VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Experience, chance and change: Allan Kaprow and the tension between art and life, 1948-1976
Keywords: Allan Kaprow
Happenings

This thesis addresses critically the work of American artist Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), focusing especially on the tensions Kaprow proposed between 'art' and 'life'. It presents a reconsideration of the most fertile period in Kaprow's career, from his undergraduate studies in the late 1940s to his mature work of the 1970s, prior to the increasing demands made on him to produce re-enactments of his early work. The period 1948-1976 presents a fuller overview of the themes and motivations of his practice than has been scrutinised in the existing literature. The research is based on extensive examination of the Allan Kaprow Papers at the Getty Institute, Los Angeles, which revealed significant and previously unstudied documentation and images. This archive and Kaprow's personal library in Encinitas, California have provided substantial previously unpublished evidence of his early interest in the American pragmatist John Dewey, and reveal many of the motivations for Kaprow's emphasis on change, together with his relational approach to form, context and process. The role of composer John Cage in the development of Kaprow's thoughts on chance helps elucidate the complexities inherent in the development of Kaprow's negotiation between chance and control. The present study also gives, for the first time, a comparative and detailed reading of the five drafts of Kaprow's Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (1966), a reading which sheds fresh light on his art and publications of the period. The thesis also presents a thorough reconsideration of the significance of play in Kaprow's work of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the tensions between and among play, work, hierarchy and liberation. Kaprow's many struggles to conceptualise and reconcile these tensions, and others, such as between audience and participant, private and public and narrative and history, were a necessary feature of the categories of art and artistic identity, including 'Happening', 'Activity' and 'Un-artist' that he helped bring into being.
Validation of the Birmingham Vasculitis Activity Score (Version 3)
Keywords: Outcome measure
Systemic vasculitis
Validation study
Activity Score
Severity of illness index

Background: The Birmingham Vasculitis Activity Score is a clinical tool to quantify disease activity in systemic vasculitis. Following its extensive use, a previous version of BVAS has been revised to improve the face validity and the feasibility. Changes were made and approved by an expert committee. Objective: To validate the third version of the Birmingham Vasculitis Activity Score (BVAS version 3) Methods: In a series of prospective, multi-centre studies, different aspects of the BVAS (version 3) were validated in patients with systemic vasculitis. The data collection was done using standardized data entry forms. The studies were approved by local ethics committees. The recruitment of controls was approved by the local clinical audit and effectiveness department. Results: The convergent validity was established by correlating the BVAS (version 3) to the physician’s treatment decision (Spearman's ρ 0.66, 95% CI 0.59-0.72), BVAS1 of version 2 (ρ 0.94, 95% CI 0.92-0.96), BVAS2 of version 2 in patients with persistent disease (ρ 0.60, 95% CI 0.21-0.83), C-reactive protein levels (�� 0.43, 95% CI 0.31-0.54), physician's global assessment (ρ 0.91, 95% CI 0.89-0.93), and vasculitis activity index (ρ 0.88, 95%CI 0.86-0.91). The BVAS (version 3) was reproducible and repeatable (intra-class correlation coefficients were 0.96 (95%CI 0.95-0.97) and 0.96 (95%CI 0.92-0.97) respectively). The BVAS (version 3) was sensitive to changing disease status with a fall of 16.9 (95% CI 14.8-18.9) units (P<0.001, paired t test) after 3 months of treatment. The BVAS (version 3) demonstrated an ability to differentiate systemic vasculitis from some non-vasculitis conditions. Conclusion: BVAS (version 3) is validated for use in clinical trials of systemic vasculitis. It is repeatable, reproducible, sensitive to change and can differentiate between systemic vasculitis and some non-vasculitic rheumatological conditions.
Neutron, X-ray, and optical studies of multiferroic materials
Keywords: neutron
X-ray
multiferroic
nonlinear optics

Developing a greater understanding of multiferroic materials, particularly those in which a strong coupling is exhibited between magnetic and electrical orderings, is of great importance if potential applications are to be realised. This thesis reports new experimental findings on several multiferroics using the techniques of X-ray and neutron diffraction together with nonlinear optical experiments.
Spherical neutron polarimetry measurements on RbFe(MoO)2 show how this system's chiral magnetic structure can be controlled by an external electric field. Consideration is given to the axial distortion that the crystal structure makes, and the effect that this has on the stabilised magnetic structures. A ferroaxial coupling is invoked to explain, from a symmetry point of view, the spin driven multiferroicity in this proper screw system.
The charge ordering in YbFe2O4 is examined by a detailed imaging of reciprocal space measured by elastic X-ray diffraction. Continuous helices of scattering are observed above the three-dimensional ordering transition temperature, whereas the intensity is concentrated onto separated maxima below this. The low temperature data are modelled using a simple oxygen displacement pattern, generalised to an incommensurate structure. The observed incommensurability implies that YbFe2O4 cannot be truly ferroelectric.
The low field magnetic structures of a Y-type hexaferrite Ba0.5Sr1.5Zn2Fe12O22 are observed in a resonant soft X-ray diffraction study. In zero field the system is helimagnetic, and with small applied fields peaks corresponding to a new phase appear. Energy calculations are used to suggest a suitable magnetic structure for the new phase and to show how this relates to the known commensurate phases that are present in low fields.
Finally, an experimental setup designed to measure second harmonic generation from non-centrosymmetric crystals is presented, along with static measurements on the multiferroic system MnWO4. An optical pump / second harmonic probe study is then undertaken, with the result that a pump induced enhancement in the efficiency of the second harmonic generation is observed.
Investigating the effects of visual deprivation on subcortical and cortical structures using functional MRI and MR spectroscopy
Keywords: neuroscience
blindness
MRI
cross-modal plasticity

Visual deprivation in early life causes widespread changes to the visual pathway. Structures normally dedicated to vision can be recruited for processing of the remaining senses (i.e. audition). This thesis used magnetic resonance imaging to explore how the 'visual' pathway reorganises in congenital bilateral anophthalmia, a condition where individuals are born without eyes. Anophthalmia provides a unique model of complete deprivation, since the ‘visual’ pathway has not experienced pre- or post-natal visual input.
Firstly, this thesis explored reorganisation of the anophthalmic 'visual' pathway for auditory processing, from subcortical structures responding to basic sounds (Chapters 3 and 4), to higher-order occipital areas extracting meaning from speech sounds (Chapter 7). Secondly, this thesis looked to better understand the neurochemical, neuroanatomical and behavioural changes that accompany reorganisation in anophthalmia (Chapters 5 and 6). Finally, this thesis investigated whether similar changes can take place in the sighted brain after a short period of visual deprivation (Chapter 8).
The experiments in this thesis provide some evidence that the lack of pre-natal visual experiences affects cross-modal reorganisation. Chapter 4 describes a unique subcortico-cortical route for auditory input in anophthalmia. Furthermore, Chapter 7 suggests that hierarchical processing of sensory information in the occipital cortex is maintained in anophthalmia, which may not be the case in congenital or early-onset blindness. However, this thesis also suggests that some reorganisation thought to be limited to anophthalmia can be found in early-onset blindness, for example with the subcortical functional changes described in Chapter 3. In addition, neurochemical, neuroanatomical and behavioural changes described in Chapters 5 and 6 are comparable to those reported in early-onset blindness, therefore demonstrating important similarities between these populations. Finally, this thesis describes how some of these functional and behavioural changes can also take place in sighted subjects after a short period of blindfolding, although this effect is extremely variable across subjects (Chapter 8).
The thesis concludes by highlighting the considerable contribution of individual differences in studies of cross-modal reorganisation, and emphasises the need for larger more homogenous groups when investigating subcortical and cortical plasticity in the absence of visual input.
Moral relativist semantics
Keywords: moral relativism
moral semantics
moral antirealism
moral contextualism

Many antirealist views of moral language are highly problematic. I argue that relativist analyses are promising alternatives. I start by looking at the views of Gilbert Harman and present two analyses inspired by his work. I argue that they withstand a large number of objections. These analyses are classical in the following sense: they imply that something is right or wrong relative to the acceptance of certain rules, or relative to certain motivations. But they don't imply that the concept of truth itself is relative. I argue that truth relativism does not provide a viable alternative to classical relativist semantics.
The moral relationship
Keywords: moral relationship
aggregation
future persons
ethics
partiality
contractualism

This thesis aims to articulate and defend a version of a 'relational moral theory.' Many philosophers have argued that the non-instrumental value of certain relationships, such as friendship and parenthood, can explain at least some of our moral obligations. A relational moral theory extends this thought by arguing that all, or most, of our moral judgements can be explained by the non-instrumental value of one or more interpersonal relationships. The plausibility of such views depend on the possibility of identifying a relationship that all moral agents share a 'moral relationship'. While the idea of such a relationship has featured in ethical writings as early as the Stoics, few attempts have been made to develop a rigorous and precise understanding of this relationship. This thesis therefore aims to articulate and defend a plausible understanding of the moral relationship, and then to use it as a basis for outlining the structure of a genuinely relational moral theory. It will argue that the moral relationship is best understood as a broad and inclusive relationship shared by all who are vulnerable to a distinct kind of 'second-order evil.' It will then argue that the value of this relationship can provide the basis for a relational form of a contractualist moral theory based on the work of T.M. Scanlon. Understanding the nature of the moral relationship, and the role it plays in such theories, will then be seen as a means of unifying, clarifying, and responding to a number of influential objections against such theories, including objections concerning its capacity to accommodate intuitions concerning cases of aggregation and our obligations to future persons.
The Atlantic at work: Britain and South Carolina's trading networks, c. 1730 - 1790
Keywords: trade
history
South Carolina
merchants
commerce
England
Eighteenth century
Charleston (S.C.)
American Revolution
London

This thesis describes the sixty years of transatlantic interaction, connection, dislocation and reconstruction in Anglo-Carolinian trade between 1730 and 1790. Focussing on about two dozen of London’s ‘Carolina traders’, it integrates their personal and collective stories of profit and loss, reputation and notoriety, and political activity and inactivity, with the broader forces they shaped and were in turn shaped by – forces of economic growth, political stability and instability, and imperial harmony and disharmony. Through their conjoined political and commercial agency – a dual role better appreciated by contemporaries than by historians – they profoundly influenced commerce between Britain and South Carolina. Their intermediation served firstly as a stabilising force in the Anglo-Carolinian polity as they procured favourable treatment for the colony’s goods and represented its grievances in the imperial metropolis. An important influence on this was their ‘absentee’ ownership of property in South Carolina and the thesis explores in depth the underappreciated prevalence and significance of this transatlantic absenteeism. From the mid-1760s, however, the traders’ political and commercial agency aggravated intra-imperial discord. Disputes between British merchants and their Carolinian correspondents reflected in microcosm the geo-political shifts of the time and reveal at an inter-personal level how resistance to British imperial authority developed among Carolinians. Furthermore, these disputes played a constitutive role in this resistance, as the purported commercial iniquities and political orientations of British merchants led their correspondents to question and reject the commercial and political norms that had once sustained Anglo-Carolinian relations. The thesis thus helps explain how South Carolina moved, often imperceptibly, against British authority during the 1760s and early 1770s by emphasising commercial discord within the growing political-economic friction. It further contributes to the burgeoning historiography of the eighteenth-century ‘Atlantic world’ by exploring the reconstruction of trading links between Britain and South Carolina after American independence. It reveals how strongly these were influenced by pre-war politics. In so doing, it demonstrates that Carolinians exercised greater commercial discretion after the war than contemporaries and historians have appreciated, and thus challenges contentions of South Carolina’s continuing commercial subservience to British trading interests.
The relationship between flagellar motor dynamics and the proton motive force
Keywords: bioenergetics
biophysics
flagellar motor

The bacterial flagellar motor is one of the few rotary motors found in nature, and an excellent example of a complex molecular machine. Flagellar motors in the model organism Escherichia coli are products of the coordinated expression of ∼50 different genes. The E. coli flagellar motor is powered by the proton-motive force (pmf), an electrochemical gradient across the cell membrane. Motor torque is gen- erated by proton flow through membrane-embedded stator units which bind to the basal body of the motor.
This thesis aimed to investigate the relationship between the pmf and the flag- ellar motor. A novel pmf control system was developed, based on the light-driven proton pump proteorhodopsin (pR). This system enabled pmf -dependent changes in motor behaviour to be precisely monitored in vivo. Expression of pR in E. coli was shown to be sufficient to drive the flagellar motor at wild-type speeds. Using the pR-based pmf control system, the motor was shown to respond to changes in pmf on a timescale of milliseconds. Surprisingly, motor speed increase was observed when pmf was increased above the physiological norm. Reduction of pmf to low levels enabled individual steps in motor rotation to be observed.
Motor response to loss of pmf was investigated. Motors were shown to exhibit a two-stage speed decrease after disruption of pmf , with motor speed falling to ∼20 % of its initial value within milliseconds, reaching a complete stop after 1 s. Extended periods of pmf loss was shown to lead to disengagement of stators from the motor, with motor speed increasing in a stepwise fashion after pmf restoration.
The integrity of the motor at different pmf levels was investigated by using TIRF microscopy to directly image positioning of fluorescently tagged motor components. The stator protein MotB was shown to physically leave and rejoin the motor after pmf disruption and restoration, with MotB dispersal following motor stop.
On the recyclability of liquid organic hydrides: hydrogenation of 9-ethylcarbazole and other heterocyclic compounds for application in hydrogen storage
Keywords: liquid organic hydrides
hydrogen storage
catalysis

The main focus of the present work is the recovery process for spent fuels based on catalytic hydrogenation of liquid organic hydrides (LOH). To gain the knowledge about the possible hurdles of hydrogen loading process, the hydrogenation of 9-ethylcarbazole as a model compound was elected to be studied in more detail. The structures of the intermediates and products of this reaction were characterized for the first time using combined GC-MS and NMR analysis with reference to DFT calculations. The fully saturated product was found to be a mixture of stereoisomers. A reaction model was developed which agreed well with the experimental results. The combined theoretical and experimental approaches were also undertaken to identify catalytic sites on the metal surface and their role in the hydrogenation of 9-ethylcarbazole. Kinetically stable intermediate (Plus 8 [H]) containing a central unsaturated “pyrrole” ring was found to be accumulated in the solution over a ruthenium black catalyst. Its further hydrogenation was found to involve its unusual shuttling from terraced sites to higher indexed sites. The stability of Plus 8 [H] was found to be influenced by the type of active sites present on the surface of the catalyst, as well as by the electronic structure of the metal. In addition, the kinetics of the hydrogenation was analyzed experimentally and the activation energies were obtained for all of the intermediate steps. Further understanding of how the molecules interact with the catalyst surface was provided by examining the hydrogenation activity and selectivity of a series of LOH. The general factors involved in LOH structure- catalyst –activity trend were outlined. Overall, due to a number of defined challenges in the LOH spent fuel recharging, it is believed that this complex H2 storage strategy is not likely to meet the targets for wide scale applications.
Immunodominant CD8+ T cell responses to HIV-1 infection - 'The good and the bad'
Keywords: medicine
immunology
HIV-1

Many lines of evidence indicate that CD8+ T cells are important in the control of HIV-1 infection and this has led to much vaccine research focused at eliciting virus specific CTL. However to date, the few large-scale trials of HIV-1 vaccines designed to elicit CD8+ T cells have produced disappointing results. This has highlighted our incomplete knowledge of the factors that determine if such cells are capable of viral control. The aim of this thesis is to further characterise qualitative aspects of HIV-1 specific CTL that are associated with both good and bad anti-viral activity.
HIV-1 specific CTL responses were investigated in three ways. Firstly, by longitudinally analysing an immunodominant HLA-B*08 restricted CD8+ T cell response in a single rapid progression patient. Secondly, HLA-B*40 restricted CTL responses to HIV-1 where characterised within a Chinese slow progressor cohort. Lastly, factors that affect the processing and presentation of certain overlapping HIV-1 specific CD8+ T cell epitopes were examined.
The results of these studies reveal that subtle variations in both host and viral proteins can have a substantial impact on virus specific CTL and in turn may impact on the outcome of disease. The generation of HIV-1 specific CD8+ T cells is a complex process affected by many variables including the viral sequence of epitope flanking regions as well as polymorphisms in the proteins involved in antigen processing and presentation. To add a further layer of complexity, it appears that HIV-1 virus specific CTL can modulate their functionality throughout the course of infection. Such factors should therefore be taken into account during HIV-1 vaccine design.
Complementarity of searches for dark matter
Keywords: cosmology of theories beyond the standard model
dark matter phenomenology
astroparticle physics

The striking evidence for the existence of dark matter in the Universe implies that there is new physics to be discovered beyond the Standard Model. To identify the nature of this dark matter is a key task for modern astroparticle physics, and a large number of experiments pursuing a range of different search strategies have been developed to solve it. The topic of this thesis is the complementarity of these different experiments and the issue of how to combine the information from different searches independently of experimental and theoretical uncertainties. The first part focuses on the direct detection of dark matter scattering in nuclear recoil detectors, with a special emphasis on the impact of the assumed velocity distribution of Galactic dark matter particles. By converting experimental data to variables that make the astrophysical unknowns explicit, different experiments can be compared without implicit assumptions concerning the dark matter halo. We extend this framework to include annual modulation signals and apply it to recent experimental hints for dark matter, showing that the tension between these results and constraints from other experiments is independent of astrophysical uncertainties. We explore possible ways of ameliorating this tension by changing our assumptions on the properties of dark matter interactions. In this context, we propose a new approach for inferring the properties of the dark matter particle, which does not require any assumptions about the structure of the dark matter halo. A particularly interesting option is to study dark matter particles that couple differently to protons and neutrons (so-called isospin-violating dark matter). Such isospin-violation arises naturally in models where the vector mediator is the gauge boson of a new U(1) that mixes with the Standard Model gauge bosons. In the second part, we first discuss the case where both the Z' and the dark matter particle have a mass of a few GeV and then turn to the case where the Z' is significantly heavier. While the former case is most strongly constrained by precision measurements from LEP and B-factories, the latter scenario can be probed with great sensitivity at the LHC using monojet and monophoton searches, as well as searches for resonances in dijet, dilepton and diboson final states. Finally, we study models of dark matter where loop contributions are important for a comparison of LHC searches and direct detection experiments. This is the case for dark matter interactions with Yukawa-like couplings to quarks and for interactions that lead to spin-dependent or momentum suppressed scattering cross sections at tree level. We find that including the contribution from heavy-quark loops can significantly alter the conclusions obtained from a tree-level analysis.