VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Villa rustica, villa suburbana: Vernacular Italianate architecture in Britain, 1800-1860
Keywords: John Nash
Villa
Picturesque Architecture
Italianate Architecture
Suburbs

This thesis examines the emergence and evolution of the Vernacular Italianate style of domestic architecture in Britain. The style was introduced in the form of a series of three country houses by John Nash in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It subsequently evolved over the next five decades into a popular template for the modest suburban house, widely disseminated through the medium of the architectural pattern books. The thesis considers the intellectual sources and antecedents which led to the emergence of this style and influenced its characteristics, analyses Nash's particular vision, and explores how the style was able to make a successful transition from villa rustica to villa suburbana, responding to the social and economic pressures which were at play in the expanding towns of the Regency and early Victorian era. It is a style which has been the subject of limited academic study to date, and the extent and significance of its role as a model villa for the new suburb is a theme which has been central to this research. A case is put forward that the style proliferated for two principal reasons: its versatility and adaptability for houses of differing physical scale and location, and its informal charm, inexpensively achieved, which conferred an air of sophistication appropriate to contemporary social aspiration. Nevertheless, as its popularity and accessibility grew over time the intellectual and aesthetic basis which underlay its origins as a product of the Picturesque aesthetic tended to be misunderstood or overlooked entirely, and by the 1860s the style had become diluted, frequently reduced to a matter of exterior detailing, with little reference either to Picturesque composition or to relationship between house and landscape, in contradiction of the tenets of Picturesque architecture propounded in the late eighteenth century, and in complete antithesis to the approach of John Nash in his original and distinctive Italianate interpretation.
Straight from the Heartland: New Sincerity and the American Midwest
Keywords: the prairie town
David Foster Wallace
Richard Powers
the Midwest
Jonathan Franzen

As more and more critics now write about postmodernism in the past tense, the “New Sincerity” of a group of late twentieth-century American writers, led by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers, has been championed as one of its successors. In response to these increasingly widespread views, this dissertation argues that much more can be learned about these three writers when we stop thinking of their work within this “end of postmodernism” discourse. Instead of attempting to make claims about its novelty, this thesis conducts a literary-historical inquiry into the New Sincerity, arguing that its roots extend across postmodernism and reach back to regionalism, in particular from the midwestern provinces that all three authors grew up in and that occupy a central place in their work. Though regionalism’s subject matter, small-town America, is commonly believed to have died in the postwar period, it is this “death of the prairie town” and its symbolic afterlife that have opened up new literary possibilities outside the realm of conventional regionalism. The powerful feelings of loss and nostalgia that its death has engendered are precisely those of which Wallace, Franzen, Powers, and the New Sincerity in general make creative use. The thesis examines how they do so in a series of three extended chapters, each of which focuses on one author. The first chapter pays careful attention to Wallace’s re-imagining of the Midwest over the course of his career and reveals how he constantly deviated from the literary trajectory he had outlined in his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” a key text in the “end of postmodernism” discourse. The second chapter explores what role the Midwest plays in Franzen’s authorial self-presentation and his contradictory attempts to balance “high-art” status with an anti-elitist image. The third and final chapter gets to the root of Powers’s problems with flat characters by examining how he all too readily relies on the Midwest and its stereotypical associations with all-American goodness in his attempts to create endearing characters. Here, as well as in the other two chapters, it is the construction of a symbolic “heartland” that plays a central role in the creative process behind the author’s New Sincerity writing.
The interest of 'North Britain': Scottish lobbying, the Westminster Parliament, and the British Union-state, c.1760-c.1830
Keywords: British Union-state
Scotland
Westminster Parliament

This thesis is a study of the role of Scots and Scottish society in the politics of the Westminster Parliament and the British Union-state during the later Georgian period. Specifically, it analyses the lobbying activity of certain Scottish interests at Parliament and the central agencies of the British state in London during the period c.1760-c.1830. In doing so, this thesis is concerned with the developing efficacy of Scottish lobbies, as well as the extent to which they represented identifiably Scottish interests at Westminster and within the British Union-state over the course of this period. It aims to expand our understanding of how important elements within Scottish society gradually came to play an active role in the British political centre and argues that Scottish lobbying changed over this period from a position of nurturing and defending a separately constructed Scottish 'national' interest to becoming part of an integrated set of interests operating within a broader and more comprehensive British framework. This change was brought about by the need to represent Scottish interests more effectively within the British Union-state, particularly as the politics of Westminster became more important to certain parts of Scottish society from the 1780s onwards during the early industrial revolution. This process was, at times, uneven, and there was often tension between ongoing convergence and persistent distinction. Nevertheless, Scottish interests became more closely integrated within the British political system over the course of this period through their lobbying activities at the Westminster Parliament and of ministers in Whitehall. They increasingly operated more effectively as part of the British political and legislative process, and did so in ways which no longer presented them as separate or different in what was becoming a more authentically 'British' political culture.
The rise and fall of the middle class: technology, skills, and inequality
Keywords: inequality
technological change
skills
job polarisation
middle class
education

Over the twentieth century advanced economies have seen an economic and social development process which was build upon the consolidation of a strong middle class. Yet, recent decades have seen an increase in wealth and income inequality, reaching levels not seen since before the Second World War. This thesis explore some of the these issues in two parts. The focus of the first part of the thesis is on the role of education and technology in the rise of the middle class. By means of an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth, I study the conditions that enable a society to transit from underdevelopment to development. The model in place reproduces a Kuznets curve, which is deemed an important empirical feature of the history of advanced economies. The second part focuses on the fall of the middle class, by studying the effect of technology and skills in job polarisation – i.e. the fall in employment in middle-skill occupations. The approach is both theoretical and empirical. A sorting model based on tasks is developed and adapted to study polarisation. Central to this model are the distributions of skills that workers have. Thus, a complete chapter is dedicated to characterise these ability distributions, using longitudinal data from the UK for 1991-2008 in an econometric model based on the so-called Mincer equation. The estimated distributions – positive skewed – are used to calibrate the sorting model. Then, this model is used to identify the nature of the technological process affecting the UK economy over the selected period of study. Simple counterfactual exercises shed light on the strong effect of technical progress on both polarisation and inequality. In contrast, the role of change in skills is negligible. The overall conclusion is that the nature of technological change is essential in defining distributional outcomes: whilst technology can enable the rise to a strong middle class, it can also undermine it.
Paintings &amp; palanquins: the language of visual aesthetics and the picturesque in accounts of British women’s travels in India from 1822 to 1846
Keywords: British India
The Picturesque
Women's Travel Writing
19th Century

This thesis explores the Picturesque as a visual aesthetic that is often self-consciously employed in the travel accounts of British women in India in the first half of the nineteenth century. It addresses how three women—Fanny Parks, Marianne Postans, and Emily Eden—made use of the language of aesthetics, in particular that of the Picturesque (a style deemed especially appropriate for women travellers) in a variety of ways: first, to help them understand and relate to their experiences in this foreign land; second, to convey these experiences to their audiences back home; and, third to carve out what frequently becomes a feminised space within the established (and predominantly masculine) field of travel writing.
The approach is largely historicist in order to situate the authors (and artists) within their contemporary cultural, social, and political context. My work builds upon that of literary scholars Elizabeth Bohls, Nigel Leask, and Sara Suleri in its interweaving of historical research and visual aesthetics with a literary analysis of travel writing and colonialism, bringing to bear their insights on authors previously little or not at all addressed in critical literature. Expanding on the notion of the “Indian picturesque,” which Leask begins to shape in his work, I bring Parks, Postans, and Eden into dialogue with the suggestions of Bohls and Suleri that women travel writers adapt the traditionally masculine ideal of the Picturesque aesthetic.
After an introduction and two chapters which explore the broader themes concerning the development of the Picturesque and its influence on British artistic representations of India, I briefly summarise how this visual aesthetic came to be applied to written texts about travels in the region, beginning with the texts produced by male travellers, and with a specific focus on the travel narrative of Captain Godfrey Charles Mundy, whose accounts are referenced in Fanny Parks’ work. My thesis then offers three case studies considering each writer in order of their arrival in India—starting with Fanny Parks’ autobiography of her travels (published in 1850), followed by the published works of Marianne Postans in the 1830s, and through to those of Emily Eden, relating to her travels in the same decade and published in 1866. Aside from drawing on the aesthetics of visual art, the discussion of each author also addresses the importance of other sources to which they allude that enable aesthetic responses to India’s landscape and peoples.
High-dimensional problems in stochastic modelling of biological processes
Keywords: High Dimensional Computing
Tensor Method
Stochastic Modelling

Stochastic modelling of gene regulatory networks provides an indispensable tool for understanding how random events at the molecular level influence cellular functions. A common challenge of stochastic models is to calibrate a large number of model parameters against the experimental data. Another difficulty is to study how the behaviour of a stochastic model depends on its parameters, i.e. whether a change in model parameters can lead to a significant qualitative change in model behaviour (bifurcation). This thesis addresses such computational challenges by a tensor-structured computational framework.
After a background introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 derives the order of convergence in volume size between the stationary distributions of the exact chemical master equation (CME) and its continuous Fokker-Planck approximation (CFPE). It also proposes the multi-scale approaches to address the failure of the CFPE in capturing the noise-induced multi-stability of the CME distribution. Chapter 3 studies the numerical solution of the high-dimensional CFPE using the tensor train and the quantized-TT data formats. In Chapter 4, the tensor solutions are applied to study the parameter estimation, robustness, sensitivity and bifurcation structures of stochastic reaction networks.
A Matlab implementation of the proposed methods/algorithms is available at http://www.stobifan.org.
Tumour-stromal interactions in cancer progression and drug resistance
Keywords: Melanoma
Drug resistance
Tumour-stromal cell interactions
Targeted Therapy
Heterogeneity

The typical response of cancer patients to treatment is only temporary, and is often followed by relapse. The failure of various therapeutic strategies is commonly attributed to the emergence of drug resistance. The response patterns for patients under such treatments indicate that complex dynamics regulate the response of the tumour to the therapy. The environment in which the tumour lives (the stroma) is known to be a modulator of multiple mechanisms that lead to drug resistance and seems to be a likely candidate for explaining some of this complexity. Understanding the role of stromal cells in the promotion of drug resistance is critical for the design of optimal treatment strategies, and for the development of novel therapies that selectively target both the tumour and the stroma. In this thesis we design two novel mathematical models that describe cancer growth within its environment and the evolution of drug resistance within spatially complex and temporally dynamic tumours. A compartment model captures clinically observed dynamics and allows direct comparison with experimental data, facilitating model parametrisation and the understanding of inter-tumour heterogeneity. An individual cell-based model highlights the key role of local interactions, determining heterogeneity at the tissue scale, that will eventually determine treatment outcome. A non-spatial approximation of this second model allows us to nd analytic guidelines for the design of eective therapy. These tools allow the simulation of a range of treatment strategies (including combination of dierent drugs and variation of schedule) as well as the investigation of therapy response based on patient- or organ-specic parameters. The work developed in this dissertation is based on the paradigmatic biology of melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer. Its results are therefore applicable to a variety of cancer treatments that target similar processes, and whose therapeutic failure can be attributed to environment-mediated drug resistance.
The remarkable outflows from the galactic microquasar SS433
Keywords: SS 433
Jets and Outflows
Accretion

In this thesis, I present 4 new, high-resolution observations of the Galactic microquasar SS 433, obtained from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). I show that we can resolve the same ejecta in successive observations separated by &Tilde; 35 d. I will demonstrate a method to uniquely determine launch vectors of the jet bolides, and I use this unprecedented baseline in time to show that the expansion rate of these bolides may reach 0.03c.
I also present the first scientific results from the study of the radio jets in a unique set of historic observations of SS 433: the 39 images that comprise the 2003 VLBA movie of Mioduszewski et al. (2004). This unmatched time sampling allows us to see daily changes in the dynamics of SS 433's jets. I present evidence that these observations caught SS 433 as it transitioned from quiescence into a flare, and I show that this manifests itself as an increase in both the jet launch speed and the brightness of the jet bolides.
Using these data, I examine the evolution of the particle energies, densities and magnetic fields within the bolides. We see that the estimates of the mass-loss rates via the jets cannot be reconciled with the those inferred from X-ray or optical data, if we posit equipartition of energy in synchrotron emitting plasma. The time resolution of the 2003 data allows us to observe the flux evolution of the jet bolides, and I show that the bolides undergo a power law decay as t−2.8.
Lastly, I examine X-ray monitoring data from the Swift/BAT satellite and the MAXI All-Sky- Monitor. From these lightcurves, I examine the geometry of the X-ray emission from close to the compact object itself, and I discuss SS 433’s place within the current paradigm of accretion in microquasars.
Throughout, we will see that it is the accessible time scales of the SS 433 phenomenon that allow us to learn about its exciting, complex physics.
Personalism, persuasiveness, and engagement: a critical realist account of legitimacy and political support
Keywords: Realism
Legitimacy
Critical theory
Liberalism
Political obligation

This thesis seeks to challenge the dominance of liberal accounts of legitimacy and support, and to remedy various faults it identifies in the literature with a rival account rooted in critical realism. Its overarching aim is to shift the focus away from ideal-theory hypotheses about what defines a 'perfect' structure, towards how agents think about and approach politics and ethics. It provides an overview of the status quo of liberal theorising about legitimacy and political support, followed by four methodological criticisms of the liberal approach: on the liberal treatment of agents with divergent views; the liberal conceptualisation of legitimacy; the blurring-together of legitimacy and political support; and political praxis concerns (part I). The thesis outlines a rival critical realist methodology to underpin its alternative account, emphasising the treatment of politics as a conflictual 'game', and a consequent focus on praxis criteria of success. It extends this discussion into a 'personalist' account of agents' political ontology, and the implications this has for a treatment of individual political agency that aspires to ecumenical appeal (II). On this basis, it outlines a procedural framework of legitimacy as persuasiveness that focuses on the way agents acquire, present, and exchange ethical and political beliefs in the political context. It defends this account against several possible liberal criticisms, and argues for its superiority on both theoretical and praxis grounds (III). Finally, it explores the implications of this conception for the ways in which agents dedicate themselves to obeying authority-structures, and for the connections of support that arise between agents and structures, highlighting the importance of continuous engagement to fully recognise the role of subjective agency in political decisions (IV).
Novel applications for hierarchical natural move Monte Carlo simulations: from proteins to nucleic acids
Keywords: Functional Motions
epigenetic marks
Hypothesis-testing

Biological molecules often undergo large structural changes to perform their function. Computational methods can provide a fine-grained description at the atomistic scale. Without sufficient approximations to accelerate the simulations, however, the time-scale on which functional motions often occur is out of reach for many traditional methods. Natural Move Monte Carlo belongs to a class of methods that were introduced to bridge this gap. I present three novel applications for Natural Move Monte Carlo, two on proteins and one on DNA epigenetics. In the second part of this thesis I introduce a new protocol for the testing of hypotheses regarding the functional motions of biological systems, named customised Natural Move Monte Carlo. Two different case studies are presented aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of customised Natural Move Monte Carlo.
Magnetic resonance spectroscopy of the in vivo brain with semi-LASER
Keywords: MRS
2-hydroxyglutarate
negative BOLD
semi-LASER

Changes in the metabolic state of the brain can occur, for example, as a result of neuronal activity or in pathologies such as cancer. In these cases, an altered energy demand can lead to changes in neurochemical concentrations detectable using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS). This thesis explores in vivo 1H-MRS methods for detection of such changes in the healthy and diseased brain. Specifically, this thesis aims to develop methods with semi-LASER localisation, thereby minimising the negative effects of chemical shift displacement and field inhomogeneity on spectral acquisition.
Firstly, a Hadamard-encoded semi-LASER method for simultaneous measurement from two regions was developed at 7 T. Slice profiles, with low chemical shift displacement and small amounts of signal overlap, were revealed in phantom and in vivo. This was then implemented in a study of neurochemical change during positive and negative blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses. Negative BOLD responses are thought to reflect regions of neuronal suppression. A small decrease in ascorbate, as well as the T2*-induced linebroadening of several spectra, were observed in these regions. Furthermore, increases in glutamate and lactate were detected in positive BOLD regions. These findings suggested that negative BOLD may not be generated by an increase in local GABA concentration.
Secondly, an optimised semi-LASER sequence (TE = 110 ms) at 3 T was shown to improve localisation of the oncometabolite 2-hydroxyglutarate (2-HG) – a product of IDH-mutation found in the majority of gliomas. This resulted in improved detection of 2-HG in patients compared to an existing technique. The method was also compared to 7 T, where benefits of an increased spectral resolution resulted in significantly better detection of 2-HG along with associated metabolites.
This thesis highlights the importance of robust localisation for performing sensitive in vivo 1H-MRS neurochemical measurement in the human brain.
Fundamentals of property law: possession, title and relativity
Keywords: Ownership
Possession
Property Law
Relative title

This thesis is concerned with the doctrine of title by possession and the doctrine of relative title. Many property lawyers believe that these doctrines are elementary, important and interesting. But, while virtually everyone accepts that possession of land or chattels is a source of title and that titles are relative, the doctrines have long been a focus of debate. The nature of possession, the nature of the possessor’s title, and the relationships between possession, relative title and ownership have been particularly contentious. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to provide sound answers to the following questions: (1) what, in this context, is possession? (2) What is the nature of the title that is acquired by taking possession of land or chattels? (3) Does English law recognise landownership and chattel-ownership?—and, if it does, is a person who acquires, by virtue of his or her possession, a title to land or chattels the (or an) owner of the land or chattels? It is argued in Chapter 2 that, for the purposes of the doctrine of title by possession, the general rule is that a person is in possession of land or chattels if and only if she has: (i) a sufficient degree of exclusive physical control; and (ii) an intention to possess. Chapters 3–5 are concerned with the second question. It is argued that, upon obtaining possession, a person acquires, in cases involving land, an estate in fee simple absolute in possession and, in cases involving chattels, a general property interest. Chapter 6 is concerned with the third question. It is argued that English law does recognise landownership and chattel-ownership; and that a person who acquires a title by obtaining possession of land or chattels owns the land or chattels if her title is supreme but not if it is inferior.