VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Progressivism, agriculture and conservation in the Cape Colony circa 1902-1908
Keywords: progressivism
agricultural
Hope
Good
Colony
South
conservation
agriculture
Cape

This thesis looks at concepts of progress and agricultural deveIopment in the Cape Colony in the aftermath of the South African War (1899-1902). The first decade of the twentieth century was one of economic crisis. War was followed by a severe depression exacerbated by a slump in the diamond industry, which prompted doubts about the longevity of the country’s mineral resources. It was also a period of recurrent drought which aroused concerns about food security and criticisms about the Colony’s reliance on imported victuals and primary products such as timber. In this context, self-professed ‘progressive’ politicians and commercial farmers looked to the land as the most viable source of national wealth. Politically this period was dominated by Leander Starr Jameson’s Progressive Party, which held office from February 1904 until February 1908. The thesis analyses how this Party, usually associated with mining capital and Rhodes’s legacy, deliberately promoted itself as the progenitor of agricultural progressivism in terms of its rhetoric and the policies it pursued. Agricultural amelioration was linked to conservation. Scientific methods and systematic land management strategies were advocated to protect and enhance scarce water resources, soil fertility and pastures on which the rural economy depended. The state positioned itself as the provider of scientific expertise and introduced legislation to promote and regulate the agricultural economy and environment. The Cape was influenced in part by conservationist developments, which occurred contemporaneously in Australia and, in particular, in the United States. Historians of American history have identified the early twentieth century there as the ‘Progressive Era’. This thesis explores the scientific links that emerged between the governments of these two countries and argues that the Cape too self-consciously promoted itself as a progressive state with agricultural development and conservation constructed as two of the principal pillars of progress.
The kinds of mathematical objects
Keywords: mathematical ontology
reductionism

The Kinds of Mathematical Objects is an exploration of the taxonomy of the mathematical realm and the metaphysics of mathematical objects. I defend antireductionism about cardinals and ordinals: the view that no cardinal number and no ordinal number is a set. Instead, I suggest, cardinals and ordinals are sui generis abstract objects, essentially linked to specific abstraction functors (higher-order functions corresponding to operators in abstraction principles). Sets, in contrast, are not essentially values of abstraction functors: the best explanation of the nature of sethood is given by a variation on the standard iterative account. I further defend the theses that no cardinal number is an ordinal number and that the natural numbers are, as Frege maintained, all and only the finite cardinal numbers. My case for these conclusions relies not on the well-known antireductionist argument developed by Paul Benacerraf, but on considerations about ontological dependence. I argue that, given generally accepted principles about the dependence of a set on its elements, ordinal and cardinal numbers have dependence profiles that are not compatible with any version of set-theoretic ontological reductionism. In addition, a formal framework for set theory with sui generis abstract objects is developed on a type-theoretical basis. I give a philosophical defence of the choice of type theory and discuss various questions relating to the nature of its models.
Structure, metamorphism, and tectonics of the northern Oman-UAE ophiolite and underlying metamorphic sole
Keywords: subduction zone
electron backscatter diffraction
tectonics
structural geology
metamorphic sole
metamorphic petrology
microstructure
Oman UAE ophiolite

Ophiolites—thrust sheets of oceanic lithosphere that have been emplaced onto the continental margin—provide the opportunity to explore the structure and genesis of oceanic crust. As many ophiolites formed above subduction zones, they also allow for the investigation of mantle wedge and subduction interface processes. This the- sis examines the Oman-United Arab Emirates (UAE) ophiolite, which is the largest and most intensely studied ophiolite on Earth. Three distinct problems are addressed. (1) Recent research has proposed that the architecture and tectonic evolution of the ophiolite in the UAE differs from in Oman. In Chapter 2, I test this hypothesis by integrating new geological mapping and field observations with previously published maps of the ophiolite in the UAE. My results indicate that the ophiolite is gently folded, but otherwise largely intact. I demonstrate that the architecture of the ophi- olite in the UAE is not significantly different from in Oman. Thus, there is no basis for a different tectonic evolution as recently proposed. (2) Observations from exper- iments and small-scale natural shear zones indicate that volumetrically-minor phases can control strain localization. In Chapter 3, I test the hypothesis that minor phases control strain-localisation at plate boundaries. To do so, I analyzed peridotites from the base of the ophiolite, a palaeosubduction interface. My results demonstrate that minor phases limited olivine grain growth, which led to rheological weakening. (3) The mechanisms by which metamorphic soles detached from the downgoing slab and accreted to the hanging-wall mantle is unclear. In Chapter 4, I examine a transect across the metamorphic sole in the UAE. My results reveal that granulite formation was more extensive than is typically considered. I propose that granulite formation resulted in rheological strengthening, which caused the subduction interface to migrate into the downgoing slab and accrete the metamorphic sole.
Migrations of the holy: the devotional culture of Wimborne Minster, c.1400-1640
Keywords: Early modern England
The Reformation
Middle Ages
Christianity
Protestantism

This thesis is a study of the religious culture of the market-town parish of Wimborne Minster, Dorset, from c.1403-1640. Broadly, it is a contribution to the history of the English Reformation (or Reformations, as the historian pleases; capital ‘R’ or lower-case). Religious change is the most significant focus, but over a longer period of time than is usually allowed for. Such themes as lay control, tithe controversies, relations with the ordinary, and popular support for preaching and church music are considered, as well as theological issues about the nature of English and European Protestantism. The thesis includes quantitative evidence drawn from the parish churchwardens’ accounts and also wills.
The date range was chosen for a number of reasons. First, because the available evidence for the parish is unusually rich, and allows for a kind of sustained attention that cannot be directed towards other such parishes: Wimborne has among the earliest and most complete surviving churchwardens’ accounts in England (beginning in 1403), as well as myriad other sources, including hundreds of wills, and corporation and church-court records. Secondly, as a means of pursuing Alexandra Walsham’s ‘migrations of the holy’ agenda. Walsham believes that investigation of religious change in the late medieval and early modern periods is hindered by those very periodisations, which are in fact products of the changes in question; how, then, to study religious change without presupposing too much? To that end, the structure of this thesis is both chronological and thematic; and an attempt has been made to preserve what was unique and so important about the changes of the mid-sixteenth century, during the reigns of Henry VIII and his progeny, at the same time as revealing deeper structural changes – and continuities too.
The broad division of the thesis is into two parts. This first three chapters, part one, establish the early religious scene in the parish, examining the legacy of the Minster’s place as a mother church in the Anglo-Saxon landscape of east Dorset, and how parish identity and forms of self-organisation were put to the test during the reigns of Henry VIII and his son, Edward VI. In part two, the focus is the interaction between the parishioners and the parish’s new governing structure, a closed corporation of 12 lay worthies; in particular, the governors’ attempts to provide regular preaching of the most sophisticated kind, as well as elaborate polyphonic music, and disputes arising from their management of the tithes and the divisive behaviour of one preacher in particular.
Observations on invisibility
Keywords: Magic
Magicians
Cognition
Illusion
Perception
Metacognition

This thesis is concerned with the psychology of magic and illusion. In particular it is focused on three illusions, which can be conceptualized as types of invisibility: (1) Illusions of omission—failures to see, (2) Illusions of commission—seeing things that are not really present, and (3) metacognitive illusions—people’s false beliefs about their own cognitive and perceptual systems. The work presented in this thesis is set out to explore these illusions through behavioural visual experiments inspired by sleight-of-hand magic tricks. Across three distinct paradigms using stimuli ranging in ranging in complexity from static line drawings, to recorded videos, to live events, I demonstrate that manipulations of observers’ expectations and attentional set can result in perceptions of visual events that are variously accurate representations, illusions of omission, or illusions of commission. I also demonstrate that these illusions are often associated with failures of visual metacognition, in that they are generally considered to be surprising and counterintuitive. In addition to these empirical elements of the project, I also consider historical and contemporary connections between experimental psychology and magic tricks. I show that, in some instances, magicians’ misdirection techniques anticipated developments by experimental psychology by hundreds of years, and that the idea of investigating the mechanisms of magic tricks and illusions played a key role in the development of experimental psychology as a scientific discipline. Through this combination of historical analyses novel experiments, I show that the integration of magic and experimental psychology has a great potential to drive future research in human cognition and perception.
Hemispatial neglect: An evaluation of novel assessment methods and rehabilitation
Keywords: Neuroplasticity
Transcranial magnetic stimulation
Visual neglect
rTMS
Cognitive testing
Spatial attention
Spatial neglect
Rehabilitation
Representational neglect
Object neglect

Hemispatial neglect, is a major cause of post-stroke disability and poor functional recovery. Hence, identifying sensitive methods to assess and rehabilitate neglect is important.
Chapters 3 and 4 focused on development of novel assessment techniques for representational neglect. The ‘Shopping Mall’ and ‘Clock Cueing’ tasks improved upon previous tests and were useful in identifying dissociations in representational neglect based on type of stimuli (topological, non-topological) and time of assessment (pre-stroke, post-stroke) in chronic stroke patients.
Chapters 5 and 6 investigated the efficacy of offline inhibitory repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) in producing short (&LT;1 month) and long term (>6 months) changes in visual neglect behaviour. Overall, the findings from these chapters were limited due to lack of sufficient power. After controlling for the effect of baseline performance, the Intervention group’s Activities of Daily Living scores significantly improved in the short-term post rTMS, as compared to the Control group. The fMRI task attempted to recruit attention-based top down modulation of sensory activity. It revealed relative hypoactivation of the right occipital lobe in the four left neglect patients tested, both pre and post rTMS, when compared to elderly controls.
Chapter 7 explored cognitive predictors of spatial and object neglect in the sub-acute stage after controlling for demographic and stroke related factors, using multivariate blocked logistic regressions. Cognitive performance indicative of spatial attention and selective attention to local features predicted both spatial and object neglect. In addition, coding of spatial relations between features also predicted spatial neglect. Suggestions for combining neglect rehabilitation techniques to target these cognitive processes are discussed.
Overall, this thesis provides novel methods to improve representational neglect assessment and highlights the importance of ancillary cognitive domains in contributing to both representational and visual neglect. The rTMS research provides study design-related insights to incorporate in future studies with larger patient samples.
Consumer theory
Keywords: Consumer Theory

This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters covering topics in consumer theory. The first chapter presents an estimator for a Marshallian demand function which not only obeys all of the standard assumptions of consumer theory but will also converge to any true demand function which also obeys these standard assumptions. The second chapter explores Giffen behavior in the context of financial assets. The chapter finds that an agent with Maxmin preferences almost always displays Giffen behavior in some financial environments. Giffen behavior is also characterized for other classes of preferences. The last chapter, coauthored with one of my supervisors: John K.-H. Quah, develops a revealed preference test for weakly separable preferences in the spirit of Sydney Afriat. Unlike previous tests, ours does not impose concavity and applies to nonlinear budgets.
The view from the fountain head: the rise and fall of John Gwenogvryn Evans
Keywords: Manuscripts
Diplomatic editions
Celtic Studies
Palaeography

John Gwenogvryn Evans was an important figure in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Welsh Celtic Studies, because he published accurate diplomatic editions of medieval manuscripts that are still used today. He also compiled an important and detailed Report on Welsh Manuscripts for the Historic Manuscripts Commission that was of significant utility to scholars of his day, and still has uses for its detailed description of manuscripts.
His extraordinary talent for accuracy in the reproduction of medieval script came to the attention of John Rhŷs, then Professor of Celtic at Jesus College, Oxford. Through Rhŷs he was exposed to the best scholarship of his day, and with the assistance of scholars such as Egerton Phillimore and John Morris Jones, he was enabled to produce work of enduring value. Due to his limited training in Welsh linguistics, and in research methodology, there were, from the start, serious flaws in his interpretation of early Welsh. Later, on losing contact with academic influences due to unwise actions, he fell into a pseudoscientific mentality more common earlier in the 19th century, seeking to find historical fact in poetry of legend and prophecy. Major errors arose from his later inclination to consider the date of a manuscript and the date of the content to be identical, and the ridicule that resulted from his 'amendments and translations' to early poetry so undermined his credibility that he never completed the full range of his intended series of texts.
This study traces the origins, manifestations, and consequences of his dual nature through seven chapters. It considers the value of his solid earlier work, and balances it against the follies of his later translations, and seeks to give a fairer view of the value of his work to his own generation, and to those that followed on from him.
Ghosts and bottlenecks in elastic snap-through
Keywords: Creep
Critical slowing down
Viscoelasticity
Elastic arch
Instability
Microbeam
Buckling
Dynamics
Snap-through
Electrostatic pull-in
Saddle-node ghost
Elasticity
Bistability
MEMS

Snap-through is a striking instability in which an elastic object rapidly jumps from one state to another. It is seen in the leaves of the Venus flytrap plant and umbrellas flipping on a windy day among many other examples. Similar structures that snap-through are used to generate fast motions in soft robotics, switches in micro-scale electronics and artificial heart valves. Despite the ubiquity of snap-through in nature and engineering, its dynamics is usually only understood qualitatively. In this thesis we develop analytical understanding of this dynamics, focussing on how the mathematical structure underlying the snap-through transition controls the timescale of instability.
We begin by considering the dynamics of 'pull-in' instabilities in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) - a type of snap-through caused by electrostatic forces in which the motions are dominated by fluid damping. Using a lumped-parameter model, we show that the observed time delay near the pull-in transition is a type of critical slowing down - a so-called 'bottleneck' due to the 'ghost' of a saddle-node bifurcation. We obtain a scaling law describing this slowing down, and, in the process, unify a large range of experiments and simulations that exhibit delay phenomena during pull-in.
We also investigate the pull-in dynamics of MEMS microbeams, extending the lumped-parameter approach to incorporate the details of the beam geometry. This provides a model system in which to understand snap-through of a continuous elastic structure due to external loading. We develop a perturbation method that systematically exploits the proximity to pull-in to reduce the governing equations to a simpler evolution equation, with a structure that highlights the saddle-node bifurcation. This allows us to analyse the bottleneck dynamics in detail, which we compare with previous experimental and numerical data.
The remainder of the thesis is concerned with the dynamics of snap-through in macroscopic systems. In particular, we explore the extent to which dissipation is required to explain anomalously slow snap-through. Considering an elastic arch as an archetype of a snapping system, we use the perturbation method developed earlier to show that two bottleneck regimes are possible, depending delicately on the relative importance of external damping. In particular, we show that critical slowing down occurs even in the absence of damping, leading to a new scaling law for the snap-through time that is confirmed by elastica simulations and experiments.
In many real systems material viscoelasticity is present to some degree. Finally, we examine how this influences the snap-through dynamics of a simple truss-like structure. We present a regime diagram that characterises when the timescale of snap-through is controlled by viscous, elastic or viscoelastic effects.
Synthesis and reactivity of alkaline earth and aluminium gallyl complexes
Keywords: magnesium
insertion reactions
calcium
metal-metal bonding
gallium

This Thesis describes the synthesis and characterisation of new alkaline earth metal and aluminium gallyl complexes. Experimental studies were performed to investigate their structure. The reactivity of these species was also studied.
Chapter 1 introduces metal-metal bonded complexes containing alkaline earth metals and aluminium and the use of gallium(I) analogues of N-heterocyclic carbenes in the synthesis of heterobimetallic complexes of gallium.
Chapter 2 describes the synthesis and reactivity of alkaline earth gallyl complexes supported by beta-diketiminate ligands.
Chapter 3 presents the synthesis and reactivity of alkaline earth gallyl complexes supported by the carbazolide ligand CzOx.
Chapter 4 describes synthesis of aluminium-gallium bonded complexes supported by amidinate and b-diketiminate ligands and the attempted study of their reactivity.
Chapter 5 presents full experimental procedures and characterising data for the new complexes reported.
Alkaline earth hydroborate complexes for the ring-opening polymerisation of cyclic esters
Keywords: Alkaline earth metal complexes
Cyclic esters
Ring-opening polymerisation
Hydroborate complexes

This Thesis describes the activity and mechanism of alkaline earth organohydroborate, tetrahydroborate and alkoxide catalysts for the ring-opening polymerisation (ROP) of cyclic esters including rac-, L-, D- and meso-lactide (LA), and rac-β-butyrolactone (rac-BBL).
Chapter One introduces cyclic esters and general mechanisms for their ROP to give polyesters. Living and immortal ROP, an overview of stereocontrolled ROP, and determination of polylactide (PLA) stereosequences are given. Various techniques for polymer characterisations are also described.
Chapter Two describes the activity and mechanism of heavy alkaline earth organohydroborate complexes for the ROP of LA. The synthesis and characterisation of alkaline earth alkoxide complexes serving as model species are also described, together with their activities for the ROP of LA.
Chapter Three describes the activity and mechanism of a cyclic organohydroborate calcium complex for the ROP of LA. The role of borinic esters as chain transfer agents in the ROP of rac-LA is also discussed.
Chapter Four describes the activity and mechanism of heavy alkaline earth tetrahydroborate complexes for the ROP of LA. The immortal ROP of rac-LA using heavy alkaline earth alkoxide complexes and borate esters as chain transfer agents is discussed.
Chapter Five describes the activity and mechanism of alkaline earth organohydroborate, tetrahydroborate and alkoxide complexes for the ROP of rac-BBL.
Chapter Six presents experimental procedures and characterising data for new complexes reported.
Structural characterisation of calnexin cycle components and assessment as antiviral targets
Keywords: Glucosidase
Iminosugar
Dengue
Calnexin cycle
UGGT
Zika
CRISPR

N-glycosylated proteins that traverse the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) can make use of the calnexin cycle to attain their correct fold. The calnexin cycle modifies the N-glycan structure and allows for association of the glycoprotein with the ER lectins calnexin and calreticulin, which in turn recruit further chaperones that assist folding. Most enveloped viruses encode glycoproteins, which, upon infection of a host cell, crucially depend on the calnexin cycle to aid their folding. This includes diverse families such as Flaviviridae, Retroviridae and Orthomyxoviridae. We studied the calnexin cycle components with the ultimate aim of developing broad-spectrum antivirals.
X-ray crystallography was used to structurally characterise the murine ER α-glucosidase I, which controls entry into the calnexin cycle, with a number of inhibitory antiviral iminosugars. These data reveal flexibility in the ligands’ alkyl tails and may act as a basis for the discovery of enzyme specific inhibitors.
UDP-glucose: glycoprotein glucosyltransferase (UGGT) is the quality control checkpoint of the calnexin cycle whose full-length structure from the thermophilic fungus Chaetomium thermophilum was recently determined. Presented here are a higher resolution structure in addition to SAXS studies of UGGT’s interaction with Sep15, a protein that enhances UGGT activity.
UGGT’s reaction releases into the ER lumen UDP, which is the only known small molecule inhibitor of UGGT. An ER-resident UDPase, ENTPD5, breaks down UDP into UMP. Enzymatic characterisation of ENTPD5 reveals its substrate specificities; in addition we show a paralog, ENTPD6, possesses similar activities. Presented here is work towards crystallisation of these two proteins and a test of the anti-Zika activity of ENTPD5 inhibitors.
Finally, CRISPR/Cas9 knock-out cells were generated to test, in principle, whether modulation of the activity of proteins involved in the calnexin cycle could be antiviral. The data confirm that the ER glucosidases are likely the best targets of those studied.