VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Determining material properties using impact wave propagation method
Keywords: impact
frequency domain analysis
wave propagation
material properties

Mechanically testing soft materials to identify dynamic material properties remains challenging in both theory and practice. Commonly used methods, the SHPB technique for example, have very limited capacity. One of the shortcomings is the impedance mismatch between bar and specimen: conventionally metal rods are employed, which generates a weak transmitted signal; also, the stress equilibrium assumption, on which traditional time domain analysis was built, is likely to be violated due to low wave speed in soft samples. Using low-impedance polymer bars is one of the promising solutions: it removes the obstacle of the weak signal. However, the problem of stress equilibrium is not yet resolved, and complexity increased: as viscosity is introduced, material behaviours become both time and frequency dependent. Therefore, applying polymeric bars in impact settings calls for rebuilding the analytical framework and testing it in simulation and experimental environments.
This work aims to answer the question: how material properties can be retrieved from an impact test? To realise this, three independent and integrated impact techniques were developed: the single rod direct impact method, the interface impact method, and the 3-rod impact method (modified SHPB). In each case, the frequency-dependent mechanical properties are derived from measurements of stress waves as they propagate in the system. The techniques were designed in a consecutive manner, but each can be used on its own. The first two techniques were fully deployed here, with complete theoretical, simulation and experimental investigations; the last technique was theoretically described, with some experimental phenomenon presented. Frequency domain analysis (FFT) was mainly adopted, important issues such as wave propagation, mechanical models, signal processing, dispersion, noise sensitivity, error analysis etc., were demonstrated throughout the journey. It is for the first time a comprehensive investigation of the single rod technique was performed combining previous and extended work; while the interface technique was brand new. The integrated framework demonstrates the robustness, accuracy, and effectiveness of utilizing wave propagation approach to identify dynamic material properties; and with proper calibration, these established works can be applied to a broad range of polymeric system-based equilibrium-free impact tests.
Forming future citizens: emotion and the republic's colonias for evacuee children during the Spanish civil war (1936–1939)
Keywords: Child evacuees
Colonias
Child displacement
War
Children and war
Children's colonies
Children
Emotion
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

This thesis is a study of the discourse, practices and experience of the Republic's colonias—collective homes or family placements—created to protect and educate evacuee children during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). It contributes to our knowledge of state and rearguard civil institutions—unions, proletarian movements, revolutionary committees, and humanitarian organizations—which set up colonias and of the experience of parents, children, and teachers as they interacted with these authorities. Intersecting Spanish Civil War history with that of emotions and childhood, the thesis is shaped by a lexical framework of emotion words: fear, hope, (un)happiness, and disillusion. These provide an interpretive framework designed to retain the complexities and possibilities of the past and bring nuance to the ideologically cemented narrative of the war.
The thesis concludes, firstly, that the wartime colonias were a continuation of two very different prehistories: liberal Republican reform and proletarian labour conflict. As a result, whilst all authorities concurred with persuading parents to evacuate children, the utopian visions and practices of anarchist, communist, socialist, and liberal Republican authorities were incompatible. Authorities sought to form future citizens according to their particular ideology. Furthermore, the government's policy for control of all colonias was never entirely successful. Secondly, emotive propaganda and emotional practices developed around the colonia were an important part of dualist civil war rhetoric. They had a significant role in the cultural project of rebuilding Republican Spain and were useful to the state in securing international support. However, whilst evacuation to colonias removed children from the besieged capital to places of relative safety, in many cases the model colonias of propaganda were mere illusion and protection of children failed either through systemic failure; inadequate and disillusioned staff who did not align themselves with Republican ideology; or through the privations of war.
Risk and resilience in cognitive ageing
Keywords: brain ageing
healthy ageing
dementia
neuroimaging
cognitive ageing
magnetic resonance imaging

Whilst advancing age is, on average, associated with declining cognitive abilities, the course of cognitive ageing is highly variable at the individual level. The overall aim of this thesis was to improve understanding of risk and protective factors associated with variability in cognitive ageing. I first explored the effect of Alzheimer’s risk gene ‘APOE’ on cognition in healthy adults, and by reviewing the extensive literature, I showed that APOE genotype can have diverse cognitive consequences via multiple neurobiological mechanisms, each with applications to distinct aspects of cognitive ageing and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). I also investigated subjective memory impairment (SMI), which like APOE is associated with increased AD risk, but is also commonly reported by healthy older adults. By presenting a clinical case of persistent SMI, and reviewing evidence for the long-term relevance of brain characteristics in SMI, I reported that MRI can detect early differences in brain structure that herald subsequent cognitive impairment, valuable in clinical settings to identify the most at-risk SMI cases.
I also investigated protective factors that preserve cognitive ability in some older adults, particularly whether the brain supports this superior cognitive ageing in multiple ways, via some older adults maintaining more ‘youthful’ brains, and others harnessing additional functional resources to ‘adapt’ to the challenge of brain ageing. Using structural and functional brain metrics alone, I identified multiple patterns of brain ageing predicted to be associated with superior cognitive ageing, and compared cross-sectional and longitudinal cognitive performance, as well as multi-modal MRI metrics acquired at multiple time points between groups. Across these analyses, I found convergent evidence that maintenance of more ‘youthful’ brain structure and function is associated with prior and continued superior cognitive and brain outcomes, particularly in grey and white matter structure, so promotion of this brain profile should be a goal of interventions. High frontal resting- state connectivity in older adults with poorer brain structure was not associated with the predicted cognitive performance benefit, when compared to those with lower structural and functional brain characteristics. Overall, this thesis provides novel insights into risk and protective factors related to variability in cognitive ageing, upon which further use of sensitive cognitive and imaging measures, and unique populations such as the oldest-old, can expand to inform markers and interventions to maximise cognitive abilities in later life.
Messaging migration: media agenda-setting, immigration attitudes, and the effects of evidence on perceptions and policy preferences
Keywords: media
text analysis
Great Britain
immigration
public attitudes
political communication
survey experiment

How do messages impact what people think? Although this broad question speaks to current debates about the role of information in politics, variations of it have appeared throughout political science. My approach draws upon political communication, psychology, and linguistics to demonstrate how information relates to attitudes, perceptions, and policy preferences.
Across four separate studies that use the issue of immigration in the British case, I address several sub-questions. First, how has the British press—itself a key messenger of political information—portrayed immigration and immigrants over several decades? Applying corpus linguistic methods, I find press coverage about immigration has both increased and been characterised by several sub-agendas. Second, how have these messages at the word-level related to changes in public concern about immigration? Using time series models, I show how specific dimensions of immigration—its sociocultural, geographic, and numerical aspects—and not overall levels of coverage are related to aggregate public concern. These two studies collectively demonstrate how the agenda-setting power of print media is likely more subtle and delimited than commonly expected.
In the third study, I focus on the individual-level impacts of messages. Which qualities of immigrants matter more for public attitudes? Findings from a nationally-representative conjoint survey experiment demonstrate how the British public places greater importance on skill level and language fluency when evaluating individual immigrants. Finally, I broaden my view of messages to include different types of supporting evidence. Do arguments citing numerical or narrative evidence impact public perceptions and policy preferences? A second nationally-representative survey experiment shows how positive messages about immigrants featuring numerical or narrative supporting evidence can positively change perceptions, especially among people who would be expected to hold more negative views. But, the presence of extra information neither raises perceptions more than similarly positive messages lacking evidence, nor influences policy preferences.
Deception, mistake, privacy and consent: a conceptual framework for resolving the ‘line-drawing’ problem in sex-by-deception and mistaken sex
Keywords: deception
deceit
consent

What is the appropriate legal response to sexual activity induced by deception or mistake? My thesis is built on three foundational moves. First, I challenge orthodox legal approaches to identifying deception and develop a tripartite taxonomy of active and passive deception, and uninduced mistake. Second, I identify the violation of the right to sexual integrity as the conceptual core of rape and sexual assault. Third, I recast the right to sexual integrity as comprising three component rights: the right to token ostensible consent, the right to be free from illegitimate interference with the decision to do so, and the right to know information relevant to that decision. Deception and uninduced mistake implicate different component rights, and so affect consent-validity in different ways. Only in restricted circumstances will consent given on the basis of an uninduced mistake (rather than deception) constitute a violation of sexual integrity. In most cases, mistaken consent is valid.
When consent is given on the basis of deception or ‘relevant’ uninduced mistakes D infringes C’s right to sexual integrity. However, the right to sexual integrity it is not absolute, and must be balanced against D’s rights, chiefly (but by no means exclusively) the right to privacy. This balancing exercise functions to exclude from the reach of both moral censure and criminal law certain deceptions and relevant mistakes that induce consent. Even when D’s privacy right is not at stake, and C’s moral consent is invalid, issues of legal and public policy may militate against imposing criminal liability.
This thesis does not offer a comprehensive account of all circumstances in which deceptively induced or mistaken consent will be morally or legally (in)valid. However, it provides a much needed, robust theoretical framework for resolving long-standing difficulties in this controversial and highly contested area of the law.
Explanations for the growth of euroscepticism in the parliamentary Conservative Party
Keywords: Conservative Party
Legislative behaviour
Euroscepticism

This thesis investigates why the Conservative Parliamentary party became more Eurosceptic between 1992-2016. It uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in seeking to answer two main research questions. Firstly, why did MPs adopt Eurosceptic positions? Secondly, why did the party become more Eurosceptic over time? It is argued that the answer to both these questions can be explained by elite driven politics within the Conservative Party. On the first research question, MPs’ positions have primarily been affected by their ideologies and their prospects of promotion. Electoral factors such as Eurosceptic constituencies and pressure from UKIP have been of less importance. In relation to the second research question, the data suggests that the party became more Eurosceptic because of both new Eurosceptic MPs entering the house and existing MPs becoming more Eurosceptic. The reason new Conservative MPs tended to be Eurosceptics was primarily that Eurosceptics dominated the talent pool of potential Conservative candidates. The selection decisions of constituency associations and the voting behaviour of the electorate had a relatively limited effect on the ideological composition of the Parliamentary party. MPs became more Eurosceptic during their Parliamentary career because of the internal politics of Parliament and developments at the EU level of government.
Religion and nation: an exercise in comparative political theology with special reference to Christos Yannaras and Sri Aurobindo
Keywords: Comparative theology
Political theology--History of doctrines--20th century.
Hindu nationalism
Orthodox political theology

This thesis is an analysis of the ideas of religion and nation from the point of view of their semantic overlap and interdependence. The principal argument of this thesis is that, from a theological standpoint, the line between the sacred and profane lies not where it has been drawn by modernity, i.e. between the religious and the secular or political, but within each sphere. The particular angle from which I am looking at this issue is that of modern nationalism. I challenge modernity’s paradigm on two levels. Firstly, by analysing nationalist discourse and action, I claim that nationalism is far from being limited to what modernity defines as ‘profane’, but instead it often sacralises the nation, taking the place that previously belonged to conventional religion or to the pre-modern religio-political whole. Secondly, engaging theologically with Christos Yannaras and Sri Aurobindo Ghose, I argue that the Christian community is a holistic, profoundly political enterprise which, rather than identifying itself with the sacred, should also be able to discern and articulate the sacred outside its institutional borders, in the secular world of nations. Yannaras and Aurobindo provide resources for challenging modernity’s paradigm, but also serve as ‘test cases’, where both modern and anti-modern paradigms coexist in tension. I highlight this tension through analysis of the construction of respective Hellenic and Indian (or ‘Eastern’) identities in a theologically dangerous contraposition to the ‘West’.
Entrepreneurship in institutional context: actor emergence in transitions from wage-employment to entrepreneurship
Keywords: Organisational institutionalism
Entrepreneurship

Observing the technical enablers of the new forms of work and the prominent changes in the corporate employment patterns, many argue that we are at the dawn of a new era in the organisation of work. As the proportion of work is increasingly taking place in smaller, distributed units, transitions into entrepreneurship following redundancies are also becoming more common. While entrepreneurship is known to positively influence economic growth and employment, less is known about how entrepreneurial ventures that originate from a corporate redundancy programme obtain viability in the field of entrepreneurship. This thesis seeks to contribute towards an improved understanding of the transitions from wage-employment to entrepreneurship by addressing the question, “How do institutional contexts influence the emergence of entrepreneurial actors that originate from a corporate redundancy programme?”
Empirically, the thesis explores the emergence of around 300 entrepreneurial ventures that originated from the corporate redundancy programme that Nokia ran in Finland as a part of the global restructuring of its operations between 2011 and 2014. By utilising interview and archival data, the thesis studies how the ventures’ embeddedness, capital strategies and engagement with the institutional infrastructure of the entrepreneurial system influence their emergence in the sense of them obtaining the authority and capacity to act for themselves in the entrepreneurial field.
The findings contribute towards the theory of entrepreneurship in several ways. The thesis demonstrates that, rather than systems of entrepreneurship forming unitary entities of homogeneous goals, identities and principles, they may, in some cases, split into subsystems. It further elaborates on the multidimensionality of entrepreneurial ventures’ embeddedness and demonstrates that entrepreneurial capital may, at times, be restricted by the context. Beyond the contribution to the contextualisation of entrepreneurship, the thesis substantiates the theory of fields in organisational institutionalism. The findings offer a rare view into the separation of institutional infrastructure into subfields and elaborate the periphery of fields as a rich terrain of overlapping social orders, nonisomorphic actors, and heterogeneous positions.
The rally-intensive ground campaign: electioneering and party adaptation in Tanzania
Keywords: Rally
Rallies

This thesis is about election campaigning in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the central feature of many African ground campaigns is the prominence assumed by the rally. Where aggregate rally attendance is high, ground campaigns are ‘rally-intensive’; this rally-intensiveness is key to understanding how parties electioneer and organise. These assertions complicate comparative typologies of election campaigns.
Part I examines under what circumstances ground campaigns become rally-intensive. It draws on historic studies of electioneering in both Western and African countries to show that campaigns became more rally-intensive after the proliferation of electronic amplification. Thereby, it illustrates that many rally-intensive campaigns emerged in the twentieth century and across continents. Next, it analyses Afrobarometer data to examine African rally attendance. It reveals that rising Internet, newspaper and television penetration reduces rally attendance. While this suggests that media penetration dampens rally attendance, there is evidence that other factors buoy it.
Part II examines electioneering in Tanzania. It analyses a survey conducted before and after the 2015 general election, and reveals some evidence that rallies have mobilisational and persuasive effects. Next, it draws on extensive participant observation of rallies and demonstrates that parties expend enormous efforts ‘producing’ rallies. Finally, it shows that canvassers alter who they contact in anticipation of who will attend rallies. Local actors’ roles in these tasks make them crucial auxiliaries in rally-intensive campaigns.
Part III uses qualitative evidence to demonstrate that Tanzanian parties have developed new, capital-intensive means of producing rallies. Inter-candidate and inter-party competition drove processes of rally capitalisation. Accordingly, parties fostered closer relationships with financiers to raise more funds. Thereby, the rally became a vehicle of party adaptation. These findings are instructive about party electioneering and organisation in Tanzania, but they are applicable by degrees wherever rally-intensive ground campaigns can be found, both in sub-Saharan Africa and further abroad.
Lysosomal dysfunction and glycosphingolipid dysregulation in rare and common neurodegenerative diseases
Keywords: Neurodegeneration
Parkinson's Disease
Lysosome

Historically, the rare early-onset neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs) have been studied as discrete metabolic diseases in their own right. However, in recent years links with more common late-onset neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), have emerged. For example, lysosomal dysfunction, impaired autophagy, and protein aggregation are shared features in these diseases. However, altered lipid homeostasis, especially glycosphingolipid (GSL) dysregulation, is a relatively new research field of interest in PD and even more so in ALS.
In this thesis, we provide evidence that GSL metabolism is altered during denervation, in an ALS mouse model, and in ALS patients. We further show that pharmacological modulation of GSL levels, especially the ganglioside GM1a, could be a therapeutic approach for ALS.
Mutations in the Gaucher disease-linked lysosomal enzyme GBA are major genetic risk factors for developing PD. In this thesis, we observed that a subset of sporadic PD fibroblasts phenocopied characteristics of lysosomal dysfunction associated with GBA mutations. Furthermore, ageing is the major non-genetic risk factor for adult-onset neurodegenerative diseases. We show that levels of GSLs and activities of lysosomal hydrolases, relevant to PD, are altered in the ageing brain of wildtype mice. Importantly, we demonstrate, in human post-mortem substantia nigra and putamen, that levels of GSLs, especially complex gangliosides such as GM1a, and multiple lysosomal hydrolase activities are reduced during ageing and to a greater extent in sporadic PD. However, these changes were not observed in mouse models of PD, questioning their usefulness as models for PD. Finally, we demonstrate that ganglioside levels in cerebrospinal fluid and serum from PD patients are potential biomarkers for PD. Consequently, existing LSD therapies may hold promise as new therapeutic approaches for treating PD.