VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Some social and economic aspects of country house building in England, 1500-1640
Keywords: England
manors
Renaissance architecture
country house
country house building
country houses
country homes
domestic architecture
Renaissance
house building

Country houses have long been subject to the attentions of architectural historians. As a result of their labours a considerable amount of information is known about the architectural and functional developments of the period with which this study is concerned, and a beginning has been made on the biographical investigation of some of the principal craftsmen involved. But the history of the country house cannot be written solely in terms of its architecture. This is especially true of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when country houses were built in such large numbers that even today there is hardly a rural parish in England which does not exhibit some evidence for a manor building of the period. The building of a country house was not just an important stage in the creation of the man-made landscape. It was equally important as a social and economic activity whose influences cannot simply be confined to the man who commissioned it, but must be extended to the artisans who built it, and indeed, to the community in which it was built.
Continued in thesis ...
Constitutional rights and private law: foundations
Keywords: constitutional rights
responsibility
rights
private law

Constitutional rights and private law are on a collision course. Constitutional rights have many consequentialist aspects, grounded in collective responsibilities to bring about states of affairs amounting to social justice. Because social justice is affected by the actions and activities of private agents, constitutional rights often intrude into areas of law regulating private relations, such as tort law or contract law. The problem is that private law rights have many deontological aspects: they are grounded in personal responsibilities to treat others in certain ways regardless of considerations external to our direct relations with them.
This thesis makes the first steps in mediating these conflicting legal clusters. It sees both right-types as important parts in legal systems that try to preserve their integrity and legitimacy in conditions of moral pluralism. A delicate balance must therefore be found be-tween subordinating private law to constitutional rights and immunizing it from their scrutiny. As a first step, most constitutional rights should not entail duties for private agents, as this would risk the politicization of private relations. However, they can burden private agents indirectly, by creating state duties about the regulation of private relations.
To discharge these constitutional duties without ignoring, distorting, or eroding the relational normativity of private law rights, state agents must carefully locate public in-roads into private law in contexts in which private agents are responsible to attain or sustain social justice: sometimes personally and sometimes as part of the political collective. Such bridges from large-scale consequentialist prescriptions to small-scale interactions are not foreign to private law. But they are often undertheorized and underdeveloped. For constitutional rights to realize social justice through private law effectively, they must be broadened and placed on solid foundations. This requires connecting them to the normative features of each right-type and the conflicting moral paradigms underlying them.
Beam model of Doppler backscattering: theory and experiment
Keywords: tokamaks
stellarators
plasma diagnostics
Doppler reflectometry
Doppler backscattering

We use beam tracing --- implemented with a newly-written code, Scotty --- in combination with the reciprocity theorem to derive a model for the linear backscattered power of the Doppler Backscattering (DBS) diagnostic. Our model works for both the O-mode and X-mode in tokamak geometry (and certain regimes of stellarators). We present the analytical derivation of our model and its implications on the DBS signal localisation and the wavenumber resolution. To determine these two quantities, we find that it is the curvature of the field lines and the magnetic shear that are important, rather than the curvature of the cut-off surface. We proceed to shed light on the hitherto poorly-understood quantitative effect of the mismatch angle. Armed with this knowledge, we analyse MAST DBS data for various frequency channels and at various times, demonstrating that the beam model can indeed properly account for the mismatch attenuation. Interestingly, we show that mismatch attenuation can have a significant effect on localisation, shifting it away from the cut-off. Consequently, one can use this model to correct for the attenuation due to mismatch and its effect on localisation, avoiding the need for empirical optimisation. This is especially important in spherical tokamaks, since the magnetic pitch angle is large and varies both spatially and temporally.
Non-equilibrium dynamics in two-dimensional quantum systems
Keywords: Renormalisation-group theory
Matter-wave interferometry
Ultracold atoms
Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition
Spin squeezing
Bose-Einstein condensate

The understanding and precise prediction of non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics, in particular across a critical point, remains a difficult task due to the relevance of all length scales near the critical point. Furthermore, the number of parameters required to characterise the state of the system increases exponentially with the number of particles, making the numerical investigation of such a system extremely difficult.
In this thesis, we use ultracold 87Rb atoms prepared in a bilayer two-dimensional (2D) trap to probe the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition in detail, both in and out of equilibrium. These experiments use a multiple-radiofrequency dressed trap, which allows dynamical control of the trapped atoms as well as the precise determination of the many-body wavefunction. For the characterisation of the 2D Bose gases using matter-wave interferometry, a novel technique was developed to obtain high contrast fringes by selective imaging of slices of the atomic cloud. This allows the observation of local fluctuations, such as phase correlation function, local vortex density and coherence full counting statistics. Utilising these observables, we have identified the BKT critical point and characterised microscopic features of harmonically-trapped 2D Bose gases in equilibrium. With this information about the system, we probe the non-equilibrium dynamics of 2D Bose gases following a quench across the BKT critical point. The system is quenched by a coherent splitting, which introduces a sudden reduction of density resulting in the quench from the superfluid to the thermal phase. We monitor the dynamics towards the vortex-proliferated state and find that the vortex-unbinding dynamics is well described by the real-time renormalisation group theory. Finally, we show preliminary results for a tunnel-coupled bilayer 2D gas, in which we probe the oscillations of the relative phase of the two layers of the superfluid.
The results presented in this thesis demonstrate that the multiple-RF dressing technique is a very powerful tool for investigating quantum many-body phenomena. This paves the way for future studies of non-equilibrium critical dynamics and their description with renormalisation-group theory.
Backbone-modified oligonucleotides for biology and medicine 
Keywords: Oligonucleotides
Antisense Oligonucleotides
Nucleic Acids

Chemically modified oligonucleotides find myriad applications in therapeutics and synthetic biology because they can be utilised to modulate biophysical or therapeutic properties, install fluorophores for detection, or to allow orthogonal reactivity through additional functional groups. Whilst oligonucleotides can be principally modified anywhere at their nucleotide subunits, the presented work investigates modifications of the oligonucleotide backbone for therapeutic applications and synthetic biology.
Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) have become an emerging therapeutic approach to modulate protein expression at the mRNA level to combat hard-to-treat diseases. Stability against nucleolytic degradation, good target hybridisation properties, and efficient delivery into the cell are essential. The chemical modification of the hydrolysable, anionic phosphodiester backbone holds great potential for protection against phosphodiesterases, and to reduce the polyanionic charges for enhanced cellular uptake. In the presented work, two charge-neutral backbone surrogates—the carbamate and amide internucleoside linkages—were investigated for their ability to confer drug-like properties by replacing the natural phosphodiester backbone. Combinations with additional bicyclic sugar modifications and different designs of the ASO segments were explored. The antisense assessment criteria comprised their general hybridisation properties with an RNA target, their stability against nucleolytic degradation, and their potential for enhanced cellular uptake.
Backbone-modified oligonucleotides are also versatile constructs for synthetic biology as exemplified by the construction of synthetic genetic polymers, ribozymes, aptamers, or gene editing systems. Amongst those, artificial genetic polymers can be applied for gene synthesis, sequencing, or the production of nanomaterials. A crucial element for backbone modifications in genetic templates is their compatibility to be read by polymerases. In this context, triazole-based internucleoside linkages have been extensively studied as promising replication compatible phosphodiester mimics. This thesis presents a novel triazole backbone structure and its assessment for replication compatibility in terms of continuation, speed, and correctness of the read-through by DNA polymerases.
Fluid-walled microfluidics for cell migration studies
Keywords: microfluidics
chemotaxis
fluid walls

Microfluidic systems have evolved significantly over the past decade to offer biologists in vitro environments that mimic organ function, enable disease modelling, and perform high-throughput drug screens. Despite these important advances, microfluidic uptake in biomedical research remains limited, with the main reasons cited being biocompatibility concerns, technical complexity, and low flexibility of systems. Recently, an alternative approach to traditional microfluidics was developed, which uses only the materials common to biologists. The technique, termed fluid-walled microfluidics, shapes cell culture media on Petri dishes in a variety of methods and has been extensively studied in static environments, using chambers resembling sessile drops to perform various cell-based assays. However, studies involving flow have remained limited to proof-of-concept applications. As flow regulates many biological behaviours, it is essential to incorporate flow in fluid-walled microfluidic assays to make these accessible to the wider biomedical community.
This thesis explores the underlying properties of fluid-walled systems to establish and experimentally validate a simple mathematical model of circuits experiencing flow, and applies it to study complex cell migration behaviours. A method for real-time isolation and retrieval of specific sub-populations of cells in flowing environments is then introduced, using 3D-printed adaptors to convert microscopes into micromanipulators that reconfigure circuits, and applied to study both mammalian and bacterial cell migration in response to various concentration gradients (chemotaxis). Finally, a general approach for chemotaxis studies is presented, using both passive and active circuits (with/without flow) to give users flexibility and control over defined experimental conditions. Altogether, this thesis serves as a blueprint for the fabrication and manipulation of open and flowing microfluidic circuits using only Petri dishes, cell culture media, FC40, a 3-axis traverse and syringe pumps. The methods outlined empower biologists to study complex cellular behaviours in environments that more closely mimic in vivo conditions, with the aim of making microfluidic technology accessible to the less experienced user.
Towards effective, efficient and equitable privacy-preserving machine learning
Keywords: privacy-enhancing technologies
committed MPC
secure multi-party computation
privacy-preserving deep learning
quantized deep neural networks

Machine learning has assumed an increasingly important role in Artificial Intelligence in recent years. Moreover, in spheres such as online shopping, virtual personal assistants, recommendation systems amongst other things, it is quickly becoming part and parcel of our daily lives. The power of data combined with machine learning algorithms has driven widespread uptake of these AI methods. However, there have been sensitivity and privacy concerns over the data to be processed. This is especially salient in areas such as healthcare and finance. Privacy-preserving machine learning mitigates these privacy challenges through private computation over sensitive data. However, the process is not trivial or without trade-offs.
In this thesis, we focus on designing effective and efficient protocols for facilitating end-to-end privacy-preserving machine learning, particularly for neural network training and inference. We primarily focus on multi-party computation alongside non-cryptographic primitives such as federated learning for private computation. We start with designing QUOTIENT, an efficient two-party secure training and prediction framework. QUOTIENT benefits from the holistic adaptation of standard neural network training into a crypto-friendly training process alongside a customized hybrid MPC protocol for secure computation. Next, we introduce federated learning to support highly decentralized training over unlabeled data. We motivate the idea of `silos' to ensure superior privacy and isolation across sub-groups. To complete the technical contribution, we propose an MPC-friendly covertly secure commitment scheme for enabling certified predictions. More specifically this helps to enforce non-functional constraints such as fairness, interpretability, and safety over trained models at the time of inference, making the process more equitable. We design, implement and benchmark all of these frameworks to show performance gains in computation, communication and accuracy. We conclude the thesis with a user study focused on enhancing usability, efficiency, assisting in design and helping ensure equity in privacy-preserving computation frameworks at large. This study takes the form of semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders in the privacy-preserving computation ecosystem.
We improve upon the state of the art by more than an order of magnitude in speed, for our protocols, alongside significant gains in accuracy and communication. The user study presents a rich socio-technical perspective to the purely technical contributions. The combination of theory, practice and evaluation, in this thesis, acts as a multi-perspective framework for motivating design, development and further research in effective, efficient and equitable privacy-preserving machine learning.
Needs in the philosophy of history : Rousseau to Marx
Keywords: philosophy
need
Rousseau
Marx
History

The thesis examines the role of the multiplication of human needs, the desires associated with them, and the capacities developed by human beings to satisfy those desires, in the philosophies of history of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx.
It presents an interpretation of Rousseau in which the historical multiplication of needs is both generated by and generates the development of amour-propre. In turn the development of amour-propre is necessary in order for human beings to develop the virtue of justice, and to participate as citizens in the society of the Social Contract.
It argues that in Kant’s philosophy of history the expansion of needs and their associated desires, and the development of the means to satisfy them, brings about a ‘culture of skill’. This in turn leads to the development of just civil societies and of the ‘culture of discipline’. These together constitute the ‘ultimate end of nature’: that naturally produced circumstance which can maximally facilitate the moralisation of mankind.
It interprets sections of Hegel’s systematic account of mind as providing a philosophical history of ordinary human motivation, in which the ‘desire’ of the isolated human being is superseded successively by the ‘needs’ of the person, the ‘social needs’ of the member of a civil society, and the ‘duties’ of the citizen of the modern state. This history provides an underpinning for Hegel’s official account of history as the rise and fall of successive civilisations.
It argues that in Marx’s early writings history is conceived as the development through private exchange of those needs, activities and products which are characteristically human, but in an ‘estranged’ shape which can only be overcome by the final abolition of private exchange itself. This conception of history survives in Marx’s later writings and provides a basis for understanding direct producers’ motivations for overthrowing a social form as derived from a sense of incompatibility between their conception of self and the economic relations under which they live. Marx’s ‘moral’ condemnations of capitalism are understood in the light of this model of revolutionary motivation.
It is concluded that in each of these thinkers the process of multiplication of needs and their associated desires plays a central role in a conception of history as a process culminating in the establishment of the ‘good society’, and thus in humanity’s self-realisation. It thereby plays an important though under-recognised role in the social and political thought of each of them.
How do theories of access to justice, judicial economy, and behaviour modification explain developments in the class actions debate from 1970 onward in England and Canada?
Keywords: Collective redress
Group litigation
Class actions
Representative actions
Civil procedure
Access to justice

This thesis investigates the rapidly developing area of collective redress in England and Canada. It looks at three procedures: class actions, group litigation, and representative actions. I make three normative arguments:
1. Class actions represent a departure from the principle of ‘accurate justice’ that has traditionally underpinned civil justice systems, although this departure is not unique and is characteristic of wider civil justice reforms;
2. Class actions and group litigation are not ‘one size fits all’ procedures, but instead serve a variety of purposes; and
3. Representative actions are distinct from both procedures and should not be used to aggregate individual claims at all – they should instead be used for the litigation of group rights.
My thesis combines qualitative surveys, doctrinal analysis, and historical research into collective redress reforms in England and Canada. England has borrowed heavily from Canadian class actions in creating its own framework in competition law; England’s group litigation regime is much more established and Canada has much to learn from it. The representative rule also originated in England, although Canada’s interpretation was much broader and led to the development of class actions. There are indications that the same might be happening in England, but I argue that such an interpretation is incorrect.
Collective redress in England and Canada is at a crossroads. In England, the UK Supreme Court has just ruled on the nascent competition law class actions regime, and is considering the scope of representative actions. In Canada, significant amendments have been made to Ontario’s Class Proceedings Act, and other Canadian jurisdictions are watching to see how these will be interpreted. Both countries can learn a great deal from each other. This thesis brings important empirical, historical, and normative insights into the current debates about collective redress on both sides of the Atlantic.
Investigating the basis of competitive nodulation and bacteroid development in Rhizobium leguminosarum
Keywords: rhizosphere
Rhizobium
Nitrogen-fixation
sustainable agriculture
symbiosis
nodulation
legume

Some soil-dwelling bacteria in the genus Rhizobium can form symbioses with leguminous plants, including important crop species such as peas and beans. During symbiosis, rhizobial bacteroids inhabiting root nodules fix atmospheric dinitrogen into ammonium, which is exchanged with the host plant for fixed carbon from photosynthesis. Inoculation of leguminous crops with highly effective rhizobia can significantly increase crop yields and reduce inorganic fertiliser usage. However, potential yield benefits are reduced or lost if inoculant strains are unable to compete with indigenous rhizobia.
High-throughput transposon insertion sequencing (INSeq) techniques were used to assess genes for importance in different stages of symbiosis, including poorly understood genetic factors influencing competitive nodulation ability and development of nitrogen-fixing nodules. INSeq classifications were used as starting points for experimental investigation of mutations found to affect abundance of rhizobia in nodules, including mutations which have both positive and negative effects on fitness. Previous results have revealed that timing of infective and developmental events is likely crucial to nodulation ability, hence a novel mutant screening strategy, aiming to identify mutants delayed in these events, was developed using Lux- and GFP-based biosensors then tested in a combined growth and non-invasive imaging system.
Rhizobial mutant strains were generated for 47 genes of interest using established and novel mutagenesis systems. Phenotypes were found for 17 of 35 mutants examined, including seven mutants with significantly impaired competitive nodulation ability, two mutants (ΔRL0339 & ΔRL3565) with enhanced competitive nodulation ability and one mutant (ΔRL3624) showing enhanced growth promotion under nitrogen-limited conditions. The results in this thesis provided the basis for further investigation of nodulation kinetics and characterisation of genes which may be utilised for future development of more effective inoculant strains.
An investigation on the Bauschinger effect in titanium alloys for aerospace applications: strain rate and pressure dependence
Keywords: Cyclic loading
Aerospace applications
Ti64
impact engineering
Bauschinger effect
Titanium alloys
Split Hopkinson bar

A comprehensive study of the reverse loading in Ti-6Al-4V hereafter, Ti64 alloys including strain rate and pressure effects (strength differential), is conducted in order to improve the understanding of the deformation mechanisms in Ti64 and characterise its Bauschinger effect.
Strain controlled quasi-static, and high strain rate reverse loading tests are performed, providing novel data to conduct a series of explicit finite element (FEA) simulations with the objective to determine the capabilities of widely used constitutive models to predict the material response under cyclic loading.
The analysis of the experimental data shows that the Bauschinger effect (B.E.) in the material is manifested principally as the loss of a distinct transition between elastic and plastic dominated deformation regions (transient softening), leading to the lowering of the plastic work expended during the straining of the material.
The analysis of the strain rate effects on the cyclic response of the material, allows to identify an inversely proportional relationship between strain rate and B.E. as well as a higher prominence of the aforementioned drop in the plastic work when the loading is conducted in the opposite direction to the pre-strain.
The numerical study conducted shows that general, widely used constitutive models calibrated with monotonic data are not able to accurately predict the cyclic loading response of Ti-6Al-4V alloys, proving the importance of the Bauschinger effect as factor to consider in order to obtain reliable models of the material’s response to complex loading.