VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Regulating the internet through private international law
Keywords: Information Technology
Regulation
Internet

This thesis discusses how private international law can effectively address challenges raised by the internet for different areas of private law, linking this question to the broader debate about the potential of private international law to resolve conflicts of regulatory authority in a globalised world.
The thesis identifies two core challenges of the internet: its independence from state borders, which drastically increases the number of connections to different countries in internet cases but reduces their usefulness; and the prevalence of private ordering, especially on online platforms that are effectively regulated only by their hosts.
Using EU private international law as an example, it argues that existing approaches to internet cases are often dominated by a deep-rooted fear of leaving claimants underprotected from the perceived dangers of an unregulated internet; thus, instead of reducing the overwhelming number of connections created by internet communication to few, particularly useful ones that allow to effectively allocate adjudicatory and prescriptive jurisdiction, they attach significance to all of them, allowing claimants to chose from a large of number of fora and applicable laws. This creates complex mosaics of jurisdiction and problematic overlaps of national laws, exposing defendants to a risk of worldwide liability.
This thesis proposes an alternative approach that arguably creates a better balance between the parties’ interests and expectations, combining a country-of-origin default rule with a targeting-based exception for consumer cases. It shows how such an approach could be implemented within the existing framework of EU private international law but would be difficult to extend beyond the relatively harmonised internal market of the EU. It argues that this approach would not only better exploit the potential of private international law for the horizontal coordination between national courts and legal systems but could also facilitate the vertical coordination between public regulators and private parties.
It thus provides an example for how private international law can accommodate new challenges without abandoning its commitment to ‘conflicts’ justice and substantive neutrality.
Study of the Drell-Yan process with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
Keywords: QCD
SM
PDF

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, at which protons collide at unprecedented center of mass energies and very high instantaneous luminosity, gives unique possibilities for precise tests of the Standard Model and to search for new physics phenomena. A precise prediction of the processes at the LHC is essential and the knowledge of the parton density functions (PDFs) of the proton plays a key role in this.
In this thesis, three analyses covering different aspects of the Drell-Yan process are presented.
From revolt to nostalgia: rethinking the Moroccan postcolonial malaise with Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Abdellatif Laâbi
Keywords: Abdellatif Laâbi
Malaise
Autobiography
Nostalgia
Exile
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Revolt
Abdelkebir Khatibi

This thesis problematizes revolt and nostalgia in relation to individual and collective malaise in Morocco by analysing the expression of both concepts in the postcolonial works of three contemporary Moroccan Francophone authors: Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Abdellatif Laâbi. Weaving together the three writers’ personal experiences and the broader political and historical context in Morocco, this thesis demonstrates that the two concepts can serve as productive mediums through which to probe a multifaceted Moroccan discourse of opposition and longing. Divided into six chapters and based mainly on close reading, the thesis builds upon a theoretical investigation of revolt and nostalgia in postcolonial studies to argue that their multi-layered and shifting meanings tend to be reduced respectively to a one-dimensional counter-discourse and a form of inefficient sentimentalism. Grounded in the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, the following two chapters demonstrate that the writers’ revolt is either strictly personal, connected to political activism, geared towards cultural decolonization, or concerned with transnational struggles, while being simultaneously performed in aesthetics through innovative strategies of formal transgression in theatre and poetry, for instance. Drawing on the work of Svetlana Boym, nostalgia is then analysed in the writers’ late autobiographies, where its retrospective and prospective forms mourn lost spaces and long for uncertain futures, and subsequently in relation to exile, where it complicates the relationship with the homeland through the exilic-like experiences of wandering, travel, and incarceration. The final chapter probes how both concepts work together in poetry to rekindle past revolts and unsatisfied nostalgias, but often end up producing bitterness and disillusionment. This thesis ultimately argues for a critical reading of more recent Moroccan Francophone literature to acknowledge the oft-neglected signs of an ongoing malaise, and further investigate the historical depth and the transformative power of both revolt and nostalgia in writing.
Ambitwistor strings and amplitudes in curved backgrounds
Keywords: Ambitwistor strings
Double copy
Curved backgrounds
Scattering amplitudes

Feynman diagrams have been superseded as the tool of choice for calculating scattering amplitudes. Various other methods are not only more efficient but also explicitly exhibit beautiful structures obscured by Feynman diagrams. This thesis aims to lay some groundwork on how two of these methods, ambitwistor strings and the double copy, can be generalised to scattering in curved backgrounds.
In the first part of this thesis, a heterotic ambitwistor string model coupled to a non-abelian background gauge field is constructed. It is shown that after decoupling gravity this model is anomaly free if and only if the background field is a solution to the Yang-Mills equations. A fixed gluon vertex operator for the aforementioned heterotic model as well as a vertex operator encoding graviton, B-field and dilaton for type II ambitwistor strings in a curved background are presented. It is shown that they are BRST closed if and only if they correspond to physical on-shell states.
In the second part, sandwich plane waves are considered. It is shown that scattering of gluons and gravitons is well defined on these backgrounds. 3-point amplitudes are calculated using quantum field theory techniques and a double copy relation between gluons on a gauge theory plane wave and gravitons on a gravitational plane wave is proposed. Using the results from the first part of this thesis, it is then shown that curved background heterotic and type II ambitwistor string models correctly reproduce these 3-point amplitudes on sandwich plane waves.
An imperial ideology and its legacy: Ottomanism in a comparative perspective, 1894-1928
Keywords: Avram Galanti (Abraham Galante)
Ottomanism
Tunalı Hilmi
Mustafa Satı (Sati’ al-Husri)

This dissertation focuses on the Ottomanist ideas of Tunalı Hilmi (1871- 1928), Avram Galanti (Abraham Galante) (1873-1961) and Mustafa Satı (Sati’ al-Husri) (1880-1968) in the years 1894-1928. Despite their different socio-political backgrounds, the three intellectuals pursued similar intellectual agendas with similar ideological inclinations over their long careers. Following their early publications as committed Ottomanists in the Ottoman period, Tunalı Hilmi and Avram Galanti turned into Turkish nationalists, while Mustafa Satı became a pioneering Arab nationalist in the context of the political shift from the Empire to post-Ottoman successor states. This study first examines the Ottomanist pursuits of the three figures in depth. It begins with a discussion of the late Ottoman milieu that constructed their Ottomanist mindset and continues with the clarification of the pillars of their Ottomanist stances. In order to better explore the broader implications of their pursuits, the dissertation particularly examines how Hilmi, Galanti and Satı considered education and language as a means to promote their Ottomanist agendas. Finally, the dissertation reflects on their nationalist stances and discusses the continuities in their intellectual pursuits to reveal the legacy of their Ottomanism on their nationalist years.
With its content and scope, the dissertation aims to participate in the growing revisionist dialogue on Ottomanism. Its inclusive approach to Ottomanism and transnational reading of its legacy in the context of three intellectuals’ ideological shifts constitute one of the first comparative studies on the subject. While it reveals the varying nature of Ottomanism in the multicultural context of the late Ottoman Empire, it indicates the broad implications of the ideology on the socio-political dynamics of the late Ottoman milieu and beyond. Moreover, by clarifying the discursive elements and political tools of their Ottomanist and nationalist years, it argues that Hilmi, Galanti and Satı’s intellectual pursuits in two different political orders contain important elements of continuity.
Exporting pandemics: free trade agreements and the global diffusion of unhealthy behaviours
Keywords: Trade policy
Medical sociology
Global health

This thesis is about the causes of unhealthy behaviours, and the role of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) in shaping them. Unhealthy behaviours include smoking, harmful alcohol consumption, and excess caloric intake. Sociologists have primarily investigated the causes of these behaviours with reference to individuals’ socio-economic and local environmental characteristics. Yet these determinants may, in turn, be shaped by a society’s macro-economic and political institutions, including FTAs. FTAs are major policy instruments that are increasingly being used to promote cross-border trade and investment. In doing so, FTAs may unintentionally foster the cross-border diffusion of unhealthy behaviours and constrain governments’ abilities to regulate them. However, scholars’ understanding of whether and how these impacts prevail is limited: most prior analyses precluded causal conclusions, whilst more rigorous statistical analyses of FTAs primarily focussed on economic outcomes. In this thesis I address these gaps. In the first empirical chapter I used a natural experiment design to evaluate whether entering into an FTA with the US corresponded to a rise in caloric intake in Canada. In a second analysis I used the synthetic control method to disentangle the specific clauses within FTAs that lead to dietary changes. In a third study I created a new dataset to investigate how FTAs might constrain governments’ abilities to introduce regulations aimed at preventing unhealthy behaviours. These empirical chapters advance previous analyses of FTAs and unhealthy behaviours by providing more robust evidence to infer a causal effect of FTAs and by elucidating their pathways to impact. They also make two broader, inter-related contributions to social scientific scholarship. First, my findings demonstrate the importance of FTAs for sociologists’ understanding of the causes of unhealthy behaviours. Second, my thesis shows that FTAs can have detrimental consequences for a society’s well-being in ways that are often overlooked in economic FTA evaluations.
Essays in empirical public finance
Keywords: Government budget deficit
Public finance
Panel data
Fiscal policy
Long-term interest rates
Government balance sheets

Both government net worth – the balance of government assets and liabilities – and government investment have fallen substantially, relative to national income, in many OECD countries in recent decades (Atkinson, 2015; IMF, 2014). This thesis investigates the macroeconomic implications of these developments, for fiscal sustainability on the one hand and for economic growth on the other.
Chapter 1 explores the relevance of the composition of government budget deficits for government bond markets. We use data for 31 OECD countries from 1990 to 2014 from the European Commission's AMECO database to show that, from the perspective of bond markets, not all budget deficits are created equal: markets charge significantly higher interest rates for deficits due to government current spending than for those due to government investment.
Chapter 2 investigates whether bond markets accord importance to the asset side of the government balance sheet and hence to government net worth, above and beyond government liabilities. We use data on both sides of the government balance sheet drawn from Piketty and Zucman (2014) – for a panel of 10 OECD countries in recent decades and for the United States over the long term – to show that, for bond markets, not all government debt is created equal: for explaining the cost of government borrowing empirically, government assets are significant, and it is government net worth rather than government liabilities that matters.
Chapter 3 is concerned with how government asset accumulation affects economic growth. We first assess the predictive relevance of government investment and government consumption for future growth, and then estimate a standard growth model in the spirit of Solow (1956) using econometric methods suitable for addressing possible endogeneity. We find that there is a significant difference in the growth effects of government investment and government consumption: government investment aids growth, while government consumption significantly impedes growth, both for a set of OECD countries and globally. These findings help to rationalise why bond markets take into account the extent to which a government budget deficit or debt increase is accompanied by government asset accumulation, as we found in Chapters 1 and 2. They also imply that the composition of government budget deficits and government balance sheets will impact future growth prospects and matter for the implementation of austerity policies and the design of fiscal rules in monetary unions.
Linear quantum optics: components and applications
Keywords: quantum simulation
quantum information
quantum photonics
integrated photonics

Quantum optics has successfully been used to test fundamental principles in quantum physics and to demonstrate the potential of quantum-enhanced technologies. Linear quantum optics, in which large quantum states of light are produced by optical interference of smaller quantum states, has proved to be particularly fruitful. Further progress will rely both on developing improved experimental tools to manipulate and measure quantum light, and on expanding and refining the range of applications of these technologies. This thesis presents our contributions towards both of these endeavours.
We first focus on some of the components necessary for linear quantum optics, starting with the requirement for reconfigurable interference between several optical modes. We propose a novel design for interferometers that satisfy this requirement, which is based on a new mathematical decomposition of unitary matrices used to describe optical interference. We show that our design is more efficient than previously known designs. We also experimentally demonstrate a modular approach to building these devices, which is based on the assembly of multiple UV-written integrated photonic chips. These chips are characterised, and three of them are assembled into a structure shown to enable a wide range of optical transformations. We then study methods of photon detection, showing how photon detectors can be calibrated and discussing the operation of superconducting photon number resolving transition edge sensors.
Next, we study two applications of linear optics. We examine the applicability of a proposal for simulating molecular spectroscopy using quantum optics in the presence of experimental imperfections. Our findings are illustrated with a proof of principle experiment in which we simulate part of the vibronic spectrum of the tropolone molecule. Finally, we study a class of optical devices, known as optical Ising machines, that has been shown to find solutions to difficult combinatorial problems. Describing the optical pulses in these devices in phase space as Gaussian quasi-probability distributions that evolve stochastically, we analyse the computational mechanism of these machines and show in theory that they can be simplified without affecting their performance.
Diet and risk of central nervous system tumours
Keywords: Vestibular schwannoma
Food and beverages
Central nervous system neoplasms
Glioma
Meningioma
Diet
Nutrition
Alcohol
Pituitary tumour

Existing evidence suggests diet may be associated with risk of central nervous system (CNS) tumours, but there is inconsistency between studies and limited knowledge of variation by tumour subtype. I present findings from the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature, and the first comprehensive analyses for the major subtypes of CNS tumours in large prospective studies with systematic coverage of dietary patterns, food groups, and nutrients.
Systematic review identified 37 epidemiological (predominantly case-control) studies, investigating risk of CNS tumours (predominantly glioma) in relation to 36 dietary factors in total. Meta-analyses of case-control studies showed some evidence for associations between vegetable or carotene intake and grains/cereal intake with decreased and increased glioma risk, respectively, and fruit intake and decreased meningioma risk, but these associations were not supported by the limited prospective evidence.
I investigated CNS tumour risk in relation to 29 food groups/nutrients and 3 dietary patterns, using data from the Million Women Study, NIH-AARP Study and PLCO Study for 2,313 cases of glioma, 750 of meningioma, 191 of pituitary tumours, and 174 of vestibular schwannoma, occurring during 15.4 million person-years follow-up. Using Cox regression, I found no significant association between any dietary factor and risk of any CNS tumour subtype, after applying a correction for multiple testing. For glioma, there were some borderline significant associations before correction, between increasing intakes of plant-based foods or increasing healthy diet scores and increasing risk, but these attenuated towards null in analyses accounting for reverse causation. For meningioma and vestibular schwannoma, the few significant associations found before correction for multiple testing may be chance findings. For pituitary tumours, there was no evidence of an association with diet.
This largest prospective analysis provides little evidence for any association of public health importance between diet and risk of the four major CNS tumour subtypes.
Finite element approximation for the unsteady flow of implicitly constituted incompressible fluids
Keywords: graph approximation
Lipschitz approximation
finite element method
implicit constitutive models
time-stepping
weak compactness
convergence

This thesis provides qualitative convergence results of a sequence of numerical approximate solutions for the flow of incompressible fluids subject to an implicit constitutive relation.
The constitutive law between shear stress tensor and shear rate tensor is encoded by a (t,x)-dependent maximal monotone graph with q-growth, for q > 1.
For the finite element approximation, the assumptions result in a pair of (conforming) inf-sup stable finite element spaces for the velocity and the pressure and in the unsteady case a fully discrete approximation based on backward Euler time-stepping is investigated.
Asset partitioning in the trust
Keywords: Asset Partitioning
Trust creditors
Trustee Indemnity
Creditors' claims
Beneficiary's creditors

Asset partitioning in the trust, the question of how creditors of trustees attach their claims to trust assets, is an elaboration of the fundamental structure of trust law. The trust creates a surrogate for separate corporate personality by using elements of personal liability of the trustee towards external creditors and towards the beneficiaries of the trust. The beneficial interest and its assignability ensure fluidity in the membership of the group enterprise. Through ingenious use of equitable doctrine, the trust has become a vehicle by which parties external to the trust need only concern themselves with their legal relations to the trustee, without regard to the internal obligational contours of the trust.
This thesis explores the doctrinal operation of these rules and seeks to make both practical recommendations for streamlining certain unclear or inconsistent doctrines, and theoretical points regarding broader trust law debates. To this end it enlists comparative prespectives from American law, where changes in central asset partitioning features have led to wide-ranging changes in the structure of trust law.
It argues that the basic structure of creditor access to trust assets does not support the view that the beneficiary has equitable ‘property right’ in the trust assets, nor that the trust fully segregates the assets of the trust from those of its members. Instead, the trust creates an order of priorities for creditor access with access being determined by the fulfilment of the trust’s purposes, and the beneficiary’s position is transmissible but obligational.
The law discussed in this thesis showcases the inadequacy of traditional private law analysis of definable correlative rights as regards the trust. The emerging picture is complex, subtle and elegant, and worthy of future study.
Linear allylic halides in metal-catalysed asymmetric substitutions
Keywords: Chiral ligands
Catalysis
Rhodium
Copper
Phosphoramidites

This thesis describes the use of linear allylic halides in transition metal catalysed asymmetric reactions.
In the first chapter we report the development of a copper-catalysed hetero-asymmetric allylic alkylation reaction of ester-containing allylic bromides. Despite the synthesis of a number of phosphoramidite ligands based on a bis-phenol backbone, we achieve only a 44% yield and 73% ee in this challenging reaction. Application of our reaction conditions to other linear allylic halides that do not bear the ester group resulted in only moderate results.
In the second chapter we describe new phosphoramidite ligands based on (S,S)-trans-cyclohexanediol and (R,R)-(+)-1,2-diphenyl-1,2-ethanediol. The ligands were examined in 3 different copper-catalysed asymmetric reactions and enantioselectivity of up to 89% ee was observed. Using the meso-diols with a chiral non-racemic amine gave diastereomeric ligands bearing achirotopic stereogenic phosphorus atoms, which were characterised with the assistance of X-ray crystallography and VT NMR studies.
In the last chapter we discuss the development of a rhodium-catalysed asymmetric carboxylation of ester-containing allylic bromides to form stereogenic carbon centres bearing two different carboxylates. The method uses common carboxylic acids as nucleophiles to form new C-O bonds in high yields and excellent enantioselectivities. We also demonstrate that the products can be used to form other chiral acetal derivatives, including valuable γ butenolides, in subsequent RCM reactions.
The ease of synthesis and stability of the products suggests that a broad range of new chemical species may be accessible by developing strategies to form stereogenic carbon centres featuring different combinations of multiple heteroatoms. We have begun to demonstrate this by using this method for the formation of O,N-aminals.