VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Agrarian change in Zimbabwe: politics, production and accumulation 
Keywords: Land Reform
Patronage
Zimbabwe
Production
Politics
Agrarian change

The analysis of agrarian change presented in this thesis integrates state practices and wider politics to the study of rural differentiation, using a case study of Zimbabwe. Most studies of agrarian change in the 21st century have tried to come to grips with rural differentiation in Africa, its causes and effects, by using particular models such as those of neo-classical economics, livelihood approaches, Marxist analysis of accumulation and social and cultural networks, or a combination of variables from the four approaches. However, these theoretical approaches fail to comprehensively integrate the role of the state and politics into the analysis of rural differentiation. My study explains differentiation by exploring beneficiary selection, production and accumulation processes on Zimbabwe’s Fast Track land reform resettlement schemes. Fast Track involved a series of partisan and violent invasions of largely white owned commercial farms from 2000, which constituted the largest land redistribution in post-colonial Africa. Scholars exploring politics and the Zimbabwean state have not applied their insights to an analysis of field based data on production and accumulation on Zimbabwe’s resettlement farms. I argue that the restructuring of the state and politics as an instrument of violence and as a site of accumulation dominated by patronage-both justified through ideology-was central to agrarian change after 2000. I find the three concepts of violence, patronage and ideology more useful in capturing the nuances and modalities of empirical realities on resettlement schemes than neo-patrimonial theories that provide generalised accounts of the African state. Though still acknowledging the role of other differentiating factors such as social networks, hard work by resettled farmers and economic factors, it is through the integration of political processes into the analysis of agrarian change that, I argue, one can understand better the dynamics shaping rural differentiation in post-2000 Zimbabwe.
The assembly history of disc galaxies
Keywords: galaxy evolution
disc galaxies
disk galaxies
Tully-Fisher
galaxies
spiral galaxies
dark matter

We present new measures of the rotation curves of disc galaxies from z~0.2 to z~1.7, using deep exposures from both DEIMOS and LRIS spectrographs on the Keck telescopes in combination with multi-band imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope. We do this with a new modelling code, curvation, which has been optimised to extract the rotation velocity measurements from galaxies at intermediate and high redshift. To this end, we conduct a bulge-to-disc de-composition to allow us to de-project observed velocities to extract a model of the intrinsic rotation curve. We demonstrate the improved accuracy and precision of these measurements via a number of tests, but primarily in recovering an intrinsic scatter of the high redshift Tully-Fisher relation which is similar to that found locally. We show for the first time that the stellar mass Tully-Fisher relation is tightly in place at z~1, the normalisation of which has evolved less than 0.02±0.02 dex in stellar mass from z~1.7 to z~0.2. We do however see evidence for evolution in classic B-band Tully-Fisher relation, which is brighter at z~1 by 0.85±0.28 magnitudes than that at z~0.3. This trend is consistent with what was previously known about the evolving star-formation rates of disc galaxies. We then explore the potential drivers of these trends in the Tully-Fisher relation by estimating the baryonic and dark matter content of our galaxies. We also discover a surprising trend in the bulgeless disc galaxies at high redshift, which may be evolving differently from other rotationally supported galaxies. In the context of work which has been conducted at z~2, we discuss our results of a stellar mass Tully-Fisher relation which is strikingly similar over two-thirds of the age of the Universe.
Wave evolution on gentle slopes - statistical analysis and Green-Naghdi modelling
Keywords: coastal and ocean engineering
computational fluid simulation.
Water waves
shoaling

An understanding of extreme waves is important in the design and analysis of offshore structures, such as oil and gas platforms. With the increase of interest in the shipping of LNG, the design of import and export terminals in coastal water of slowly varying intermediate depth requires accurate analysis of steep wave shoaling. In this thesis, data from laboratory experiments involving random wave simulations on very gentle slopes have been analysed in terms of a model of large wave events, and the results interpreted by observation of the shape and magnitude of the large wave events. The auto-correlation function of the free surface elevation time histories, called NewWave, has been calculated from the wave spectrum and shown to fit very well up to the point where waves start to break (when compared to the ‘linear’ surface elevation time history). It has been shown that NewWave is an appropriate model for the shape of the ‘linear’ part of large waves provided kd > 0.5. A Stokes-like expansion for NewWave analysis has been demonstrated to match the average shape of the largest waves, accounting for the dominant vertical asymmetry. Furthermore, an appropriate local wave period derived from NewWave has been inserted into a Miche-based limiting criterion, using the linear dispersion equation, to obtain estimates for the limiting wave height. Overall, the analysis confirms the Miche-type criterion applies to limiting wave height for waves passing over very mild bed slopes.
A derivation of general Green-Naghdi (GN) theory, which incorporates non-linear terms in its formulation, is also presented. This approach satisfies the boundary conditions exactly and approximates the field equations. The derived 2-dimensional vertical GN Level 1 model, capable of simulating steep waves on varying water depth, is validated against solitary waves and their interactions, and solitary waves on varying water depth and gives good qualitative agreement against the KdV equation. The developed and validated numerical model is used to simulate focussed wave groups on both constant depth and gentle slope. In general, the behaviour of waves simulated by the numerical model is very similar to that observed in the experimental data. There is evidence of vertical asymmetry as the water depth is reduced, owing to the non-linearity. Although the main physics is still controlled by linear dispersion, the higher order harmonics become increasingly important for shoaling waves. The numerical results also show a slope-induced wave set-up that keeps on increasing in amplitude as the wave group travels on the gentle slope.
Recycling of materials in civil engineering
Keywords: concrete

Although Britain is relatively rich in natural aggregate reserves, planning approvals to develop new quarries are running at about half the rate of aggregate extraction. The use of secondary materials, such as recycled aggregate, might not create a major course of aggregate but if secondary material were used in less demanding situations, the quantity of natural aggregate required by the construction industry would be reduced. This dissertation reports mainly on laboratory tests conducted on crushed concrete and demolition debris to examine the potential use of these materials in new construction. Standard aggregate tests were conducted on the materials to check their compliance with the Specification for Highway Works (1986), particularly for use as aggregate in road sub-base layers. A more detailed examination of the aggregates was conducted with regard to CBR, shear strength and frost susceptibility where the influences of moisture content, density and particle packing on these properties were investigated. One part of the study involved examining the use of recycled aggregate as the coarse aggregate fraction in new concrete. An analysis of the shear strength data was conducted using the dilatancy index defined by Bolton (1986). From the frost susceptibility results, it was concluded that further work would be required in this area to determine the main factors which influence the frost heave of recycled aggregates. The recycled aggregate concrete compared well with the natural aggregate concrete and appeared to be of superior quality than that produced in other research. During the study, it became evident that the recycled aggregates could perform as well as limestone in most cases and therefore could be considered for many potential uses. Some recommendations are presented at the end of this dissertation for the development of a standard on recycled materials which would help to promote the use of recycled aggregates in the construction industry in Britain.
Searches for new physics using Dijet Angular Distributions in proton-proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector
Keywords: Particle Physics
CERN
Black Holes
Extra Dimensions
Large Hadron Collider
Jets

Angular distributions of jet pairs (dijets) produced in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of- mass energy √s = 7 TeV have been studied with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider using the full 2011 data set with an integrated luminosity of 4.8 fb−1, and reaching dijet masses up to 4.5 TeV. All angular distributions are consistent with QCD predictions.
Analysis of the dijet angular distribution, using a novel technique simultaneously employing the dijet mass, is employed. This analysis is sensitive to both resonant new physics and phenomena with a slow-onset in mass. Using this technique, new exclusion limits have been set at 95% credibility level for several hypotheses of physics beyond the standard model including: quantum gravity scales, with 6 extra dimensions, below 4.11 TeV, quark contact interactions below a compositeness scale of 7.6 TeV, and excited quarks with a mass below 2.75 TeV. In a large and complex scientific experiment, such as ATLAS, the collection, management and usability of coherent data and metadata is a challenging operation. The availability of these data to physicists within the experiment is essential to all analysis efforts. A new web-based interface called “RunBrowser”, which makes ATLAS and LHC operations data available to the ATLAS Collaboration, is introduced.
Power to the parents? Participatory governance, civil society, and the quality of democracy in rural Honduras and Guatemala
Keywords: community-managed schools
participatory governance
quality of democracy
Honduras
Guatemala
civil society

This thesis examines whether and how participatory governance (PG), a model for incorporating citizen participation in designing and/or implementing strategies to solve public problems, can strengthen civil society and improve the quality of democracy. The study focuses on community-managed schools (CMS) in Honduras and Guatemala, arguably each country's largest PG initiative, in which parents managed rural schools.
This thesis advances a "political capabilities" framework to explore state efforts to strengthen civil society and improve the quality of democracy. I use a mixed-methods approach, centering on surveys of over 2,000 parents and eight community case studies.
My research first shows how different long-standing political legacies—“controlled inclusion” in Honduras and “coerced marginalization” in Guatemala—impinged on CMS. In Honduras, patronage networks captured CMS. In Guatemala, community- and national-level polarization contributed to CMS's reversal. Both undermined the CMS model and reduced the likelihood that participants would develop political capabilities.
Despite these obstacles to stimulating civil society, I find surprising evidence of important individual-level “spillover” effects—such as gaining skills and increasing participation in other organizations—among a non-trivial minority of participating parents. Moreover, regressions and case study analysis indicate that state support, parents' level of involvement, and parents' perceptions of council effectiveness and democraticness can increase the likelihood of certain spillovers.
Still, prior organizational experience remains the best predictor of subsequent participation and leadership. And qualitative analysis further demonstrates the limits of CMS's impacts on rural civil society. For the most part, individuals have not used newly acquired skills to build new types of groups and organize autonomously. Instead, community organizations remain very limited in their scope of action and heavily circumscribed by the state.
In sum, this thesis demonstrates how, through one type of PG initiative, states can stimulate participation and produce changes in individuals’ civic and political behavior. But CMS was not a “game-changer” for rural civil society—the link from incremental changes in individual behavior to how rural communities organize themselves and engage with the state remains tenuous.
Essays on human capital formation in developing countries
Keywords: Human Capital
Economics
Development Economics
Education

This thesis consists of a short introduction and three self-contained analytical chapters.
Chapter 1 focuses on the question of learning gaps and divergence in achievement across countries. I use unique child-level panel data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam to ask at what ages do gaps between different populations emerge, how they increase or decline over time, and what the proximate determinants of this divergence are. I document that learning gaps between the four countries are already evident at the age of 5 years and grow throughout the age trajectory of children, preserving country ranks from 5 to 15 years of age. At primary school age, the divergence between Vietnam and the other countries is largely accounted for by substantially greater learning gains per year of schooling.
Chapter 2 focuses on learning differences between private and government school students in India. I present the first value-added models of learning production in private and government schools in this context, using panel data from Andhra Pradesh. I examine the heterogeneity in private school value-added across different subjects, urban and rural areas, medium of instruction, and across age groups. Further, I also estimate private school effects on children's self-efficacy and agency. I find modest or insignificant causal effects of attending private schools in most test domains other than English and on children's academic self-concept and agency. Results on comparable test domains and age groups correspond closely with, and further extend, estimates from a parallel experimental evaluation.
Chapter 3 uses panel data from the state of Andhra Pradesh in India to estimate the impact of the introduction of a national midday meal program on anthropometric z-scores of primary school students, and investigates whether the program ameliorated the deterioration of health in young children caused by a severe drought. Correcting for self-selection into the program using a non-linearity in how age affects the probability of enrollment, we find that the program acted as a safety net for children, providing large and significant health gains for children whose families suffered from drought.
Multiscale gyrokinetics for rotating tokamak plasmas
Keywords: fusion
gyrokinetics
Plasma physics
tokamak

This thesis presents a complete theoretical framework for turbulence and transport in tokamak plasmas. The fundamental scale separations present in plasma turbulence are codified as an asymptotic expansion in the ratio of the gyroradius to the equilibrium scale length. Proceeding order-by- order in this expansion, a framework for plasma turbulence is developed. It comprises an instantaneous equilibrium, the fluctuations driven by gra- dients in the equilibrium quantities, and the transport-timescale evolu- tion of mean profiles of these quantities driven by the fluctuations. The equilibrium distribution functions are local Maxwellians with each flux surface rotating toroidally as a rigid body. Large-scale deviations of the distribution function from a Maxwellian are given by neoclassical theory. The fluctuations are determined by the high-flow gyrokinetic equation, from which we derive the governing principle for gyrokinetic turbulence in tokamaks: the conservation and local cascade of free energy. Transport equations for the evolution of the mean density, temperature and flow ve- locity profiles are derived. These transport equations show how the neo- classical corrections and the fluctuations act back upon the mean profiles through fluxes and heating.
This framework is further developed by exploiting the scale separation between ions and the electrons. The gyrokinetic equation is expanded in powers of the electron to ion mass ratio, which provides a rigorous method for deriving the electron response to ion-scale turbulence. We prove that such turbulence cannot change the magnetic topology, and ar- gue that, therefore, the magnetic field lies on fluctuating flux surfaces. These flux surfaces are used to construct magnetic coordinates, and in these coordinates a closed system of equations for the electron response is derived. All fast electron timescales have been eliminated from these equations. Simplified transport equations for electrons in this limit are also derived.
Labour market risks and institutional determinants
Keywords: Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis
risk shift
new risk
non-standard employment
Comparative Historical Analysis
Labour market
unemployment
East Asia

Korea and Japan stand out in the group of OECD countries for their rapid increase in, and high levels of, non-standard employment. The empirical evidence leads us to a two-part puzzle: Why are there so many precarious workers in Korea and Japan? And what are the institutional determinants of such labour market risks? This thesis commences by introducing the concept of 'risk shift', and the fuzzy-set ideal type approach is employed to conduct a comparative study of 18 countries. The labour market risks in Korea and Japan are then compared in an international context with 16 selected OECD countries. Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis is employed to investigate the institutional determinants of labour market risks. It then focuses on the increase in non-standard employement in Korea and Japan. Taiwan is also included as a contrasting case, the study taking an institutional approach employing Comparative Historical Analysis. Chapters employing CHA examine how the different welfare production regimes evolved and how they matter in explaining the high rate of non-standard employment in East Asia. The new risk discussion, the argument on the definition and impact of deindustrialization and lastly theories on East Asian welfare states are revisited in the conclusion of this thesis. Finally, I critically discuss the notion of precarious workers and highlight the centrality of social policy that their organizational configuration affects political culture, the formation of the production system, the structure of the labour market and the kind of risk a country could experience.
Decolonising Anglo-Indians: strategies for a mixed-race community in late colonial India during the first half of the 20th century.
Keywords: East Indians
racial passing
racial mixing
East Indian
Domiciled Europeans
Indo-Britons
Eurasian
Domiciled European
Eurasians
miscegenation
half-caste
McCluskiegunge
Indo-Briton
Anglo-Indian
Anglo-Indians
Indianisation
half-castes
McCluskieganj

Anglo-Indians, a designation acquired in the 1911 Indian Census, had previously been known as Eurasians, East Indians, Indo-Britons and half-castes. ‘Anglo-Indian’ had previously denoted, and among some scholars continues to denote, Britons long resident in India. We will define Anglo-Indians as a particular mixed race Indo-European population arising out of the European trading and imperial presence in India, and one of several constructed categories by which transient Britons sought to demarcate racial difference within the Raj’s socio-racial hierarchy. Anglo-Indians were placed in an intermediary (and differentially remunerated) position between Indians and Domiciled Europeans (another category excluded from fully ‘white’ status), who in turn were placed below imported British superiors. The domiciled community (of Anglo-Indians and Domiciled Europeans, treated as a single socio-economic class by Britons) were relied upon as loyal buttressing agents of British rule who could be deployed to help run the Raj’s strategically sensitive transport and communication infrastructure, and who were made as a term of their service to serve in auxiliary military forces which could help to ensure the internal security of the Raj and respond to strikes, civil disobedience or crises arising from international conflict.
The thesis reveals how calls for Indianisation of state and railway employment by Indian nationalists in the assemblies inaugurated by the 1919 Government of India Act threatened, through opening up their reserved intermediary positions to competitive entry and examination by Indians, to undermine the economic base of domiciled employment. Anglo-Indian leaders responded with varying strategies. Foremost was the definition of Anglo-Indians as an Indian minority community which demanded political representation through successive phases of constitutional change and statutory safeguards for their existing employment. This study explores various strategies including: deployment of multiple identities; widespread racial passing by individuals and families; agricultural colonisation schemes; and calls for individual, familial or collective migration.
Development and application of image analysis techniques to study structural and metabolic neurodegeneration in the human hippocampus using MRI and PET
Keywords: hippocampus
PET
MRI
neurodegeneration
segmentation

Despite the association between hippocampal atrophy and a vast array of highly debilitating neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration, tools to accurately and robustly quantify the degeneration of this structure still largely elude us. In this thesis, we firstly evaluate previously-developed hippocampal segmentation methods (FMRIB’s Integrated Registration and Segmentation Tool (FIRST), Freesurfer (FS), and three versions of a Classifier Fusion (CF) technique) on two clinical MR datasets, to gain a better understanding of the modes of success and failure of these techniques, and to use this acquired knowledge for subsequent method improvement (e.g., FIRSTv3). Secondly, a fully automated, novel hippocampal segmentation method is developed, termed Fast Marching for Automated Segmentation of the Hippocampus (FMASH). This combined region-growing and atlas-based approach uses a 3D Sethian Fast Marching (FM) technique to propagate a hippocampal region from an automatically-defined seed point in the MR image. Region growth is dictated by both subject-specific intensity features and a probabilistic shape prior (or atlas). Following method development, FMASH is thoroughly validated on an independent clinical dataset from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), with an investigation of the dependency of such atlas-based approaches on their prior information. In response to our findings, we subsequently present a novel label-warping approach to effectively account for the detrimental effects of using cross-dataset priors in atlas-based segmentation. Finally, a clinical application of MR hippocampal segmentation is presented, with a combined MR-PET analysis of wholefield and subfield hippocampal changes in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration. This thesis therefore contributes both novel computational tools and valuable knowledge for further neurological investigations in both the academic and the clinical field.