VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Utpaladeva's doctrine of recognition
Keywords: doctrine
recognition
Utpaladeva

Much has been written on the connections between philosophy and religion in ancient India. Most has been written on the connection between orthodox Hindu religion and orthodox Hindu philosophy, or Buddhist religious practice and Buddhist philosophy.
But the religious tradition of which Utpaladeva was a member was not orthodox and its sacred scriptures, the non—dualist &Sacute;aivite Tantras, were taught only in secret initiatory sects. And Utpaladeva is one of the very few Tantric philosophers who does not propound his views in the form of a commentary upon one of the Tantras themselves.
Utpaladeva's philosophy is not intended solely for members of his own esoteric cult, it is written "for the benefit of mankind", to convince those of differing religions and philosophical persuasion that the world view expounded in the non—dualist &Sacute;aivite Tantras is the only correct one. Thus although Utpaladeva quotes from the Tantras in his Ῑ&sacute;varapratyabhij&ncaron;&amacr;k&amacr;rik&amacr;s, he attempts to establish the identity of the self with &Sacute;iva by independent philosophical argument (tarka).
The principal philosophical view which Utpaladeva is concerned with refuting is that of the Buddhist Dharmakīrti. Dharmakīrti's views were expounded in Kashmir c.800 A.D. by Dharmottara, who founded the "Kashmir School" of Buddhist commentary. Even the orthodox brahmin Ānanandavardhana, author of the Dhvanyāloka treatise on poetics, wrote a commentary on Dharmottara's Pram&amacr;ṇavini&sacute;cayaṭīka.
The other important expositor of Dharmakīrti's views in Kashmir was &Sacute;aṅkaranandana, also a brahmin, who is said (by the Buddhists) to have been converted to Buddhism by Dharmakīrti's brilliant logic. Abhinavagupta refers to &Sacute;aṅkaranandana several times in his commentaries on Utpaladeva's work, accepting &Sacute;aṅkaranandana's refutation of the philosophical views of the other schools.
From Introduction - continued in thesis ...
Social marketisation and policy change in China
Keywords: Social Marketisation
China
Social Organisation
Policy Change

What kinds of social organisations (SOs) are more likely to succeed in promoting policy change? How and why can some SOs promote policy change in China?
This thesis argues that the emerging tendency of social marketisation - social entrepreneurship and government purchase of services from SOs - can empower social organisations to facilitate policy change from the government. Based on three survey databases, this research shows that when social organisations become social enterprises or obtained government contracts for purchasing services, their likelihoods of success in promoting policy change increased and their influence on government policy making improved, after controlling for other resource and institutional factors.
This research subsequently draws upon two in-depth case studies on Nonprofit Incubator (NPI) and China Foundation Centre (CFC) to demonstrate how social organisations can use entrepreneurial and marketised strategies to promote the emergence and spread of five new government policies in China. The underlying mechanism of their successes is the formation of social organisation chains (SOCs), which consist of infrastructure, financial, support, and operational organisations. The formation of SOCs created positive social change. Positive social change facilitated policy change. This study further applies the perspective of SOCs to examine how the three local states (Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen) re-regulate the social organisation sector, and reveals a wider applicability of SOCs at the city level. Finally, this thesis has discussed the relations between social marketisation and other significant theoretical and practical issues.
The contribution of this thesis is that it finds a positive relationship between social marketisation and policy change in China, and reveals the process and the underlying mechanism.
Necropolis:  yellow fever, immunity, and capitalism in the Deep South, 1800-1860
Keywords: Immunocapital
Acclimation
Yellow Fever
Disease
Unacclimated
Slavery

This thesis is a social history of disease and mortality in the American Deep South before the Civil War. Yellow fever attacked the region at epidemic levels every two or three years between 1800 and 1860, killing about eight percent of the urban population, and as many as 20 or 30 percent of recent migrants from Europe. With little epidemiological understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and almost no public health infrastructure to ameliorate disease—the only real protection from this scourge was to "get acclimated": fall sick with, and survive, yellow fever. About half of all people would die in the acclimating process. By placing the Deep South within an Atlantic disease diaspora uncontained by continental boundaries, the project shifts the fault-lines of the Southern past from North-South political conflicts onto similarly formative but overlooked ecological processes in the Greater Caribbean.
Yellow fever and mass mortality are largely absent from the recent historiography on the cotton kingdom and "slave racial capitalism." But as well as being a “slave society,” this thesis suggests the Deep South was also a "disease society": Deep Southerners discussed yellow fever obsessively, worked according to its seasonal schedule, and judged others based on their perceived vulnerability to the disease. Yellow fever, and immunity to it, profoundly shaped the asymmetrical hierarchies of Deep Southern society, with acclimated "immunocapitalist" creoles on top, and unacclimated "foreigners" below. Slavers and their allies argued only intellectually-inferior but naturally-resistant black people could perform the arduous labour of sugar and cotton cultivation in the Deep South, as whites too frequently died. This became the region's chief argument for permanent racial slavery. However, almost every slave revolt in Louisiana coincided with a particularly bad epidemic, suggesting slaves found disease politically intriguing and understood that yellow fever left white society chaotic and vulnerable to attack.
Causal mechanisms of choice architecture interventions in alcohol consumption
Keywords: Behavioral insights
Nudge
Choice architecture

This thesis attempts to answer the research question: What are the causal mechanisms for behaviour change undergirding choice architecture (CA) interventions in alcohol use? This thesis is organised along two dimensions: conceptual and empirical. At the conceptual level, this project discusses the application of CA to public policy; the lack of consensus regarding the theory of change underpinning the relationship between CA intervention stimuli and modified behaviour; and the need for clearer understandings of the CA intervention components in relation to other behavioural interventions. At the empirical level, this project systematically reviews available CA interventions intended to reduce alcohol consumption in public drink settings and suggests new alcohol-related CA intervention strategies.
Monetary mythology: the West German central bank and historical narratives, 1948-78
Keywords: Bundesbank
West Germany
Inflation
Central Banking
Bank deutscher Länder
Reichsbank

This thesis examines the emergence, and then development, of what I call 'monetary mythology', a historical narrative, or version of history, concerning the inter-war period of Germany. Following the Second World War, it was left to West German elites to establish a new federal central bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank. A three-way power struggle emerged between the existing West German central bank – the Bank deutscher Länder - the federal government and the various state governments, all vying to influence the institutions and structure of this new monetary authority. In justifying their arguments, West German elites used various lessons derived from the turbulent experiences of the inter-war era. Monetary mythology, for its part, emphasised the lessons of Germany's two inflations; and the Bank deutscher Länder, and its allies, explicitly tied these lessons to the need for an independent central bank. And though it was once challenged by other competing historical narratives in the period 1949-51, monetary mythology emerged by 1956 triumphant in the public sphere in terms of framing the parameters through which West Germans viewed their monetary history.
The doctoral project at hand approaches economic history from a cultural angle. In doing so, it offers an alternative history of the Bundesbank, as well as an alternative explanation for the cultural preoccupation surrounding inflation in West Germany. The thesis explains this cultural preoccupation in institutional terms. In providing for a central bank that was independent of political instruction, the Bundesbank Law of 1957 allowed for conflicts between the federal government and central bank to emerge. These conflicts often became 'dramatised' in the public sphere, creating controversies surrounding the Bundesbank's independence, and, in turn, giving rise to circumstances in which the lessons of the two inflations continued to remain relevant, geared in support of central bank independence.
Methods for modelling human functional brain networks with MEG and fMRI
Keywords: MEG
Connectome
fMRI
Gaussian graphical model
Bayesian statistics
Functional connectivity
Volume conduction
Imaging genetics
GGM
Magnetic field spread

MEG and fMRI offer complementary insights into connected human brain function. Evidence from the use of both techniques in the study of networked activity indicates that functional connectivity reflects almost every measurable aspect of human reality, being indicative of ability and deteriorating with disease. Functional network analyses may offer improved prediction of dysfunction and characterisation of cognition.
Three factors holding back progress are the difficulty in synthesising information from multiple imaging modalities; a need for accurate modelling of connectivity in individual subjects, not just average effects; and a lack of scalable solutions to these problems that are applicable in a big-data setting. I propose two methodological advances that tackle these issues.
A confound to network analysis in MEG, the artificial correlations induced across the brain by the process of source reconstruction, prevents the transfer of connectivity models from fMRI to MEG. The first advance is a fast correction for this confound, allowing comparable analyses to be performed in both modalities. A comparative study demonstrates that this new approach for MEG shows better repeatability for connectivity estimation, both within and between subjects, than a wide range of alternative models in popular use. A case-study analysis uses both fMRI and MEG recordings from a large dataset to determine the genetic basis for functional connectivity in the human brain. Genes account for 20% - 65% of the variation in connectivity, and outweigh the influence of the developmental environment.
The second advance is a Bayesian hierarchical model for sparse functional networks that is applicable to both modalities. By sharing information over a group of subjects, more accurate estimates can be constructed for individuals' connectivity patterns. The approach scales to large datasets, outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and can provide a 50% noise reduction in MEG resting-state networks.
The origins of the Reagan Doctrine Wars in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan
Keywords: Revolution
Civil War
Cold War
Reagan Doctrine
Third World
Irregular Warfare
Strategy and Policy

This diplomatic and military history offers a new interpretation of the origins of the three fighting fronts during the final phase of the Cold War in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan. Vaguely remembered today as proxy wars on the periphery, in fact, these were protracted revolutionary civil wars and regional contests for the balance of power in which millions died, while at the same time they were central to global superpower confrontation. Analysis focuses on the strategy and policy of the United States. The chronology from 1975 to 1982 covers the Ford administration's covert action intervention in the Angolan Civil War, which came to grief at the hands of Cuban troops; Jimmy Carter's effort to conduct foreign policy based on principles, which ran foul of power considerations in Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Afghanistan; and Ronald Reagan's embrace of these wars early in his first term as part of the revival of U.S. strength in its competition with the Soviet Union.
The principal argument is that, while generally undervalued as controversial small wars of dubious significance, these wars were in fact integral to U.S. experience of limited war during the Cold War following victory in World War II. In strategic terms, the main conclusion is that the U.S. restricted itself to conducting economy of force contingency operations in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan as a result of its costly struggles in Korea and Vietnam. Despite declaring these peripheral wars to be central to the Cold War, avoiding the costs of involving U.S forces directly in Third World conflicts and minimizing the risks of escalation with the Soviet Union were overriding political and military imperatives.
Statistical structure of plasma turbulence from BES measurements in MAST and the effect of flow shear
Keywords: Tokamak
Plasma Turbulence
Beam Emission Spectroscopy

The suppression of turbulent transport is a key requirement for enabling nuclear fusion to become a viable energy source. One possible route to achieving this suppression is through toroidal flow shear. We investigate the effect that flow shear has on the structure of turbulence by analysing data from both measurements of the fluctuating intensity field using the Beam-Emission-Spectroscopy (BES) diagnostic on the spherical tokamak MAST, as well as from numerical simulations of the fluctuating density field in MAST. We develop a procedure to map from the correlation parameters of the intensity field to the correlation parameters of the density field. This procedure is illustrated using the MAST BES system and the validity of the underlying assumptions is tested on fluctuating density fields generated by direct numerical simulations using the gyrokinetic code GS2. By using this procedure, we demonstrate how, in experiment, the flow shear associated with the differential toroidal rotation of tokamak plasmas breaks an underlying symmetry of the turbulent fluctuations imposed by the up-down symmetry of the magnetic equilibrium. Indeed, in both experimental BES measurements and gyrokinetic simulations, this symmetry breaking in ion-scale turbulence in MAST is shown to manifest itself as a tilt of the spatial correlation function and a finite skew in the distribution of the fluctuating intensity (density) field. The tilt is a statistical expression of the "shearing" of the turbulent structures by the mean flow. The skewness of the distribution is related to the emergence of long-lived density structures in sheared, near-marginal plasma turbulence. The extent to which these effects are pronounced is argued (with the aid of the simulations) to depend on the distance from the non- linear stability threshold. Away from the threshold, the symmetry is effectively restored.
Risk factors for ovarian cancer by histological phenotype in the Million Women Study
Keywords: Epidemiology
Ovarian cancer
Pathology

There is growing evidence that the different histological types of ovarian cancer have diverse origins. Many high-grade serous tumours (the most common type) are hypothesised to arise from the fallopian tubes, while endometrioid and clear cell tumours are hypothesised to develop from endometriosis, and the origins of mucinous tumours are uncertain. If these hypotheses are true, then the population-level risk factors for the ovarian cancer histotypes should likewise vary – but few epidemiological studies have sufficient cases to explore this. This thesis investigates the association between ovarian cancer and various exposures (including tubal ligation and reproductive factors), in a cohort of 1.3 million women, with 8,000 incident ovarian cancers. Participants completed a questionnaire at recruitment, and were followed up for routinely collected information on cancers and deaths using national registries. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate adjusted relative risks of ovarian cancer in women by different exposures. Tubal ligation was associated with reduced risks of cancers of the ovary, and also of the peritoneum and fallopian tube; parity and breastfeeding were also associated with reduced risks of ovarian cancer. These associations with ovarian cancer were highly heterogeneous between the different histological tumour types, consistent with hypotheses of their distinct origins. In particular, risks of endometrioid and clear cell tumours were substantially reduced amongst women with tubal ligation, but substantially increased amongst nulliparous women. For high-grade serous carcinomas, there was a smaller but significant reduction in risk with tubal ligation, and no significant association with parity. I also describe some methodological studies I set up for future tissue-based work: developing techniques in image analysis, and a pilot study of obtaining linked pathology reports and tissue samples. The population-level associations demonstrated by histotype are largely consistent with the new hypotheses of the different origins of ovarian cancer histotypes.
The figure of Hades/Plouton in Greek beliefs of the archaic and classical periods
Keywords: Greek gods
Underworld god
Greek religion
Hades

The main aim of this work is the presentation, characterisation and review of the image of the Greek underworld deity, Hades/Plouton in Greek beliefs of the Archaic and Classical periods, on the basis of comparison of the preserved literary and epigraphic testimonies with the remains of material culture, and the reconstruction of the most coherent possible image of the god, claimed by scholars to be of little importance to Greek beliefs and to have no cult. The present dissertation liberates the god from long-standing scholarly misconceptions and returns him to his proper place within the Greek pantheon. Its main scholarly contribution and originality can be summarised as follows: (i) Hades is mainly an agricultural deity with a clear cult environment and has more in common with the world of the living than that of the dead; (ii) Hades influenced the representation of other male deities connected with earth: his main attribute, paradoxically the cornucopia or 'horn of plenty', appears for the first time in Greek art in the 6th century BC as exclusively his, and is later ascribed to other deities; (iii) Hades and Plouton were the same deity (Plouton – an Attic instantiation – spread throughout Greece with Attic literature and the Eleusinian cult of Demeter and Kore), sharing the same myths, and both, through the properties inscribed in their names (invisibility in Hades' and corn in Plouton's), referring to the earth; both names are products of the conceptualisation of the world of the dead; (iv) contrary to the prevailing scholarly view, the multiplicity of Hades' names is not exclusively the result of euphemism (which I propose to see rather as a by- product): the nomenclature is more complex and depends principally on cultic or mythological contexts and local tradition. My work not only reconstructs the repertoire of Greek ideas and opinions on Hades and the character of his cult, but also advocates a new understanding of the notion of Greek deity, as metonymy: Hades is representative of a wider class of deities who are concrete and abstract at the same time (like Gaia [the Earth], Uranos [the Sky], Okeanos [the Sea]): they denote a place, a god, a property of something, a form of matter.
Healing nature: green living and the politics of hope in Hong Kong
Keywords: China
East Asian Studies
Sustainability
Hong Kong
Environmentalism
Subjectivity
Anthropology
Social Movements

In Hong Kong, 'green living' (luksik saangwut 綠色生活) is promoted as a way of living that is kind to the Earth and good to the people. It is a grassroots movement that encourages people to take personal responsibility for the environment and the society at large. While most studies of Asia's environmental movements focus on green groups' lobbying tactics and mobilisation strategies, this thesis pays serious attention to individuals' experience of living a green life. Although Hong Kong’s green culture is highly influenced by the global appeal to sustainability and environmental protection, its specificities are shaped by the city's social and political climate in a unique historical conjuncture. By focusing on individual experience and their practices of green living in the everyday, I argue that green living in Hong Kong is best understood as 'technologies of the self' wherein new environmental, social, and political subjectivities are formed among the ordinary people. The perceived reciprocity between the act of healing nature and the healing power of nature is an essential element in the formation of green subjectivity in Hong Kong. Not only does green living help people heal and transform themselves, it has also given rise to an embodied politics (santai likhang 身體力行) that enables people to reimagine a social and political 'otherwise'. Such embodied politics has come to represent a politics of hope that empowers people to confront with the politics of fear that has been looming over Hong Kong since the former British colony was returned to China in 1997. In light of this background, I argue that what the Hong Kong people want to sustain is not just the natural environment, but also the social norms and the ways of living that are thought to distinguish themselves from their counterparts in mainland China.
Multi-mode absorption spectroscopy for multi-species and multi-parameter sensing
Keywords: Interband cascade lasers
Quantum cascade lasers
Laser noise canceller
MUMAS

The extension of Multi-mode Absorption Spectroscopy (MUMAS) to the infra-red spectral region for multi-species gas sensing is reported. A computationally efficient, theoretical model for analysis of MUMAS spectra is presented that avoids approximations used in previous work and treats arbitrary and time-dependent spectral intensity envelopes, thus facilitating the use of commercially available Interband Cascade Lasers (ICLs) and Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCLs).
The first use of an ICL for MUMAS is reported using a multi-mode device operating at 3.7 μm to detect CH4 transitions over a range of 30 nm. Mode-linewidths are measured using the pressure-dependent widths of an isolated absorption feature in HCl. Multi- species sensing is demonstrated by measurement of partial pressures of CH4, C2H2 and H2CO in a low-pressure mixture with uncertainties of around 10%. Detection of CH4 in N2 at 1 bar is demonstrated using a shorter-cavity ICL to resolve spectral features in pressure-broadened and congested spectra.
The first use of a QCL for MUMAS is reported using a commercially available device operating at 5.3 μm to detect multiple absorption transitions of NO at a partial pressure of 2.79 μbar in N2 buffer gas. The revised model is shown to enable good fits to MUMAS data by accounting for the time-variation of the spectral intensity profile during frequency scanning. Individual mode-linewidths are derived from fits to pressure- dependent MUMAS spectra and features from background interferences due to H2O in laboratory air are distinguished from those of the target species, NO. Data obtained at scan rates up to 10 kHz demonstrate the potential for achieving short measurement times.
The development of a balanced ratiometric detection scheme for MUMAS with commercially available multi-mode lasers operating at 1.5 μm is reported for simultaneous detection of CO and CO2 showing improved SNR performance over previous direct transmission methods and suitability for a compact field-employable instrument. In addition, MUMAS spectra of CO2 are used to derive gas temperatures with an uncertainty of 3.2% in the range 300 - 700 K.