VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
“Enough! or too much”:  forms of textual excess in Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey
Keywords: cities
syntax
Edinburgh
French Revolution
balance
Burke
Malthus
De Quincey
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Kublai Khan
Sospiria de Profundis
Prelude
London
flux and reflux
illuminated books
labyrinth
sublime
editing
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Laocoon
Biographia Literaria
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Piranesi
fragmentation
excess
prose and poetry
illustration
population
limits
Blake

My thesis explores the potential and the peril of Romantic literature's increasingly complex forms through a close comparative study of the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. These writers exemplify the Romantic predicament of how to make vision manifest – how to communicate one's imaginative and intellectual expansiveness without diminishing it. They sought different strategies for increasing the capacity of literary form, ostensibly in the hope of communicating more: clarifying meaning, increasing accessibility and intensifying original experience. But textual expansion – materially, stylistically and intellectually – often threatens more opportunities for confused and partial meanings to proliferate, overwhelming the reader by dividing texts and undermining attempts at coherent thought. Expansion thus becomes excess, with all its worrying associations of superfluity. To further complicate matters, Burke's influential tenet of the Sublime makes a virtue out of excess and obscurity, raising the problematic spectre of deliberately confused/confusing texts that embody an aesthetic of incomprehension. I explore these paradoxes through four types of 'textual excess' demonstrated by the writers under discussion: firstly, the tension between poetry and prose adjuncts, such as prefaces and notes, in Wordsworth and Coleridge; secondly, De Quincey's indulgent verbosity and struggle to control the freeing shapelessness of prose; thirdly, Wordsworth's and De Quincey's parallel experiences of revision as both uncontrollably diffusive and statically concentrated; and lastly, Blake's more deliberate, systematic attempt to enact a literary Sublime in which the reader is forced out of passivity by the competing demands of verbal and visual media. All are motivated and thwarted in varying degrees by their anxious preoccupation with saying "Enough", and the difficulty of determining when this becomes “Too much”. These authorial dilemmas also incorporate larger concerns with man's (over)ambition at a time of rapid and unprecedented economic, social and intellectual acceleration from the Enlightenment to industrialism. The fear that the concept and process of 'progress', or 'improvement', marks deficiency rather than fulfilment haunts Romantic writers.
Statistical analysis of natural selection in RNA virus populations
Keywords: adaptation
influenza
RNA virus
Site Frequency Spectrum
McDonald Kreitman Test
evolution

A key goal of modern evolutionary biology is the identification of genes or genome regions that have been targeted by natural selection. Methods for detecting natural selection utilise the information sampled in contemporary gene sequences and test for deviation from the null hypothesis of neutrality. One such method is the McDonald Kreitman test (MK test), which detects the the molecular 'footprint' left by natural selection by considering the frequency of observed mutations within the sampled population. In this thesis I investigate the applicability of the MK test to viral populations and develop several new methods based on the original MK test. In chapter 2, I use a combination of simulation and methodological improvements to show that the MK test can have low error when applied to analysis of RNA virus populations. Then, in chapter 3, I develop an extension of the MK test with the purpose of estimating rates of adaptive fixation for all genes of the human influenza A virus subtypes H1N1 and H3N2. My results are consistent with previous studies on selection in influenza virus populations, and provide a new perspective on the evolutionary dynamics of human influenza virus. In chapter 4 I develop a formal statistical framework based, on the MK test, for calculating the number of non neutral sites at any frequency range in the site frequency spectrum. In this framework, I introduce a new method for reconstructing the site frequency spectrum that incorporates sampling error and allows for the inclusion of prior knowledge. Using this new framework I show that the majority of nucleotide sites in hepatitis C virus sequences sampled during chronic infection represent deleterious mutations. Finally, in chapter 5 I use the generalised framework introduced in chapter 4 to develop a statistic for evaluating the deleterious mutation load of a population. I apply this test sequences that represent 96 RNA virus genes and show that my approach has comparable power to equivalent phylogenetic methods. In this thesis I have developed computationally efficient methods for analysis of genetic data from virus populations. It is my hope that these methods will become useful given the explosion in sequence data that has accompanied recent improvements in sequencing technology.
Invisibility, struggle and visibility: women workers' strategies of survival in the informal sector
Keywords: Turkey
informal sector
gender
survival strategies
informal employment
women

Across the world, women constitute the bottom segments of the informal labour market hierarchy, and the story is no different for Turkish women, except they are further constrained by a patriarchal family culture and corporatist welfare state structure which favours high-skilled workers in full-time employment. A reading of the literature on the reasons for participating in the informal sector suggested that workers either end up in the informal sector as a result of structural factors, such as high unemployment, horizontal and vertical labour market discrimination and limited job opportunities for the low-skilled and low-educated, or they actively chose to participate in the labour market to seize the opportunities it provides, such as evading tax and/or bureaucratic costs, or testing out business ideas. However, this dichotomous understanding provided little scope, if any, to understand why women also entered the informal sector, in ever growing numbers and what the gender-specific constraints and opportunities in the informal sector are. Against this background, this thesis aims to show that this dichotomous theorisation of the informal sector is an exaggeration of reality, and that women workers position presents a middle ground, in which they recognise the constraints on their ability to improve their lives but they are also not powerless. Hence, by focusing on the variety of survival strategies used by women workers in the informal sector, the thesis attempts to show the choice among these strategies, including the conditions in which these strategies can be adopted and the barriers to do so.
The computation of Greeks with multilevel Monte Carlo
Keywords: pathwise sensitivities
Financial derivatives
Differentiation of stochastic processes
Barrier options
Computational complexity
multilevel Monte Carlo
Sensitivities of SDE solutions
Binary options
Digital options
simulation
Option pricing
Lookback options
Greeks
European options
Risk
Vibrato Monte Carlo
stochastic differential equations
Monte Carlo simulations
Asian options

In mathematical finance, the sensitivities of option prices to various market parameters, also known as the “Greeks”, reflect the exposure to different sources of risk. Computing these is essential to predict the impact of market moves on portfolios and to hedge them adequately. This is commonly done using Monte Carlo simulations. However, obtaining accurate estimates of the Greeks can be computationally costly.
Multilevel Monte Carlo offers complexity improvements over standard Monte Carlo techniques. However the idea has never been used for the computation of Greeks. In this work we answer the following questions: can multilevel Monte Carlo be useful in this setting? If so, how can we construct efficient estimators? Finally, what computational savings can we expect from these new estimators?
We develop multilevel Monte Carlo estimators for the Greeks of a range of options: European options with Lipschitz payoffs (e.g. call options), European options with discontinuous payoffs (e.g. digital options), Asian options, barrier options and lookback options. Special care is taken to construct efficient estimators for non-smooth and exotic payoffs. We obtain numerical results that demonstrate the computational benefits of our algorithms.
We discuss the issues of convergence of pathwise sensitivities estimators. We show rigorously that the differentiation of common discretisation schemes for Ito processes does result in satisfactory estimators of the the exact solutions’ sensitivities. We also prove that pathwise sensitivities estimators can be used under some regularity conditions to compute the Greeks of options whose underlying asset’s price is modelled as an Ito process.
We present several important results on the moments of the solutions of stochastic differential equations and their discretisations as well as the principles of the so-called “extreme path analysis”. We use these to develop a rigorous analysis of the complexity of the multilevel Monte Carlo Greeks estimators constructed earlier. The resulting complexity bounds appear to be sharp and prove that our multilevel algorithms are more efficient than those derived from standard Monte Carlo.
Applications of DABSO in metal catalysis
Keywords: chemistry

Chapter 1 discusses the importance of the sulfonyl moiety in biological compounds and the developments in the use of sulfur dioxide and sulfur dioxide donors in metal catalysis and organic synthesis.
Chapter 2 focuses on the serendipitous discovery, optimisation and exploration of a route towards the synthesis of sulfones via an N-aminosulfonamide intermediate exploiting both palladium-catalysed aminosulfonylation and the predisposition of N aminosulfonamides to decompose to the sulfinate salt (Scheme 1).
Scheme 1
Chapter 3 investigates the synthesis of benzosultams with an aryl-N-SO2 linkage. A range of benzosultams and its derivatives were prepared after optimisation of a synthetic sequence involving palladium-catalysed aminosulfonylation and a subsequent Buchwald– Hartwig coupling (Scheme 2).
Scheme 2
Chapter 4 describes efforts towards the synthesis of a benzosultam with an aryl-SO2-N linkage through various precursors and metal-catalysed routes using DABSO as the sulfur dioxide source (Figure 1).
Figure 1
Chapter 5 provides a summary of this thesis and outlines possibilities for future work.
Chapter 6 provides experimental details and data for compounds discussed in this thesis.
Appendix A details a brief investigation into the synthesis of N aminosulfonamides from heteroaryl iodides as an extension of the Willis group palladium-catalysed aminosulfonylation reaction (Scheme 3).
Scheme 3
Appendix B presents 1H and 13C NMR spectra as well as X-ray crystallographic data of key compounds.
The performance of jacked pipes
Keywords: pipe jacking

Pipejacking is a tunnel construction technique which is increasing in popularity, but fundamental research is necessary to fully understand the extent of its possible uses and limitations. This dissertation reports on laboratory research into the performance of reinforced concrete pipes, assessment of pipe joints and the use of joint packing materials. The research has addressed specific problems which the tunnelling fraternity have raised. Model pipes have been constructed at scales of 1:6 and 1:10.5 using reinforced microconcrete and they have been tested in either a sand filled chamber or between supporting yokes. Current British Standard tests have been used as a control on the quality of pipe manufacture. Data have been recorded of changes in soil pressures, pipe geometry and strains induced in the pipes. The tests have investigated deformation of pipes, deflection angles between consecutive pipes, distribution of stress concentrations and the effects of the use of joint packing materials on allowable jacking loads and induced stress magnitudes in the pipes. A review of current pipejacking practice is presented and recommendations for the control and supervision of pipejacking operations are made. The conclusions include recommendations for fieldwork monitoring and implications of this stage of the research to industry. Recommendations are made for maximum installation jacking loads for any given deflection angle between pipes. The prediction of friction angles at the pipe soil interface have been assessed at different soil stress levels and new recommendations are made. The effects of cyclic loading on the pipejacking system and transfer from jacking load to ground loading once the pipes are installed are presented. The criteria used in the selection of a recommended joint packing material for use in jacking operations have been included. Failure modes of pipes are stated and recommendations are made for pipe design, installation and monitoring to predict and prevent such failures. This dissertation is the report on the first stage of an overall programme of research which is now set to progress with monitoring of pipejacking operations on several construction sites.
Genetic variation and sexual system evolution in the annual mercuries
Keywords: phylogeny
population genetics
mating-system
Mercurialis annua
androdioecy

The Mercurialis annua L. (Euphorbiaceae) species complex comprises a group of closely related lineages that present a wide range of sexual-systems, making it a valuable model for the study of plant sexual-system evolution. Within this polyploid complex, diploid populations are dioecious, and polyploid populations either monoecious or androdioecious (males coexist with functional hermaphrodites). The primary aim of this thesis was to use patterns of genetic diversity to elucidate the evolutionary origin and maintenance of the sexual-system diversity in M. annua. The phylogeny of the M. annua complex was reconstructed using chloroplast and ITS DNA sequence. This, in conjunction with morphometric analysis, showed that both hexaploid M. annua, and a novel species from the Canary Islands (newly described here as Mercurialis canariensis), were allopolyploid in origin. Such an origin for hexaploid M. annua suggests that androdioecy may have been able to arise in this group as a consequence of hybridisation between a monoecious lineage, tetraploid M. annua, and a dioecious lineage, M. huetii. Artificial crosses were used to show that hexaploid M. annua has disomic marker inheritance, and a statistical approach was developed to quantify genetic diversity and differentiation in polyploids with disomic inheritance. Strong gradients in genetic (allozyme) diversity at a pan-European scale were used to infer the existence of separate glacial refugia for dioecious and monoecious races of M. annua, at the eastern and western ends of the Mediterranean basin, respectively. A metapopulation model had previously been proposed to explain the ecological maintenance of androdioecy in M. annua. Here, population-level patterns of genetic diversity were used as an indirect test of this model. The discovery of lower within-population diversity, and of greater genetic differentiation between populations, for monoecious populations than for androdioecious populations was consistent with the metapopulation model, and suggests that androdioecy is maintained by the occurrence of regular local extinction.
Formal relationships in sequential object systems
Keywords: JML
object oriented
design-by-contract
Java
computing
specification
formal methods
DbC
type system

Formal specifications describe the behaviour of object-oriented systems precisely, with the intent to capture all properties necessary for correctness. Relationships between objects, and in a broader sense the relationship between whole components, may not be adequately captured by specifications. One critical component of specifications having a role in relationships are invariants which define a constraint between multiple objects. If an object's invariant relies on external objects for its conditions, correct operations which abide by their specifications modifying these external objects may violate the constraint. Such an invariant defines a relationship between multiple objects which is unsound since it does not adequately describe the responsibilities which the objects in the relationship have to each other.
The root cause of this correctness loophole is the failure of specifications to capture such relationships adequately as well as their correctness requirements. This thesis addresses this shortcoming in a number of ways, both for individual objects in a sequential environment, and between concurrent components which are defined as specialized object types. The proposed Colleague Technique [29] defines sound invariants between two object types using classical Design-by-Contract [35] methodologies. Additional invariant conditions introduced through the technique ensure that no correct operation may produce a post-state which does not satisfy all invariants satisfied by the pre-state.
Relationships between objects, as well as their correct specification and management, are the subjects of this thesis. Those relationships between objects which can be described by invariants are made sound with the Colleague Technique, or the lightweight ownership type system that accompanies it. Behavioural correctness beyond these can be addressed with specifications in a similar manner to sequential systems without concurrency, in particular with the use of runtime assertion checking [11].
Control of cell growth in root hairs
Keywords: RSL4 gene targets

During development plant cells acquire different shapes and often these shapes are correlated with their function. To understand how these cell shapes and forms develop, it is necessary to understand the underlying regulatory mechanisms of cell growth. The growth of root hair cells is a good example of cells undergoing localized cell expansion to acquire their final form. In Arabidopsis two bHLH transcription factors RHD6 and its target RSL4 have been identified as key regulators of the initiation and elongation phases of root hair (H) cell development. However in order to obtain a better understanding of this RHD6-RSL4 transcriptional pathway controlling root hair growth, the characterization of the immediate targets of RSL4 is necessary. Here I describe the use of a glucocorticoid inducible expression system coupled with the microarray analysis to identify the direct targets of RSL4. Thirty four putative direct target genes of RSL4 were identified. I assessed the requirement of nine of these genes by characterising the phenotypes of plants homozygous for the loss of function alleles. Plants homozygous for loss of function mutations in AT1G22620/SAC1, AT1G35670/CPK11/CDPK2, AT1G30870/PRX7 and AT5G03540/EXO70A1 (44% of the genes analysed) exhibited defects in root hair growth. Taken together my results not only identified potential RSL4 target genes but also demonstrated that RSL4 controls root hair growth by regulating genes that encode proteins involved in cell signalling, vesicle trafficking and cell wall modification.
‘Every Age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage’: art and the sacred journey in Britain, c. 1790 – 1850
Keywords: art history
material and visual culture
religion
nineteenth century
pilgrimage
Britain

This thesis examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination in Britain from the years 1790 to 1850. Historically, distinctions between understandings of pilgrimage as motif, metaphor, artistic process, and actual journey have been blurred to varying degrees, resulting in the creation of images that were at once narratives, memorials, and stimuli for contemplative journeys from pictorial space to imagination. In the first half of the nineteenth century, religious architecture, sacred landscapes, and the emblematic figure of the pilgrim with coat, hat, and scrip functioned as temporal reminders of a promised land to come, as mediated through artistic practice. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated visual sources, I contend that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. This study draws out the various levels at which pilgrimage engaged the visual imagination. In doing so it offers a detailed perspective on the conjunction of content, form, meaning, and process for artists and theorists, as notions of the transfer of ‘spirit’ from sacred space to represented space re-emerged as a key aspect of the theological and artistic discourse of the period. Chapter 1 outlines the antiquarian dissemination of medieval pilgrimage texts and images. I suggest that an awareness of pilgrimage as embodying the real and imagined emerged with the recovery of allegorical texts, histories of actual pilgrimages, and an interest in pilgrimage souvenirs. The discussion moves on to intersections between pilgrimage and religious art in Chapters 2 - 4, including the idea of painting as pilgrimage, as demonstrated through specific case studies, and the refashioning of relics and religious ruins as contemporary sites of pilgrimage (Chapter 5).