VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Why public ownership? Urban utilities in London, 1870-1914
Keywords: England
London
public ownership
government ownership
public utilities
urban utilities

Private gas and water companies received parliamentary permission to act as incorporated companies in the early 1800s. Then, the idea that gas and water would be anything other than a luxury was unthinkable, and government regulated by entry. But by the 1830s the problems with competition were clear. Under pressure from the new sanitary reformers, and from the companies themselves, parliament sought new ways to regulate. However, the institutional endowments of the British state did not facilitate a working regulatory regime, and by the 1870s, the regulatory foundations for public ownership had been set.
Public ownership was a viable alternative because of the administrative transformation of local government. There was a deliberate attempt to reduce corruption and make local governments capable of managing projects of increasing complexity. Politicians faced high costs if they used public utilities for personal gain, but the electoral system meant that utilities could be to court an increasingly strong working class and trade union vote.
The expansion of the franchise following the 1867 Reform Act reduced the level of wealth of the median consumer-voter and increased the preference for redistribution. Voters favoured higher levels of expenditure, and political parties converged on the policy of public provision. Politicians faced a trade-off. On one hand, they sought to maximize profits; on the other, they sought to maximize political support. Politicians attempted to conclude franchise agreements with private sector agents. However, the problems of contracting were one of the driving forces behind municipalisation. Once in public sector hands, a new contracting problem emerged: Politicians showed themselves to be willing to increase the wages of municipal employees, both as an ideological choice and as an act of political calculation. The outcomes of these choices forced businessmen to weigh the costs and benefits of home versus overseas investment in urban infrastructure projects.
Criminalisation and detention of African asylum seekers in Israel: exclusionary policies, and the dynamics of race and place
Keywords: detention
Sudanese refugees
ethnonationalism
Israel
asylum seekers
Eritrean refugees
racialisation
South Tel Aviv

In this dissertation I advance our understanding of African asylum seekers’ detention in Israel, an ethnonational state, by exploring it in relation to differential politics of belonging and postcolonialism. I focus on detention of asylum seekers in Holot detention facility in Israel’s Negev Desert 2013-2018, when over 13,000 Eritrean and Sudanese men were detained for at least one year. Detention was one of multiple exclusionary policies directed at this group over a decade under the Prevention of Infiltration Law (1954). This was the only migrant group subjected to collective administrative detention on such scale and legally categorised ‘Infiltrators’. I review detention’s development and application to asylum seekers, tracing how detention’s role changed to keep asylum seekers away from urban areas where they historically lived, particularly South Tel Aviv.
Throughout the thesis, I explore gaps between aims and impacts of detention policies on populations most affected by them. I draw on interviews with two populations: (1) Eritrean and Sudanese men detained in Holot (during detention, and post-detention); and (2) Israeli residents in South Tel Aviv. I supplement interview data with ethnographic participant observations.
Scholarship on Israel’s exclusion of non-Jewish migrants is dominated by arguments about the importance of citizenship and the ethnonational boundaries of the state. I argue for a more nuanced account of exclusion to understand the heightened enforcement of migration control upon a group with distinct attributes – African, male, asylum seekers. I contend that we better understand the differential exclusion of this group through observing Israel’s differential inclusion of Mizrahi Jewish residents in South Tel Aviv and the logics that underpin it. I take stock of Israel’s postcolonial context, Euro-centred scales of belonging, and orientalist approach to Jewish populations, and African asylum seekers. I demonstrate how policies reflect a hierarchical value placed on human worth in an ethnonational state.
Some aspects of economic and social policy in Ceylon, 1840-1871
Keywords: Ceylon
19th century
nineteenth century
social policy
economic policy
Sri Lanka

One of the important themes of nineteenth century history as the impact of the industrialised Western nations on tropical colonial peoples. The detonations were more immediate in the economic and social fields where they were caused by the character of the colonial power, the particular problems it faced and the policies it evolved in answer to them. In Ceylon, as elsewhere, the British faced broad problems of a choice between Western enterprise or indigenous enterprise, plantation culture or peasant culture, Western principles of economic freedom and laws of contract or tropical systems of compulsion and customary law, and between Western or indigenous forms of administration. Within the limits of the paths they chose, the principles of land policy were crucial in any agricultural country, both to Western and indigenous enterprise. In Ceylon it so happened that the question of waste lands presented a major problem. Their efforts to meet this problem through the waste lands legislation of 1840-41 and 1897 together with the spread of plantations in the Central Highlands are commonly said to have had disastrous effects on the Kandyan peasantry, leading to land shortage and landlessness. Some writers have gone so far as to attribute callous exploitative motives to the authors of this legislation. These views called for a re-examination, with particular attention to the implementation of policy at the grass roots and an attempt to assess the extent of land shortage and landlessness.
Continued in thesis ...
Chinese apocrypha titled Foshuo fumu enzhong jing and its material culture in the medieval Chinese society
Keywords: Dunhuang manuscripts
Chinese apocrypha
Buddhist steles
medieval China
Buddhist material culture

This thesis explores changes in the content and material culture of a group of scriptures known as the Foshuo fumu enzhong jing 佛說父母恩重經 (the Sutra Spoken by the Buddha on the Profoundness of Parents’ Kindness) during the Tang (618–907) and Northern Song (960–1127) dynasties, examining their relationship to the broader development of Buddhist beliefs and Confucian and other pre-existing non-Buddhist ideas, such as filial piety and ancestor worship. In contrast to previous philological studies that sought to identify the various versions of this scripture and determine the textual origins of its composition, this thesis pays special attention to the objects on which the scriptures are written and inscribed, such as stelae and manuscripts. By giving serious consideration to their inscriptions, material forms, and physical locations against the socio-political backdrop that encouraged their production, this project addresses questions of the uses of the stelae and manuscripts by ordinary, largely unrecorded people in rural localities of Shandong and Dunhuang and the purposes of their patronage.
Synthetic approaches to medicinally relevant euphorbia diterpenes
Keywords: total synthesis
natural product synthesis

This thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the role of natural product synthesis in the 21st century, and provides a scientific and historical context for the research undertaken in this thesis, including prior work undertaken in the Jonathan W. Burton group towards the total synthesis of target compounds euphodendroidin D 1.17 and pepluanin A 1.18.
Chapter 2 provides a description our work on the synthesis of racemic cyclopentane 1.102 via a palladium-catalysed cyclisation, and the derivatisation thereof to racemic lactone 2.50. Chapter 3 covers our unsuccessful efforts to develop an enantioselective synthesis of 1.102, and our successful asymmetric synthesis of 2.50 via an alternative route. It also covers our extensive investigations into the allylic oxidation of 2.50.
Chapter 4 details our attempts to conduct a series of further redox manipulations, ultimately resulting in the scalable and high-yielding synthesis of 4.38, a densely functionalised intermediate, and the furthest point reached in our attempt to synthesise euphodendroidin D 1.17. Chapter 5 describes our asymmetric synthesis of 5.24, an advanced sulfone intermediate which was also necessary for our planned convergent synthesis of euphodendroidin D 1.17.
Finally, chapter 6 summarises our achievements and suggests a prospective improvement to the synthetic plan should the project be continued.
Extracting biological insights from genomics data using machine learning approaches
Keywords: molecular biology
deep learning
ChIP-seq
DNase-seq
ATAC-seq

ATAC-seq, ChIP-seq, and DNase-seq have revolutionised molecular biology by allowing researchers to identify important DNA-encoded elements genome-wide. Regions where these elements are found appear as peaks in the analogue signal of an assay’s coverage track, and despite the ease with which humans can visu- ally categorize these regions, meaningful peak calls from whole genome datasets require complex analytical techniques. Current methods focus on statistical tests to classify peaks, reducing the information-dense peak shapes to simply maxi- mum height, and discounting that background signals do not completely follow any known probability distribution for significance testing. Deep learning has been shown to be highly accurate for image recognition, on par or exceeding human ability, providing an opportunity to reimagine and improve peak calling. Here, a large, labelled dataset is built by classifying peak and noise regions by hand. These data are used to explore supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, as well as to assess the reliability of p-values in chromatin binding as- says. The culmination of this work was the development of a peak calling frame- work, LanceOtron, which combines multifaceted enrichment measurements with deep learning image recognition techniques for assessing peak shape. In bench- marking transcription factor binding, chromatin modification, and open chromatin datasets, LanceOtron outperforms the long-standing, gold-standard peak caller MACS2 through its improved selectivity and near perfect sensitivity. In addition to command line accessibility, a graphical web application was designed to give any researcher the ability to generate optimal peak calls and interactive visualizations in a single step. Furthermore, the general applicability of this technique is demon- strated in chromatin conformation capture experiments. This establishes that the signals extracted and analysed may be found across a range of genomic data, and extending this technique to new datatypes is possible requiring only minor adjustments and model retraining.
Discovering galaxies in the early universe
Keywords: astrophysics
spectroscopy
Hubble Space Telescope
galaxies
Epoch of Reionization
equivalent widths
star forming galaxies
James Webb Space Telescope

Star forming galaxies (SFGs) are expected to be the sources responsible for reionising the Universe, but detailed study of these within the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR, z>6), will only become possible with the long-wavelength coverage and sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). One approach to understanding these systems is to study lower-redshift galaxies which share similar properties and are potential analogues to galaxies in the reionisation era. In this Thesis I study star forming galaxies that exhibit large nebular emission line equivalent widths (EW), consistent with what has been inferred at high redshifts, using HST/WFC3 slitless spectroscopy to select galaxies at z~1-3 directly on their emission line strength.
VLT/FORS2 spectroscopic follow-up on z~1 emission line selected galaxies from the WFC3 WISPS survey confirms the slitless spectroscopic redshift of 95% of galaxies with emission line detections, and those galaxies with large rest-frame H-alpha EWs not only have high specific star formation rates but also high [OIII]/H-beta and [OIII]/[OII] ratios, suggesting lower metallicities or higher ionisation parameters than low-EW SFGs. I measure a strong EW evolution with redshift from WISPS, which I also confirm with a spectroscopic study of z~2 SFGs from the 3D-HST survey where I determine the distribution of [OIII]5007 rest-frame EWs. The abundance of extreme emission line galaxies (EELGs) increases rapidly with redshift, and while abundance of these EELGs and their contribution to the ionising background at intermediate redshifts is minimal (only 3.6% of z~2 SFGs have [OIII]5007 EWs above 750A), EELGs may dominate the ionising output of the SFG population during the EoR.
I am a member of the JWST Advanced Deep Extra-galactic Survey (JADES), a joint NIRSpec and NIRCam instrument science team GTO programme whose main science goals are to trace galaxy evolution from z~1 to within the EoR by measuring star formation rates, metallicities and stellar masses of a large sample of galaxies. As part of JADES, I re-analysed multi-band imaging in the GOODS fields to draw up a list of robust high redshift candidates and a prioritisation of these targets, in particular SFGs in the EoR, for NIRSpec spectroscopic follow-up. I confirm through simulations of JADES NIRSpec deep spectroscopy that our key science goals can be met with the achieved signal-to-noise from our observational strategy (in particular redshift confirmation, and metallicity measurements from line ratio diagnostics).
Living whilst dying: exploring 'a life worth living' for people with heart failure living at home towards the end of life
Keywords: sensory methods
phenomenology
heart failure
anthropology
meaning-making
ethnography
death and dying
end of life
qualitative

BACKGROUND: End of life literature is dominated by narratives of deterioration and death. Research is predominantly conducted in hospitals or hospices, involving terminal illnesses such as cancer during the final weeks or days of life. For those with heart failure, health can fluctuate over months and years through turbulent trajectories from diagnosis to (sometimes unexpected) death. Through anthropological exploration of everyday bodily experiences of living, I sought to illuminate what kind of life people deem ‘worth living’ whilst dying.
METHODS: Positively reframing dying around living well at home, and taking a phenomenological approach, I undertook ethnography in people’s homes. I conducted life history interviews and ongoing participant observation with fourteen participants (67-98 years old) over eighteen months. This was supplemented by multiple conversations with family members, observations of two specialist heart failure support groups, observations of eight heart failure clinics, and forty home visits with heart failure specialist nurses.
FINDINGS: Throughout the process of living whilst dying with heart failure, bodies, lifeworlds, and priorities fluctuate as participants continuously experiment with how they move through daily life. I explore how this negotiation of a life that participants deem meaningful and worth living is enacted in three ways: attending to and interpreting one’s body; sensuous engagement with the lifeworld and material relations; and wrapping up one’s narrative whilst settling into stillness. I build on work by Scarry (1985), Mattingly (1994), Mol (2010), and Ingold (2010) to develop a theoretical framework of iterative unmaking/remaking as people position themselves towards the end of life.
CONCLUSIONS: Living whilst dying with heart failure is characterised by gradual slowing and settling into stillness, as participants turn away from making altogether, and towards ‘being done’ with living. Attending to processes of making – through the movement and stillness of bodies, things, and stories – allows us to reconsider dominant biomedical discourses of care, technologies, and decision-making towards the end of life. Making a life worth living is not complete until stories no longer look to the future in some way, and movement is stilled. Settling into stillness, and being done, might thus be respected.
Effects of aerosol on shallow convective clouds
Keywords: clouds
aerosol
atmosphere

Clouds and aerosols are deeply significant components of the Earth's atmosphere and climate system. Yet, aerosol-cloud interactions, particularly for shallow convective clouds, remain poorly understood and highly uncertain. Many varied, and often conflicting, hypotheses of aerosol effects on shallow clouds have been proposed, reflecting the myriad pathways and mechanisms through which they interact. This thesis uses high-resolution, large-domain simulations to investigate the effects of aerosol on shallow convective clouds. Large-domain simulations are performed to capture the large-scale behaviour of the cloud field in response to aerosol perturbations. Increased aerosol is found to lead to decreases in domain-mean precipitation, increases in domain-mean liquid water path, and little impact on cloud fraction or the frequency of higher precipitation rates, in contrast to existing research. It is hypothesised that these differences are due to differing approaches to the model setup. Idealised and realistic simulations of trade wind cumuli are performed, producing starkly different cloud fields and responses to increases in aerosol. The idealised simulations experience significant changes in their thermodynamic evolution along with convective deepening, in contrast with little change in the thermodynamic evolution of the realistic simulations. Detailed investigation of the properties and life-cycle of individual clouds highlights the different responses of clouds with different characteristics to changes in aerosol. Cloud lifetimes are directly quantified using a cloud tracking algorithm, displaying little change in response to increased aerosol. Shallow clouds occur less frequently, while congestus clouds may become deeper. Increased aerosol notably delays the onset of precipitation, and reduces the probability of precipitation. This analysis emphasises the importance of representing the diversity present in realistic trade wind cloud fields.
Essays on schadenfreude: evidence from natural experiments
Keywords: schadenfreude
well-being
intergroup relations

The object of this Thesis is Schadenfreude, or “the pleasure for the misfortunes of others”. I characterise some of the conditions that may trigger Schadenfreude and leverage three natural experiments, applying causal inference techniques on data from large social surveys. In Chapter 1, I find that, during the European debt crisis, exposure to news concerning Greece - a stigmatised group, described as a financial burden to other nations -, was associated to increased levels of self-reported well-being in a sample of European respondents. In Chapter 2, I observe an instantaneous increase in self-reported happiness in a sample of respondents from ten countries, excluding the United States, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, in May 2011. In Chapter 3, I draw on intuitions by Goffman to study how Italian citizens reacted to a highly publicised criminal court verdict against former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. I find that Italian respondents reported higher happiness after the verdict, and that social cohesion appear to have increased for respondents politically distant from Mr. Berlusconi. These effects are generally fleeting and small in size. Overall, the Thesis posits that Schadenfreude can emerge as a result of perceived threats to group integrity; it thus represents an emotional device that binds outward moral derogation and inward solidarity. I conclude proposing that Schadenfreude should be integrated in the sociology of intergroup relations.
Gender, globalisation and the gallows: women sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia
Keywords: death penalty

A disproportionate number of foreign national women are sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia, where there is the largest recorded female death row in Southeast Asia; latest disaggregated statistics suggest that there are 141 women on death row, 95% of whom for drug trafficking and 86% of the female death row population are non-citizens. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to address the notable dearth of scholarship on women under sentence of death, particularly for drug trafficking (current analyses focus on the death penalty for homicide). In so doing, it addresses the gap in the literature on the death penalty in Asia, as despite 95% of the world’s executions occurring on this continent, it has received far less attention than other capital punishment regimes. Overall, this thesis engages with the theorising on the criminalisation of women in a globalised era, the literature on the feminisation of migration, existing work on female cross-border informal traders, as well as research on the criminalisation of female migrant workers in the Asian context. It draws upon findings from 47 ‘elite’ interviews with lawyers, judges, Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) activists, consular officials, police, prosecutors and religious counsellors involved with these women’s cases, as well as systematic searches of legal and media databases which provide information on 146 women’s cases between the years 1983-2019. The analysis of the empirical data involves a conceptual engagement with notions of gendered precarity (chapter 5), gendered disposability (chapter 6), and an examination of the connection between drug trafficking and human trafficking in Southeast Asia (chapter 7). It draws on these findings to examine the undue impact of the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking on economically precarious foreign national women (chapter 8), contributing to the burgeoning death penalty abolitionist literature.
Discovery of mechanisms of herbicide resistance using the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha
Keywords: herbicide resistance
forward genetics
bioinformatics
plant sciences

Non-target site resistance (NTSR) to herbicides in weeds is a threat to global crop yields. Few specific alleles conferring NTSR have been identified, only two of which involve loss of gene function. Here, I show that the mechanism of NTSR to the herbicide thaxtomin A (TXTA) conferred by loss-of-function of the gene PAM16 is conserved in Marchantia polymorpha, validating its use as a species with which to study NTSR. To identify novel NTSR mechanisms, I used forward genetics in M. polymorpha to generate 13 TXTA-resistant mutants and identified candidate NTSR-conferring SNPs in these mutants via mapping-by-sequencing. I identified a novel mechanism of NTSR to TXTA conferred by loss-of-function of the gene RAD8. To functionally characterise this mechanism, I generated rad8 loss-of-function mutants and found that they are cross-resistant to isoxaben, overproduce reactive oxygen species, and produce less of a putative TXTA metabolite than wild-type. I also found 4 candidate resistance-conferring SNPs in M. polymorpha homologues of genes associated with NTSR in the weed Amaranthus tuberculatus. These results demonstrate that forward genetics in M. polymorpha can identify novel NTSR alleles and corroborate existing candidate NTSR alleles, and that reverse genetics in M. polymorpha can be used to functionally characterise these resistance mechanisms.