sustainability in jurisdictions like the UK, where the model is developed, but the progress it has achieved needs to be protected against the trust and compliance-eroding effects arising from the regulator’s difficulties in satisfying taxpayer expectations.
When politicians collude with firms: the impact of elite networks on inequality
Keywords: inequality
Elite networks
firms
politicians

This thesis examines the effect of elite networks on inequality. Elite networks are informal social networks between politicians in power and top executives of politically connected firms where personal ties and long-term interactions build trust and loyalty between involved actors. Both groups draw benefits from these interactions. Politicians stay in power and may extract bribes and other favours, while firms are rewarded with exclusive government contracts, favourable regulation, and direct subsidies. Top corporate executives that are successful in acquiring these rents, as a consequence of their elite network interactions, are rewarded by their firms with higher salaries. This consequentially widens the dispersion of earnings between the top 1% of income earners (most of which are corporate executives) and everyone else. The contribution of this thesis to the political economy literature is twofold: (1) it examines, on an individual level, the consequences elite network interactions have on its members; increasing re-election chances for politicians and securing rents for firms, and (2) it examines the consequences elite networks impose on society, notably on increasing income inequality. It presents a thus far unrecognized factor that may help explain the rise of income inequality in the US and the UK. The thesis is organized into three stand-alone papers. The first two papers show the benefits of collusion for politicians and firms, while the third one links the impact of elite networks on inequality. The first paper shows that politicians which distribute fraudulent procurement contracts increase their chances of re-election. The second paper shows that politically connected financial firms were favoured in the TARP allocation process during the US financial crisis. The third paper shows that politically connected senior executives have significantly higher earnings than non-connected ones.
Empirical performance of simple statistical inference-type models with feature extraction in comparison to modern machine learning methods concerning regression and classification problems
Keywords: classification
performance
empirical
benchmark
interpretable model
regression
black box model

While most statistical methods used in the industry are of simple structure -- like decision trees and logistic regression -- many machine learning competitions are won by modern complex methods, which also outperformed the more simple methods in previous benchmark studies. In these benchmark studies, the results were usually obtained over raw and unprocessed datasets. In practice, when developing a model, a feature extraction is performed first to create non-redundant and useful covariates for the model. This is especially important for the simple methods, which often require approximately linear features without severe outliers.
In this thesis, we investigate the performance of modern machine learning methods on raw data, without any additionally extracted features, in comparison to simpler and more interpretable models on data together with feature extraction. For this purpose we employ certain preprocessing and feature extraction algorithms to objectively approximate this task over 32 different datasets.
Our results show that, for classification problems, the simple methods perform almost as well as the more complex methods. This is true for both binary classification, regarding the metric area under the ROC curve, and for multiclass classification with regards to the weighted F1 Score metric.
In our regression problems, the modern methods outperform the simpler methods and seem superior to the more interpretable methods in terms of their respective R-squared or explained variance.
We suspect that the difference between classification and regression problems might be due to the evaluation metrics used; specifically how they react to the monotonicity or linearity of the extracted features, but more research is necessary to investigate this difference.
Malware ecologies: a politics of cybersecurity
Keywords: Agency
Cybersecurity
Geography
Malware
Cyberspace

Computation, in popular imaginations, is at perennial risk of infection from the tools of nefarious hackers, commonly referred to as malware. Today, malware pervade and perform a crucial and constitutive role in the insecurities of contemporary life from financial transactions, to ‘critical national infrastructures’ – such as electricity, water, and transportation – to devices in our ‘smart’ homes and cities, and even to potential ‘cyberwar.’ Yet, critical security research has rarely turned its attention to malware. In contrast, I explore malware and their politics, situated and extended beyond, an (auto)ethnographic study of the malware analysis laboratory of the UK endpoint protection business, Sophos. I argue that malware are currently processed through a patho-logic that conflate organic and non-organic materialities, permitting analogies between biology and computation, and are generative of particular forms of security that relegate malware to the intent of their authors. I explore how endpoint protection businesses are imbibed with these logics in order to attend to how malware are analysed, detected, and curated beyond them. By drawing on my method of ‘becoming-analyst,’ I critically reflect on how malware become known, are responded to by ad hoc political groups, and can assist in rethinking the role of computational agency in geography, international relations, security studies, and beyond. I instead conceive of malware as performative political actors making limited choices in broader computational ecologies. I therefore advocate for an eco-logical repositioning of malware, where cyberspace is not simply a neutral domain; but is central to the formation of choice that gives space for malware to be political. With four cases – Conficker, Stuxnet, the Dukes, and WannaCry / (Not)Petya – I write new stories on how malware are encountered and dealt with in the twenty-first century. In doing so, I challenge contemporary discourses of cybersecurity to ask if conventional notions of who and what (per)form security are adequate, and how these are reconfigured through a radical 'more-than-human' politics, where malware are not just objects of security, but are active participants in its production and negotiation.
The ritual of churching of women after childbirth in Denmark, 1500-1900
Keywords: Church rituals
Motherhood
Church discipline
Scandinavia
Churching

This thesis traces the ritual of churching of women after childbirth in Lutheran Denmark which has hitherto been marginalised in scholarship. Rooted in Levitical childbirth impurity and closely linked to the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, churching was a troublesome legacy for Lutheran reformers because initially it fell short of supporting the objective of elevating marriage as the cornerstone of society and propounding procreation as the foremost duty of virtuous mothers. Reformers solved the problem by retaining a mandatory lying-in whilst remodelling churching as a thanksgiving ritual shorn of Catholic sacramentals. Yet notions of childbirth uncleanness were not immediately eradicated, and mothers reacted by reshaping the ritual to fit with their own religiosity. The ritual of churching therefore offers fresh insight into the reception of Lutheran reform at parish level.
Rediscovering the rite through hymns, sermons, clerical and legal papers, narratives and material culture, this study demonstrates that churching not only served to reintegrate the mother into Church and society after childbirth but it was also a social marker for the married mother and helped to reinforce communal bonds. For the unmarried mother, however, her route back to Church and society was through church discipline. If churching thus afforded the clergy the means to shame the unwed, a married mother could well use the rite to punish an unpopular clergyman by withholding the churching fee or behaving aggressively during the ceremony. This insight adds a new facet to the scholarship of the complex power relationship between parishioners and clergy in early modern Denmark. From the eighteenth century onwards, churching was rarely performed in urban areas. Far from becoming obsolete, however, this thesis demonstrates that rural churching continued to thrive well into the nineteenth century and, in some areas, even into the first half of the twentieth century.
The magic lantern in Japan: transnational technology across the long nineteenth century
Keywords: Japanese History
History of Science and Technology

This thesis presents a history of the magic lantern in Japan from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. From the first recorded appearance of the magic lantern in the 1770s, Japanese intellectual figures such as Ōtsuki Gentaku were fascinated by the device and positioned it within a wider discourse on epistemology, knowledge about nature, and the study of the human body. This helped to lay the groundwork for the emergence of localised groups of domestic magic lantern producers in the early nineteenth century, which supported, in turn, the unprecedented country-wide popularity of magic lantern shows in the latter half of the 1800s and early 1900s. With different versions of the device in production and circulation, the technology found use in the hands of a variety of state and non-state historical actors, linking it to both broad societal changes and the everyday lives of Japanese people in this period.
This work, the first detailed study of the topic in English, traces not only the development of the magic lantern as a physical instrument in Japan, but also the expanding web of intellectual, social, economic, cultural, and political developments that hinged on or were otherwise profoundly shaped by connections to this unique technology. As well as elucidating the significance of the magic lantern beyond the spheres of visual culture and pre-cinema history, the thesis uses the device to tell a story from beyond the prevailing narratives of global technological and intellectual development. By analysing the ways that this single technology was imported, ascribed meaning, manufactured, and used over a significant timeframe – the “long” nineteenth century – it is possible to consider Japanese history outside of the conventional divide of “early modern” Tokugawa Japan and “modern” Meiji Japan. This new technological history decentres the influence of the West and the state, revealing instead the far-reaching importance of transnational, often non-state connections and networks to major trends in areas such as technological and cultural production, epistemology, humanitarianism, and political discourse.
Development of NMR methodology for the study of complex molecular and biomolecular systems
Keywords: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is amongst the most powerful and versatile spectroscopic tools for characterising biological systems. A key advantage of NMR techniques is that in addition to being sensitive to structural features of biomolecules through their chemical shift, chemical exchange and relaxation processes allow dynamic molecular properties to be studied. Techniques have also been developed to facilitate the characterisation of translational diffusion with NMR, through the application of pulsed field gradients.
In this thesis we develop and apply NMR methods for studying biomolecular systems. Firstly, in Chapter 2, we introduce an experimental protocol and model for the analysis of cellular systems from the diffusional properties of the water within them. In addition to reporting diffusion coefficients, this analysis also provides information on cell radii, abundance and permeability. A drawback of NMR compared to other spectroscopic techniques is its relative insensitivity. One way of improving this is through chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) experiments where the presence of lowly concentrated species is effectively read out through its interactions with a highly concentrated species. In Chapter 3 we show how this experiment can be used to follow changes in a range of solution properties. The diffusion and CEST experiments are combined in Chapter 4, where we introduce the novel diffusion-weighted CEST experiment. Here, the diffusion weighting is used to differentiate between compartments, while the CEST component of the experiment characterises properties of each of the compartments.
In Chapters 5 and 6, modern NMR techniques are used to characterise dynamical features of 15N-labelled proteins. Experiments employed in this section include a fast dynamics analysis as well as CPMG and R1ρ relaxation dispersion experiments. Collectively, these experiments provide important insights into the behaviour of the proteins with atomic-level resolution.