VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The role of the planar cell polarity pathway in branching morphogenesis
Keywords: Planar Cell Polarity
Lung Development
Branching Morphogenesis

The development of organs such as the lung and kidney occurs by branching morphogenesis. Changes in the cytoskeletal architecture, cell-cell adhesion and cell polarity are necessary for the formation of new branches. Interactions and reciprocal signalling between epithelial and mesenchymal cells mediate these organised cell movements that give rise to a complex system of tubes suitable for the transport of gas or fluids. Mutations that disrupt formation of either the correct number, or shape of epithelial branches, affect lung function. This, in turn, can lead to congenital abnormalities such as cystadenomatoid malformations, pulmonary hypertension or lung hypoplasia. Defects in lung architecture are also associated with adult lung disease, particularly in cases of idiopathic lung ﬁbrosis. Identifying the signaling pathways that drive epithelial tube formation will likely shed light on both congenital and adult lung disease. This study shows that mutations in the planar cell polarity (PCP) genes: Celsr1; Vangl2 and Scribble, lead to disrupted lung development and defects in lung architecture. Examination of Vangl2 mutant kidneys reveals similar impairment of branching morphogenesis. Detailed histological and immunocytochemical analysis reveals that lungs from Celsr1Crsh/Crsh, Vangl2Lp/Lp and ScribbleCrc/Crc mice are small and misshapen with fewer branches, and by late gestation exhibit thickened interstitial mesenchyme and defective saccular formation. Moreover, epithelial integrity is disrupted, cytoskeletal remodeling perturbed and mutant endoderm does not branch normally in response to the chemoattractant FGF10. In ex-vivo culture, inhibition of Rho kinase, an important downstream effector of the PCP signaling pathway, can mimic the branching defects observed in these three mouse mutants. Furthermore, all three proteins are present in restricted spatial domains within lung epithelium. ScribbleCrc/Crc lungs, the most severely affected line, exhibit additional defects in components of the tight and adherens junctions; this in turn affects lumen diameter. These findings show that components of the PCP pathway: Celsr1; Vangl2 and Scribble are required for normal foetal lung development, thereby revealing a novel signalling pathway critical for this process. Examination of postnatal mice was not possible as homozygous mutations result in embryonic lethality. However, an assessment of Vangl2Lp/+ mice reveals that loss of a single copy of Vangl2 is enough to cause defects in embryonic lung development that persist into adult life, affecting lung function. Similarly, Vangl2Lp/+ mice show a small but significant reduction in kidney glomeruli.
Investigations of suction caissons in dense sand
Keywords: sand
offshore
foundation

Offshore structures are used in a variety of applications ranging from the traditional oil and gas extraction facilities to emerging renewable energy concepts. These structures must be secured to the seabed in an efficient and cost effective manner. A novel approach is to use shallow inverted buckets as foundations, installed by suction, in place of the more usual piles. These foundations lead to cost savings through reduction in materials and in time required for installation. It is necessary to determine how these foundations perform under typical offshore loading conditions so that design calculations may be developed. This thesis presents experimental data from a comprehensive series of investigations aimed at determining the important mechanisms to consider in the design of these shallow foundations for dense sand. Initially the long term loading behaviour (e.g. wind and current) was investigated by conducting three degree of freedom loading {V:M/2R:H} tests on a foundation embedded in dry sand. The results were interpreted through existing work-hardening plasticity theories. The analysis of the data has suggested a number of improved modelling features. Cyclic and transient tests, representing wave loading, were carried out on a foundation embedded in an oil saturated sand. The novel feature of the cyclic loading was that a 'pseudo-random' load history (based on the 'NewWave' theory) was used to represent realistic loading paths. Of particular interest was the tensile load capacity of the foundation. The results observed suggested that for tensile loading serviceability requirements rather than capacity may govern design. Under combined-load cyclic conditions the results indicated that conventional plasticity theory would not provide a sufficient description of response. A new theory, termed 'continuous hyperplasticity' was used, reproducing the results with impressive accuracy. Surprisingly, under the conditions investigated, loading rate was found to have a negligible effect on response.
'Changing times': war and social transformation in Mid-Western Nepal
Keywords: embodiment and embodied change
war-time social processes
Maoism
Maoist base area
everyday life during war
Nepal
Bourdieu
agency in conflict
practice theory
post-conflict reconstruction
anthropology of war and conflict
conflict zone
generation and conflict
People's War
revolution
civilians and guerillas
social change
guerilla enclave
youth
civil war
peasants
habitus
post-conflict societies

This thesis is an ethnographic account of social change, triggered by the civil war in Nepal (1996-2006). Based on an ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Thabang, the war-time capital of the Maoist base area, this thesis explores the transformative impact of the conflict on people’s everyday lives and on the constitution of key hierarchies structuring Nepali society. Rather than focusing on violence and fear – the commonly researched themes in warzones – the thesis examines people’s everyday social and embodied practices during the war and its aftermath, arguing that these remain central to our understanding of war-time social processes and the ways in which they shape the contours of post-conflict society. By focusing on mundane practices – such as meat-eating and alcohol-drinking, raising livestock and worshipping gods – the thesis demonstrates how change at the micro-level is illustrative of a profound transformation in the social structures constituting Nepali society.
Theoretically, the thesis seeks to understand how the situation of war re-orders society: in this case, how people in the Maoist base area interiorized formerly transgressive norms and practices, and how these practices were normalized in the post-conflict environment. The research revealed that much of the change triggered by the conflict came as a result of the ‘exceptional’ times of war and the necessity to follow ‘rules that apply in times of crisis’. Thus, in adopting transgressive practices during the conflict, people were responding to the expediency of war-time rather than following Maoist war-time policies or ‘propaganda’. Furthermore, while adopting hitherto unimaginable practices and making them into habitual action, people transformed the rigid social structures, without necessarily intending to do so. The thesis puts particular stress on the centrality of unintended consequences in social change, the power of embodied practice in making change real, and the ways in which agency and structure are mutually constitutive.
Authority, states and persons: in the search for optimal reconciliation
Keywords: authority
respect
legitimacy
Liberalism

The problem of legitimate authority is widely regarded as fundamental to moral and political philosophy. This thesis aims to explain what the problem precisely is, and to offer a practical method for solving it. The starting point is a claim about the phenomenology of the person as an inherently authoritative agent: we are persons, as distinct from mere ‘things’, by virtue of the authority we possess over ourselves. This claim explains, I argue, why there is a problem of legitimate authority – why the exercise of state authority stands in need of justification – and what the problem precisely is: given the inherent tension between the authority of the state on the one hand, and the self-governing authority of persons on the other, the problem of legitimate authority is essentially that of creating the conditions for optimal reconciliation between them.
The bulk of the thesis is devoted to a search for a solution to this problem. The ideal solution lies in developing a concept which I call the Authorization Principle. In its most basic form, the principle states that the exercise of state authority is legitimate only when it is exercised to enforce arrangements that all citizens authorize the state to enforce. The conclusion of the thesis is that the principle should be formulated as follows: The exercise of state authority is legitimate insofar as it is exercised within the provisions of a constitutional arrangement constructed through a process that gives equal weight to all the epistemically undefeated concerns in the society regarding the conditions necessary for persons to exercise personal authority.
The solution proposed in the thesis for the problem of legitimate authority has three important implications. The first is that it is entirely within the capacity of ordinary democratic societies to solve the problem. The second is that there is no single legitimate way to govern a society. Standards for the legitimate use of state authority are in some way indexed to culture, ability and resources as well as to other aspects of a society’s unique circumstances. The third is that a society cannot settle the problem of legitimate authority once and for all. The state’s arrangement will require revision every so often in order to maintain the legitimacy of state authority.
Advancing human pose and gesture recognition
Keywords: machine learning
deep learning
gesture recognition
computer vision
human pose estimation

This thesis presents new methods in two closely related areas of computer vision: human pose estimation, and gesture recognition in videos.
In human pose estimation, we show that random forests can be used to estimate human pose in monocular videos. To this end, we propose a co-segmentation algorithm for segmenting humans out of videos, and an evaluator that predicts whether the estimated poses are correct or not. We further extend this pose estimator to new domains (with a transfer learning approach), and enhance its predictions by predicting the joint positions sequentially (rather than independently) in an image, and using temporal information in the videos (rather than predicting the poses from a single frame). Finally, we go beyond random forests, and show that convolutional neural networks can be used to estimate human pose even more accurately and efficiently. We propose two new convolutional neural network architectures, and show how optical flow can be employed in convolutional nets to further improve the predictions.
In gesture recognition, we explore the idea of using weak supervision to learn gestures. We show that we can learn sign language automatically from signed TV broadcasts with subtitles by letting algorithms 'watch' the TV broadcasts and 'match' the signs with the subtitles. We further show that if even a small amount of strong supervision is available (as there is for sign language, in the form of sign language video dictionaries), this strong supervision can be combined with weak supervision to learn even better models.
Power and happiness: C.B. Macpherson’s overlooked contribution
Keywords: happiness
internal impediments
ideology
democratic theory
individualism
power

Although theories of ideology or ‘internal impediments’ have been sidelined in most academic and popular discourse, they remain vital to the improvement of democratic politics. This essay argues as much insofar as theories of ideology have been dismissed on the grounds that their supposed reliance on conceptions of human nature necessarily undermines their potential contribution to human improvement. The argument is advanced in the context of a now obscure debate surrounding the work of C. B. Macpherson. Macpherson provides a framework which, for the very reasons it is dismissed by those interested in developing theories of ideology, remains alive to objections against such theories typically considered decisive. These are that the conceptions of human nature upon which such theories rely imply an essentialist and egoistic individualism resulting in an inability to appreciate the extent to which human beings are shaped by social and historical context. Using Aristotle as a counter-example to such charges, and in demonstrating Macpherson’s heavy reliance upon a relevantly similar form of individualist perfectionism, the dissertation provides reason to rethink the intellectual marginalization both of theories of ideology and of Macpherson’s political philosophy insofar as this has been effectuated or is considered justified by the claims here disputed.
Reporting from ‘the field’:  foreign correspondents and the international news coverage of East Africa
Keywords: communications
media
Africa
Sudan
international news
Kenya
newswires
newspapers
Uganda
Bourdieu
news production
Reuters
newsroom ethnography

There has been significant academic criticism of the international news coverage of Africa, but little or no first-hand research on the forces that create this news. This thesis draws on 51 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic work with practicing foreign correspondents in Sudan, Kenya and Uganda to explore the question: how can we explain and theorise the production of international news on East Africa?
The thesis argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory, and its analytical toolbox of ‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’, can be meaningfully used to examine international journalistic practice. Field theory has been widely and productively used to understand domestic news production, but it has not yet been employed to empirically investigate journalistic production in the global sphere.
The analysis is presented in three sections, each of which focuses on a different ‘layer’ of the international news system: the global field, where newswires compete for clients and capital; the national field ‘back home’ where traditional, nation based news outlets are based; and, finally, the local and immediate site where foreign correspondents work.
Each of these layers is explored through an in depth case study of a major news producer/group of producers working in East Africa. The first and most substantial section examines the global journalistic field, and the position and practices of the Reuters newswire within this field. The second examines the foreign correspondents who report on Africa for print outlets in the UK. The final section presents two case studies of correspondents at work, negotiating a local news ecology: the election violence in Kenyan (2007-8), and the international coverage of the Darfur crisis. The discussion explores the fluidity between these three layers.
Each analysis section stands alone as an investigations of major news producers in Africa today, and the forces that influence their work. Together, they build the argument that field theory is a useful approach to conceptualising the contemporary global news system, and examining journalistic practices within this. The main strengths of the theory lie in its notion of habitus; the extent to which it can incorporate and explain change; and its ability to link macro level phenomenon with micro level practice. The theory is ideally suited to capture and study the way in which foreign correspondents negotiate a complex and fluid global news system.
Pension fund capitalism in Europe: institutional organisation and governance of Finnish pension insurance companies
Keywords: Europe
organisation fields
investments
governance
institutional theory
pension funds
pension insurance companies

Pension capital is the single largest block of capital in the global domain of finance and a transformative social force. However, the studies on pension fund capitalism have been geographically limited. Although vast pools of pension capital have been generated outside the Anglo-American institutional environments, we still have little knowledge on the social construction of pension fund capitalism outside that context. The purpose of the study is to develop theoretical-methodological tools for studying the institutional differences in pension fund investments with habitual institutionalist theory at the level of organisation fields, and to apply these tools in an empirical case study that has theoretical relevance concerning the recent financialisation of European pension provision. The case study is focussed on the field of Finnish pension insurance companies that execute the nationally mandatory partly funded TyEL pension scheme. The case study includes a single case analysis at the organisation field level with embedded case analyses on the investment processes in two companies. The study is based on multiple sources of textual and interview data gathered and analysed with content analysis. It is argued that the institutional life of Finnish pension insurance company investments illustrates divergence from the Anglo-American pension fund capitalism and has reinforced elastic institutional solutions especially in domains of governance and regulation even under Europe-wide financialisation pressures. The Finnish case shows that there are alternative institutional solutions for various domains of pension fund capitalism, but the strong Europe-wide trends have all characterised recent institutional change in the TyEL field as well. It is concluded that although the European shift towards pension fund capitalism with the generation of increasingly independent portfolio investors with increasingly principle-based regulation and risk-based supervision has not necessarily implied strong institutional convergence, the European pension investors are likely to share a number of common questions in the future.
The electrochemical detection and characterisation of single nanoparticles
Keywords: Nanoparticle Detection
Nanoelectrochemistry

This thesis presents experimental work with the primary aim of developing new approaches for the detection and characterisation of nanoparticles via electrochemical methods. The first chapter introduces the fundamental aspects of electrochemistry while the second chapter discusses the need for nanoparticle detection methods and the nonelectrochemical and electrochemical techniques that are currently used in the measurement of nanoparticles.
A novel way to quantify silver nanoparticles in aqueous solution is proposed via nanoparticle-electrode impact experiments. In this technique a suitably potentiostatted electrode is immersed in a nanoparticle solution so as to bring about the oxidation or reduction of a single nanoparticle upon its collision with the electrode surface. This “direct” nanoparticle impact technique is then employed to detect laboratory synthesised silver nanoparticles in seawater. It is further shown that this method is capable of sizing silver nanoparticles contained in a commercially available cleaning product. Commercial silver nanoparticles are subsequently monitored via a sticking and stripping technique where homemade gold electrodes fabricated from CDs are immersed in a seawater sample spiked with nanoparticles prior to stripping voltammetry.
The reduction of hydrogen peroxide on the surface of silver nanoparticles impacting upon an electrode is also examined. This “indirect” nanoparticle detection method is shown to provide an accurate route to nanoparticle sizing. A Fickian model is subsequently proposed to describe nanoparticle transport to the substrate electrode in both direct and indirect nanoparticle detection techniques. The importance of determining the proportion of nanoparticles which adhere to the electrode surface upon impact is highlighted and the sticking coefficient of a gold nanoparticle at a carbon surface determined. This technique to monitor nanoparticle sticking is optimised by chemical modification of the substrate electrode in order to achieve a “sticky” surface improving the rate of silver nanoparticle sticking.
Finally, the nanoparticle collision method is shown to be applicable to C60 nanoparticles where their detection and sizing is achieved in non-aqueous conditions. The methods developed in this thesis make a significant contribution to the promising application of electrochemical techniques in the detection and characterisation of single nanoparticles.
Highly comparative time-series analysis
Keywords: classification
high throughput methods
time-series analysis

In this thesis, a highly comparative framework for time-series analysis is developed. The approach draws on large, interdisciplinary collections of over 9000 time-series analysis methods, or operations, and over 30 000 time series, which we have assembled. Statistical learning methods were used to analyze structure in the set of operations applied to the time series, allowing us to relate different types of scientific methods to one another, and to investigate redundancy across them. An analogous process applied to the data allowed different types of time series to be linked based on their properties, and in particular to connect time series generated by theoretical models with those measured from relevant real-world systems. In the remainder of the thesis, methods for addressing specific problems in time-series analysis are presented that use our diverse collection of operations to represent time series in terms of their measured properties. The broad utility of this highly comparative approach is demonstrated using various case studies, including the discrimination of pathological heart beat series, classification of Parkinsonian phonemes, estimation of the scaling exponent of self-affine time series, prediction of cord pH from fetal heart rates recorded during labor, and the assignment of emotional content to speech recordings. Our methods are also applied to labeled datasets of short time-series patterns studied in temporal data mining, where our feature-based approach exhibits benefits over conventional time-domain classifiers. Lastly, a feature-based dimensionality reduction framework is developed that links dependencies measured between operations to the number of free parameters in a time-series model that could be used to generate a time-series dataset.