VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A study of the relationships between informal second language contact, vocabulary-related strategic behaviour and vocabulary gain in a study abroad context
Keywords: vocabulary acquisition

This thesis reports on a longitudinal, mixed-methods study of the relationships between informal (i.e. out-of-class) second language (L2) contact, vocabulary-related strategic behaviour and vocabulary gain in a study abroad context. The study addressed three main gaps in knowledge that arose from analysis of the literature: (1) the evidence of informal L2 contact was largely unreliable, ungeneralisable, or both; (2) the evidence of vocabulary-related strategic behaviour in informal L2 contact was neither context nor task specific; and (3) there was no evidence of the interplay between informal L2 contact, vocabulary-related strategic behaviour and vocabulary gain in a study abroad context.
The sample (n=241) were adults undertaking a study abroad experience (SAE) in England, who comprised a range of nationalities and first language backgrounds and for whom the majority of the SAE was spent outside of the classroom. A vocabulary test was administered at the beginning and end of the SAE. A questionnaire was administered during the SAE to determine the most highly identified with informal L2 contact scenarios and out-of-class vocabulary-related strategies. Subsequently, an innovative research tool comprising computer-based simulations of the most identified with scenarios was developed and used as the stimulus in semi-structured interviews to capture task and/or context-specific vocabulary-related strategic behaviour. Analysis grouped participants by length of stay and location.
The most highly identified with informal L2 contact scenarios involved participants seeking information from external sources, such as interlocutors, posters or websites. The vocabulary-related strategies most highly identified with by the sample pertained to the use of a newly encountered lexical item; that is, they were strategies in which the learner used or prepared to use a lexical item that they had decided to engage with strategically. The strategic behaviour manifested in response to the simulation tool (the 'OWLS') provided strong evidence in support of the fundamental considerations of task, context and intention in strategy-based research. Regression analysis revealed that informal L2 contact scenarios that were less strategically prohibitive and strategies that were less context-dependent were predictors of vocabulary gain. The pedagogical implications of these findings are far- reaching in terms of preparing L2 learners for informal contact on a SAE and guiding their manipulation of that contact for maximum linguistic gain.
Biochemical and functional characterization of the RNA binding protein SAF-A/hnRNP U and investigation of its potential role in mammalian X chromosome inactivation
Keywords: X Chromosome Inactivation
Nuclear Scaffold

X chromosome inactivation (XCI) is an important mechanism for gene dosage compensation between XY males and XX females during early embryonic development of eutherian mammals. The major regulator of XCI is the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) X inactive specific transcript (Xist). Xist RNA is believed to recruit epigenetic modifiers and initiate a silencing cascade that alters the chromatin structure and culminates in the transcriptional repression of most genes at the inactive X chromosome (Xi). Though extensively studied, the protein factors involved in the recruitment, spreading and maintenance of Xist RNA at the Xi are largely unknown.
Recently published studies provide evidence that the DNA and RNA binding nuclear matrix protein scaffold attachment factor A/heterogeneous ribonucleoprotein U (SAF-A/hnRNP U) is required for Xist localization to the Xi. These studies, however, are incomplete in that they neither provide information on the RNA binding consensus sequence for SAF-A/hnRNP U on Xist, nor on its functional role in XCI.
The present study was designed to re-investigate the role of SAF-A/hnRNP U in XCI using state-of-the-art techniques, notably fluorescence recovery after photo-bleaching (FRAP), 3D-structured illumination microscopy (3D-SIM), and in vivo crosslinking and RNA immunoprecipitation (CLIP).
The results indicate that SAF-A/hnRNP U exists in two forms; a highly dynamic pan-nuclear protein and a stably Xi-associated form. 3D-SIM reveals that the latter closely associates with Xist RNA, and lines out the interchromatin channels within the Barr body. This finding suggests that SAF-A/hnRNP U takes part in the structural organization of the Xi by creating a secluded chromatin environment that retains XCI factors in their dedicated nuclear location. In contrast to observations made in microscopy imaging, biochemical experiments did not confirm a direct binding of SAF-A/hnRNP U to Xist RNA. This observation led to the conclusion that the protein plays an indirect, structural role in XCI.
In need of a new story, writing, teaching and learning history in mandatory Palestine
Keywords: education
knowledge
history
mandate
historiography
Palestine

This study looks at history teaching as a reflection of the circumstances and interests that shaped the nature of Palestinian society, Arab and Jewish, in mandate Palestine. It examines the pedagogical and political roots of educational segregation between Arabs and Jews, tracing the causes that turned it into an impervious practice and explores the engagement of both communities with the education of the national other and the reciprocal influence of this engagement on both education systems.
The thesis examines the sociology of particularly Arab, but also Hebrew knowledge, focusing on who wrote history textbooks and why, what were the cultural and intellectual influences involved in this process, and how was history instrumentalised for the creation of a new identity, shedding light on the conscious or unconscious manner in which colonial historiographic paradigms wrote themselves into these textbooks. The juxtaposition of Arabic and Hebrew textbooks underlines the centrality of the conflict in moulding exclusive notions of collectivity and territoriality through the narration of the past.
The second part of the project discusses the institutionalisation of this historiography into an educational policy, through curricula, syllabi and exams. I focus on the colonial logic behind this policy, highlighting its inconsistent educational rationale. By analysing the pedagogic discourse of Arab educators and essays written by students, I argue that a growing community of educators and students countered the British policy, seeking to make sense and find an authentic voice within the contours of colonial reality. The thesis concludes with an examination of the teaching of history beyond the history course, analysing the omnipresence of history in the students' lives and their interpretation of it, underlying the differences between the Arab and Hebrew communities in their ability to disseminate a shared, historical consciousness. This analysis of Arabic and Hebrew sources discloses the uncanny resemblance between the production of historical education in both communities, which nonetheless contributed in both cases to driving them apart rather than opening any space for commonality.
'Rebellion to the Gods'. Dialogue and conflict with tradition in the poetry of Amelia Rosselli from 'Primi Scritti' to 'Variazioni belliche'
Keywords: Gestalt
Intertexuality
Modernism
Literature and ethics
Literature and trauma
Ethnomusicology

This thesis focuses on Intertexuality in the Poetry of Amelia Rosselli from Primi Scritti (1952-1963) to Variazioni belliche (1959-1961).
The research is based on the annotated books of the author’s personal library kept in the Fondo Rosselli of Viterbo and of her personal documents, letters and original typescripts of her works held in the Centro Manoscritti Autori Moderni e Contemporanei of the University of Pavia. Rosselli's annotations are studied for the first time and they have proved to be essential for the interpretation of her poetry.
Rosselli's aspiration to Gesamtskunstwerk is reflected in the composition of her library which ranges from musicology, quantum physics, Gestalt psychology, history of art and philosophy. I explored the influence of these disciplines in her work adopting an interdisciplinary approach. In particular I concentrate on the influence that her studies in etnomusicology have had on the style of her poetry.
The theoretical framework of Julia Kristeva and Gian Biagio Conte enable me to draw two main intertexual strategies in Rosselli's poetry: the intertexuality of harmonics, and parody.
Rosselli's use of literary allusion is a very original one: it is based on her work as a musicologist, which she articulates in the essay La serie degli armonici. In this essay Rosselli studied natural harmonics in music. Allusions develop into an intertextual fugue creating a mîse en abyme effect. Another type of allusion is the parody in which the poetic I acting as the fool challenges the literary fathers of Tradition in order to find her own space in the canon.
The study of intertextuality has also some important consequences on a literary hystoriographic perspective: I recognized in her poetry what Detloff called 'the persistence of Modernism'. Her work like the one of Anglo-American modernists is characterized by a form of resilience to trauma and loss. Like the literature of survivors, Rosselli’s deals with the expression of inexpressible, the fragmentation of the poetic I, and the will of re-writing her own story to overcome trauma. The ultimate result is a political and ethical cry for social justice, symphathy and peace.
Bioprocessing of oncolytic group B adenovirus for scalable production
Keywords: metabolism
replication
virotherapy
oncolytic
adenovirus

The central aim of this thesis was to develop strategies to improve the manufacture of the group B chimeric oncolytic adenovirus, ColoAd1, which rapidly kills and lyses host cells. In attempting to improve the cellular yield of ColoAd1, this thesis therefore sought to identify host infection-related factors that limited ColoAd1 production.
In the widely-used manufacturing cell line, HEK293, ColoAd1 replication depleted intracellular ATP earlier than Ad11p and activated the intracellular energy sensor, AMPK. This might have reflected earlier ATP depletion, or possibly the absence of the E4orf4 protein from ColoAd1 compared to Ad11p. Despite this difference in AMPK activation, both viruses appeared able to maintain mTORC1 activity, which may be essential particularly for protein synthesis in the early stages of virus infection. For production purposes, preventing intracellular ATP depletion was seen as an attractive mechanism of maintaining ColoAd1 infected host cell viability and was hypothesised to lead to increased virus yield. A range of strategies were explored to enhance depleting ATP levels. Even though none of these were dramatically successful, they indicated that perhaps the anabolic building blocks required for viral replication were more important than cellular energy levels. Finally, a screening methodology based on siRNA knockdown was used to identify kinases that affected ColoAd1 replication. Many hits were identified, and several candidate kinases indicated a role for intracellular calcium signalling limiting virus particle production.
Overall, data presented in this thesis supports the manufacture of ColoAd1 in HEK293 cells and suggest that enhancing glycolysis may increase ColoAd1 yield. It also provides mechanistic insights into the replication of ColoAd1 and Ad11p that may inform the improved design of group B oncolytic adenoviruses.
Corresponding forms: aspects of the eighteenth-century letter
Keywords: dialogue
letters
Robert Burns
Samuel Richardson

My thesis investigates the dialogic aspects and literary qualities ascribed to letters during the long eighteenth century. In part this involves documenting the correspondence between letters and other genres, such as the novel. Being in correspondence encouraged writers such as Burney and Johnson to express the relationship between sender and recipient in interesting ways. I posit that the letter offered a sophisticated means for writers, including those in Richardson's circle, to represent speech and thought, and mimic (with varying degrees of indirection), that of others. I consider the editorial habits and typographical conventions that governed letter-writing during the period, honing in on Richardson's contributions. I link his claim that letters were written ‘to the Moment' with broader tropes of 'occasional' style, and show how this manifests in letters' intricate modulations of tense and person.
Chapter 1 details the conventions that prevailed in letters of the period, and their interactions with irony and innovation. I compare convention in the epistolary novels of Smollett and Richardson, and look at closure in the Johnson-Thrale correspondence. Chapter 2 demonstrates that various methods of combining one's voice with others were utilized in letters (such as those of the Burney family), including some that took advantage of the epistolary form and its reputation as 'talking on paper'. Chapter 3 shows the role of mimesis in maintaining the dialogic structure of letters, and links it to contemporary theories of sympathy and sentiment. Chapters 4 and 5 apply the findings about epistolary tradition, polyphony and sentimentalism to the letters of Sterne and Burns. In them, there is a mixture of sentiment and irony, and of individual and 'correspondent' styles. The conclusion discusses the editing of letters, both in situ and in preparation for publication. The twin ideals of spontaneity and sincerity, I conclude, have influenced the way we choose to edit letters in scholarly publications.
Fact factories: Wikipedia and the power to represent
Keywords: digital inequalities
Wikipedia
power in online communities
digital speech acts
authority

Wikipedia is no longer just another source of knowledge about the world. It is fast becoming a central source, used by other powerful knowledge brokers like Google and Bing to offer authoritative answers to search queries about people, places and things and as information infrastructure for a growing number of Web applications and services. Researchers have found that Wikipedia offers a skewed representation of the world that favours some groups at the expense of others so that representations on the platform have repercussions for the subjects of those representations beyond Wikipedia's domain. It becomes critical in this context to understand how exactly Wikipedia's representations come about, what practices give rise to them and what socio-technical arrangements lead to their expression.
This ethnographic study of Wikipedia explores the values, principles and practices that guide what knowledge Wikipedia represents. It follows the foundational principles of Wikipedia in its identity both as an encyclopaedia and a product of the free and open source software and internet freedom rhetoric of the early 2000s. Two case studies are analysed against the backdrop of this ideology, illustrating how different sets of actors battle to extend or reject the boundaries of Wikipedia, and in doing so, affect who are defined as the experts, subjects and revolutionaries of the knowledge that is taken up.
The findings of this thesis indicate that Wikipedia's process of decision-making is neither hierarchical nor is it egalitarian; rather, the power to represent on Wikipedia is rhizoid: it happens at the edges rather than in the centre of the network. Instead of everyone having the same power to represent their views on Wikipedia, those who understand how to perform and speak according to Wikipedia's complex technical, symbolic and policy vocabulary tend to prevail over those who possess disciplinary knowledge about the subject being represented. Wikipedians are no amateurs as many would have us believe; nor are they passive collectors of knowledge held in sources; Wikipedians are, instead, active co-creators of knowledge in the form of facts that they support using specially chosen sources.
The authority of Wikipedia and Wikipedians is garnered through the performative acts of citation, through the ability of individual editors to construct the traces that represent citation, and through the stabilization and destabilization of facts according to the ideological viewpoints of its editors. In venerating and selecting certain sources among others, Wikipedians also serve to reaffirm traditional centres of authority, while at the same time amplifying new centres of knowledge and denying the authority of knowledge that is not codified in practice. As a result, Wikipedia is becoming the site of new centres of expertise and authoritative knowledge creation, and is signalling a move towards the professionalization of the expertise required to produce factual data in the context of digital networks.
‘Busy working with materials’: transposing form, re-exposing Medardo Rosso
Keywords: Rephotography
C. S. Lewis
Reproductive technologies
Phenomenology of art
Photography of sculpture
Practice-led research
Medardo Rosso
Ontologies of art

This thesis examines how making extends artists' thoughts beyond their conceptions. Central to this is consideration of how an artist's statements and their work relate: this thesis argues that the relationship is neither of identity nor contradiction, but of a productive tension from which emerges a richer understanding of thought. A similar approach underscores this doctorate's relationship of studio and written components, both of which desire self-sufficiency. The studio work consists of discrete yet mutually informing series, all engaged with the specificity of a moment of exposure, whether here and now or recording a past moment. The notion of 'documentation' underscores these works, which include large chemical photographs, high-definition video, cyanotypes and extensive exploration of casting to reveal latent images. The written component is a thorough study of the various instances of Medardo Rosso's sculpture Ecce Puer, offering art-historical and theoretical grounding of hands-on making as a way pressing cultural issues inhere in a work at a more fundamental level than understood by its contemporaries or maker. The first chapter locates Rosso in his historical milieu. Chapter 2 assesses the elements constituting Ecce Puer; it argues that no definitions of a 'work' adequately encompass these, and coins the term 'complex work' to designate artworks indivisibly singular and plural, concrete and abstract. Chapter 3 offers phenomenological interpretation of Rosso's confused writings, illuminating them through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy but understanding Rosso's thought as inadequate to the complexity of his work. Chapter 4 examines Rosso's photography, specifically his photography of photographs, connecting what this achieves to his phenomenology. Chapter 5 introduces a key notion of 'friendship' to understand how the connections between instances of Ecce Puer became 'meaningful'. Having offered a fundamentally new interpretation of Rosso's project, chapter 6 extends Michael Fried's history of French painting to relocate Rosso within early twentieth-century art.
Kato's perturbation theorem and honesty theory
Keywords: Kato's Perturbation Theorem
honesty theory
semigroups of operators

We study an additive perturbation theorem for substochastic semigroups which is known as Kato's Theorem. There are two previously-known generalisations of Kato's Theorem, namely for abstract state spaces and for KB-spaces. We prove a version of Kato's Theorem for a class of spaces which encompasses both, namely ordered Banach spaces with generating cone and monotone norm. We also study a property of the perturbed semigroup in Kato's Theorem known as honesty of the semigroup. We add a few results to the fairly extensive existing theory of honesty for Kato's Theorem for abstract state spaces. In light of our new generalisation of Kato's Theorem to ordered Banach spaces with monotone norm, we investigate generalising the theory of honesty to these spaces as well. The results for the general case are less complete as many of the results for the case of abstract state spaces depend on the additive norm structure of the space.
We also consider some new applications of honesty theory in abstract state spaces. We begin by applying honesty theory to the study of the heat equation on graphs. We prove that honesty of the heat semigroup coincides with a concept known as stochastic completeness of the graph which has been studied independently of honesty. We then look at the application of honesty theory to quantum dynamical semigroups. We show that honesty is the natural generalisation of the concept of conservativity of quantum dynamical semigroups. Conservative quantum dynamical semigroups are known to have certain "nice" properties. We show that similar properties hold for honest semigroups using honesty theory results. Finally, we consider a form of boundary perturbations in the context of transport semigroups. There exists an analogous theory of honesty for this set-up. We formulate a general result from which honesty results of both Kato's Theorem and transport semigroups can be derived.
Combined experimental and computational investigation into inter-subject variability in cardiac electrophysiology
Keywords: Cardiac electrophysiology
Systems biology
Repolarisation abnormalities
Population of models
Inter-subject variability
Computational biology
Inter-individual variability
Cardiac modelling
Mathematical modelling
Computational modelling

The underlying causes of variability in the electrical activity of hearts from individuals of the same species are not well understood. Understanding this variability is important to enable prediction of the response of individual hearts to diseases and therapies. Current experimental and computational methods for investigating the behaviour of the heart do not incorporate biological variation between individuals. In experimental studies, experimental results are averaged together to control errors and determine the average behaviour of the studied organism. In computational studies, averaged experimental data is usually used to develop models, and these models therefore represent a 'typical' organism, with all information on variability within the species having been lost.
In this thesis we develop a methodology for modelling variability between individuals of the same species in cardiac cellular electrophysiology, motivated by the inability of traditional computational modelling approaches to capture experimental variability. A first study is conducted using traditional modelling approaches to investigate potentially pro-arrhythmic abnormalities in rabbit Purkinje fibres. A comparison with experimental recordings highlights their wide variability and the inability of existing computer modelling approaches to capture it. This leads to the development of a novel methodology that integrates the variability observed in experimental data with computational modelling and simulation, by building experimentally-calibrated populations of computational models, that collectively span the variability seen in experimental data.
We apply this methodology to construct a population of rabbit Purkinje cell models. We show that our population of models can quantitatively predict the range of responses, not just the average response, to application of the potassium channel blocking drug dofetilide. This demonstrates an important potential application of our methodology, for predicting pro-arrhythmic drug effects in safety pharmacology. We then analyse a data set of experimental recordings from human ventricular tissue preparations, and use this data to develop a population of human ventricular cell models. We apply this population to study how variability between individuals alters the susceptibility of cardiac cells to developing drug-induced repolarisation abnormalities. These abnormalities can increase the chance of fatal arrhythmias, but the mechanisms that determine individual susceptibility are not well-understood.