VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Towards an appropriate pedagogy for the development of the Muslim-background Church of Algeria
Keywords: Liminality
BMB
Liberating Liminality

This study is based on qualitative research in the field of practical theology. It is a theological reflection on the practices of teaching and learning in the Muslim-background Church of Algeria. It reflects on the development of this Church with a view to ensuring its critically faithful participation in the continuing mission of the triune God. It seeks to explain and evaluate appropriate pedagogy for the development of the Church in the local and universal context of national Algerian identity and World Christianity. The journey of this thesis explores what it might look like to have a nuanced understanding of the indigenous Church as it develops in the cultural, religious and educational context of Algeria. It observes that in multiple ways, the experience of the Algerian Church is liminal. It also identifies the way in which a negative experience of liminality has been an impediment to the development of a coherent Algerian Christian identity, to the Church’s progress and development in Algeria, and to its place in the movement of World Christianity. However, it then moves on to argue how and why this context may be viewed positively, suggesting that the paradox of liminality can be viewed as a positive ‘state’ pregnant with potential for Algerian Christians. It concludes with a proposal for a framework of liberating liminal pedagogy, which is an invitation for the Algerian Church to engage in Christian education and theological training in the context of the Church’s Theo-dramatic performance of God’s mission. This leads to an overall attitude and commitment to continual praxis, which integrates local identity and Christian maturity through a multidimensional cognitive, affective and behavioural training process.
Characterization of barefoot and shod running
Keywords: electromyography
Dynamical systems theory
foot-strike
barefoot
foot strike
running
Mixed effects models
Variability

Barefoot (BF) and shod (SD) running mark relevant mechanical boundary conditions for affecting running biomechanics. This thesis studies the variation in foot-strike strategy (FSS), and whilst accounting for this variation provides a description of BF and SD running at different aerobic training velocities in uninjured, highly trained competitive (1500 m personal best: mean (standard deviation) = 3:59.8 (10.0)) male distance runners (n = 19). At one velocity, BF running for nine uninjured competitive female runners is also studied. Three dimensional (3D) gait analysis was used to measure lower-limb joint angles during treadmill running, and surface electromyography (EMG) was used to measure lower-leg muscle activity. Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) were used to account for and quantify between-subject variation and stride-specific foot-strike angle (FSA).
This thesis provides evidence to discourage the general practice of classifying runners in the present population within a FSS group for BF running. Also, a subset of individuals exhibited high FSA variability for BF running, possibly because of discomfort.
The hypothesis that FSA correlates with changes in running kinematics was supported. A larger hip width to femur length ratio found in females was associated with more hip adduction, corroborating previous research.
More plantarflexed FSA was hypothesized for higher velocities, and flatter foot placement was anticipated for BF versus SD running. Flatter foot placement was observed for BF running, but FSA was independent of velocity for BF running and more foot dorsiflexion at foot-strike (FS) was observed for fast velocity for SD running. These adjustments may be motivated by maximal or sub-maximal deformation of the heel pad and the novelty of BF running. Coupled with the observed increase in gastrocnemius muscle activity for BF versus SD running, these observations may be cause for caution for the novice BF runner. A different coordinative structure for tibia and rearfoot coupling emerged as velocity increased, possibly in response to an increased functional demand of the talocrural and subtalar joints for BF running as velocity increases.
The hypothesis that coordinative variability changes with FSA during impact phase, to reflect the underlying elevated injury risk for rearfoot-strike runners, was not supported. Coordinative variability was independent of FSA. In addition, coordination was more robust to changes in velocity and differences in FSA for SD running, possibly reflecting habituation.
Running BF may have potential as a diagnostic tool for studying injury etiology, because the limit of no external cushioning may place mechanical demands on the runner sufficient to elicit anomalous running kinematics, which may manifest as high kinematic variability.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” and other tales: an ethnography of children in Greater London
Keywords: Contemporary
Ethnography
Fieldwork
Time
Participant-observation
Aspiration
Practice
Children
Childhood
Future
London

Aspiration has become a political buzzword, and the rhetoric surrounding ‘raising aspirations’ to improve futures has filtered down to primary school level. Some researchers have critiqued the rhetoric as vacuous without material investment, and at worst, detrimental to disadvantaged groups. Whilst engaging with these ideas, this research offers a radical rethink. Firstly, rather than approaching the issue from a policy-driven perspective, it presents an emic view of children’s aspirations. Instead of applying a categorisation of aspirations as ‘high’ or 'low’ (and therefore able to be ‘raised’), it examines both the content and context of aspirational statements. Secondly, and more crucially, it does not just examine children’s elicited representations of their futures (or presents), but engages with children’s spontaneous practices occurring in time. This kind of engagement is rare, but is one of the possibilities and benefits of ethnography.
My fieldwork involved almost total immersion into children’s life-worlds. Using a method of ‘full participation’ with children, I took part in my participants’ practices for the greater part of each day over 15 to 18 months. In documenting both their everyday practices and their ‘in time’ narratives spontaneously embarked upon, I am able to reconcile the real-time ‘flow’ of life with the ‘fixings’ of meaning people everywhere construct in order to make meaning in and of their lives. In telling futures, my participants employed the flexibility of narrative in optimistic expressions of ideal competence, ownership and autonomy that asserted the teller’s personhood in the present – as able to act; effectual; recognisable by others; and worth knowing. In their telling, aspirations were not so much individually motivational, as they were an inter-subjective action in the world with productive power that could and did have ‘future’ effects.
Temporal regularity in audition
Keywords: psychoacoustics
auditory cortex
temporal processing
psychophysics
rhythm
electrophysiology
temporal predictability
auditory midbrain
noise learning
pattern detection
beat perception
auditory system

Sound, by its very nature, is a temporal phenomenon. Everything from the perception of pitch to the sense of closure at the end of a symphony, relies on the brain's ability to integrate information over time. Ultimately it is perception that enables the richness of our interactions with the world around us, and it is a remarkable feat that the brain can quickly and accurately sift through the flood of information entering the ears to construct a coherent yet dynamic internal representation of the external world. Underlying this feat in part is the brain's ability to rapidly detect temporal patterns over timescales that span orders of magnitude, from sub-milliseconds to tens of seconds. Of particular interest is the ability to detect rhythms, or sound patterns in the range of hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. This timescale is particularly fascinating because it is critical to the perception of rhythm and beat in music, an ability that comes surprisingly naturally to us despite its neural underpinnings being far from understood. It is not just musical beat perception that remains mysterious; even the brain's mechanisms for detecting simple temporal patterns at this timescale are still not known. The work in this thesis therefore explores two broad questions that are key to understanding temporal processing at the rhythm timescale: 1- what are the perceptual consequences of rhythmic temporal regularity in sound? and 2- how does the brain detect temporal regularities at the rhythm timescale? I combine human psychoacoustics, rodent electrophysiology, and computational modelling to demonstrate that rhythmic sound patterns are easier to detect than arrhythmic ones, that adaptation in the auditory system may be a mechanism by which information about temporal structure at the rhythm timescale is encoded and made available to higher structures, and that low-level auditory processing may play a substantial part in shaping complex percepts such as where and how clearly we feel the beat in music.
The civic virtue of philotimia: rhetoric, ideology, and politics in democratic Athens
Keywords: democracy
orators
classical Athens

This thesis explores the place that philotimia held in the value system and ideology of democratic Athens in the period between 430 and 320 BCE by examining the rhetoric of philotimia in instances of public speech, especially in the courtrooms and the Assembly.
Chapter 1 explores the relation between philotimia and metriotēs in courtroom rhetoric of Demosthenes’ time. Section 1 shows that being philotimos and being metrios could be presented as belonging to the same mentality, that of prioritizing public interest without ignoring appropriate personal ambitions and goals. Section 2 takes Against Meidias as a case study. In the rhetoric of Against Meidias, we find an account of what it means to be an exemplary elite philotimos citizens and what it means to be a rich hybristēs in democratic Athens.
Chapter 2 starts off by showing that the idea of civic-oriented philotimia that we find in Against Meidias is systematically found in courtroom speeches and honorific inscriptions from the mid-fourth century onwards. Section 2 moves backwards in time and explores the rhetoric of philotimia in the time of Lysias. In the last years of the fifth century and beginning of the fourth, I identify a greater need to warn the dikasts against bad or dangerous philotimoi rather than present oneself as a good philotimos. At the same time, the rhetoric of civicoriented philotimia can be traced as far back as 403/402, which indicates that it was not a novelty of the mid-fourth century. Section 3 explores cases of philotimoi that took action outside the democratic city as depicted in the speeches of Lysias and Demosthenes.
Chapter 3 explores the rhetoric of philotimia in political discussions. The rhetoric of philotimia is very limited when a speaker is discussing his contributions to policy-making, either directly in the Assembly or when discussions of politics are transferred in the courtroom. Section 1 discusses assembly scenes in Thucydides and Aristophanes. Section 2 focuses on representations of political competition in the time of Demosthenes. Section 3 discusses the rhetoric of charis in the deliberative speeches of Demosthenes. Section 4 explores Demosthenes’ self-presentation and collective philotimia in his trial battles with Aeschines.
This study does not argue for a semantic shift in the meaning of philotimia from a negative into a positive value, but shows that philotimia was an ambivalent concept throughout the period examined. The closely regulated and selective promotion of philotimia that is evidenced in the rhetoric of the courtroom and the Assembly reflects the duality of philotimia as a concept and the fact that the Athenians were very much alert to it.
Moduli spaces of unstable curves and sheaves via non-reductive geometric invariant theory
Keywords: Geometric Invariant Theory

Many moduli problems in algebraic geometry can be posed using Geometric Invariant Theory (GIT). However, as with all such tools, if we are to have any hope of obtaining a well-behaved moduli space, certain objects, which are in whatever sense degenerate, must be ruled ‘unstable’ and left out of the classification. The goal of this thesis is to show how new results in non-reductive GIT may be used to construct moduli spaces that parameterise these unstable objects. Once a moduli problem is posed using GIT, this is done by studying the associated instability stratification and using non-reductive GIT to take quotients of the unstable strata, effectively splitting the moduli problem up into manageable pieces. We apply this method in two examples.
First, we consider moduli spaces of coherent sheaves over a projective scheme. The instability stratification in this case is closely related to the stratification by Harder-Narasimhan type. However, in order to apply the relevant theorems in non-reductive GIT, in fact one must perform a blow-up process analogous to partial desingularisation in the reductive case. This corresponds to refining the stratification by Harder-Narasimhan type. We give a sheaf-theoretic interpretation of this refinement, and use it to construct moduli spaces of such sheaves, in the case of Harder-Narasimhan length 2. We also include some results towards the length 3 case, and some remarks on generalisation to arbitrary lengh.
Our second application is moduli of projective algebraic curves. Here it is not clear a priori what the instability stratification should mean intrinsically, which leads us to define the notion of Rosenlicht-Serre type for curves. We show that in the case of a curve with only unibranch singularities this data essentially coincides with the semigroup of the singularities, and give a construction of moduli spaces of unibranch curves of fixed Rosenlicht-Serre type.
Genomic epidemiology of meningococcal vaccine antigens in the United Kingdom
Keywords: Invasive meningococcal disease
Genomic epidemiology
Molecular epidemiology
Neisseria meningitis
Protein-based vaccines
Genomics
Meningococci
Meningococcal vaccines
Bacteria
Vaccines
Whole genome sequencing
Genomic surveillance

Vaccination against Neisseria meningitidis remains the optimal means to prevent invasive meningococcal disease (IMD), an important cause of septicaemia and meningitis disproportionately affecting infants and young children. Subcapsular protein-based vaccines were developed to offer broad protection against genetic lineages of meningococci responsible for endemic capsular group B IMD. As meningococci solely colonise the human oropharynx, the inherent variation in surface proteins potentially limits their efficacy as vaccine antigens. With increasing use of these vaccines worldwide, high-throughput genomic methods were required to analyse meningococcal protein diversity. The aims of this study were to determine the diversity and distribution of proteins in subcapsular protein-based vaccines Bexsero® and Trumenba® amongst meningococcal whole genome sequences (WGS) from disease and carriage isolates from the UK, 2010-2017. Using the principles underlying multilocus sequence typing, two novel genomic typing schemes were established on PubMLST.org Neisseria website. The Bexsero® Antigen Sequence Typing (BAST) and Outer Membrane Vesicle peptide Typing (OMVT) schemes were used to analyse ~3500 disease and ~650 carriage meningococcal WGS.
Using this comprehensive, national dataset, non-random distribution of BASTs and Bexsero® antigens was demonstrated, with a few variants occurring at high frequency. Strong, non-overlapping associations between OMVT clusters, BASTs, cc and genogroups were identified in disease and carriage meningococci, likely driven by host immune and metabolic selection. Understanding the population structure of subcapsular and outer membrane proteins has important implications when selecting antigens and variants for inclusion in existing or novel protein-based vaccines, for both meningococci and other Neisseria species, including gonococci. The development of BAST typing coincided with Bexsero® vaccine introduction into the UK infant immunisation programme and detailed pre-vaccine genomic surveillance provided estimations of vaccine coverage (58.3%-60.3%) and identified low incidence of exact antigenic variants. Both typing methods are rapid, scalable and open-source, with the potential to optimise vaccine development, reformulation and implementation worldwide.
Treatment planning &amp; targeting during shock wave therapy
Keywords: Shock Wave Lithotripsy
Trilateration
Passive acoustic mapping
Shock Wave Therapy
Ultrasound
Cavitation

Shock wave lithotripsy is a non-invasive procedure by which kidney stones are fragmented. Currently, many shock waves are delivered to the body that do not impact the stone, but do result in tissue trauma, mainly caused by cavitation. This work presents a monitoring system to reduce the number of shock waves delivered to the body, by tracking the target, and to detect cavitation throughout the procedure.
For the first goal, a circular array, housing twenty-two 0.5 MHz transducers that can be mounted around the aperture of a clinical lithotripter, was used to collect pulse-echo data, from which an acoustic triangulation algorithm was able to locate stones. The accuracy of the system in water was better than 4 mm in the lateral direction and better than 2 mm in the axial direction within ±15 mm of the focus—which is the variation that would be expected clinically. For the second goal, the acoustic pressure field of a shock wave therapy source was measured and its cavitation field was determined. Cavitation was localised using a conventional ultrasound probe and passive acoustic mapping. Bubbles were shown to grow, collapse, and rebound, and the characteristic times were determined. It was found that these parameters increased with the energy level and the pulse repetition frequency and that at the highest energy setting the characteristic time was 288 μs. Finally, the characteristic time of cavitation in an ex vivo pig kidney and for an artificial stone in water due to a clinical shock wave source was determined using passive acoustic mapping. The characteristic times in the pig kidney were shorter than for the stone, e.g. 560 μs in the kidney and 730 μs on the stone at EL 6. No significant correlation between cavitation on a stone that fractured well and a stone that fractured poorly could be determined.
The work in this thesis heralds an advance in current lithotripsy monitoring techniques that are based on B-mode and x-ray. Real-time tracking of the kidney stone and cavitation mapping throughout the treatment would limit the renal injury that routinely occurs during lithotripsy.
Legal politics in the Libyan constitution-making process
Keywords: qualitative methods
Libya
ethnography
socio-legal studies
public law
empirical study
MENA
constitution-making

Since the end of the Cold War, constitution-making has become a central element of post-conflict reconstruction, and state- and peace-building, more generally. Both scholars and practitioners assume that legal procedures and standards of constitution-making provide structures for resolving potentially violent political contest and debate, and thereby contribute to reconciliation and consensus finding. It is hoped that such processes will amplify commonality and strengthen democracy in a state. However, constitution-making processes in politically unstable countries often do not bring about the desired stability and security. As scholarly research in constitution-making has remained largely normative, there is still little detailed knowledge about why this is the case.
My thesis is an in-depth empirical analysis of the Libyan constitution-making process from 2014 to 2018. I describe the actors who are engaged in the constitution-making process and the ways in which the law, including constitutional law-making, is actually used and put to work in a post-conflict scenario. By analysing the Libyan process in this way, I highlight the open, provisional, and dynamic dimensions to constitution-making, and thereby contribute to an empirical understanding of these processes.
The Libyan example indicates that when societal conflict is high and the political landscape deeply divided, a constitution-making process is unlikely to solve conflicts through a redistribution of power or resources or the elaboration of a unitary vision for a state. On the contrary, since the idea of a constitution is to establish a high-level legal framework, constitution-making risks becoming a high-stakes arena of political conflict. This is what happened in Libya, developing into what I call legal politics. Understanding the dynamics of legal politics raises questions about the assumptions of those who advocate constitution-making in post-conflict situations and casts doubt on the technocratic vision that states can be built in a rational and orderly fashion.
Towards dynamic pharmacophore models through the use of coarse grained molecular dynamic simulations
Keywords: Coarse Grained
Molecular Dynamics
Computer Aided Drug Design

Computer aided drug design (CADD) plays a crucial role in the drug discovery pipeline e.g. in virtual screening of chemical databases, de novo drug design, and lead optimization. Due to the increased numbers of protein structures elucidated, structure-based methods for developing pharmacophore models have started gaining in popularity and are becoming of particular importance. There have been a number of studies combining such methods with the use of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to model protein exibility. In this project, the development and application of a new methodology, based on coarse grained (CG) MD, through the use of the MARTINI forcefield, and employed to explore protein ligand interactions, will be presented. An overview of the history of CADD is presented, along with current computational fragment based methods available for exploring protein-ligand interactions. An overview of the theory and methods behind MD simulations both all atom and CG is also provided. In the first results chapter, the parametrization of MARTINI beads as pharmacophoric probes, the analysis protocol and the application of this method to a data set of water soluble targets of pharmacological interest is described. The results suggest that the pharmacophoric probes have the ability to identify protein-ligand interactions on the targets of interest. The probes are also able to identify the residues involved in forming ligand binding interactions, showing a particular accuracy in identifying "hotspot" interactions. In the second results chapter, the extension of the initial data set to a range of GPCRs is described. The results suggest that the pharmacophoric probes have the ability to accurately explore both the orthosteric and allosteric binding sites of the GPCR targets and accurately identify the interactions and residues involved in ligand binding. This is done without the need to embed the protein in a lipid bilayer. In the final results chapter, the application of the dynamic pharmacophoric probes to identifying PIP2 and cholesterol binding sites, on membrane proteins, is presented. The results suggest that the probes can indeed identify these binding sites, along with identifying the residues that are involved in binding the PIP2 head groups. This was also done without embedding the protein in a lipid bilayer, which is the usual practice for identifying lipid binding interactions, reducing the computational resource requirements.