VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Separation and abstraction in property transfers: a comparative study of English and Chinese law
Keywords: separation
abstraction
rescission
property transfer
causality

This thesis is a non-traditional comparative study of a traditional topic, to see to what extent the non-unified rules in English law and vague rules in Chinese law can be fitted into the conceptual framework of separation and abstraction which originates in German law. It therefore comprises two main questions: first, how title/ownership is conveyed inter vivos consensually and second, whether the validity of conveyance is infected by a nullified or rescinded underlying basis. As for the existence of separation (between the underlying obligation and conveyance), answers for both jurisdictions are generally in the affirmative. It is further argued that though the underlying contract and the conveyance may factually coincide, a separate intent to convey can nevertheless be found as a method of conveyance conceptually independent from the contract. As for the existence of abstraction, answers for both jurisdictions are also generally in the affirmative, though in English law it appears to be but is in reality not subject to an exception in the context of sale of goods involving fraudulent misrepresentation, while in Chinese law such proposition can only be inferred from clues in other legislative provisions rather than direct authorities. A special feature of English law which must not be neglected is that though the transfer system may be notionally abstract at common law, the consequence of a valid conveyance involving a flawed underlying basis might be a right beyond in personam under a constructive trust. This makes the English system effectively causal in equity, though a coherent rationale is not easy to find regardless of the trust being an immediate response or one triggered by rescission. Although trusts are recognised in China, the role of constructive trust as a device for reversing unjust enrichment is alien to Chinese law, with substantial barriers from a systematic perspective for Chinese law to take lessons from English law. When it comes to debates over justifications between abstraction and causality, pro-causality justifications such as swollen assets, involuntary assumption of risk, causality plus bona fide acquisition, and property of sentimental value cannot stand up to scrutiny. It is suggested that the theory of detecting opportunity could serve as a positive argument for abstraction
Accommodating poetic, linear narratives with cyclical, repetition-based musical-poetic structures in the Cantigas de Santa Maria
Keywords: Rhyme
Poetry
Medieval
Musical analysis
Narrative
Cantiga
Miracle
Music

Central to the world of thirteenth-century Galician-Portuguese song are the Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM), of which the cantigas de miragre are the focus of this study. This body of Marian miracle narratives is not without its hermeneutical complications. The songs’ musical-poetic forms largely comprise alternations between a refrain, and strophes that finish by reiterating the refrain’s metre, rhymes and melody. Combining the strictly linear narrative of the miracle cantiga with this cyclical framework poses manifold complications. Seemingly self-contained narrative logic is divided by interstrophic refrains, and chains of thought are divided. This setup in the cantigas de miragre is rendered all the more curious, given that few comparable instances of cyclical structure and linear narrative occur elsewhere in late-medieval vernacular repertory. In essence, concatenating the linear with the circular does not typically work in narrative song.
This thesis is the first scholarly work that examines how the cantigas de miragre navigates this dichotomy. Parsing the musical, poetic and narrative structures of a selection of songs, Part I of the thesis demonstrates how the sonically tenacious refrain, when recapped within strophes, works to highlight the narrative thrust of a miracle story. The memorially marked recurrence of refrain metre, rhymes and melody functions as a device to separate the narratively central from the extraneous. It thereby exposes a miracle song’s essential message to its audience. Given late-medieval attitudes towards sonic repetition and memory—as well as a deeply ingrained awareness of the power of rhetoric—it is understandable that such a manner of declamation arose from the cantiga de miragre’s cyclical form. As Part I sets out this theory, songs are considered in more detail in the case studies that make up Part II. Here, the multifaceted nature of the repertory is shown to influence the way Part I’s theory is applied. These case studies all comprise different musical-poetic structures that manipulate the cantiga de miragres’ approach towards sonically turning back. The way these diverse structures coexist alongside their narratives indicates that the cantigas de miragres’ text-music relationships are far more intimate and complicated than existing scholarship has considered up until now.
Us in the time of strangers imagining community in colonial Kenya and Tanganyika, c.1900-1965
Keywords: Decolonisation
Nationalism
Comparative history
Tribe
Tanganyika
Entangled histories
Kenya
Community
East Africa

In the mid-nineteenth century, while linguistic and cultural similarities were acknowledged and prudential links maintained across ecological zones, insurance against environmental disaster, ‘felt’ community across East Africa was, pushing generalisation to its limits, intensely local, indeed parochial. A century later, as independence loomed, public argument turned on the fate of historically novel visions of ethnic, racial and territorial community. My thesis seeks to explain this development. It explores the way in which community came to be imagined by thinkers across East Africa, the way these communities featured in people’s lives, and developing, and diverging, understandings of the relationship between various visions of community in Kenya and Tanganyika, seeking to widen our understanding of community in East Africa beyond the recent domination of the literature by tribe. It argues that conceptually similar visions of ethnic and racial community were called into being in Kenya and Tanganyika as a response to what was by the 1940s a region-wide sense of disorder, the product of the disruptive impact of widening markets in labour and produce on existing moral economies, and rapidly became the central object of public argument. From this region-wide crisis and response, thinkers developed in the same decade specifically Kenyan and Tanganyikan understandings of the relationship between these communities, more forcefully in Kenya, more ambiguously in Tanganyika, understandings upon which intellectuals in the next decade, convinced now of colonialism’s destructiveness, brought the novel imperative to independence to bear, further shaping distinctively Kenyan and Tanganyika visions. These longer-term developments, in turn, shaped the imaginations of the region’s post-colonial nation-builders.
The life and theology of Bishop John Ponet (1516-1556)
Keywords: John Ponet
Tudor
Reformation
Thomas Smith
Thomas Cranmer

This thesis provides a major revision of the life and theology of Bishop John Ponet (1516-1556). Ponet was one of the most important English bishops within the mid-Tudor Church of England. However, he has been seriously neglected thanks to the paucity of scholarly attention given to his life and theology, and the tendency to minimise his contribution to the English reformation to political theology. This thesis corrects both the neglect and imbalance of Ponet studies through the retrieval of a substantial body of newly discovered sources, including thirty-six books owned and annotated by Ponet, over seven-hundred pages of manuscript material authored by Ponet, various letters relative to Ponet, and other archival material pertaining to Ponet. The introductory chapter of the thesis provides the historiographical context and methodological framework of the dissertation. Chapter one investigates Ponet’s upbringing in Kent and uncovers his intellectual, linguistic, astronomical, and dramatical contributions as a leading member of the ‘Athenian Tribe’ at Cambridge University. Chapter two surveys the period of Ponet’s archiepiscopal patronage under Henry VIII and progress during the early reign of Edward VI. It reveals the continuities between Ponet’s private convictions under Henry VIII and his public writings under Edward VI. Chapter three details Ponet’s episcopal accomplishments and demonstrates his transition from evangelical theologian to one of the most important figures among English bishops, alongside Archbishop Cranmer and Bishop Ridley. Chapter four examines Ponet’s reaction to the accession of Queen Mary and his subsequent exile, elucidating Ponet’s role as superintendent of the Strassburg exiles. Chapter five provides the theological counterpart to the previous chapter, and illuminates Ponet’s thought concerning clerical marriage, political theology, and sacramental theology. This dissertation contributes the most detailed account of Ponet’s life to date and presents the most comprehensive survey of his theological thought within the history of reformation scholarship.
Characterisation of SAMHD1's ancestral function
Keywords: SAMHD1
Nucleotide metabolism
Cancer
Cell death
Leukaemia

Deoxynucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs) are the building blocks of DNA. DNA synthesis requires dNTPs for replication and subsequent cell division. Therefore, nucleotide metabolism in cells is tightly regulated and failure of this regulation results in damage, toxicity and cell death. SAMHD1 is a highly conserved protein that degrades dNTPs and restricts HIV-1 through dNTP starvation. SAMHD1 is mutated in Aicardi-Goutières syndrome, a disease characterised by the chronic production of type I interferon. SAMHD1 is also involved in DNA repair and is mutated in cancer. SAMHD1 evolved before lentiviruses, suggesting that SAMHD1’s main function is not to restrict viruses. This project aimed to identify and characterise SAMHD1’s ancestral function. I show that addition of deoxynucleosides (dNs) to the culture medium resulted in the death of SAMHD1-deficient cells but not of WT cells. dNs were taken up by the cells and converted into dNTPs through the nucleotide salvage pathway. Cell death was most pronounced upon feeding with deoxyguanosine (dG) alone, suggesting that dGTP overload is particularly toxic to cells. In this model SAMHD1 tunes dNTP levels and protects cells against apoptosis triggered by dNTP overload or imbalances in the dNTP pools. Characterisation of this mechanism shed light on the mechanism of action of forodesine, an anti-cancer agent that inhibits purine nucleoside phosphorylase. Forodesine induces the accumulation of dGTP and subsequent cell death. Nevertheless, forodesine showed efficacy only in a minority of leukaemic patients, for unknown reasons. PBMCs from CLL patients with SAMHD1 loss-of-function mutations showed a significant reduction of CLL B-cells upon treatment with forodesine and dG compared with the control group. Therefore, I propose a model where SAMHD1 limits the efficacy of the PNP inhibitor forodesine which predict that patients with SAMHD1 mutations respond well to forodesine treatment. Forodesine could be used as a precision medicine. This new important role of SAMHD1 in dealing with dNTP overload and unbalances may be SAMHD1’s ancestral function. This mechanism can be exploited physiologically where dNTP accumulation is required for toxicity, such as forodesine treatment.
Interdisciplinary communities of practice: a blended learning in higher education model
Keywords: Cross-Institutional
Online Education
Qualitative Research
Communities of Practice
Higher Education
Blended Learning
Interdisciplinary Learning
Food Systems

This study investigates Innovative Food Systems Teaching and Learning, a postgraduate programme designed by the University of Oxford in collaboration with four higher education institutions. The programme aims to provide food systems teaching and interdisciplinary learning opportunities, to facilitate high­-level knowledge and skills needed to understand, analyze, communicate and address complex systems­-based efficiency, resiliency and sustainability challenges within the UK and globally. The purpose of this research study is to explore the ways in which the programme facilitated students’ interdisciplinary learning outcomes within a community­-based, blended learning environment. The study incorporates a variety of qualitative data collection methods including a focus group, interviews and survey, to capture students’ in­-depth interdisciplinary learning experiences associated with the programme. The findings indicate many ways in which IFSTAL demonstrated a successful community of practice and blended learning design, promoting students’ interdisciplinary learning. However, participants identified some barriers and offered recommendations to improve the programme and further enhance interdisciplinary learning outcomes. The programme’s in­-person settings facilitated students’ interdisciplinary learning but the virtual learning environment presented conflicting findings across the data collection methods, requiring further investigation.
Spatio-temporal control of network activity through gain modulation in cortical circuit models
Keywords: Motor primitives
Motor cortex
Cortical circuits
Motor system
Gain modulation
M1
Learning
Excitatory
Inhibitory

Animals perform an extraordinary variety of movements over many different time scales. To support this diversity, the motor cortex (M1) exhibits a similarly rich repertoire of activities. Although recent neuronal-network models capture many qualitative aspects of M1 dynamics, they can generate only a few distinct movements all with the same duration. Therefore, these models can still not explain how M1 efficiently controls movements over a wide range of shapes and speeds. In this thesis, we demonstrate that simple modulation of neuronal input–output gains in recurrent neuronal-network models with fixed connectivity can dramatically reorganise neuronal activity and thus downstream muscle outputs. Consistent with the observation of diffuse neuromodulatory projections to M1, our results suggest that a relatively small number of modulatory control units provide sufficient flexibility to adjust high-dimensional network activity on behaviourally relevant time scales. Such modulatory gain patterns can be obtained through a simple reward-based learning rule. Novel movements can also be assembled from previously learned primitives, thereby facilitating fast acquisition of hitherto untrained muscle outputs. Moreover, we show that it is possible to separately change movement speed while preserving movement shape, thus enabling efficient and independent movement control in space and time. Our results provide a new perspective on the role of neuromodulatory systems in controlling cortical activity and suggest that modulation of single-neuron responsiveness is an important aspect of learning.
Ecclesiastical penance in the Church of Constantinople
Keywords: Constantinople
ecclesiastical
Christian
Church
Byzantine
hagiographical
penance

The present study provides for the first time a systematic and comprehensive examination of the evidence for ecclesiastical penance found in the vast corpus of pre-Metaphrastic Byzantine hagiography.The value of the thesis lies primarily in the body of evidence which it makes available and interprets within the context of what can be known of the historical development of penitential practice among the Byzantine laity and of the nature and limitations of hagiographical evidence.
The evidence is arranged chronologically in four sections (330-551, 451—692, 692-863, 843-983), and a distinction is made within each section between evidence which reflects a Constantinopolitan milieu and evidence taken from other areas of the Greek-speaking Christian world.
The cumulative weight of the evidence supports the following conclusions about the history of Byzantine penance: 1) ecclesiastical penance did not cease to exist in the Byzantine churches following the "Nectarius incident" of 391/2; 2) monastic influence upon the outward form and inner understanding of ecclesiastical penance spread gradually from the fourth century onwards and was not a sudden phenomenon provoked by the events of the iconoclastic age; 3) the constitutive elements of the modern Greek practice of confession can be found in the practice of Byzantine lay people already in the fifth and sixth centuries, but the Lives of the saints nowhere suggest that confession was ever an obligation upon the laity in the period under survey or that a majority of the Byzantine faithful had recourse to the institutions of ecclesiastical'penance as a normal or routine part of their religious practice; 4) the phenomenon of unordained monks consciously exercising the apostolic power of binding and loosing was not, as Holl asserted, a central and informing element in the history of Byzantine penitential practice; 5) enthusiasm for hagiographical sources as privileged reflectors of the Byzantine popular milieu must be tempered by a realistic appreciation of the limitations inherent in the narrative forms and techniques of hagiography.
Assessment of prognostic models for patients with acute pulmonary embolism
Keywords: Cohort
Management
Prognosis
Prediction
Pulmonary embolism
Model
Validation
Impact
Index
Update
Severity
Course
Score
Derivation

Background: Acute pulmonary embolism (PE) is a life-threatening condition. This thesis presents my research into the role of prognostic models and strategies for assessing the severity of acute PE, how these compare with recommendations in clinical guidelines and the role of physician’s clinical judgment for improving patient management.
Methods: Methods used in each element in the research were appropriate to the relevant objectives: systematic reviews for assessing prognostic markers and prognostic models; sensitivity analysis using the net benefit decision-analytic measure across a range of threshold values for low-risk PE categories in direct comparisons; survey of clinical practice; development and assessment of a case-ascertainment strategy to detect PE patients in one hospital and to explore selection bias; and development of a study protocol for a future comparative study.
Findings: Individual prognostic markers are insufficient on their own to accurately predict outcome. Prognostic models are more successful, with the PE severity index (PESI) and simplified PESI (sPESI) models being the most validated. They provided a low event rate in patients identified as low-risk, which was similar to that obtained with other, less validated, strategies, such as the Hestia hospital checklist. High-risk groups were best identified using PESI or other models at high cut-off levels or by adding clinical vital signs, biomarkers and imaging-based markers of right ventricular dysfunction/ myocardial ischemia. The net benefit analysis confirmed the superiority of PESI and sPESI over original competing models, and the incremental value of adding prognostic markers. The survey showed that emergency physicians still rely mostly on their own clinical judgment when deciding about early discharge or complete outpatient management and the case-ascertainment study showed that if case-ascertainment is incomplete, selection bias may mean that event rates and prognosis will be underestimated, prognostic models will be overoptimistic and the results of different studies cannot be compared, contrasted or combined reliably.
Conclusions: Based on current evidence, the PESI models are the most appropriate strategies for deciding on early discharge and outpatient management for patients presenting to hospital with acute PE. Future research, with complete case-ascertainment, needs to compare these models with Hestia and clinical judgement to assess their value for decisions about the management of non-selected PE patients.
Long term behaviour of spatial population models with heterozygous or asymmetric homozygous selection
Keywords: Allen-Cahn Equation
population genetics
Delayed ternary-branching annihilating random walk
Spatial population model

We investigate the long term behaviour of two models for the spatial distribution of alleles in a diploid population, one with asymmetric selection in favour of the homozygotes, and one with selection in favour of the heterozygote.
We model the population with asymmetric homozygous selection using a version of the spatial Λ-Fleming-Viot process. We identify three regimes. For very small values of the asymmetry, the limiting behaviour of the process is the same as for the case with symmetric selection. This case was studied in Etheridge, Freeman and Penington (2017), and they showed, under certain rescaling and initial conditions, that the hybrid zone, the interface between two homogeneous regions of each homozygote, evolves according to mean curvature flow. However, for larger, but not that much larger, values of asymmetry, we show a new behaviour, that the hybrid zone evolves according to a different type of flow, which we call constant curvature flow. Furthermore, there is a strength of asymmetry for which elements of both types of curvature flow are present in the limit. This suggests that the behaviour found in Etheridge, Freeman and Penington (2017) is more sensitive to perturbations than first thought.
We then go on to investigate the fluctuations of this process about its limit. To do this, we specialise to the one-dimensional case. We show that, when time, space and the strength of the asymmetry are appropriately rescaled, the hybrid zone, which is a single point in one dimension, evolves according to a Brownian motion, with drift proportional to the asymmetry.
Finally, we turn to the model with heterozygous selection. We restrict ourselves to two dimensions, and investigate this process through its dual, the branching annihilating random walk. We show that, up to an arbitrary time, and with arbitrarily high probability, there exists a branching rate such that we may couple a branching annihilating random walk to a ternary branching Brownian motion. While interesting in its own right, this result lends support to a conjecture of Blath, Etheridge and Meredith (2007), that a branching annihilating random walk in two dimensions has a positive probability of survival for all time for any positive branching rate.