VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Assessing climate readiness of Kenyan counties through an exploration of County Integrated Development Plans
Keywords: Water Resources
Climate change
Devolution
CIDPs
Water Management

Through comparative document analysis of the 47 County Integrated Development plans, this study assesses the climate readiness of Kenya by reviewing types of climate information, water development priorities, and the perceived climate risks of the counties. Results show that the climate information used in the documents is mainly information about climate hazards that have either been experienced in the counties or are anticipated in the future, and local knowledge being used in just one document. Development of water supply infrastructure is the main water development priority across all the counties while floods and droughts are the most stated climate risks anticipated by the counties. While there are 91 instances of climate initiatives used across all the documents, the information is mostly not adopted to the specific context and geographical scale of the counties. The water development priorities of the counties are usually the same despite the climate risk faced by the county, with a lot of counties leaning towards ground water exploration, building of supply infrastructure and expansion of land under irrigation. The study concludes that there is need for uniformity of the information that goes into the CIDPs, and adaptation of integrated water management.
The Crimean moment and crucible: Ideas of war and peace, 1854-6
Keywords: pacifism
Quakers
morality
Crimean War
just war
intellectuals
Religious Society of Friends
Victorian Britain
religion
debate
media
Peace Society

Disrupting an almost forty-year period of peace in Europe, the Crimean War (1854-6) led Victorians to the belief that they were living through an historic caesura. Besides intensifying extant moral and ideological divisions within Victorian society, this conflict also exposed the horrors of the battlefront in graphic detail, and so acquired an unprecedented degree of immediacy and visibility. ‘Seeing’ war in all its fearful reality gave rise to challenging moral questions. This thesis argues that the Crimean War thus became a crucible in which Victorians negotiated and contested ideas of war and peace. Within a wider ‘war’ of words and ideas, peace advocates and their critics fiercely debated the morality of wars in general, and the justice of the Crimean War in particular. At the same time, Victorians reflected seriously and more deeply than at any time over the previous decades on war’s place in the life of a professedly Christian nation. Where many historians have studied the war intensively as an episode in diplomatic and military history, this thesis advances fresh perspectives on its unique impact on Victorian thought and culture, by tracing the complex ways in which the idea of ‘just war’ and the principles of the peace movement framed religious, intellectual, political, and cultural debates. It is distinctive in developing a wide contextual perspective, and in placing diverse commentators—churchmen, dissenters, historians, parliamentarians, poets, writers, artists, and others—within a common argumentative framework. Offering a close, critical, and analytical reading of an eclectic range of underused and hitherto untapped sources, it uncovers the remarkable cross-fertilization of various motifs between them, and illuminates the interactivity of debate. The result is an account that reconstructs a richer and more holistic picture of ideas and debates about a war which marked a defining moment in the Victorian era.
Mimesis and intertextuality in twelfth-century Byzantine literature: the case of Theodore Prodromos
Keywords: epigram
biblical paraphrasis
mimesis
intertextuality

This thesis examines mimesis and intertextuality in twelfth-century Byzantium through the close study of the writings of Theodore Prodromos. Chapter One focuses on Prodromos' sequel to Lucian’s satire Philosophies for Sale. Analysing Prodromos’ appropriation of ancient literary personae (from Homer to Euripides to Hippocrates), I argue that Prodromos highlights the positive impact of classical literature on his occassional writings. Chapter Two investigates Prodromos’ philosophical writings. As well as investigating Prodromos’ criticism of ancient philosophical authorities, I draw attention to literary strategies that Prodromos deploys to showcase his excellence as a teacher of philosophy. Chapter Three studies Prodromos in his capacity of a panegyrist. I discuss the rise of military ideology in the Comnenian period and argue that Prodromos achieved his success as a court poet through reviving the Homeric hexameter. Chapter Four investigates Prodromos’ subversion of the Comnenian political system. I identify three major strategies of subversion (endorsement of disgraced aristocrats, allegory and classical imitation) and single out the recurrent themes of Prodromos' criticism. Chapter Five discusses how Prodromos reconciled his classical aspirations with his Christian faith. I focus on the poorly studied collection of epigrams on the Old and New Testament, and demonstrate how Prodromos rewrites Scripture according to the conventions of classical literature. Chapter Six showcases originality of the epigrams’ poetics by highlighting carnivalesque elements, which were earlier identified in other writings by Prodromos. Having evaluated my evidence, I come to the conclusion that mimesis and intertextuality were essential for achieving success in classroom, court circles and literary salons.
Learning dense prediction: from correspondence to segmentation
Keywords: deep learning
computer vision
stereo matching
segmentation
dense prediction
generalization
optical flow

Dense prediction is the task of predicting a label for each pixel in the image. Given 3D data (point clouds or RGB-D images) as input, dense prediction can also be extended to 3D space and assign each 3D point/location a label. According to the label type, dense prediction can be mainly categorized as depth estimation, motion prediction, segmentation, and other related tasks. There are four major challenges for learning dense predictions: i) how to significantly improve the accuracy and resolve the ambiguous regions, ii) high memory and computational costs, iii) the dependency on a large amount of labeled data for training, and iv) the poor cross-domain generalization to novel datasets.
This integrated thesis focuses on dense prediction tasks, from correspondence estimation (stereo matching and optical flow) to 2D/3D semantic segmentation. Seven robust deep neural network models are proposed to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, to realize effective training with just synthetic data or unlabeled real data, and to boost the cross-domain generalization to various unseen datasets.
For the first task, traditional 3D geometry constraints are embedded into end-to-end trainable stereo matching networks to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on two stereo matching benchmarks (by publication date). Based on this work, a domain-invariant stereo matching network is proposed. It is trained on the synthetic data but outperforms many models fine-tuned on real data. For the second task, a Separable Flow network is developed for optical flow estimation, which ranks the first on two standard optical flow benchmarks (by the time of publication). It's also one of the best methods for predicting optical flow on various unseen datasets. Moreover, research is also conducted on unsupervised pre-training and domain adaptation for semantic image segmentation. Finally, the 2D image segmentation knowledge is further leveraged for tackling 3D segmentation. The proposed 3D segmentation networks achieve the leading position on large-scale point-cloud segmentation benchmarks (at the time of publication).
Essays in social policy
Keywords: policy feedback
campaign promises
voting behaviour
welfare state expansion
economic voting

This dissertation explores the political determinants and consequences of social policies in advanced economies. In its four papers, it aims to contribute to our understanding of how social policies influence the political and electoral behaviour of voters as well as the ways in which electoral outcomes determine social policies. Paper 1 investigates the statistical sources of model uncertainty in the literature of welfare state determinants. It approaches this issue by quantifying the sensitivity of empirical estimates towards different model specification choices, including the control variable set, the fixed effect structure, the standard error type, the country sample, the period sample and the operationalisation of the dependent variable. By developing an Augmented Extreme Bounds Analysis (A-EBA) method combined with a grid-search deep learning approach, the paper reveals that the selection of the country and period sample and the operationalisation of welfare state generosity has a substantially larger impact on the coefficients and standard errors in generosity estimations than the control set. Paper 2 quantifies the electoral returns to campaign promises on social benefit expansions. By applying a discontinuity-based research design on survey data in Germany, the results show that promises on pension benefit expansions swing voters to the pledge-making party. This alignment gain, however, is only transitory as the effect diminishes shortly after pledge fulfilment suggesting that even unbroken promises on very generous welfare state policy expansions do not yield long-term political support. Paper 3 measures the mobilising effect of pension benefit expansions in the US. The paper matches voting records with a large administrative dataset on pension payments to retired public employees in Illinois. The results of a discontinuity-based research design show that pension benefits increase electoral participation in the short run among Democrat voters, particularly among those with lower levels of income. In contrast, Republican and/or unaffiliated voters remain unresponsive. Thus, the results suggest that policy feedbacks depend strongly on voters’ ideological and material predisposition. Paper 4 examines whether the provision of social benefits and assistance programmes can mitigate the political costs of unpopular policies, such as climate change policies. By applying an instrumental variable approach to a dataset covering a large set of advanced economies over time, the estimates show that the welfare state can be a viable tool to prevent electoral punishment the incumbent receives for passing unpopular policies. These findings highlight that the welfare state can generate the political and electoral support that is necessary for urgently needed measures in times of global warming.
Identifying signalling molecules controlling T cell antigen sensitivity and discrimination
Keywords: T cell
Sensitivity
Discrimination

T cells are critical checkpoints in adaptive immunity and they are activated when their T cell surface receptor (TCR) recognises antigens presented on major histocompatibility complex (pMHC). It is well established that T cells have high sensitivity able to recognise even a single pMHC ligand and high discrimination able to respond to higher-affinity foreign pMHC but not to lower-affinity self pMHC. The mechanism(s) of antigen sensitivity and discrimination have been proposed to be dependent on a large number of molecules. These molecules are often identified by their association with TCR-proximal signalling events using different experimental assays. As a result, these conclusions rely on inference. Here, we directly quantified antigen sensitivity and discrimination in systematic experiments where different T cell molecules were modulated. Using chemical inhibitors, we identified the tyrosine kinase Lck as controlling antigen discrimination, Lck and Phospholipase Cγ (PLCγ) as controlling antigen sensitivity, and Lck, PLCγ, Calcineurin, Phosphoinisitide-3-kinase (PI3K), Protein kinase Cθ (PKCθ), Mitogenactivated protein kinase (MEK) and mammalian Target of rapamycin (mTorc) as controlling antigen efficacy (maximum response). We found no evidence that molecules Calcineurin, PI3K, PKCθ, MEK or mTorc impact antigen sensitivity or discrimination. These basic insights can improve T cell-based therapies, especially cell therapies where increasing antigen sensitivity and discrimination can improve efficacy and safety.
Characterization of cardiomyopathy causing mutation in muscle lim protein (C58G)
Keywords: HCM
MLP
CSRP3
cardiomyopathy
DCM

Muscle LIM Protein (MLP) is encoded by the gene Cysteine and glycine rich protein 3 (CSRP3), a well-established disease gene for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). Unlike most HCM disease genes, which code for sarcomere related proteins, MLP is a non-sarcomeric protein that is critical for signalling within the cardiomyocyte. To better understand the mechanism underlying MLP associated HCM a knock-in (KI) mouse model carrying CSRP3 mutation C58G was generated. In vivo phenotyping of homozygous KI/KI mice recapitulated aspects of human cardiomyopathy with diastolic and systolic left ventricular dysfunction. No differences were observed between heterozygous KI/+ and WT littermate controls. RNASeq based transcriptomic analysis revealed activation of pro-fibrotic signalling, induction of the fetal gene programme and activation of markers of hypertrophic signalling in hearts of homozygous animals at 3 months. C58G mutation led to increased degradation of MLP protein in vitro and in vivo. MLP protein expression was reduced by 80% in KI/KI and by 50% in KI/+ mice. The reduced expression was due to increased proteasome activity which was verified by a proteasome reporter mouse. To uncover phenotype in KI/+ mice they were crossed with knock-in mutant mouse for MyBPC, which has been associated with increase proteasome activity. The double mutant failed to show any differences compared to heterozygous knock-in mice. In conclusion, the CSRP3 C58G mouse serves as a unique mouse model to study cardiomyopathy caused by mutations in the non-sarcomeric protein MLP. The results suggest that the lack of protein and proteasomal overload both contribute to the development of disease phenotype.
Dressing as horsemen: the universalisation of steppe dress in the first half of Tang dynasty China (618-755)
Keywords: the Tang dynasty
patrimonial politics
silk
dress
silk roads
late antiquity
horse culture
gift-giving
Steppe peoples

This thesis studies the widespread use of a kind of riding dress by the ruling class in the first half of Tang dynasty China (618-755). In contrast to the traditional type of dress of the Han people, generally a full-length attire with wide sleeves, the riding dress, an ensemble of tight-sleeved robe, trousers, belt and boots, had its origins in the typical attire of steppe peoples, developed out of the need to enhance efficiency and comfort while riding. The primary question of this thesis is: Why did the Tang elite choose to wear such practical clothing of foreign origin as ordinary attire? Previous studies tend to regard the diffusion of the riding dress as a natural consequence of the preceding situation, that is, the intrusion of steppe peoples and correspondingly of their clothing customs into mainland China during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (386-589). This thesis tackles the question from a new angle, first, by effectively synthesising iconographic, textual and archaeological materials and, secondly, by taking into account recent historiography on Tang politics emphasising on the interethnic political networking at the Tang court in the context of the competitive and entangled interstate relationships in Eastern Eurasia that the Tang experienced in its attempt to survive. To incorporate people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds into the political hierarchy, the Tang court needed a visual symbol of status and office that could be widely accepted by both the Han people and foreigners. This thesis defends that the riding dress served this role by being bestowed upon clients as a common insignia with Chinese titles and making the status ranking system visual. This thesis also reveals that the adoption of luxury silks with hybrid designs was an essential factor that contributed to elevating the status of the riding dress from a local steppe dress to a dress that suited the aristocrats’ tastes.
The relationship between executive functioning skills and mathematical achievement: A cross-sectional correlation study
Keywords: Inhibition
Quantitative
Executive functioning
CDE
Mathematics
CDE2022
Gender
Working memory

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between executive functions (working memory and inhibition) and academic achievement, specifically math achievement, and examine whether the relationship was significantly moderated by gender. The associations between a measure of math achievement and executive functioning tasks were examined. Gender was explored as a possible moderator in this relationship. The participants were 28 7- 8 year-old children from the United States. Results indicated that working memory was positively and significantly correlated with math achievement, however there was no significant relationship between inhibition and math achievement. Working memory was found to be predictive of math achievement. Gender was not found to account for significant variance in math achievement, nor were significant gender differences found for any measures. These data provide support for a positive relationship between working memory and math achievement, but lacks sufficient evidence of a relationship between inhibition and math achievement, as well as a moderating role of gender in the relationship between executive functioning and math achievement.
Preparation and evaluation of modular probes of reductive stress
Keywords: lanthanides
luminescence
RSS
modular probes
RNS
hydrogen sulfide
reductive stress
oxygen
ROS
redox

This thesis explores the synthesis of and subsequent use of monometallic lanthanide complexes and their reductive potential for selected biomarkers. Attempts on a bimetallic complex are also reported.
Chapter 1 outlines the properties of lanthanides with a focus on their photophysical and chemical behaviour, and the kinetic requirements for complexes containing lanthanides. Medical applications and discussions on the key reductive biomarkers to this thesis are also discussed.
Chapter 2 explores the use of anthracene as a functional chromophore in a DO3A-based lanthanide complex, and the synthetic protocol and characterisation of these complexes by NMR, luminescence, and UV. Interaction of these complexes with singlet oxygen and irradiative stimuli is focused on in detail.
Chapter 3 discusses attempts on synthesis of a bimetallic lanthanide complex based on the anthryl-functionalised DO3A complexes discussed in Chapter 2.
Chapter 4 investigates synthesis and characterisation of benzoazide-functionalised DO3A lanthanide complexes. Studies on their reduction potential are undertaken using two biomarkers, and the difference in reactivity is briefly discussed.
Chapter 5 reports synthesis and characterisation of DO3A lanthanide-containing complexes functionalised with nitrobenzene. Investigations into the reduction potential of these complexes to a previously chosen reductant are undertaken and discussed.
Chapter 6 discusses the conclusions reached during the course of this work, and suggests possible avenues for future research.
Chapter 7 contains experimental techniques for processing data, and procedures for synthesis and characterisation of these complexes.
Intertextuality in exile: the fusion of French and Russian language and literature in the works of Gaito Gazdanov
Keywords: modernism
literary influence
exile
émigré writing
intertextuality
Gazdanov

This thesis considers the works of Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) and analyses his engagement with a transnational range of predecessors and contemporaries. In foregrounding Gazdanov’s intertextual practice as a crucial element of his creative process, it demonstrates his deliberate cultivation of a (primarily, but not exclusively) Franco-Russian canon as a means of fashioning an identity as an exilic writer. The method draws flexibly on different theories of intertextuality (Kristeva, Barthes, Culler, Taranovskii) and aligns them with Russian Formalist theories of the literary process as unfolding through imitation, struggle and parody. Gazdanov’s influences are situated according to four distinct axes: a Russian nineteenth-century tradition, European (principally French) modernism, early Soviet writing, and the works of émigré contemporaries of the younger generation. Each of the four cases articulates a different iteration of intertextuality: typological transpositions of Russian classical novels, the impact of Proust as a cultural institution in interwar Paris, an interest in Babel’ as a Russian author mediating the non-Russian influence of Maupassant, and a mutual dialogue with Nabokov as a fellow émigré playing with canonical Russian influences. Intertextuality serves as a means of understanding how Gazdanov and other émigré writers aligned themselves with established literary canons, and simultaneously struggled against them in search of their own voice. What emerges from this enquiry is literature representing a multilingual, heterotopic form of identity that resists rigidly national canons.
Advertising as orchestration: papers on attuning cognition and history in the study of persuasion
Keywords: persuasion
1960s
lego
maidenform
cultural cognition
advertising history
1950s

The understanding of the brain that has emerged in the past two decades of research posits cognition as the orchestration of multiple processes that are shaped through the accumulation of material experience. Key cognitive skills such as theory of mind and conceptual blending can now illuminate how the processing of advertising is the result of the consumer’s material knowledge. This dissertation explores how these advances can be incorporated in the study of persuasion, and in particular in historical contexts. To demonstrate, I revisit the iconic 1949-1969 “I dreamed I … in my Maidenform bra” campaign. This proposal is developed over three papers.
In Paper I, I detail how Maidenform orchestrated its efforts to keep abreast of developments in the advertising industry, in the fashion and undergarment sector, and in the media and cultural landscapes. Recovering this historical backdrop is crucial to the study of cognition in the wild, because it formed the material environment that the campaign thrived in.
In Paper II, I introduce cognitive cultural theory and argue that it has the potential to revive empirical work that pulls together consumer cognition and the rhetorical intent of the text. I exemplify this by analysing the mental processes that underpin the interpretation of a LEGO ad, focusing in particular on conceptual blending and theory of mind.
In Paper III, I take a cognitive cultural perspective to humoristic consumer responses to the Maidenform campaign. I delineate how humour enables audiences to mentally elaborate on the implications of novel ideas, and show how a set of artefacts articulated, unravelled, mimicked, materialised, bowdlerised, and hijacked the original premises of the campaign.
Together, these papers demonstrate how advertising texts should not only to be understood as a vehicle for symbolic thought in consumer culture, but also as its instrument.