VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
What is unfair discrimination?
Keywords: Human dignity
Equality
South Africa
Constitutional Court of South Africa
Discrimination

In this thesis, I seek to understand ‘unfair discrimination’ under the South African Constitution, as it has been interpreted and applied by the Constitutional Court. The Court holds that unfair discrimination involves differences in treatment that violate human dignity. However, it has not clearly explained what this violation of dignity involves. Without this explanation, its ‘Harksen test’ for unfair discrimination provides little guidance in identifying this wrong.
In response to this lack of explicit guidance, I examine the case law and extract three requirements for establishing the particular type of dignity violation that is required for a finding of unfair discrimination: a) there must be differentiation on the basis of group characteristics; b) that is disproportionate; and c) threatens to create or perpetuate patterns of group disadvantage. Requirements b) and c) are intertwined in important ways. I demonstrate that the Court’s judgments largely turn on a proportionality analysis, as the Court weighs the impact of the discrimination on the disfavoured group against its purpose. Having found that the discrimination is disproportionate, the Court regularly concludes that the law or action expresses impermissible ‘messages’ about the disfavoured group, messages that threaten to create or perpetuate patterns of group disadvantage. Using the literature on ‘legal expressivism’, I examine these messages and conclude that they primarily reflect the concern that the state may be reasonably construed to be acting on the basis of prejudice or impermissible stereotypes.
I then use this understanding of the violation of dignity to explain the key features of the Harksen test. While the Harksen test parcels out this enquiry in a slightly different form, these three requirements form the basis of this two-part test. The result is a clearer understanding of the Court’s jurisprudence and firmer guidance in identifying unfair discrimination.
Power in political thought: a comparative conceptual morphology
Keywords: dunamis
physics
interdisciplinarity
concepts
Aristotle
power
force

The aim of this thesis is to resurrect interest in the concept of power in political theory by shedding light on some of its relatively unexplored discursive dimensions and developing a fresh approach to its understanding. Particularly, it studies an under-examined theme in the current literature, which, however, forms a crucial aspect determining different definitions of power: in what manner do different ways of thinking about power underpin variable conceptual formulations and theoretical interpretations of this key political concept? What types of cognitive, ideational and conceptual ‘micro-processes’ shape different ways of thinking about power in political thought?
The thesis suggests novel interpretative possibilities that may be distilled from developing a hermeneutical approach extending across the dimensions of historical time and disciplinary space, by combining methodological insights from the fields of morphology, intellectual history and interdisciplinary study. To that end, it engages perspectives gleaned from historical treatments of power, as well as recent understandings of spatiality and force provided by scientific discourse.
The concept of power is explored through the perspectives of (i) cultural historicity and (ii) interdisciplinarity. Along the axis of cultural historicity, the analysis studies Aristotle’s classical concept of ‘dunamis’ as the original conceptual modality of power in political thought. Along the axis of interdisciplinarity, the examination explores the concept of force in the discourse of physics, and its parallel development in political thought. This dissertation shows that the exploration of those conceptual modalities can yield a new appreciation of certain diachronic and contingent conceptual features of power and enhance our understanding of the multifaceted discursive processes through which those form, including the underpinning ‘micro-semantic’, linguistic and ideational processes which contribute to the emergence of variable modes of thinking about power. In so doing, the thesis aims at illuminating our modern understanding of the concept, moving the scholarly discourse forward towards new horizons of meaning and interpretation.
What is unfair discrimination?
Keywords: Equality
Human dignity
South Africa
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa
Constitutional Court of South Africa
Unfair discrimination

This thesis offers an original account of the South African Constitutional Court’s reasoning in identifying unfair discrimination perpetrated by the state. I use this account to develop proposals for improving the Court’s jurisprudence, in line with its stated aim of addressing patterns of group disadvantage.
The Court’s Harksen test for unfair discrimination makes dignity the touchstone for identifying this wrong. However, the Court has not explained what is required to prove a violation of dignity or how dignity fits with its concern for group disadvantage. I demonstrate that three necessary conditions must be satisfied for the Court to conclude that dignity has been violated: there must be a) unfavourable treatment on the basis of protected grounds; b) that threatens to create or perpetuate patterns of group disadvantage; and c) that lacks adequate justification. I also investigate important features of the Court’s reasoning that have been overlooked in the existing literature, including its concern for messages expressed by discrimination and the fluctuating intensity with which it reviews justifications.
Among my proposals for developing this reasoning, I argue that the Court should remove human dignity from the Harksen test and openly acknowledge the considerations doing the work in its decisions. I also provide a detailed critique of five of the Court’s most controversial decisions where it found discrimination to be fair despite clear indications that it entrenched patterns of disadvantage. I show that in all five cases the Court applied an indefensibly weak intensity of review, falling below the baseline level of scrutiny which ought to be applied in unfair discrimination cases. I contend that consistent application of this baseline will help to make the Court better at preventing and addressing patterns of group disadvantage.
I conclude with a restatement of the Harksen test that consolidates the Court’s reasoning and my proposals.
Reducing human effort in web data extraction
Keywords: Web data extraction

The human effort in large-scale web data extraction significantly affects both the extraction flexibility and the economic cost. Our work aims to reduce the human effort required by web data extraction tasks in three specific scenarios.
(I) Data demand is unclear, and the user has to guide the wrapper induction by annotations. To maximally save the human effort in the annotation process, wrappers should be robust, i.e., immune to the webpage’s change, to avoid the wrapper re-generation which requires a re-annotation process. Existing approaches primarily aim at generating accurate wrappers but barely generate robust wrappers. We prove that the XPATH wrapper induction problem is NP-hard, and propose an approximate solution estimating a set of top-k robust wrappers in polynomial time. Our method also meets one additional requirement that the induction process should be noise resistant, i.e., tolerate slightly erroneous examples.
(II) Data demand is clear, and the user’s guide should be avoided, i.e.., the wrapper generation should be fully-unsupervised. Existing unsupervised methods purely relying on the repeated patterns of HTML structures/visual information are far from being practical. Partially supervised methods, such as the state-of-the-art system DIADEM, can work well for tasks involving only a small number of domains. However, the human effort in the annotator preparation process becomes a heavier burden when the domain number increases. We propose a new approach, called RED (abbreviation for “redundancy”), an automatic approach exploiting content redundancy between the result page and its corresponding detail pages. RED requires no annotation (thus requires no human effort) and its wrapper accuracy is significantly higher than that of previous unsupervised methods.
(III) Data quality is unknown, and the user’s related decisions are blind. Without knowing the error types and the error number of each type in the extracted data, the extraction effort could be wasted on useless websites, and even worse, the human effort could be wasted on unnecessary or wrongly-targeted data cleaning process. Despite the importance of error estimation, no methods have addressed it sufficiently. We focus on two types of common errors in web data, namely duplicates and violations of integrity constraints. We propose a series of error estimation approaches by adapting, extending, and synthesizing some recent innovations in diverse areas such as active learning, classifier calibration, F-measure estimation, and interactive training.
Undefined myasthenias: clinical and molecular characterisation and optimised therapy
Keywords: MuSK
DOK7
N-glycosylation pathway
COL13A1
AChR-deficiency
salbutamol
neuromuscular junction
congenital myasthenic syndrome
Acetylcholine receptor
stridor
clustered-AChR antibodies
rapsyn
congenital myasthenia
myasthenia gravis
GMPPB

Congenital myasthenic syndromes (CMS) are a group of heterogeneous disorders caused by mutations in genes encoding for proteins that are essential for neuromuscular transmission. All CMS share the clinical feature of fatigable muscle weakness. The differential diagnosis of CMS is wide, with a range of diseases going from autoimmune myasthenia gravis to muscle disorders. In this thesis, it was shown that measuring antibodies to clustered acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) by cell-based assay is helpful in the differential diagnosis of CMS.
The findings of the current investigations showed that mutations in COL13A1, encoding the Collagen Type XIII α1 chain, were responsible for the symptoms of several patients with previously undefined myasthenias. In addition, this work described the clinical and complementary features of a novel CMS subtype due to mutations in the glycosylation pathway gene GMPPB. Investigations on a novel MUSK missense mutation (p.Ala617Val) uncovered previously unrecognised mechanisms of how levels of MuSK phosphorylation are critical to maintain synaptic structure, and guided suitable treatment for the patient.
The study on the clinical and molecular basis of stridor, a novel clinical feature recently identified in patients with DOK7-CMS, prompted the identification of a novel DOK7 isoform, which warrants further investigation to elucidate its role in AChR clustering.
Finally, the therapy of patients with severe AChR-deficiency was optimised thanks to a case series study that showed a robust improvement following the addition of ß2-adrenergic agonists to their long-term treatment regime that included pyridostigmine.
Towards a grammar of theatrical blindness
Keywords: Theatre
Disability Studies
Classical Reception
Blindness

Since the fifth century, the theatre has been a place for seeing. In spite of this, blind figures repeatedly appear on the stage, from Oedipus, Polymestor, Tiresias and the Cyclops to Shakespeare's Gloucester, Beckett's Hamm, Friel's Molly Sweeney and Kane's Ian. These blind characters have an important role to play in articulating the task of the spectator, both in their aural and imaginative construction of the fictional world in pre-naturalistic theatre, and also in their ability to see through the dramatic illusion in later drama. These scenes of blindness and blinding also have consequences for reception studies, since the relationship between them is not straightforwardly a textual reception history. Instead, these blind characters and the scenes in which they appear are read as what Deleuze and Guattari term an 'assemblage': a heterogenous multiplicity that is produced at the moment of reading / watching with reference to other scenes of blindness and blinding.
This thesis sketches out a grammar for such an assemblage, and each chapter focuses on a rule in this grammar. When read as part of an assemblage of blindness, blind characters always have a special relationship with death (Chapter 2), showcase their own performance (Chapter 3), undermine the fictional setting that has been established onstage (Chapter 4), have access to a kind of superhuman knowledge (Chapter 5) and alter the position of their spectators (Chapter 6). Each chapter is structured around a particular moment when the theatre's interest in blind characters resurges, as a response to changes in the social, cultural or scientific understanding of vision and visual impairment. In each chapter, the grammar that is outlined in Chapter 1 with reference to ancient plays returns to the fore, but is refracted through the historical period back on to the grammar of the assemblage.
Systems of forms in many variables
Keywords: Hardy-Littlewood method
Forms in many variables
Rational points
Algebraic varieties
Circle method
Quadratic forms

We consider systems of polynomial equations and inequalities to be solved in integers. By applying the circle method, when the number of variables is large and the system is geometrically well-behaved we give an asymptotic estimate for the number of solutions of bounded size.
In the case of R homogeneous equations having the same degree d, a classic theorem of Birch provides such an estimate provided the number of variables is R(R+1)(d-1)2d-1+R or greater and the system is nonsingular. In many cases this conclusion has been improved, but except in the case of diagonal equations the number of variables needed has always grown quadratically in R.
We give a result requiring only d2dR+R variables, obtaining linear growth in R. When d = 2 or 3 we require only that the system be nonsingular; when d&LT;4 we require that the coefficients of the equations belong to a certain explicit Zariski open set. These conditions are satisfied for typical systems of equations, and can in principle be checked algorithmically for any particular system.
We also give an asymptotic estimate for the number of solutions to R polynomial inequalities of degree d with real coefficients, in the same number of variables and satisfying the same geometric conditions as in our work on equations. Previously one needed the number of variables to grow super-exponentially in the degree d in order to show that a nontrivial solution exists.
Re-writing Ariadne: following the thread of literary and artistic representations of Ariadne’s abandonment
Keywords: classical myth
image &amp; text
classical reception
Ariadne

This thesis takes Ariadne's abandonment as a case study in order to examine the literary processes of reception that underlie the transmission of classical myth in different eras and cultural contexts — from Classical Antiquity through the Italian Renaissance. Rather than focusing on the ways in which visual representations of Ariadne relate to literary treatments, it draws attention to the literary reliance on a cultural framework, shared by writer and reader, that enables dynamic storytelling. It argues that literary variation of the myth is central to its successful transmission, not least because it allows for appropriations and adaptations that can be made to fit new social and religious parameters, such as Christian conventions in the Middle Ages.
In focusing on the important role played by the visual arts in the classical tradition, this research further challenges the still prevalent misconception that the visual arts are secondary to literature, and refutes the common assumption that the relationship between image and text is unidirectional. It highlights the visual impulses leading to paradigm shifts in the literary treatment of the abandonment narrative, and examines the ways in which writers engage with the visual tradition in order to re-shape the ancient narrative. Throughout, attention is drawn to the visual and cultural framework shared by ancient writers and readers, and to the lack of engagement with this framework in traditional classical scholarship. Through its focus on the literary narratives' visuality and mutability, this thesis offers a new paradigm for studying classical myth and its reception.
Fortune and the body: physiognomy in Ming China
Keywords: physiognomy
divination
Chinese philosophy

This thesis explores the cosmology of physiognomy—a method of telling fortune by inspecting the body and the material world—and its social reception in China in the Ming period. This is accomplished through the analysis of extant manuals as well as stories of fortune-tellers’ practices. I focus on the Ming dynasty, because of their richness of historical evidence and the distinctive features of physiognomy developed in these periods, but also take materials about the Song inherited in the Ming in my analysis. The manuals and the anecdotal evidence on its social practices and practitioners show that during the Song and Ming period Chinese physiognomy became more systematic. Chinese Physiognomists also inspected the material world beyond the human body, and used the human body as a paradigm for the inspections in which the whole material world is seen as ‘homological’ to the body. One of the most representative examples of using this body paradigm to examine material objects is the physiognomy of written characters. In the manuals that deals specifically with the human body, the body is seen as a bridge between society and the cosmos. In this cosmology the human body represents the ‘totality’ of human existence and social life. Because social life is expressed on the body, someone’s fortune can be predicted by examining the body. Different numerological as well as cosmological systems after the Song were subsumed into physiognomy and the body and the cosmos came to be linked in the manuals in a more sophisticated way than before. However, fortune is not seen as totally fixed. Moral cultivation can alter the body and thereby change someone’s fortune. The body is seen in physiognomy as both physical and moral. As a technique, physiognomy is not only systematically theorized in the manuals but also highly socialized. Physiognomy was practiced by very diverse groups of people across various religious and social communities including Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, local literati, and so on. Although a popular technique, which was also linked to many different kinds of medical and religious traditions, physiognomy was still contested, and people with different social backgrounds and personal experiences held different views on it.
New insights into old problems
Keywords: OSL
Cladistics
Naqada Period
Early Dynastic Period
Luminescence
Archaeology
Radiocarbon
Egyptian
Ceramics
Relative Dating
Absolute Dating
Chronology

This thesis takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of ancient Egyptian ceramics by applying scientific dating techniques alongside more traditional methods. It is the first study to apply OSL dating to an Egyptian ceramic assemblage, and it has done so by developing the minimum extraction technique (MET), which has made it possible to use OSL to sample, and thus analyse, ceramics housed in museums.
The MET is at present essential to the success of OSL dating of Egyptian ceramics, as the exportation ban on antiquities has prevented OSL analysis of field material.
For this thesis, using this new sampling technique, OSL has been applied to several assemblages from the Predynastic to the Early Dynastic period. Ceramics from Bêt Khallaf have been examined, with three phases being established: late Naqada III, First Intermediate Period, and the mediaeval Islamic period. Absolute dates have been determined for each phase and, where comparison is possible, have been found in good agreement with the historical chronology.
A set of vessels from Naqada, Ballas, and the Tomb of Djer at Abydos have been examined using OSL in conjunction with radiocarbon dating. Again, three phases of activity were discerned: late Naqada II, early Naqada III, and the first scientifically determined dates for a burning event in the Tomb of Djer (the New Kingdom).
The thesis also demonstrates how OSL can be used as a relative dating technique by analysing a collection of Wavy-Handled ceramics and wine jars from Turah, finding that the OSL results agree well with the established relative chronology.
Finally, this thesis has also examined the applicability of cladistic analysis to the study of Egyptian ceramics. Cladistics is a technique borrowed from the biological sciences which offers a complimentary way to examine the evolution of ceramic types and forms, in particular the development of beer and wine jars.
The role of antigen in the maintenance and localisation of CD8+ T-cells in the context of liver stage malaria
Keywords: Liver-stage malaria
Immunology
Tissue-resident T-cells

A highly effective vaccine against malaria is urgently needed, with leading vaccination strategies involving the induction of protective antigen-specific CD8+ T-cells via heterologous prime-boost viral vector immunization, targeting primarily the pre- erythrocytic liver stages of the Plasmodium falciparum lifecycle. To date, the greatest immunogenicity has been obtained through a heterologous prime boost regimen, where vaccination with an Adenoviral vector is followed 8 weeks later by a Modified Vaccinia Ankara virus (MVA) boost. Experimental work directed at providing a greater understanding of CD8+ T-cell memory responses induced by Ad-MVA vaccinations lead to the development of a novel vaccine strategy aimed at priming CD8+ T-cells in the periphery and subsequently targeting them to hepatic tissue with protein loaded poly(lactic- co-glycolic acid) nanoparticles or recombinant viral vectors. Durable Ag-specific CD8+ T- cells exhibiting a phenotype of tissue-resident memory T-cells were generated in the liver, with a ten-fold increase over the conventional heterologous vector regimen. Importantly, in P. berghei sporozoite challenge models of liver-stage malaria, this strategy was found to result in unprecedented levels of sterile protection across multiple clinically relevant antigens and mouse strains. This prime and target immunization strategy for liver-stage malaria may provide a novel general approach for prevention or immunotherapy against other hepato-trophic pathogens.