VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Burdens of a creditor nation: business elites and the transformation of US trade policy, 1917-62
Keywords: GATT
Cold War
American history
business history
Marshall Plan
business interest groups
balance of payments
Postwar Europe
trade policy
international trade
foreign aid
Economic history
World War II
political economy
Planning

My research seeks to explain the evolution of trade policy debates among American business leaders between World War I and the 1960s. The key finding is that a new framework for discussing trade policy was widely adopted after the United States became a creditor nation during World War I. This framework related tariffs and imports to exports, international lending and American foreign policy. High levels of imports ceased to be a threat and instead came to be seen as a pre-requisite for high levels of exports and a well-functioning global economy; raising the levels of imports, including through tariff cuts, became a strategy for providing American allies and debtors with dollar revenues. This new insight into the political economy of American foreign economic policy is based on new evidence from the archival records of business associations and a wide range of other primary and secondary sources. In addition to bringing to light new evidence, my research also addresses some of the gaps that still exist in the literature on the history of the foreign economic policy of the United States, the Cold War and transatlantic relations.
A rationalist theory of legitimacy
Keywords: Legitimacy
Rights
Liberalism
Authority
Anarchism

In this thesis, I argue for rationalism, the claim that political legitimacy should be distributed such that justice is promoted best.
In chapter 1, I define legitimacy as the permission to rule. I deny that political institutions generally enjoy authority, which is the moral power to directly impose duties on others. I then describe how legitimate political institutions without authority are possible in principle.
In the second chapter, I outline a major problem for rationalism. If individuals have strong, moral rights, then it seems that political institutions cannot legitimately operate without their subjects’ consent. I describe the key assumptions in this argument, and discuss a series of unconvincing proposals in the literature to escape it. In chapter 3, I argue that we can solve the problem if we look at theories of the moral justification of rights. There are two major such theories, the interest theory and the status theory. I outline the interest theory, and argue that it allows for non-consensual but legitimate political institutions. In chapter 4, I describe a Kantian claim about the nature of rights, according to which our rights are fully realised only if there are political institutions. If we accept this thought, then non-consensual political institutions can be legitimate on the status theory as well.
In chapter 5, I outline what it means to promote—rather than respect—justice, and argue that the promotion of justice enjoys primacy over other values. At first sight, rationalism appears to have very radical implications, given that it asks us to base legitimacy on justice. In chapter 6, I argue that this impression is mistaken. We should often pursue justice indirectly, for example, through methods which focus on legal validity or democratic procedure rather than justice.
Quantifying radiation damage in X-ray diffraction experiments in structural biology
Keywords: X-ray crystallography

Quantitative studies of global radiation damage are presented for two different types of experiments in structural biology: macromolecular crystallography (MX) and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS)
MX is the most common technique to elucidate the atomic resolution structures of biological macromolecules. However, these molecules undergo radiation induced changes during the experiment that undesirably affect the data. Global radiation damage, which is characterised by an overall loss in the diffracted intensity of Bragg reflections, limits the amount of useful data that can be collected from a single crystal in an experiment. Furthermore, for experimental phasing experiments, the radiation induced intensity changes can be so significant that the phasing signal becomes undetectable, thereby hindering successful structure determination. This thesis investigates methods to track and correct the diffraction data that are affected as a result of global radiation damage. First, extensions to the diffraction weighted dose (DWD) metric are investigated for the ability of DWD to track the overall intensity decay of reflections. This metric then is combined with a new mathematical model of intensity decay to perform zero-dose extrapolation. An additional probabilistic extrapolation approach is incorporated into the traditional regression based approach to allow extrapolation of low multiplicity reflections. As an alternative approach, a new hidden Markov model representation of the data collection experiment is developed that allows the time-resolved calculation of structure factor amplitudes, with error estimates calculated explicitly. This method gives comparable refinement statistics to that obtained from data processed with the current data reduction pipeline, and improvements to the algorithm are proposed.
SAXS, on the other hand, is a complementary structural technique that results in low resolution information about macromolecules. However it still requires the probing of the macromolecules with ionising radiation, so radiation induced changes are still a problem. Unfortunately the tools for assessing radiation damage in SAXS experiments are not mature enough for them to be used routinely. This thesis presents extensions to RADDOSE-3D to perform dose calculations for SAXS samples. Additionally, a free, open source Python library has been developed to allow the exploration and visualisation of the results of a similarity analysis of frames within a dataset. These tools are then used to determine the efficacy of various radioprotectant compounds at different concentrations to mitigate radiation damage effects.
Generational change in gender gaps in political behaviour and attitudes: the roles of modernisation, secularisation, and socialisation
Keywords: gender gap
political generations
voting

This thesis examines to what extent there are generational differences in gender gaps in political behaviour and attitudes, and what explains this generational variation. Generations differ considerably on factors such as women’s role in the family and the workplace, gender inequality, and formative experiences, and I argue this leads to different gender gaps for different generations. I examine such generational variation in gender gaps in vote choice, left-right self-placement, attitudes towards spending and redistribution, and attitudes towards gender-egalitarianism. Broad cross-national trends in Europe and Canada are identified, as well as country-specific patterns using Britain and the US as case studies. This thesis finds that generally, in the countries studied, men are more left-wing than women in older birth cohorts, whilst women are more left-wing than men in younger birth cohorts. This ‘gender-generation gap’ is produced through processes of modernisation, especially secularisation. In addition to this broad trend, the political context or zeitgeist during a generation’s formative years produces gender gaps in both vote choice and attitudes that differ between generations according to this socialisation experience. The influences of modernisation and such political socialisation interact to create complex patterns of generational variation in political gender gaps that differ across political contexts. For example, in the British case, women of younger cohorts are not more left-wing in their vote choice than men. These results suggest that we should focus on gender gaps at the level of generational subgroups in order to fully understand political differences between men and women. Furthermore, they predict that gradually, the gender gap where women are more left-wing than men will grow over time through generational replacement. However, they also indicate that this will not occur in all contexts, and that more work needs to be done to understand how the political context shapes gender gaps.
Ambiguity and intermediation in the early moments of market formation: the case of the UK social investment market
Keywords: Nascent markets
Ambiguity
Field emergence
Social investment
Impact investment
Intermediation
Early moments

Markets are arenas of social interaction for the exchange of products and services that are embedded in specific networks, cultures, and political relations. The study of how new markets come into being is a lively area of scholarly debate, and the purpose of this thesis is to shed light on the dynamics of these early moments of market formation. These nascent markets are characterized by the lack of shared meanings and settled rules around their participants, processes, and infrastructure. I approach them with arguments from economic sociology and from theories of organizations and institutions.
The empirical context is a longitudinal study of the UK social investment market from 2000 to 2015, a field that intersects the social, financial, and public sectors. Social investment refers to the combination of financial returns and social impact, but the contest over its meaning and practice is itself a part of this analysis. The core data collection is based on interviews, reports, field events, and online sources, which provide an empirical basis to understand the social, cultural, and political processes that are shaping this market.
I build on different traditions in the sociology of markets to explore changes over time in the rules, identities, practices, and dominant actors during the early moments of the UK social investment market. My first main finding is that the initial period of uncontested ambiguity is followed by efforts from mainstream organizations to reduce that ambiguity by reshaping rules and practices. This then results in a period of collaborative contestation, where peripheral actors challenge the core features of the field and hinder the path to stability. The second finding is about the role played by intermediary organizations in nascent markets, which consists of building the market infrastructure by connecting actors, developing a language, and establishing rules and practices.
These findings point to the importance of theorizing about ambiguity in the early moments of markets. I contribute to this endeavor by specifying some of its features and dynamics, and by emphasizing the centrality of intermediation. I also further our understanding of those markets that span across the worlds of business, policy, and civil society.
Developmental response to brain inflammation
Keywords: Acute phase response
Postnatal development
Neuroinflammation

Perinatal inflammation contributes to neurodevelopmental diseases, and animal models have revealed that the inflammatory response within the central nervous system is age dependent. It remains unclear what intrinsic and/or extrinsic factors are responsible for this variation. Here, my aim was to discover the mechanisms responsible for the age-dependent changes in the inflammatory response of the brain by injecting interleukin-1 (IL-1β) into the brain of mice at postnatal day (P)7, P14, P21 or into adult mice.
A "window of susceptibility" was found at P14, which was associated with marked neutrophil recruitment and blood-brain barrier (BBB) breakdown, in response to a low dose of IL-1β. Evaluation of cytokine, chemokine, and adhesion molecule mRNA transcripts failed to reveal any specific increases in basal or reactive expression following the injection of IL-1β at P14. The extrinsic hepatic acute phase response (APR) was evaluated, but, once again, there was no evidence that an altered APR might account for the enhanced inflammatory response at P14. Indeed, an inverse relationship between the magnitude of the leukocyte recruitment to the brain and the APR was discovered. Enhancement of the APR with intravenous IL-1β after injection of a low dose of IL-1β into the brain was found to reduce the number of neutrophils and BBB permeability in the brain. While no molecular changes seem to account for the presence of the "window of susceptibility", a population of Iba-1+ large, flattened and irregular perivascular cells was discovered within the P14 brain, that may contribute to the increased leukocyte recruitment at P14.
Although variations in the brain inflammatory response with development were not fully account for, my results highlight the importance of the systemic inflammatory response on the outcome of acute brain injury and suggest that the systemic APR might be manipulated therapeutically to protect the brain in the perinatal period.
BOR2G: Building Optimal Regularised Reconstructions with GPUs (in cubes)
Keywords: autonomous vehicles
optimisation
machine learning
artificial intelligence
robotics
mapping

Robots require high-quality maps—internal representations of their operating workspace—to localise, path plan, and perceive their environment. Until recently, these maps were restricted to sparse, 2D representations due to computational, memory, and sensor limitations. With the widespread adoption of high-quality sensors and graphics processors for parallel processing, these restrictions no longer apply: dense 3D maps are feasible to compute in real time (i.e., at the input sensor’s frame rate).
This thesis presents the theory and system to create large-scale dense 3D maps (i.e., reconstruct continuous surface models) using only sensors found on modern autonomous automobiles: 2D laser, 3D laser, and cameras. In contrast to active RGB-D cameras, passive cameras produce noisy surface observations and must be regularised in both 2D and 3D to create accurate reconstructions. Unfortunately, straight-forward application of 3D regularisation causes undesired surface interpolation and extrapolation in regions unexplored by the robot. We propose a method to overcome this challenge by informing the regulariser of the specific subsets of 3D surfaces upon which to operate. When combined with a compressed voxel grid data structure, we demonstrate our system fusing data from both laser and camera sensors to reconstruct 7.3 km of urban environments. We evaluate the quantitative performance of our proposed method through the use of synthetic and real-world datasets—including datasets from Stanford's Burghers of Calais, University of Oxford's RobotCar, University of Oxford’s Dense Reconstruction, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s KITTI—compared to ground-truth laser data. With only stereo camera inputs, our regulariser reduces the 3D reconstruction metric error between 27% to 36% with a final median accuracy ranging between 4 cm to 8 cm.
Furthermore, by augmenting our system with object detection, we remove ephemeral objects (e.g., automobiles, bicycles, and pedestrians) from the input sensor data and target our regulariser to interpolate the occluded urban surfaces. Augmented with Kernel Conditional Density Estimation, our regulariser creates reconstructions with median errors between 5.64 cm and 9.24 cm.
Finally, we present a machine-learning pipeline that learns, in an automatic fashion, to recognise the errors in dense reconstructions. Our system trains on image and laser data from a 3.8 km urban sequence. Using a separate 2.2 km urban sequence, our pipeline consistently identifies error-prone regions in the image-based dense reconstruction.
United in defeat: the causes and consequences of identity fusion in football fans
Keywords: Football
Identity fusion
Cognitive anthropology
Football fandom
Group psychology
Social cohesion
Brazil
Social bonding
Hooliganism
Human evolution

What motivates extreme pro-group action, such as heroism and self-sacrifice on the battlefield? Despite much scholarly attention in recent years, the question is yet to be fully explained. Recent research suggests that shared dysphoric experiences are one way of generating identity fusion, a visceral sense of 'oneness' between individual and group that has been shown to motivate willingness to fight and die for the group. Using two special populations - British and Brazilian football fans - this thesis investigates the causes and consequences of fusion. Football fan cultures are diverse, globally popular, and ripe for examining intergroup conflict. This thesis focuses on two related components of the 'shared dysphoria pathway' to fusion: emotional arousal (e.g. watching one's team suffer a particularly bitter defeat) and the sense of 'self-transformativeness' that ensues from intense, shared experiences. Across four studies, it is shown that for some individuals, sharing the agony of defeat can be emotionally and physiologically arousing to such a degree so as to transform their sense of personal identity. In turn, this leads to a more porous boundary between group and individual identities, i.e. individuals become 'fused' with their groups. Fused people are documented as engaging in some of the most extreme and potentially dangerous social behaviours we know. Two related consequences of fusion are examined: extreme pro-group action and outgroup hostility. Football hooliganism is a persistent, global problem, which is addressed in a fifth study. This thesis refutes past work suggesting that hooligans are social misfits, instead contending that hooligans are especially fused to their group and motivated to defend their 'brothers-in-arms', which results in outgroup violence. These findings suggest that a more thorough understanding of the causes and consequences of fusion could conceivably impact a great many areas, perhaps most importantly conflict resolution and policies relating to intergroup conflict.
Self-management of weight in adults with overweight and obesity: characterising and evaluating cognitive and behavioural strategies
Keywords: self-management
obesity
health behaviour
weight management

Background: The majority of adults in the UK are overweight or obese, and many embark on weight loss attempts, often without professional support. This dissertation set out to hone in on the cognitive and behavioural strategies used by adults with overweight and obesity attempting to lose weight, particularly in self-guided attempts, and to test the relationship between use of these strategies and weight loss success. Methods: A new taxonomy and questionnaire were developed to provide a framework to identify the cognitive and behavioural strategies used by individuals during weight loss attempts. The taxonomy was used in a systematic review and meta-analysis of self-help interventions for weight loss and in a systematic review of qualitative studies of self-directed weight loss. The questionnaire was used in an observational cohort study in adults with overweight and obesity trying to lose weight. Results: The taxonomy and questionnaire consist of 117 strategies. The qualitative review illuminated a range of attitudes and beliefs towards these strategies and highlighted the centrality of interpretation of self-monitored data. The quantitative review found that self-help interventions led to greater weight loss than unsupported attempts to lose weight at six months. In the cohort study, despite heterogeneity in the strategies employed, coherent patterns of behaviours emerged for individual participants. Strategies related to motivational support, dietary impulse control, and weight loss planning and monitoring were associated with greater weight loss. Conclusion: This dissertation demonstrates that self-help interventions can lead to significant weight loss and provides results to guide the content of such interventions. It maps out a previously uncharted area and provides a set of tools for further research and intervention development.
Advanced quantitative analysis of crack fields, observed by 2D and 3D image correlation, volume correlation and diffraction mapping
Keywords: X-ray diffraction
Finite Element
Digital Volume Correlation
Tomography
J-integral
Fatigue
Simulation
Fracture
Digital Image Correlation

This thesis is concerned with the evaluation, in-situ, of the elastic strain energy release rate of cracks. This can define the criteria for crack propagation, and it is usually necessary to obtain this via calculation from the geometry and applied load. A new method is proposed, based on the conjoint use of digital image correlation to measure full-field displacements and finite element to extract the strain energy release rate of surface cracks. It has been extended to 3-D datasets with the use of digital volume correlation and tomographic imaging. A finite element model with imported full-field displacements measured by DIC/DVC acting as boundary conditions is solved and the J-integral is calculated. For linear elastic materials, modal contributions can be separated via the interaction integral.
The method has been benchmarked using synthetic datasets to assess its sensitivity to noise and experimental uncertainties. It is very robust to experimental noise and can be used without knowledge of the specimen geometry and applied loads. The application of the method in 2-D is demonstrated in an analysis of experimental data for a mode I fatigue crack, introduced to an aluminium alloy compact tension specimen. Analysis of mixed-mode cracks in 2-D is shown on a PMMA sample with the Arcan geometry. In 3-D, static loading of a fatigue crack in nodular graphite cast iron is studied and the results from the method are compared with those obtained via a field-fitting approach.
Diffraction analysis of polycrystalline materials can determine the full tensor of the elastic strains within them. Maps of elastic strains can thus be obtained typically using synchrotron X-rays or neutrons. A method is presented to calculate the elastic strain energy release rate of a crack from 2-D diffraction strain maps. The diffraction data is processed via a finite element approach to obtain the parameters required to calculate the J-integral. A validation is presented using a synthetic dataset from a finite element model. Its experimental application is demonstrated in an analysis of synchrotron X-ray diffraction strain maps of a propagating fatigue crack in a bainitic steel, before and after an overload.
Finally, a complex case study of stable fracture propagation in polygranular isotropic nuclear graphite is presented. Synchrotron X-ray tomography and strain mapping by diffraction were combined with DVC and image analysis to extract the full-field displacements and elastic crystal strains. The displacement fields have been analysed using the developed methods to extract the critical strain energy release rate for crack propagation. Non-linear properties described the effect of microcracking on the elastic modulus in the fracture process zone. The analysis was verified by comparison of the predicted and measured elastic strain fields.