VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Conservative and Labour research departments, economic thought, and party policy, 1970-79
Keywords: Europe
Industrial relations
Conservative Party
Economic thought
Labour Party
Research department

This thesis considers the influence of professional policy experts on the ideologies of the Conservative and Labour parties in 1970-9. By focusing on the Conservative Research Department and the Labour Party Research Department, the thesis seeks to connect intellectual and political practice during a decade often seen as a turning point in post-war British historiography. To do so, the thesis examines three policy areas that defined the high politics of the decade: economic governance, industrial relations, and European integration. By tracing the research departments' adoption or rejection of policies, the thesis constructs a systematic account of the departments’ ideological leanings, intellectual impact, and positions in the parties’ ideological traditions. The thesis argues that economic thought was a primary battleground, laying the basis for the parties’ approaches to other questions. In this sphere, the Conservative Research Department contributed to the party’s shift towards neo-liberalism, while the Labour Party Research Department promoted a programme of leftist state interventionism. In industrial relations, the Conservative policy unit advocated cooperative relations with trade unions, while Labour’s policy experts found their radical aspirations obstructed by party and trade union leaders. In respect of Britain’s membership in the European Economic Community, the Conservative policy unit’s enthusiastic pro-Community views stood in contrast to the Labour experts’ trenchant Euroscepticism. The thesis argues that both research departments were able to exploit their privileged organisational positions to act as intermediaries between intellectual and political practice. During the ideologically fluid 1970s, the parties’ policy experts were, for the most part, effective in promoting ideas that aligned with their intellectual preferences. The result was a radicalisation of politics, where Conservative and Labour ideas were set on diametrically opposed trajectories. The research departments contributed to this divergence, and therefore, to the transition from post-war social democracy to Thatcherite neo-liberalism.
The pulpit and the brush: preaching and painting in seventeenth-century Spain
Keywords: Catholic Church
Preaching
17-Century Spain
Rhetoric
Painting
Religious Art

The Council of Trent re-examined the traditions of the Catholic Church regarding the role of the visual arts in worship. Equipped with a humanistic mindset steeped in Greco-Roman rhetoric, the leading clergy came to value paintings, first and foremost, for their ability to stir the viewers’ emotions, giving rise to a new understanding of religious images. Such a stance, common in early modern Spain, encouraged the employment of images and words as different but compatible instruments that converged to achieve a common goal, making an emotionally arresting impression on the viewer or listener. The Church regarded this strategy as the most effective way of engaging with the laity.
Contemporary printed sermons show how Spanish churchmen developed new styles of preaching based on their understanding of classical rhetoric, which helped them elicit the desired emotional reactions in the context of Catholic liturgy. One such technique, inspired by medieval meditation literature, involved using word painting to summon vivid, emotive images in the mind of the listener. Preachers couched in similar language their references to inner visions and to physical images (chiefly altarpiece paintings but also portable canvases produced from the pulpit unexpectedly), which highlights their perceived equivalence. Such practices became common and shaped the public’s visual culture.
The experience of hearing sermons played a decisive role in the development of religious art. Preachers circulated ideas to which only a small educated elite had access, and did so from a position of authority. As part of a congregation, artists and art patrons absorbed this knowledge, which informed their making and dissemination of new iconographies. A comparison of artistic and oratorical examples as well as theoretical literature from the period reveals that painters and preachers employed similar criteria in judging what type of details and ornamentation were pertinent to a specific painting or sermon.
Reaction-bonded silicon carbide for nuclear fusion blanket applications
Keywords: Raman spectroscopy
radiation damage
residual stress
micromechanics
nuclear fusion
Silicon carbide

Reaction-bonded silicon carbide has properties which make it useful for certain components of a nuclear fusion reactor, but its response to irradiation has not been studied since early work suggested its unsuitability. Modern commercially available samples of RB-SiC, along with some novel samples prepared in-house were investigated to identify links between microstructure and radiation and mechanical performance.
2.5 displacements per atom (dpa)and 0.25 dpa of radiation damage were introduced using ion implantation at 300 °C and 750 °C. The radiation-induced changes to mechanical properties were investigated using nanoindentation, chemical defects by Raman spectroscopy, and structural defects by electron backscatter diffraction.
Residual stresses were found to strongly influence the micromechanical properties of reaction-bonded SiC. Radiation changes these stresses leading to the degradation of macroscopic mechanical properties. Further investigation of these residual stresses found they are caused by radiation swelling of silicon carbide. This swelling is constrained by the unirradiated layer in ion irradiation experiments, creating a lateral stress which increases the apparent toughness and hardness, as assessed by nanoindentation. This constrained swelling effect appears to significantly influence the mechanical properties measured by nanoindentation of ion implanted layers.
Ion irradiation appears unable to recreate defects created by neutron irradiation. The lateral swelling stress prevents chemical bonds reaching their equilibrium length, possibly hindering their evolution. The choice of implanted ion also appears to influence defects in SiC; self-ions change the local chemistry and defect structures.
An investigation of the role of ASPP2 in HIF signaling and cancer
Keywords: cell biology
transcriptomics
interactomics
CRISPR-Cas9
phosphoproteomics
ASPP2
cancer
hypoxia
molecular biology
cell signaling
gene co-expression
bioinformatics

The ability to sense and respond to hypoxia is essential for the survival of living organisms and is frequently co-opted by tumor cells to adapt to hypoxic microenvironment. As the pivotal transcription factor for hypoxic responses, the hypoxia inducible factors (HIFs) transactivate a wide repertoire of genes that can mediate divergent functional outcomes. The regulation of HIF target gene selectivity is complex, involving the canonical regulation by oxygen sensors prolyl hydroxylases and factor inhibiting HIF (FIH) and the regulated recruitment of transcriptional cofactors, such as p300. However, how HIF target gene selectivity is regulated in cancers has yet to be fully understood.
Apoptosis stimulating protein of p53 2 (ASPP2) belongs to the ASPP protein family whose members are established regulators of p53-family proteins. Recently, it was found that ASPP2 is one of the alternative substrates of FIH and may be a potential competitor of HIFalpha for FIH activity. However, whether ASPP2 plays a role in the regulation of HIF activity in cancer remains unclear.
In this work we showed that ASPP2 regulates the expression of a subset of HIF target genes irrespective of FIH status. Using HIF target gene EGLN3 for further investigation, we further found that ASPP2 does not affect either the protein expression, subcellular localization, or the level of DNA-binding of HIFs to the HRE-containing EGLN3 loci.
To explore whether ASPP2 modulates the expression of EGLN3 and potentially other ASPP2-sensitive HIF targets through regulating another signaling pathway that crosstalks with HIFs at the transcriptional level, we constructed a bioinformatics pipeline that combines gene coexpression analysis and gene set enrichment analysis to successfully identify both known and hitherto unknown ASPP2-coexpressed pathways at a pan-cancer level.
Among these ASPP2-coexpressed pathways, we focused on the hippo pathway in which transcriptional coactivator YAP has previously been reported to act as a transcriptional cofactor of HIF1alpha. We found that the loss of ASPP2 reduces the nuclear localization of YAP under hypoxia. It also attenuates the nuclear interaction between YAP and HIF1alpha, as well as the level of DNA-binding of YAP at HRE-containing loci of EGLN3.
Overall, this study demonstrates for the first time that ASPP2 modulates a subset of HIF target gene expression, potentially by regulating the interaction between YAP and HIF1alpha. Our work also identifies novel pan-cancer ASPP2-associated pathways that would assist in unlocking hypothesis to expand the functions of ASPP2 in human cancers and beyond.
Entanglement between nodes of a quantum network
Keywords: Quantum networking
Trapped ions

Quantum devices are rapidly gaining momentum as a technology that will induce a paradigm shift in computing, communication and cryptography. Trapped ion qubits are one of the leading candidates for implementing a quantum computer, having previously demonstrated all of the required criteria. Local gate fidelities between ions exceed those for all other platforms, but the total number of ions in a trap is limited by unavoidable issues – one possibility for scaling the ion trap quantum processor is to create entanglement between ions in separate traps via single photons. The work in this thesis demonstrates the generation of remote entanglement between ions at high fidelity and rate, paving the way towards protocols using multiple entangled pairs for computations.
We describe the construction from scratch of a twin-trap apparatus designed to entangle separated ions. We demonstrate the entanglement of strontium ions in traps separated by ∼ 2 m by swapping entanglement from single photons emitted by the 88Sr+ ions. A novel photon collection geometry is used, maximising the entanglement between the ion and photon without impeding optical access for standard ion trap laser beam geometries. The Bell state fidelity of the ion-photon state, which is itself a valuable entanglement resource for blind computation, is at least 97.70(12) % in either trap, with entangled pairs detected at a rate of at least 3.98 × 103 s−1. The remote ion-ion Bell state fidelity is 94.0(5) %, and is generated at a rate of 182 s−1, representing the highest fidelity remote entanglement reported in ions by a large margin, at a rate more than an order of magnitude faster than previous experiments.
The two identical trap systems are designed with capabilities beyond those demonstrated here. We can co-trap 88Sr+ and 43Ca+ in a microfabricated trap suitable for local ion transport operations, opening up the possibility of performing distillation of remote entanglement in the same apparatus. Entanglement distillation can be used to make remote entanglement with similar fidelity to local operations, and would represent a significant step towards a fully scalable ion trap quantum computer architecture.
Essays on genericity
Keywords: philosophy of language
generics
genericity
formal semantics

This thesis collects five papers that are connected by the common theme of genericity in natural language, and gives an account of the meaning of generic sentences.
I begin in Chapter 2 by exploring extant versions of the standard modal theory, providing novel considerations in favour of two particular implementations which I build upon in later chapters.
In Chapter 3, I turn to the logical form of generic sentences, which I take to involve covert quantification. I develop a new argument that generics have covert quantificational structure by examining the ramifications of the invalidity of an under-explored logical principle. This argument has deleterious effects for kind-predication theories that eschew quantification.
Chapter 4 considers whether recent research on the primary acquisition of genericity in early child speech poses a problem for the modal theory. I argue that all the acquisition data that rivals theories can accommodate can also be explained by appealing to Universal Grammar, but not vice versa, a fact that counts in favour of the modal theory.
Chapter 5 develops a new semantics for generics which I call the structured theory. The structured theory is comprised of a standard modal semantics (like those given in Chapter 2) together with an algebraic account of plurality in the framework of situation semantics. I argue that the structured theory makes sense of generic conjunctions, like 'Elephants live in Africa and Asia', providing an adequate account of their meaning, and thus undermines the support for alternative semantics.
Chapter 6 investigates novel data concerning sequences of generics, and develops a compositional account of how the dynamics of conversation affects the interpretation of generics, which I call the dynamic theory. The key is to take the meaning of generics to be constrained by the possibilities raised by previously entertained generics. This theory illustrates the need for a dynamic semantics for generics, one that the modal theory comfortably provides.
Spectral and durational unstressed vowel reduction: an acoustic study of monolingual and bilingual speakers of Bulgarian and Turkish
Keywords: vowel contrast
Bulgarian
unstressed vowel reduction
acoustics of lexical stress
Turkish
contrast neutralisation
vowel merger
incomplete neutralisation
language contact
bilingualism

This thesis is an extensive acoustic study of a range of phonetic and phonological phenomena traditionally referred to as unstressed vowel reduction. Five geographically contiguous varieties of two typologically distinct and genealogically unrelated languages, Bulgarian and Turkish, are investigated: two standard varieties, West Bulgarian and Istanbul Turkish, and three varieties from northeast Bulgaria: the Bulgarian and Turkish of a bilingual community, and monolingual East Bulgarian.
Vowels are modelled as three-dimensional objects defined by duration, F1 and F2 frequencies. Unstressed Vowel Shift or the systematic differences between stressed and unstressed realisations, categorical target split and contrast neutralisation are implicationally related yet distinct aspects of traditional vowel reduction which are addressed separately. It is demonstrated that Unstressed Vowel Shift may, but does not have to, result in the phonologisation of a separate unstressed target, which in turn may, but again does not have to, merge with the target of another vowel.
East Bulgarian exhibits the highest degree of overall reduction: Unstressed Vowel Shift is strong and categorical, and results in the unstressed merger of all open–close vowel pairs. Istanbul Turkish lies at the opposite end of a reduction continuum, with only gradient Unstressed Vowel Shift under temporal pressure. West Bulgarian shows different degrees of reduction across vowel pairs. The bilingual varieties reveal intricate patterns of interference: Bilingual Turkish is influenced by East Bulgarian and exhibits greater reduction than both Istanbul Turkish and Bilingual Bulgarian, the latter displaying little reduction as a result of substratal Turkish transfer.
In addition to providing an in-depth analysis of Unstressed Vowel Shift in multiple varieties, the thesis investigates claims of typological incompatibility between vowel harmony and reduction, Unstressed Vowel Shift in the context of language contact, the phonological status of Unstressed Vowel Shift, the nature of phonological rules, and emergent features, which prove useful for modelling processes at different stages of phonologisation, as well as hybrid structure that arises in language contact. A number of previous claims about Bulgarian and Turkish phonology are refuted.
Energy levels in organic semiconductors: tuning and doping
Keywords: Electronic properties and materials
Organic electronics
Organic field-effect transistors
Organic semiconductors
Molecular doping
Molecular energy levels

The energy level tuning effect, observed when mixing halogenated versions of similar molecules, has recently been identified as a new way to modify the bulk ionisation energy and electron affinity of an organic semiconducting thin film, and increase the open-circuit voltage in organic solar cells. In this thesis, the energy level tuning effect is extended to organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). A method for the fabricating ambipolar devices with balanced hole and electron transport is established. This is achieved by using blends of two host molecules, zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc) and its eight-times fluorinated derivative (F8ZnPc), with energy levels that shift based on mixing ratio. The semiconducting behaviour of the bottom-gate bottom-contact OFETs can be tuned continuously from unipolar p-type, through ambipolar, and finally to unipolar n-type. For the ambipolar devices, the optimum balance between the hole and electron mobilities is found for the blend of 1:1.5 weight ratio of ZnPc:F8ZnPc with hole and electron mobilities of (8.3 ± 0.2)×10 −7 cm2V−1s−1 and (5.5 ± 0.1)×10−7 cm2V−1s−1 , respectively. An application of the ambipolar devices in a complementary-like voltage inverter circuit, with performance comparable to an inverter based on separate ZnPc and F8ZnPc OFETs, is demonstrated.
Next, a p-dopant (F6-TCNNQ) is introduced into the blend of ZnPc: F8ZnPc to investigate the impact of the energy level tuning effect on the molecular doping process. The doping efficiency is investigated using photothermal deflection spectroscopy and electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, and is found to depend upon host mixing ratio. The experimentally observed trend is explained with a statistical model that includes both shifts of the host’s ionisation energies, and, importantly, the electron affinity of the dopant. The energy level shift in the model is in close agreement with the 0.86 eV shift in ionisation energy observed experimentally. As further validation, the model reproduces the measured trend at low temperature. The energy level tuning effect therefore has a crucial impact on the molecular doping process. The practice of comparing host and dopant energy levels must consider the long-range electrostatic shifts to consistently explain the doping mechanism in organic semiconductors.
The making of Philip’s Macedonia: The archaeology of the Macedonian kingdom from the Persian Wars to the fall of Perdiccas III (c.510-359BC)
Keywords: Macedonia
Ancient history
Classical archaeology

This thesis aims to present and examine the archaeological material from the Macedonian kingdom between c.510 and 359 in order to provide an insight into Macedonian society, culture and religion at this time. This period is often neglected by scholars since it is bookended by the wealthy burials of the late sixth century, and Philip II’s rise to power and subsequent domination of the Hellenic world. Given this broad remit, the main body of the study is divided into four chapters, each of which deals with a discrete archaeological context or class of material.
Chapter two examines the evidence from settlement contexts, considering factors such as settlement location, layout, and the use of landscape, looking in particular at the exploitation of topographical features and natural resources. The architectural remains from the period, although limited, are also surveyed. This evidence is used to examine the extent to which the Macedonian kingdom can be considered ‘urbanised’ during the period under study, which is then assessed against the opinion promulgated in ancient literary sources that the region was urbanised only during the reign of Philip II.
The third chapter focuses on the mortuary evidence. The burial customs and eschatological beliefs of the Macedonians are explored through an examination of the treatment of the body and the choice of burial rite, tomb type and grave furnishings. The objects placed in the grave are also studied to establish how they were affected by factors such as the age, gender and socio-economic status of the deceased, since this provides an insight into how the Macedonians perceived and presented themselves.
In the fourth chapter, an analysis of the material relating to religion and cult is undertaken to ascertain the use of sanctuaries and cult spaces in the Macedonian kingdom, and glean an insight into Macedonian religious customs and beliefs. The resulting narrative is then compared to what is known of the better documented late Classical period, in order to establish whether the religious phenomena apparent from the reign of Philip II were rooted in earlier traditions.
Finally, a diachronic survey of the regal issues of the Macedonian kings is used to examine the economic position of the Macedonian kingdom during their reigns. Within this, the denominations and weight standard on which such coins were minted is analysed to establish the markets for which they were intended. The types chosen for Macedonian regal coins are additionally used to elucidate the cultural and political ideologies of the kings who issued them.
Towards the synthesis and delivery of a halogenated MCT1 substrate
Keywords: 3-bromopyruvate
ultrasound
radionuclides
microbubbles
liposomes
drug delivery
monocarboxylate transporter 1

The monocarboxylate transporter 1 (MCT1) has received special attention as a potential therapeutic target in cancer thanks to its role in lactate shuttling. In breast cancer (BC), high MCT1 expression has been correlated with basal-like phenotype and a ‘triple-negative’ status, an aggressive subgroup of tumours with no identified molecular targets.
In this thesis, MCT1 was targeted with a brominated pyruvate derivative, 3-bromobyruvate (3BP). 3BP is an alkylating agent known to inhibit glycolysis. Here, it was shown that 3BP is selectively toxic to cells expressing MCT1. Metabolomics, used to investigate metabolic effects, is a high-throughput, unbiased approach that requires no assumptions on possible targets. Inhibition of glyceraldehyde phosphate dehydrogenase (GADPH), an established 3BP target, was confirmed. Accumulation of pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) intermediates, inhibition of nucleotide synthesis, ATP and thiol-based antioxidant depletion were found to be profound in MCT1- expressing cells.
The reactivity of 3BP towards thiols necessitates the use of a delivery system. 3BP was encapsulated in cavitation-sensitive liposomes and co-administered with lipid microbubbles (MBs) as ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs). Ultrasound locally triggers the release of the therapeutic, which was confirmed using an in vitro apparatus developed in house.
With radiotherapy being one of the main modalities used in BC treatment, the next question was whether a radio-labelled therapeutic agent could be delivered via MCT1. A radio-iodinated lactate derivative (‘123I-HPLA’) was synthesised and tested for selectivity towards MCT1- expressing cells with positive outcomes.
Finally, Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) MBs were investigated for the development of a novel delivery system. Clinically relevant ultrasound pressures resulted in persistent cavitation, fragmentation and accelerated monomer release from PLGA MBs.
The findings of this study support the use of small halogenated carboxylic acids to selectively target MCT1 and addresses the delivery challenges associated with such compounds.