VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Anglo-American relations in the period of the Chamberlain premiership May 1937 -May 1940: the relationship between naval strategy and foreign policy
Keywords: Anglo-American relations
foreign policy
naval strategy
Chamberlain

This thesis traces the development of Anglo-American naval relations throughout the Chamberlain premiership and the various attempts that were made during this period to extend and broaden the existing level of cooperation in the hope that it might be used for politico-strategic purposes. It deals in some depth with the background to and course of Eden's various initiatives to the Roosevelt Administration in the six months following the July 7th incident of 1937 and explains why his attempts to construct some form of naval partnership with the United States evoked such opposition from within the ranks of the British Government. In this connection, Chamberlain's rather ambivalent role in Anglo-American relations and the contrast between Eden and himself in their use of different methods, style and policy is closely examined in the first half of the thesis. After Eden's resignation and until appeasement became discredited, Anglo-American naval cooperation continued to be a mainly technical rather than strategic nature. In the last few months of peace, however, the British again looked to the Americans for strategic assistance and tried unsuccessfully to encourage them to deploy their fleet in the Western Pacific in order to counter the threat of the Japanese in the Far East. The thesis goes on to explore the changing naval relationship between Britain and the United States after the outbreak of the Second World War and how it led to greater involvement between them on detailed day-to-day technical matters related to the war in Europe.
Although predominantly a study in the formation of British policy, the thesis has also drawn extensively on the official American records in an attempt to establish that a close link existed between naval strategy and foreign policy in Anglo-American relations during this period.
Extreme waves, overtopping and flooding at sea defences
Keywords: wave basin calibration
acoustic Doppler velocimetry
extreme waves
wave kinematics
focused wave groups
wave harmonic structure
laser doppler anemometry
wave runup
Wave overtopping

This thesis describes experiments that were carried out using focused wave groups in the UK Coastal Research Facility (UKCRF). Considerable effort was put into calibrating the UKCRF to determine the relationship between the input signals sent to the paddles and the waves generated in the facility. Focused wave groups of various sizes and phases, based on NewWave theory were generated, and measurements were made of the resulting surface elevation data, water particle kinematics, wave runup and overtopping volumes. NewWave theory models the profile of extreme waves in a Gaussian (random) sea. The thesis describes the first time this model has been applied in the context of coastal wave transformation. A method for the separation of the underlying harmonic structure of a focused wave group is described and results presented. This technique has been used in relatively deep water but is shown to work successfully in the coastal zone until wave overturning. A method has been devised to provide a theoretical Stokes-like expansion of the free and bound waves to model the surface elevation and water particle kinematics of the focused wave groups. Satisfactory agreement is achieved between the theoretical predictions of UKCRF measurements. Suggestions are made for an improved model. The underlying harmonic structure of the focused wave groups is presented as stacked time histories that give insight into the wave transformation process from deep to shallow water. Particular attention is paid to the low frequency wave generated as the wave group interacts with the beach. This is compared to the low frequency wave that is generated by a solitary wave in the UKCRF. Runup and overtopping measurements are in reasonable agreement with predictions based on certain empirical formulae, but not others. These comparisons are useful in identifying those formulae able to predict runup and overtopping of extreme waves in the coastal zone.
Chinese daughters negotiating contemporary norms and traditional filial obligation
Keywords: Emotion work
Intergenerational relationships

In the past, Chinese normative values deprived daughters of education, choice and autonomy, relegating them to a dependent domestic role within a rigid family hierarchy. This is no longer the norm. Today, Chinese daughters are widely educated and many are working outside the home, becoming financial assets to their families. Despite this, gendered expectations concerning filial obligation have not abated, and perhaps surprisingly given their modern lifestyles and financial contributions, Chinese daughters continue to accept this responsibility, including caregiving for ageing parents.
The aim of this thesis is to explore the nature of the current caregiving paradigm between Chinese daughters, their parents and parents-in-law. It seeks to understand why Chinese daughters continue to undertake filial obligation when they are no longer dependent on the family; how they manage the practical discharge of filial obligation; and the ways in which traditional filial obligation have shifted. In furtherance of this exploration, in 2011 and 2012, 58 Chinese women and 6 Filipina domestic helpers were interviewed in Hong Kong and Singapore. Thematic analysis was performed on the transcribed data. Symbolic interactionism, caregiving motivation models, and Hochschild's (1983) theory of emotion management provided the conceptual and theoretical framework for the research.
Drawing from the data, a support and care typology was developed reflecting the varying levels of daughters' filial support and their motivations for providing this support. Among these respondents, the core belief in "duty" has not fundamentally changed from that of their parents' generation. However, feelings of affection and gratitude, the strength of traditional or contemporary norms, and one’s self-image together with emotion work, moderated the duration and quality of care daughters were willing to provide. These factors may also determine whether caregiving is outsourced to foreign domestic helpers, or whether parents and in-laws are placed in nursing homes, and the nature of care provided thereafter.
Choosing while black: examining Afro-Caribbean families' engagement with school choice in Birmingham
Keywords: education
ethnicity
school choice

Over the past twenty years, parental choice has become the favoured Government policy governing school allocation and the dominant legislative approach for improving educational attainment. The existing sociological research on school choice has primarily focused on the ways in which families of different socioeconomic backgrounds have engaged with the process of listing preferences for secondary schools; while class has been emphasised, the choice processes of ethnic minorities have received little attention. Yet the persistent educational challenges faced by Afro-Caribbean students across class boundaries since the early years of migration to England raise questions about whether choice policies’ promise of improved academic performance extends to all ethnic groups. This study focuses on Afro-Caribbean families and their engagement with the process of selecting secondary schools in Birmingham. Twenty individual families in semi-structured interviews and ten additional mothers in two focus groups shared their experiences of listing school preferences. To develop a fuller understanding of how these Afro-Caribbean families made their school choices, this study draws upon Courtney Bell’s (2005) application of ‘choice sets’ to education. Families’ choice sets – the schools which they perceived to be available options – were shaped by various factors, including past school experiences, the schools available in the local authority, and Birmingham’s school allocation criteria. Additionally, geographic considerations, the ethnic mix of a schools’ student population, and families’ access to social networks also influenced which schools families saw as possibilities. Ultimately, while there was no single ‘Afro-Caribbean’ way of selecting schools, this study highlights the circumstances and structures faced by many Afro-Caribbean families which constrained their choice sets, and consequently, the schools to which their children were allocated. Though this thesis is limited in its generalisability, its conclusions lay the foundations for future research into the ways in which ethnic identity is lived in the educational context.
Beyond borders: political marginalisation of Congolese young people in Uganda
Keywords: politial participation
refugee young people

This thesis combines ethnographic methods with feminist political analysis to examine Congolese young people’s decision-making roles in families, households, communities and policy spaces in Kampala and Kyaka II refugee settlement, Uganda. As refugees and young people, research subjects face many structural constraints. However, their diverse experiences defy homogenising discourses of marginality as an inherent, fixed characteristic. Instead, this thesis develops and applies a conceptual framework of political marginalisation as a dynamic process in multiple spaces.
Research findings show that young people’s decision-making roles vis-à-vis resource distribution and division of labour are relational and contextual. Their multiple subject positions and relationships in overlapping networks affect differential decision-making roles. In particular, social age and gender are major axes of decision-making processes. Analyses of inter-linkages across patterns of relationships reveal that research subjects in peer networks and intergenerational household networks with independent resources have more decision-making opportunities at household, community and policy levels than their counterparts in intergenerational family networks. This contradicts assumptions that young people without their biological parents are inherently ‘marginalised’, and highlights the political importance of decision-making processes in perceived ‘private’ spaces, such as families and households.
Structure and power relationships thus situate decision-making processes and affect available choices, but they cannot solely explain political roles and behaviour. This thesis also stresses the importance of agentic beliefs, intentions and aspirations. As actors in dynamic marginalisation processes, some young people attempt to access central spaces through education, remunerated formal employment and physical mobility. Others use marginal and transitional spaces to provide alternatives to the status quo.
Such creativity and productivity occasion possibilities of political change. However, UNHCR’s protection and assistance responses do not facilitate these transformative processes because of their focus on perceived essentialist characteristics of monolithic ‘marginals’. This thesis offers an alternative approach that recognises refugee young people’s political agency, as well as the structural and power dynamics that constrain their decision-making opportunities.
The emergence of regional security organisations. A comparative study on ECOWAS and SADC.
Keywords: African politics
ECOWAS
regional organisations
peacekeeping
regional integration
SADC
humanitarian intervention
regionalism

The emergence of regional security organisations during the 1990s in Africa proved to be of great significance for the lives of many Africans, including those living in conflict-torn countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire or the Democratic Republic of Congo, but, at the same time, this phenomenon has been understudied. This dissertation explores why regional security organisations with an agenda of democratic governance emerged in Africa in the 1990s. This question is answered with two in-depth case studies on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Driven by an empirical puzzle, this study is both hypothesis-testing and hypothesis generating. The study starts by laying out the different possible factors put forward by several bodies of theory in international relations to explain the emergence of ECOWAS and SADC as security organisations. These hypotheses are then tested throughout the history and the evolution of ECOWAS and SADC in order to highlight the circumstances of their creation and their qualified failure as economic communities. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the security and democracy mandates entrusted to ECOWAS and SADC by its member states based on the study of the legal texts that outline the specific objectives of each regional security organisation and the tools they were given to implement their mandates. The study finally analyses the implementation records of ECOWAS and SADC in order to assess the commitment of their member states to their new democracy and security mandate. The research concludes with the two following hypotheses: 1) A security agenda cannot emerge without the involvement of the regional hegemon. 2) What the regional hegemon can do, including affecting the speed of the transformation, is constrained by the acceptance of its leadership by its neighbours (legitimacy) and by state weakness (capability).
Yiddish periodicals published by displaced persons, 1946-1949
Keywords: Holocaust
Yiddish literature
displaced persons

This thesis is intended to demonstrate the existence of a vibrant cultural and literary life among the survivors of the Holocaust during their time as Displaced Persons (DPs) in Germany, Austria and Italy. It delineates their historical background, presents theoretical problems with which they may have been confronted, and explains the lack of previous academic research into their creative production. It then analyzes three representative literary journals from the period 1946 to 1949, when the DP population was at its peak: In Gang: khoydesh-zhurnal far literatur un kunst / khoydesh-zhurnal far literatur, kultur un gezelshaftlekhe problemen (In Progress: Monthly Journal of Literature and Art / Monthly Journal of Literature, Culture and Societal Problems), published in Rome between March 1947 and February 1949; Fun letstn khurbn: tsaytshrift far geshikhte fun yidishn lebn beysn natsi-rezhim (From the Last Extermination: Journal for the History of the Jewish People During the Nazi Regime), published in Munich between August 1946 and December 1948; and Shriftn far literatur, kunst un gezelshaftlekhe fragn (Writings for Literature, Art and Societal Questions), published in Kassel, Germany in January 1948. These journals were chosen because their editorial material reflected strong commitments to dealing with the political and especially the cultural issues of the day. These included the on-going examination of the possibility of Jewish cultural continuity, the drive for a Jewish state, and the attempt to come to terms with the immensity and horrors of the Holocaust. The thesis also includes an annotated bibliography of the contents of these three journals which is intended to improve their accessibility for future study.
Variational modelling of cavitation and fracture in nonlinear elasticity
Keywords: created surface
cavitation
invertibility
regularity of the inverse
ductile fracture
Cartesian currents
surface energy
distributional determinant
SBV
singular minimizers
weak continuity of the Jacobian
nonlinear elasticity

Motivated by experiments on titanium alloys of Petrinic et al. (2006), which show the formation of cracks through the growth and coalescence of voids in ductile fracture, we consider the problem of formulating a variational model in nonlinear elasticity compatible both with cavitation and the appearance of discontinuities across two-dimensional surfaces. As in the model for cavitation of Müller and Spector (1995) we address this problem, which is connected to the sequential weak continuity of the determinant of the deformation gradient in spaces of functions having low regularity, by means of adding an appropriate surface energy term to the elastic energy. Based upon considerations of invertibility, we derive an expression for the surface energy that admits a physical and a geometrical interpretation, and that allows for the formulation of a model with better analytical properties. We obtain, in particular, important regularity results for the inverses of deformations, as well as the weak continuity of the determinants and the existence of minimizers. We show, further, that the creation of surface can be modeled by carefully analyzing the jump set of the inverses, and we point out some connections between the analysis of cavitation and fracture, the theory of SBV functions, and the theory of Cartesian currents of Giaquinta, Modica, and Soucek. In addition to the above, we extend previous work of Sivaloganathan, Spector and Tilakraj (2006) on the approximation of minimizers for the problem of cavitation with a constraint in the number of flaw points, and present some numerical results for this problem.
Metabolic control of energetics in human heart and skeletal muscle
Keywords: heart failure
mitochondrial uncoupling protein-3
mitochondrial function

Myocardial and skeletal muscle high energy phosphate metabolism is abnormal in heart failure, but the pathophysiology is not understood. Plasma non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA) increase in heart failure due to increased sympathetic drive, and regulate the transcription of mitochondrial uncoupling protein-3 (UCP3), through peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-α. The aim of the work in this thesis was to determine whether cardiac PCr/ATP ratios and skeletal muscle PCr kinetics during exercise were related to cardiac and skeletal muscle UCP3 levels respectively, thus providing a mechanism for the apparent mitochondrial dysfunction observed in heart failure. Patients having cardiac surgery underwent pre-operative testing, including cardiac and gastrocnemius 31P magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Intra-operatively, ventricular, atrial and skeletal muscle biopsies were taken for measurement of mitochondrial protein levels by immunoblotting, along with mitochondrial function by tissue respiration rates. Fasting plasma NEFA concentrations increased in patients with ventricular dysfunction and with New York Heart Association (NYHA) class. Ventricular UCP3 levels increased and cardiac PCr/ATP decreased with NYHA class, however, demonstrated no relationship to each other. In skeletal muscle, maximal rates of oxidative ATP synthesis (Qmax) related to functional capacity. Skeletal muscle UCP3 levels increased with NYHA class but were unrelated to skeletal muscle Qmax. Tissue respiration experiments revealed no relationship between ventricular function and indices of mitochondrial coupling, furthermore, indices of mitochondrial coupling were unrelated to tissue UCP3 levels. No evidence was found to support mitochondrial uncoupling, mediated through UCP3, as a cause of the abnormalities in cardiac and skeletal muscle high energy phosphate metabolism.
Identification of novel interactions between MicroRNAs and pattern-recognition receptor signalling in dentritic cells
Keywords: microRNA
HIV
Dendritic cell

Dendritic cells are equipped with a range of different pattern-recognition receptors (PRR) aimed at recognizing foreign pathogens. Recent evidence has suggested that PRR signalling regulates the expression of microRNAs (miRNAs), important post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression, which have been shown to fine-tune innate immune responses.
This thesis describes the discovery of miR-650, a novel PRR-responsive miRNA that is down regulated in monocyte-derived dendritic cells (DCs) on PRR stimulation. Chapter 4 describes the characterisation of miR-650 expression in DCs matured by exposure to a variety of different pathogen-derived ligands, or during Influenza A virus infection. When correlating the level of miR-650 to the induction of DC activation markers on the cell surface, an inverse correlation was observed, suggesting a relationship between miR-650 down regulation and the effective dose of the ligand.
Work presented in this thesis further explores the potential function of miR-650 by using a multi-pronged approach encompassing computational biology, genome-wide expression profiling and individual reporter assays, to gain insight into the gene networks regulated by miR-650. While Chapter 5 focuses on the identification and confirmation of individual miR-650:target interactions, Chapter 6 investigates both direct as well as secondary effects exerted by miR-650 on a global level.
The work in these two chapters identifies a number of novel miR-650 targets and suggests a dual role for miR-650 in the innate immune response. Firstly, it is shown that miR-650 directly regulates a group of interferon-stimulated genes with known antiviral activity. Supporting its role in antiviral host defence, miR-650 is also shown to directly target components of the autophagic machinery, and even more importantly, down regulation of miR-650 induces autophagosome formation. Secondly, identified targets also include negative regulators of innate signalling suggesting that, in addition to its antiviral function, PRR-mediated down regulation of miR-650 expression may also provide a negative feedback loop controlling inflammatory responses. Notably, miR-650 displays reciprocal target regulation with miR-155, a well-studied miRNA with established functions in the innate immune system, thus suggesting cooperativity between the two miRNAs.
The original aim of this thesis was to examine the effect of HIV-1 infection on the global miRNAome of DCs using a genome-wide profiling method. However, as outlined in Chapter 3, the data generated suggest that HIV-1 infection has little or no impact on miRNA expression. Further work is needed to establish if this represents deliberate immune evasion by HIV-1, or just indicates the limits of the methodology employed.
Changes in the phenomenon of icon-painting in Romania from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day
Keywords: Elena Ene Drăghici-Vasilescu

The thesis aims to prove, on the one hand that the second half of the nineteenth century was the period of maximum deviation from the traditional Romanian style of icon-painting and, on the other hand, that the process following the Romanian Orthodox Church's Synod of 1889, in spite of the proclaimed return to a pure Byzantine style, actually has involved the coexistence of at least two main styles of painting: Eastern Mannerist of Byzantine lineage and Western Mannerist of Renaissance persuasion. In addition to this, a mixture of various elements, even in the painting of the same building, is also present, reaching sometimes the point of kitsch.
As steps towards this end, my thesis discusses the way in which the tradition of the Orthodox Church regarding icon and wall-painting manifested itself throughout Romanian history, with special emphasis on the period from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day. I investigate whether or not, and how the Romanian modern icons (still) fit into the Byzantine conception of an icon.
The thesis presents the same tradition regarding the requirements of the profession of an iconographer, how they were fulfilled in the past and how they are satisfied today in Romania, in both a monastic and a secular milieu. Traditionally, in addition to their skills and artistic training, it is essential that iconographers should be deep believers, have a solid theological training, and live a very pure life. In Chapter 6 I present the answers of 27 Romanian contemporary iconographers to a 17 item questionnaire regarding the way in which they are trained and keep the canonical rules today, the techniques they use in painting and their own attitude towards their work.