VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Leonidas of Tarentum, Fifty-nine epigrams: text, translation, and commentary
Keywords: epigram
Hellenistic Literature
Leonidas of Tarentum
Hellenistic Epigram
Hellenistic Poetry

The present thesis is an edition with translation and commentary of 59 epigrams of the Hellenistic poet Leonidas of Tarentum. It starts with an Introduction which, after briefly tracing the history of the scholarly work on Leonidas, considers general aspects pertaining to his life, his work, and his poems. The transmission of text is outlined (medieval transmission, papyri, epigraphic evidence, quotations). Leonidas is then placed in his historical and cultural context and his potential links with historical figures and poets of the Hellenistic age are treated, as well as his reception in Antiquity. Lastly, his language and style are outlined, followed by observations on the metre of his poems. There follows the text, translation and commentaries of selected epigrams. These are chosen from three macro-categories (dedicatory, sepulchral and ‘miscellaneous’ epigrams) and are arranged according to their theme. Some general observations precede specific groups of epigrams. The commentary deals with all relevant aspects of the poems, such as text, interpretation, 'Realien', and matters of style, metre and diction.
The knowledge of afterthoughts: a comparative reading of the poetry of Caproni and Sereni
Keywords: comparative literature
contemporary Italian poetry
knowledge
literature

The present work explores the idea that one of the forms of knowledge literature produces can be understood in terms of afterthought. It focuses on the retrospective attempts to understand that characterise two poetic collections both published in Italy in 1965, Vittorio Sereni’s Gli strumenti umani and Giorgio Caproni’s Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso & altre prosopopee. Sereni often laments the long years it takes him to write a poem, the despair he feels, and the shame that follows for caring so much about poetry. This fluctuation between hope and guilt, meaning and non-sense, far from being just a biographical detail, becomes what life and literature seem to have in common, and what his poetry sets out to investigate by using the resources of the ‘parlato-scritto’ (to use Giovanni Nencioni’s term) to create a cohesive and yet open structure. Caproni’s poems combine everyday discourses and poetic form to scrutinise the little we can reach, express, and communicate. The possibility of pointing at reality through deictics, or of connecting words thanks to rhyme, is carefully analysed to verify whether a residue of sense can be found in the structures we rely on to make sense of our lives despite their apparent emptiness. Sereni’s and Caproni’s ideas and texts are studied through a broad set of comparisons, as one of the ways in which the claim that literature can know is explored in this thesis is by using literary works to understand each other. This methodology is outlined through the figure of the critic-reader and aims at exploring a possible response that critical works may offer to the afterthoughts of literature, considering the hypothesis that we may know something better after having read a text in thinking back to certain passages that struck us, comparing them to other ones from that or other books, and to what we have learnt through our experiences.
Totalism
Keywords: repugnant conclusion
fission
population axiology
total utilitarianism
prioritarianism
population ethics
procreation asymmetry
totalism
impossibility theorems

Totalism in population axiology is the view that one population is better than another if and only if it contains greater total wellbeing. This thesis defends Totalism. I begin, in Chapter 1, by arguing for the principle of Anonymity, according to which any two populations with the same anonymous distribution of wellbeing are equally good. Chapter 2 argues against Prioritarian population axiologies on the basis that they imply the desirability of welfare diffusion: the implausible claim that it can be better for there to be less total wellbeing spread thinly between a larger total number of people. Chapter 3 argues against the popular intuition that adding good lives within a certain range cannot result in a better population. Chapters 4 and 5 provide new evidence for the unavoidability of the Repugnant Conclusion, the controversial implication of Totalism which holds that a smaller population of excellent lives can be worse than a much larger population of mediocre lives (and which is traditionally considered to be a damning objection to Totalism). Chapter 6 argues for a version of Totalism applicable to prudence in fission cases: cases where an individual “splits” into two or more successors, while retaining what matters in survival. Finally, Chapter 7 ties things together and summarises several direct arguments for Totalism. With the exception of Chapter 7, which makes extensive use of results and notation from earlier parts of the thesis, each chapter is entirely self-standing and can be read independently of the others.
'Putting your heart on the screen': an ethnography of young filmmakers in Israel

Keywords: affect
neoliberalism
filmmaking
ethics
film
university
media
ethnography
film production
subjectivity
cultural production
anthropology
education
schooling
Israel

Putting Your Heart on the Screen explores a new generation of Israeli filmmakers whose approach to filmmaking is defined by their conviction that they both must and can only make films about their own painful experiences—what they call their ‘heart’ (lev). It introduces a new approach to the complex subjective processes at play within film production via its focus on the intersections between this new genre of personal films and the subjectivities and lived experiences of the filmmakers who make them. The thesis draws primarily on 14 months of fieldwork conducted in Israel (2018–2019) that involved observing and participating in the everyday working and learning practices of young filmmakers. The thesis identifies and interrogates the influences that shaped the form and content of their work, developed their ways of knowing, and crystallized their conceptions of what types of film are worth making.
The thesis argues that the widespread desire among the young filmmakers to make ‘personal films’ emerged from a regime of truth that has become dominant at the expense of other forms of truth telling—a regime in which the truth that the creative subject seeks to uncover and represent is her own ‘wounded heart.’ ‘The heart’ is analysed as a historically particular form of truth that lies at the centre of a complex discursive apparatus consisting of ethical practices, affective orientations, aesthetic forms, spatial components, and economic relations, all of which come to inform the creative practice of filmmaking. In this way, the thesis ethnographically demonstrates how larger cultural formations shape subjectivity, thereby contributing to scholarly understandings of the effects of identity politics in the form of personal, painful, and subjective experiences, at the microscale of how people think of themselves and others.
Adaptive robust control with statistical learning
Keywords: stochastic control
model uncertainty
algorithmic trading
statistical learning
stochastic gradient descent

In stochastic control problems the agent chooses the optimal strategy to maximise or minimise the performance criterion. The performance criterion can be either the expectation of a reward function for the standard control problem or the non-linear expectation for the robust control problem. In parameterised stochastic control problems, the agent needs to know the value of the model parameters in the stochastic system to specify the optimal strategy correctly. However, it is hardly the case that the agent knows the values of the model parameters.
In this thesis, we aim to study a robust stochastic control problem where the agent does not know the values of the parameters of the underlying process. Therefore, we frame the stochastic control problem where we assume that the agent does not know the values of the model parameters. However, the agent uses the observable processes to estimate the values of the model parameters while simultaneously solving the stochastic control problem in a robust framework.
There are two key components in this new stochastic control problem. The first component is the parameter estimation part where the agent uses the realisation of the underlying process to estimate the unknown parameters in the stochastic system. We particularly focus on online parameter estimation. The online estimator is an important ingredient for our stochastic control problem because this type of estimator allows the agent to obtain the optimal strategy in feedback form. The second component is the stochastic control part which is the question of how to design a time-consistent stochastic control problem that allows the agent to also estimate the parameters and optimise her strategy simultaneously. In this thesis, we address each component of the problem above in the continuous-time setting and then the utility maximisation problem under this framework is studied carefully.
πολὺν γέλων: laughter, humour & Greek tragedy
Keywords: Sophocles
parody
Aristophanes
laughter
clown
old comedy
joke theory
Aeschylus
humour
tragedy
comedy
play theory
Euripides
Greek tragedy

This DPhil builds upon the relatively limited prior research into laughter and humour in Greek tragedy. Recent and long-standing social theories of laughter are introduced to account for the textual instances of γέλως ‘laughter’ vocabulary in extant tragedy, clarifying its associations and consequences in the dramatic context. As laughter and humour are not one and the same, cognitive theories of humour are also employed to elucidate scholars’ perceptions of comic elements and even jokes in tragedy. Humour is traditionally associated with tragedy’s sister genre, Old Comedy, and so common comedic tropes appearing in tragic contexts are identified and analysed as potential sources of audience amusement. Euripides’ reciprocal parodic engagement with Aristophanic paracomedy is assessed, and this framework is extended further to address Euripides’ apparent parody of Sophoclean and Aeschylean tragedy too. Performance theory, and particularly that of theatre clowning, is introduced to account for certain characters’ rather idiosyncratic relationships to laughter and humour. An analysis of laughter and humour disputes the various aesthetic, ethical and affective arguments against comic interpretations of tragedy, simultaneously challenging inherited interpretations of humour that are perhaps grounded more in the cultural prejudices of receiving cultures than in the ancient texts themselves.
Models for dynamic networks with metadata
Keywords: science of science
open source
belief propagation
simulation
network metadata
bayesian inference
temporal networks
causal inference
graphical models
academic networks
stochastic block model
group detectability
statistical inference
variational inference

There is increasing understanding that many complex systems of interest – everything from the global economy, to social group dynamics, to biochemical processes in the brain – require holistic modelling, rather than the consideration of units of the population in isolation. Network science techniques, which commence by viewing the system as a set of vertices or nodes (the units of the population, e.g. individual people) and edges (the relationships between them, e.g. friendship), are one popular approach to do so.
Naturally, such complex systems express a wide array of important properties that we ought to account for when modelling them, beyond simply the presence or absence of a particular relationship. Most pertinently for this work, they evolve over time – i.e. they are dynamic – and the units of the population may have distinct properties, or attributes, which further differentiate them from each other. We define any such extra information we might possess outside of the simple node/edge paradigm to be metadata.
Despite the potential utility of such metadata, it is only quite recently that methods have begun to jointly model both network and metadata together. In this thesis, we provide a new class of models that do so — specifically, with the purpose of finding groups in networks that change over time. We describe distinct versions of this class of models that allow the networks to be weighted and directed, as well as avoid the potential issue of placing nodes with similar degrees in the same group.
In addition to elaborating such models, we derive novel requirements for the efficient detectability of groups given the presence of metadata — and in the process explain why a recent paper which claims to do the same for a similar static model is flawed. The inference method we leverage to investigate detectability is also highly scalable, and we further accelerate the process by proposing both a ‘greedy’ scheme, and a recursive procedure that effectively provides a top-down hierarchy of the network groups.
We conclude by using our models as one component of a larger method, that provides an entirely novel means of estimating the influence of an author. We use a causal framing of the problem that to our knowledge has not previously been explored in this context, and depends upon recent ideas from the causal inference literature.
Topics in sieve theory
Keywords: analytic number theory
sieve methods

This thesis is concerned with applications of sieve methods to two Diophantine problems.
The first problem requires us to prove the existence of a certain infinite configuration of sums of two squares. Namely, the aim is to exhibit two increasing sequences of integers ai and mj such that mj − ai = □ + □ for every 1 ≤ i ≤ j. This set-up has a geometric interpretation which arises naturally in the field of quantum chaos. We tackle this problem using a modified half-dimensional Maynard-Tao sieve, and present details of the argument in Chapter 2.
The second problem asks us to show that a certain Diophantine equation has few integer solutions. We approach this problem by adapting the polynomial sieve developed by Browning and using the work of Weil and Deligne to obtain appropriate estimates for various exponential sums which naturally arise. As a corollary to the main result, we will deduce that polynomials with integer coefficients have “small asymmetric additive energy,” a result which has various applications in the literature. We give the details of this argument in Chapter 3.
'Not infected with the Venime of the Times': the Rump Parliament and places of learning, 1649-53
Keywords: Hartlib Circle
Parliament
the Nominated Assembly
the Rump Parliament
the Long Parliament
history of education
British Civil Wars
ordination
republicanism
the Ministry
early modern
Committee for Regulating the Universities
the English Revolution

This thesis explores the role of the parliamentary state in places of education during the period of the Rump Parliament (1649-53) by focusing on the committee for regulating the universities (CRU). Although there are many studies devoted to education and its reform during this period, the role of the state in this sphere is largely overlooked. This thesis addresses this oversight, demonstrating that the Commonwealth government and the regimes of the 1640s and 1650s more widely were important agents in educational matters and were deeply involved in places of learning. The Rump’s priorities for schools and universities are analysed and it is shown that the government wished to work inside the traditional structure of educational institutions rather than to overhaul them.
This thesis also offers a fresh approach to the Commonwealth government and period. Historians often examine the Rump through its legislation and events at Westminster which results in a depiction of the government’s life as characterised by infrequent spasms of activity. The study below challenges this interpretation and argues that the regime ought to be analysed through the workings of its committees, like the CRU, and the implementation of its rule in institutional or local contexts. As is demonstrated, it is necessary to look at both the centre and the localities when discussing the Rump. This thesis thus focuses on both the members of government and those of educational establishments, examining the agency of the latter group and illustrating the widespread existence of cooperation and consensus in the period. To achieve its aims, this thesis adopts an archive-based approach and uses the records of numerous places of learning, including many not often included in histories of the period or education. New perspectives on both the Rump and key Commonwealth issues, including the ministry and propagation, emerge as a result.
Changing perceptions of Film Studies: How to increase uptake of A Level Film Studies in an inner London Academy
Keywords: MLT 2019
MLT

Working as head of Film and Media in a school with a traditionally low uptake of creative and arts-based subjects, I have been faced with the challenge of attempting to increase the uptake of Film Studies amongst the current year 11 cohort. Whilst the balance between creative art subjects and STEM being taught in schools is something that has been part of the national discussion about education in England for the last two decades, most of this focus has been on the drive to increase numbers and gender equality amongst the students opting to study STEM subjects. Despite the long-standing evidence that creative thinking is essential to student progress and learning in the classroom, not just to the creative subjects, but to their holistic learning, little has been written in terms of how we can best tackle negative views of arts subjects amongst disinterested groups. Having surveyed the year group as a whole at the beginning of the year, I created a sample group that reflected the year group in terms of gender and levels of interest in choosing Film Studies as one of their A level options, and across the year provided three interventions for this group, each aiming to tackle a misconception or driver of negative perceptions that emerged from focus groups and student surveys. This group, in comparison to the rest of the year who acted as a control group, showed sizable shifts in attitudes towards Film Studies, and whilst the true impact won't be known until options are finalised, the proportion of students intending or considering to study Film have increased significantly.
The lack of a breadth of Film Studies specific research, and the inability to definitively know if the interventions themselves, rather than just increased exposure to Film Studies as a prospect, were the true force for these changes limited the research. However, the findings did lead to potential solutions and actions for my department moving forwards.
The research pointed towards issues around motivation, parental and family attitudes towards the subject, as well as uncertainty of what the subject was and where it could lead students beyond their time in education. Whilst each of these elements are explored in more detail within the research, there are some overall solutions that seem to present themselves, particularly around exposure to the subject
Can goal-free problems be used to support students in solving goal-specific problems in the secondary mathematics classroom?
Keywords: MLT 2019
MLT

This research project explores the extent to which goal-free problems can be used to support Year 10 students in solving goal-specific problems in the domain of circle theorems. The study compares the performance of an intervention group working on goal-free problems (n = 51) with a control group (n = 46) on a variety of goal-specific problems at the end of a sequence of ten lessons. Issues within the affective domain, such as student confidence and enjoyment of lessons, are also compared through the use of questionnaires.
Findings from the assessment demonstrate that the intervention had a positive impact on students’ performance on multi-application circle theorem problems. However, no statistically significant difference was found between the control group and the intervention group on non-routine, multi-domain goal-specific problems. Analysis of questionnaire responses found that the intervention group found the sequence of lessons to be less challenging than the control group. However, analysis also highlighted several negative perceptions held by students towards goal-free problems which educators should be aware of if they intend to use goal-free problems in the classroom.
Developing effective English intervention strategies: To what extent does developing metacognitive awareness in lower attaining boys improve their self-regulation and self-efficacy?
Keywords: MLT 2019
MLT

Theory on gender and education is multifaceted and convoluted. Undeniably, boys continue to outperform girls in STEM subjects and comparatively underperform in English Language and Literature. Free School Meal (FSM) eligible White British, working-class boys have significantly lower levels of attainment than their peers. Saints College*, a mixed secondary school in London, does not buck this trend. This research explores the reasons for this discrepancy and attempts to address it by implementing an intervention strategy focused on metacognition during reading.
The rationale for focusing on metacognition was grounded in theory. Metacognition, or ‘thinking about thinking’, is essential for self-regulation. Evidence suggests a link between self-regulatory behaviours, self-efficacy and academic attainment. Interventions focused on improving metacognition - and thus self-regulatory behaviours - during reading are proven to have a high effect size. Improved literacy has the potential to bolster academic attainment across the board and improve longer term outcomes for pupils.
There were three components to this research. Firstly, a questionnaire was shared with a focus group of nine FSM eligible, low attaining boys to explore their perception of their self-efficacy. Then, informed by research, a six-week intervention focused on developing metacognition during reading was delivered and evaluated. To enable for comparison, the same intervention was delivered to eight girls of a similar demographic.
Findings from this research suggest that the boys have a negative opinion of their self-efficacy concerning self-regulatory behaviours. The intervention developed metacognitive awareness but did not secure transferability of these skills cross curricular. Whilst they did outperform the boys’ group, the girls were less receptive to the intervention. Consequently, further questions arise concerning the impact of social conditioning and the role of teachers’ perceptions in perpetuating the gender attainment gap.
*pseudonym