VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The demise of corporate insolvency law in India
Keywords: Indian law
Law and development
Insolvency law
Bankruptcy law
Banking
Law and finance

The subject of this thesis is the operation of corporate insolvency law in post-colonial India. Indian corporate insolvency law has been widely condemned as dysfunctional, critics complaining of extreme delays and a series of associated harms to creditors in the disposal of formal proceedings. Surprisingly little is known, however, about why the law has ‘failed’ creditors in this way - why the law operates as it does. That is the question that motivates this thesis. The thesis reports the results of an in-depth study of the introduction and development of India’s two principal insolvency procedures for corporate debtors: liquidation (under the Companies Act 1956) and rescue (under the Sick Industrial Companies (Special Provisions) Act 1985, for industrial companies). The most significant contribution made by the thesis is the reporting of new evidence of the influence of judges on the development of these two insolvency procedures over time, drawn from an original analysis of a large body of Indian case law. This evidence suggests that the role of the courts (or more specifically, the role of judges) has been significantly underestimated in previous attempts to explain the demise of corporate insolvency law in post-colonial India.
Competition law, state aid law and free-movement law:  the case of the environmental integration obligation 
Keywords: four freedoms
environmental integration
Article 11 TFEU
competition law
state aid law
free movement law
internal market law

This thesis investigates competition law, State aid law and free-movement law in their interaction with Article 11 TFEU’s obligation to integrate environmental protection requirements into all activities and policies of the Union. The Article is formulated in broad and sweeping terms which makes integrating environmental protection requirements complex and context-dependent. The challenge of integrating environmental considerations is further increased as such integration in competition, State aid and free- movement law is different from other areas of EU action. The three areas are the core provisions protecting the internal market by prohibiting certain actions of the Member States and undertakings. Unlike in other areas, the EU is therefore not in the position to develop or design the actions but has to scrutinise the measure according to pre-established parameters. To address this challenge, a novel functional approach to environmental integration is developed. The approach should facilitate a better understanding of environmental integration and in particular its application to competition law, State aid and free-movement law. An important element of this thesis equally the comparison between the three areas of law. It sheds light on conceptual issues that are not only relevant to the integration of environmental protection. The comparison advances the understanding in relation to questions such as how restrictions are defined and how the respective balancing tests are applied. The contribution of this research is therefore twofold. One the one hand, it compares how the different tests in competition, State aid and free-movement law operate, thereby offering opportunities for cross-fertilisation. On the other hand, this comparison and the improvements suggested as a result help to conceptualise environmental integration thereby paving the way for a more transparent and consistent integration of environmental protection in competition, State aid and free-movement law.
Functional characterisation of synuclein-based novel genetic mouse models
Keywords: transgenic mouse models
Parkinsons disease
fast-scan cyclic voltammetry
dopamine
alpha-synuclein
basal ganglia
synuclein

Synucleins are highly conserved presynaptic proteins with unknown function. α-synuclein plays a key role regulating dopamine homeostasis and is intimately involved in Parkinson’s disease (PD) pathogenesis. However, the normal/pathological role of α-synuclein remains unidentified. Studies exploring its function are limited as current transgenic mouse models do not fully recapitulate PD pathology. This thesis reports the functional characterisation of two novel synuclein-based mouse models.
I report the molecular and functional characterisation of transgenic mouse lines with wild-type or A30P-mutant human α-synuclein genomic locus carried within a bacterial artificial chromosome. SNCA-A30P&plus;Snca-/- mice exhibited a highly physiologically relevant expression pattern of the transgene, including expression in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc) and a specific, age-related loss of TH&plus; cells in the SNpc, the key region of preferential cell loss in PD, compared with non-transgenic Snca -/- littermate controls. Analysis of dopamine signalling using fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FCV) showed young adult SNCA-A30P&plus;Snca-/- mice had an approximately 20% lower evoked extracellular dopamine concentration ([DA]o) compared with non-transgenic Snca -/- littermate controls, a decrease specific to the dorsal striatum. This difference diminished with age and could not be attributed to changes in dopamine reuptake/content.
I detail the behavioural and neurochemical phenotype in mice lacking all three synucleins (α/β/γ). Functional compensation between synucleins emphasises the importance of studying their effects by removing all three proteins simultaneously. Triple-null mice exhibited hyperactivity in a novel environment reminiscent of a hyperdopaminergic-like phenotype, but showed no phenotype in anxiety or motor related tests. FCV revealed synuclein triple-null mice had a two-fold increase in [DA]o, specific to the dorsal striatum and not attributable to changes in dopamine reuptake/content, changes in striatal nicotinic receptor activity nor calcium-dependent changes in dopamine exocytosis.
Together, the analysis from these two novel mouse models reveal synucleins play an important role in altering synaptic function in the dorsal striatum (the region selectively affected in PD) and contributes to growing evidence suggesting synucleins are negative regulators of synaptic dopamine release.
Mere appearances: appearance, belief, &amp; desire in Plato's Protagoras, Gorgias, &amp; Republic
Keywords: Republic
Plato
Gorgias
Protagoras
Philosophy
Appearances
Psychology

This thesis examines the role appearances play, with notable continuity, in the psychology and ethics of Plato's Protagoras, Gorgias, and Republic. Common to these dialogues is the claim that evaluative appearances are almost invariably false: what appears to be good or bad is typically not in fact so and what is good or bad typically does not appear so. I argue that this disparity between apparent and real value forms the basis of Plato's diagnoses of a wide range of practical errors: psychological phenomena like akrasia, mistaken conceptions of the good like hedonism, and the influence of cultural sources of corruption like oratory, sophistry, and poetry. It also, relatedly, forms the basis of his account of lower passions like appetite, anger, or fear. Such passions are especially prone to lead us astray because their objects -- appetitive pleasures like food, drink, or sex, for example -- present especially deceptive appearances. One of the principal aims of this thesis is to show that this presents a significant point of agreement between the psychologies of the Protagoras, Gorgias, and Republic. In all three dialogues, I argue, motivational errors result from a specific kind of cognitive error: the uncritical acceptance of appearances. Plato's early and middle psychologies differ in their account of the subject of this error -- in the Protagoras and Gorgias, the whole person; in the Republic, the appetitive or spirited part of a person's soul -- but not in their basic theory of how our passions arise or, crucially, why they are liable to motivate us towards harmful ends.
Barabási-Albert random graphs, scale-free distributions and bounds for approximation through Stein's method
Keywords: power law
Stein's method
random graph
scale-free

Barabási-Albert random graph models are a class of evolving random graphs that are frequently used to model social networks with scale-free degree distributions. It has been shown that Barabási-Albert random graph models have asymptotic scale-free degree distributions as the size of the graph tends to infinity. Real world networks, however, have finite size so it is important to know how close the degree distribution of a Barabási-Albert random graph of a given size is to its asymptotic distribution. Stein’s method is chosen as one main method for obtaining explicit bounds for the distance between distributions. We derive a new version of Stein’s method for a class of scale-free distributions and apply the method to a Barabási-Albert random graph. We compare the evolution of a sequence of Barabási-Albert random graphs with continuous time stochastic processes motivated by Yule’s model for evolution. Through a coupling of the models we bound the total variation distance between their degree distributions. Using these bounds, we extend degree distribution bounds that we find for specific models within the scheme to find bounds for every member of the scheme. We apply the Azuma-Hoeffding inequality and Chernoff bounds to find bounds between the degree sequences of the random graph models and the given scale-free distribution. These bounds prove that the degree sequences converge completely (and therefore also converge almost surely) to our scale-free distribution. We discuss the relationship between the random graph processes and the Chinese restaurant process. Aided by the construction of an inhomogeneous Markov chain, we apply our results for the degree distribution in a Barabási-Albert random graph to a particular statistic of the Chinese restaurant process. Finally, we explore how our methods can be adapted and extended to other evolving random graph processes. We study a Bernoulli evolving random graph process, for which we bound the distance between its degree distribution and a geometric distribution and we bound the distance between the number of triangles in the graph and a normal distribution.
High resolution CMB physics
Keywords: Cosmic Microwave Background

This thesis presents the measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum for the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) experiment and its polarized upgrade, ACTPol. I present the tools that I have developed for constructing unbiased and nearly optimal statistical estimators. I discuss how to separate the cosmological and the astrophysical signal and how to characterize instrumental systematics. The goal of this work is to obtain accurate power spectra measurement that can be used for cosmological parameter estimation.
I first present the analysis of the complete ACT data set. The high resolution of the telescope allows us to recover power spectra to &ell; = 10000. I report the measurement of the power spectra at 148 GHz and 218 GHz, as well as the cross-frequency spectrum between the two channels. The power spectrum measurement is consistent with the ΛCDM model and a basic foreground model.
I then present the cross correlation of maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope with maps from the Planck satellite in two overlapping regions covering 592 square degrees. I find excel- lent agreement between the two datasets at both frequencies, quantified using the variance of the residuals between the ACT power spectra and the ACT×Planck cross-spectra.
The next generation of CMB experiments are focused on measuring its polarization. I present efficient algorithms for CMB lensing simulation and power spectrum estimation for flat-sky CMB polarization maps.
Finally, I discuss the first temperature and polarization power spectra measurement from the ACTPol experiment. They are the first attempt to measure the polarization of the CMB at high resolution.
Heart function in mouse models of muscular dystrophy
Keywords: DMD
muscular dystrophy
heart function

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is an X-linked recessive disease caused, in most cases, by the complete absence of the 427 kD cytoskeletal protein, dystrophin. Without dystrophin, the dystrophin-associated protein complex (DAPC) does not form and the plasma membrane is destabilised. There is no effective treatment and affected individuals die from respiratory failure and cardiomyopathy by age 30. This thesis describes experiments in which in vivo cardiac function was measured using non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging in a number of mouse models relevant to muscular dystrophy. As syncoilin forms a link from the DAPC to the cytoskeleton, it was postulated in Chapter 3 that the syncoilin knockout mouse would have cardiac defects similar to those caused by the loss of dystrophin. However, the loss of syncoilin did not alter the protein levels of its binding partners, measured by western blotting, and caused no defect in heart function or structure, measured using histological staining. Similarly, in Chapter 4, a mouse with a mutation in the transient receptor potential channel canonical type 3 (TRPC3), a receptor/stretch-activated cation channel thought to be involved in the pathogenesis of DMD, was found to have no functional or morphological cardiac defect. In the mdx mouse, a mouse model of DMD that lacks dystrophin, cardiomyopathy was prevented by either increasing levels of the dystrophin related protein, utrophin, or of dystrophin, in the diaphragm, which thereby restored diaphragm function. In Chapter 5 it was found that in a transgenic mdx mouse in which utrophin was over-expressed in skeletal muscle and diaphragm, but not in the heart, cardiac function was restored to wild-type levels. However, histologically the transgenic heart showed more fibrosis and immune cell infiltration than that of untreated mdx controls. In Chapter 6 it was found that in mdx mice treated with a peptide-conjugated phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomer (PPMO), that resulted in high dystrophin restoration in skeletal muscle and diaphragm only, cardiac function was also restored to wild-type levels. In Chapter 6 it was also found that in dystrophin/utrophin-deficient double-knockout (dKO) mice, a more severely affected animal model of DMD, treatment with a PPMO again produced high levels of dystrophin only in skeletal muscle and diaphragm, and once more restored cardiac function to wild-type levels. In the dKO mouse, there was no difference in heart function between treatment of the diaphragm plus the heart and treatment of the diaphragm alone. Restoration of diaphragm and other respiratory muscle function, irrespective of the method used, was sufficient to prevent cardiomyopathy in dystrophic mice. The novel mechanism of treating respiratory muscles to prevent cardiomyopathy in dystrophic mice has implications for the study of heart function in the current DMD mouse models and suggests a new approach to treatment.
Branch groups and automata
Keywords: Automata
Automaton

The focus of this thesis is finitely generated subgroups of the automorphism group of an infinite spherically homogeneous rooted tree (regular or irregular). The first chapter introduces the topic and outlines the main results. The second chapter provides definitions of the terminology used, and also some preliminary results. The third chapter introduces a group that appears to be a promising candidate for a finitely generated group of infinite upper rank with finite upper
p
-rank for all primes
p
. It goes on to demonstrate that in fact this group has infinite upper
p
-rank for all primes
p
. As a by-product of this construction, we obtain a finitely generated branch group with quotients that are virtually-(free abelian of rank
n
) for arbitrarily large
n
. The fourth chapter gives a complete classification of ternary automata with
C
2
-action at the root, and a partial classification of ternary automata with
C
3
-action at the root. The concept of a `windmill automaton' is introduced in this chapter, and a complete classification of binary windmill automata is given. The fifth chapter contains a detailed study of the non-abelian ternary automata with
C
3
-action at the root. It also contains some conjectures about possible isomorphisms between these groups.
The roles of Flrt2 and Flrt3 cell surface proteins during mouse development
Keywords: cell biology

Embryos morphogenesis relies on the interactions between different tissues and their constituent cells. These interactions are controlled by different signalling and adhesion molecules, such as the Fibronectin Leucine-rich Repeat transmembrane (Flrt) family of proteins. The closely related Flrt2 and Flrt3 share 45% amino acid sequence identity, and show several sites of co-expression in the developing mouse embryo. Experiments in this laboratory have shown that mice deficient in either one of Flrt2 or Flrt3 are embryonic lethal due to cardiac insufficiency, and structural defect in the AVE and a fusion failure of the lateral body walls of the embryo respectively. The highly conserved structural features shared between Flrt2 and Flrt3 suggest possible shared functional roles between the two closely related genes. The aims of this study were first to generate a Flrt2 and Flrt3 double mutant embryos, and examine the hypothesis that the two genes function cooperatively at sites of their co-expression. The second goal was to generate a Flrt2 LacZ reporter and a conditional alleles, using the EUCOMM/KOMP resource, to further analyse Flrt2 expression patterns and function.
Flrt2 and Flrt3 double mutant embryos were embryonic lethal at embryonic day (E) 10. The genetic experiment designed in this study suggests that Flrt3 seems to function in cooperation with Flrt2, to maintain tissue integrity in the developing mouse embryo as loss of both exhibits a more severe phenotype than the single mutants, and has a more severe impact on the embryonic development.
The Flrt2 LacZ reporter and conditional alleles generated in this study were shown to be useful tools in dissecting Flrt2 expression patterns, and can be used in further experiments to study the expression of Flrt2 in particular sites that have not been studied or extensively mentioned in the literature, or in site-specific deletion of Flrt2 in tissues where Flrt2 is expressed but the function has not been elucidated.
A semisynthetic protein nanoreactor for single-molecule chemistry
Keywords: single-molecule chemistry
semisynthesis
CuAAC
alpha-hemolysin

The covalent chemistry of individual reactants bound within a protein nanopore can be monitored by observing the ionic current flow through the pore, which acts as a nanoreactor responding to bond-making and bond-breaking events. However, chemistry investigated in this way has been largely confined to the reactions of thiolates, presented by the side chains of cysteine residues. The introduction of unnatural amino acids would provide a large variety of reactive side chains with which additional single-molecule chemistry could be investigated.
An efficient method to incorporate unnatural amino acid is semisynthesis, which allows site-specific modification with a chemically-defined functional group. However, relatively little work has been done on engineered membrane proteins. This deficiency stems from attributes inherent to proteins that interact with lipid bilayer, notably the poor solubility in aqueous buffer.
In the present work, four different derivatives α-hemolysin (αHL) monomer were obtained either by two- or three-way native chemical ligation. The semisynthetic αHL monomers were successfully refolded to heptameric pores and used as nanoreactors to study single-molecule chemistry. The semisynthetic pores show similar biophysical properties to native αHL pores obtained from an in vitro transcription and translation technique. Interestingly, when αHL pores with one semisynthetic subunit containing a terminal alkyne group were used to study Cu(I)-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, a long-lived intermediate in the reaction was directly observed.
Individual differences in complex grammar acquisition: causes and consequences
Keywords: language development
arithmetic learning
cognitive development
literacy learning
grammar acquisition
neuroconstructivism
mathematical development

A longitudinal study lasting 3.5 years was conducted to investigate complex grammar development, focusing on acquisition of the passive and type 3 conditionals, and its relationship with a number of domain-general, domain-specific and environmental factors.
128 children (M = 5 years 10 months) were tested at the beginning and towards the end of each school year starting from Year 1. The administered measures included established tests of fluid intelligence, short-term and working memory, seriation, grammar, vocabulary, literacy and arithmetic, plus newly-developed tests of passive and conditional sentence acquisition, and arithmetic word problem solving.
It was demonstrated that grammar acquisition is not complete even when children start Year 4 of primary school (M = 8 years 7 months), when the current study was completed. At that time, 32% of children have not acquired type 3 conditionals and 89% showed no understanding of centre-embedded sentences. However, only 3% showed no passive sentence acquisition.
Fluid intelligence, verbal STM and WM, ability to seriate, vocabulary and parental education level were all found to contribute to individual differences in complex grammar acquisition, independently of age differences and, where relevant, independently of non-verbal ability. There were differences between the passives and the conditionals in their relationship to these variables.
Complex grammar development was found to be a significant predictor of reading comprehension, spelling and arithmetic performance, independently of age, non-verbal ability, verbal STM and WM.
The findings demonstrate the inter-relatedness of higher cognitive functions, particularly domain-general with domain-specific ones. Modularity in its strictest sense (informational encapsulation, functional isolation) is not present in normally developing brains. Educational applications of the results are discussed.