VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Women and work in irrigated landscapes in rural India
Keywords: Local Governance Institution
Gender
Asia
Labour
India
Irrigation practices

In India, the 1992 Reservation Law and the 2006 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have formalised women as legitimate actors in rural development. These gender-inclusive policies do not necessarily conform to the traditional domestic role of women, which often precludes them from formally engaging in political processes and labour outside the home. In Northern India, these major policy shifts are illustrated in ancient irrigation management systems. With growing rural outmigration and climatic variability aggravating water resources and food security issues, irrigation management is increasingly dependent on the active participation of women. Yet irrigation management is still widely perceived as a male responsibility. This thesis investigates how women adapt and respond to new institutionally mandated responsibilities and expectations as female leaders and as water users. The research is presented in four complementary papers based on quantitative and qualitative data collected during fieldwork in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh. Three major findings emerged to contribute to theories and evidence of the role of public policies in shaping gendered outcomes for common pool resource management in irrigation system in India. First, gender norms affect women differently depending on their public role in the community. Unlike non-political women, female leaders, as public figures, must secure communal approbation to gain power, credibility, and socio-economic networks. As a result, female leaders shape their political behaviour and policy preferences around local notions of femininity, female morality, and labour-based ideas of expertise. Second, for female water users, gender inclusive policies that legitimise their role as participants in formal political processes and the labour force for irrigation management increase their likelihood to defy gender-based restrictions and engage in formal political processes around irrigation management. Third, providing that formal/legal structures legitimize their actions, women will readily breach gender norms if they are to economically benefit from it. The implication of this research are that policies aimed at providing legal support for women to engage in formal rural development, combined with formalised economic opportunities for women are effective eroding agents of gendered institutions and are catalysts in facilitating the engagement of women in all areas of rural development. Given worldwide concerns over rural development, this study encourages such governmental actions to enable the effective and full engagement of future generations of women in the formal management of common pool resources.
Bayesian methods for inverse problems
Keywords: barcode detection
inverse problem
iterative ensemble Kalman filter
warping ensemble Kalman filter
deconvolution of well testing data
history matching problem

This thesis describes two novel Bayesian methods: the Iterative Ensemble Square Filter (IEnSRF) and the Warp Ensemble Square Root Filter (WEnSRF) for solving the barcode detection problem, the deconvolution problem in well testing and the history matching problem of facies patterns.
For the barcode detection problem, at the expanse of overestimating the posterior uncertainty, the IEnSRF efficiently achieves successful detections with very challenging real barcode images which the other considered methods and commercial software fail to detect. It also performs reliable detection on low-resolution images under poor ambient light conditions.
For the deconvolution problem in well testing, the IEnSRF is capable of quantifying estimation uncertainty, incorporating the cumulative production data and estimating the initial pressure, which were thought to be unachievable in the existing well testing literature. The estimation results for the considered real benchmark data using the IEnSRF significantly outperform the existing methods in the commercial software.
The WEnSRF is utilised for solving the history matching problem of facies patterns. Through the warping transformation, the WEnSRF performs adjustment on the reservoir features directly and is thus superior in estimating the large-scale complicated facies patterns. It is able to provide accurate estimates of the reservoir properties robustly and efficiently with reasonably reliable prior reservoir structural information.
Founding and re-founding: a problem in Rousseau's political thought and action
Keywords: history of political thought
social contract
Corsica
Geneva
founding of political societies
enlightenment
eighteenth century
constitutions
Poland
Rousseau
Europe
political thought

The foundation of political societies is a central theme in Rousseau's work. This is no surprise coming from a man who was born into a people who had their own celebrated founder and foundations, and immersed himself in the writings of classical republicans and the quasi-mythical histories of ancient city-states where the heroic lawgiver played an important and legitimate role in political foundations. However, Rousseau's propositional political writings (those written for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland) have been accused of being unsystematic and running the spectrum from conservative and prudent to radical and utopian. It is this seeming incongruence which is the subject of this thesis. In particular, it is argued that this confusion is born out the failure to recognize a systematic distinction between "founding" and "re-founding" political societies in both the history of political thought, and Rousseau's own work (a distinction in Rousseau which has rarely been noted, let alone treated to a study of its own). By recognizing this distinction one can identify two Rousseaus; the conservative and prudent thinker who is wary of making changes to established political systems and constitutional foundations (the re-founder), and the radical democrat fighting for equality, and claiming that no state is legitimate without popular sovereignty (the founder). In demonstrating this distinction, this thesis examines the ancient concept of the lawgiver, the growth and expansion of the idea leading up to the eighteenth century, Rousseau's own philosophic writings on the topic, and the differing political proposals he wrote for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland. The thesis argues that although there is a clear separation between these two types of political proposals, they remain systematically Rousseauvian.
The styles and voices of non-dramatic Greek poetry in the fourth century BC
Keywords: hellenistic
poetry
classical

This thesis is an investigation into the styles and voices of the non-dramatic Greek poetry of the fourth century BC. This has been a neglected area of study in Greek literary history, and the extant poems of the fourth century have either been largely ignored or regarded contemptuously by modern critics. I seek to redress this balance by providing close readings of surviving poems, and aim to show that contrary to widespread opinion, there are signs that this is a period of dynamic creativity. The first section looks more closely at the various factors that have led to a neglect of fourth-century poetry, including issues of periodization, the transmission of texts and the canonisation of poetry, the impact of musical and technological innovations and of social changes. Scholarship on late-classical Greek art is also discussed as a comparison. I then turn to discuss specific texts in depth, focussing on the way poems characterise themselves through speakers and addressees. I begin with inscribed poetry (epigrams and hymns), in which I observe tendencies both to conform to a generic model and occasionally to produce more apparently literary-conscious works. The sometimes intrusive presence of the learned author-narrator is discussed in ‘bookish’ poems; the final section is devoted to various kinds of sung poetry, including enkomia, burlesque and parody. Although the texts I analyse are diverse in genre and character, they are sufficient to point to a wider vitality of literary activity throughout the century.
Spaces of uneventful disaster tracking emergency housing and domestic chemical exposures from New Orleans to national crises
Keywords: New Orleans
Ethnography
Biopolitics
US
Emergency Housing
Housing
FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)
Chemical Exposure

In this thesis, I examine the politics, poetics, and logics of uneventful human harm in the United States by tracking the life and afterlife of a chemically contaminated emergency housing unit. In 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) deployed 120,000 trailers to the US Gulf Coast to house those displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Chemical testing, spurred by reports of inhabitant illness, revealed elevated levels of formaldehyde emanating from the plywood walls of the trailers. After being reclaimed by the federal government and beginning in 2010, the FEMA trailers were resold at auction to every corner of the country. Resold trailers gravitated to precarious populations at the poles of rural capital accumulation—from oil patches in North Dakota to reservations in Washington. These trailers serve as an exceptional substrate for an investigation into the anatomy of the uneventful as they once approached the apex of eventfulness as a national controversy and now reside in the shadows of the everyday.
This thesis apprehends and theorizes these dispersed and ordinary instruments of domestic harm across multiple registers: epistemological, material, spatial, and affective. I examine how failures of matter and meaning shaped and patterned the lives of those who inhabited the FEMA trailers as their lives became framed by chemical off-gassing, architectural insufficiency, material deterioration, and electrical short-circuiting. Crossing scales and venues, I interrogate the modalities of scientific incomprehension that erode the perception, admittance, or substantiation of mass chemical exposure. These technical processes, along with cultural horizons of eventfulness and the chronicity of disaster, foreclosed avenues of toxic harm accountability. These ‘economies of abandonment’ bring into relief the contemporary biopolitical priorities in which the FEMA trailer—an ostensible protection from harm that fosters illness—becomes possible. FEMA trailer residents attend to the minute, gradual, and ongoing symptoms of exposure to discern the reality and magnitude of residential contamination. The body of the exposed becomes both an epistemic instrument and, across time, the means of making low-level, chronic, and cruddy chemical exposures into eventful instances that drive individuals to action.
Youth, aspiration, and mobility: young people debating their potential futures in Nepal
Keywords: Social Change
Young People
Development
Work
South Asia
Higher Education
Agency
Migration

This study is centrally concerned with young people's capacity to identify and realise promising educational and occupational pathways. Whilst it is now well established among social scientists that young people have agency, much less is known about what types of agency young people might demonstrate. Based on field research conducted in 2011-2012 with a group of young people studying, working, and living in Nepal's capital city, Kathmandu, the present study scrutinises Western-inspired approaches prevalent in the scholarship on youth which equate agency to resistance and individuality. It does so, by bringing the literature on youth agency into conversation with theoretical work on the concepts of aspiration and mobility. Through an in-depth analysis of young people's time-space-strategies, the thesis contributes to existing literature in three ways: First, it shows that young people may grow in power as they learn to fulfil social obligations and foster stronger relationships with other people. Second, it illustrates that young people's agency may not only take the form of observable practices, but may also reside in young people’s active efforts to think through their options for improving their own and other people's situation. Third, it highlights the importance of young people's spatial mobilities and immobilities in negotiating various social pressures and in developing a sense of themselves as competent, educated, and successful people. The findings of this thesis are, therefore, of relevance to the interdisciplinary field of youth studies as well as to emerging debates in geography about the apparent need to produce 'aspirational citizens' and about the meanings attached to spatial (im)mobility in contemporary societies.
Analysis of the CD200R family
Keywords: host-pathogen interactions
paired receptors
CD200R

Paired receptor families, consisting of multiple genetically and structurally similar but functionally opposite activating and inhibitory cell surface receptors, are among the fine tuners of the immune regulation. Recent studies on the evolutionary origin of these receptor families have suggested links to pathogen driven diversification, according to which activating receptors continuously evolve in order to counterbalance pathogens that try to subvert the immune response by stimulating the inhibitory receptor through their virulence factors.
This thesis is about the CD200R paired receptor family. This family consists of an inhibitory receptor CD200R which is expressed on various leukocytes and delivers inhibitory signals upon engagement with its ligand CD200.
In this study, the possibility that the activating members of the family evolved under pathogen pressure was investigated. Genomic DNA from twenty two different mice strains was screened for the presence of members of CD200R family. The number of activating receptors varied, CD200RLe and CD200RLc were found to be mutually exclusive and three strains possessed previously unknown members of CD200R family.
In addition, the possibility that CD200R family members and other paired receptors interacted directly with bacteria was tested with a new assay but only the interaction of PIR-A1 with was found as previously reported.
The rabbit CD200R family has been characterized and ligand receptor interaction between rabbit CD200 and rabbit CD200R has been demonstrated. However, no interaction between rabbit CD200R and a candidate viral CD200 homologue, the M141R protein of myxoma viruses, could be shown. This finding suggested a CD200R independent role for M141R molecule and possibly other homologues in pox viruses.
Finally, two novel antibodies (OX131 and OX132) were characterized together with formerly generated antibodies against mouse CD200R family. The binding specificities and their effects on the CD200-CD200R interaction have been shown. This will help usage of these antibodies in various studies on the functionality and distribution of these receptors.
Practical improvements to the deformation method for point counting
Keywords: deformation method
Arithmetic geometry
point counting

In this thesis we investigate practical aspects related to point counting problems on algebraic varieties over finite fields. In particular, we present significant improvements to Lauder’s deformation method for smooth projective hypersurfaces, which allow this method to be successfully applied to previously intractable instances.
Part I is dedicated to the deformation method, including a complete description of the algorithm but focussing on aspects for which we contribute original improvements. In Chapter 3 we describe the computation of the action of Frobenius on the rigid cohomology space associated to a diagonal hypersurface; in Chapter 4 we develop a method for fast computations in the de Rham cohomology spaces associated to the family, which allows us to compute the Gauss–Manin connection matrix. We conclude this part with a small selection of examples in Chapter 6.
In Part II we present an improvement to Lauder’s fibration method. We manage to resolve the bottleneck in previous computation, which is formed by so-called polynomial radix conversions, employing power series inverses and a more efficient implementation.
Finally, Part III is dedicated to a comprehensive treatment of the arithmetic in unramified extensions of Qp , which is connected to the previous parts where our computations rely on efficient implementations of p-adic arithmetic. We have made these routines available for others in FLINT as individual modules for p-adic arithmetic.
New approaches to stereocontrolled glycosylation
Keywords: Neighbouring Group Participation
Carbohydrate Chemistry
Glycosylation
Stereocontrol
Chiral Acid

The conceptually simple process of linking carbohydrate units by glycosylation has proven to be one of the most difficult synthetic processes to control from a stereochemical perspective. In particular it is the stereocontrolled synthesis of 1,2-cis glycosyl linkages (e.g. α-glucosides, β-mannosides) which poses the most difficult challenge. The research presented in this thesis describes new ways in which stereocontrol in glycosylation reactions can be achieved. New methods of neighbouring group participation have been explored, utilising novel protecting groups at the 2-postion of a series of glycosyl donors.
In particular the use of glycosyl donors bearing a (thiophen-2-yl)methyl protecting group at the 2-hydroxyl have shown exceptional α-selectivity especially when used in conjunction with a sterically hindered glycosyl acceptor.
Work within this thesis also describes the first use of chiral Brønsted acid catalysts in the activation of glycosyl donors. It has been clearly demonstrated that not only can such catalysts be used in glycosylation reactions, but also that the chirality of the catalyst can dictate the stereochemical outcome of the reaction. The preliminary studies presented demonstrate that this methodology warrants further investigation.
Schizophrenia: neural architecture, brain regional differences, and changes with age
Keywords: neuropathology
schizophrenia
changes with age
neuroscience
neuroanatomy
microstructure
DTI

Schizophrenia is a heterogeneous and life-altering disorder. Although a multitude of research has been published on schizophrenia since its first iteration as dementia praecox, there is still much to be learned about this disease. Neuroscientific research has revealed important findings on brain changes; some of these have become consistent with the disease, such as the decrease in whole-brain gray matter and the enlargement of the ventricles. However, other findings remain controversial, including the posited increase in neuron density. New techniques are being implemented every day to study these changes, including the use of diffusion tensor imaging. A novel application of this method in the gray matter in the current study reveals increased diffusivity in schizophrenia, potentially implicating decreased tissue integrity and a loss of neuropil. Relationships with asymmetry are also explored in conjunction with altered neurodevelopment. An examination of the microstructure literature using meta-analysis suggests that overall there is an increase in density in schizophrenia. This provides support for a neurodevelopmental origin of schizophrenia, and has implications for the reduced neuropil hypothesis; additionally, a finding of decreased inhibitory neurons in schizophrenia provides support for the theory of dysfunctional inhibitory cortical circuits. A focus on the microstructure in the inferior parietal lobule, a neglected region in schizophrenia research, reveals a difference in structure in schizophrenia, as well as important relationships with age that support a progressive course to the disease. The effect of clinical variables such as medication and length of illness were examined in each of these studies, and these relationships provide important insight into the progression of the disease, as well as the nature of the impairment in those who have schizophrenia. The various techniques used in this project combine to create a picture of profound and comprehensive alterations in brain structure at both the macro- and micro-scale.
Tidal turbine array modelling
Keywords: wind energy
rotor design
Tidal energy
CFD
renewable energy

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used in this thesis to model wind and tidal stream turbines and to investigate tidal turbine fence performance. There are two primary objectives of this work. The first is to develop and validate an actuator line method for the simulation of wind and tidal turbines which applies the blade forces to the flow field without the need for a regularisation kernel. The second is to examine tidal fences using, in part, the newly developed actuator line method.
A potential flow equivalence method for determining the relative velocity to the blade chord and flow angle at the rotor blades in the actuator line method is proposed and validated. Results for simulations using this method compare favourably with those from both experiments and alternative computational methods, although the present model’s results deviate from experimental results in the vicinity of the blade tips.
A CFD-embedded blade element-momentum tool is used to design rotors for operation in infinitely wide tidal fences spanning a tidal channel. Rotors are designed for fences with several different blockage ratios, with those designed for high blockage flows having greater solidity than those designed for operation in fences with lower blockage. It is found that designing rotors for operational blockage conditions can significantly improve the power output achieved by a tidal fence. Improved power output for higher blockage conditions is achieved by the application of greater thrust to the flow.
Actuator line simulations of short (up to 8 turbines) fences with varying intra-rotor spacing and number of rotors confirm that hydrodynamic performance of the rotors improves as the spacing is reduced and as rotors are added to a fence. The position of a rotor within the fence impacts its performance; rotors at the ends of a fence extract reduced power compared to those at the centre of the fence, particularly for tip speed ratios greater than the design tip speed ratio.