VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Democracy and the justification of political authority
Keywords: political legitimacy
democracy
authority

This thesis investigates the place of democracy in the justification of political authority. The investigation of the thesis proceeds in two parts. The first part considers the lines of argument that being democratic is necessary for political authority to be fully justified. Anna Stilz argues that the subjects have general obligation to obey the law only if they are free from political domination, which freedom is available only in the democratic State. Philip Pettit argues that the freedom from domination does not affect the subjects' obligation to obey the laws, but is constitutive of their obligation to 'accept a regime', i.e. to refrain from revolting against a regime. David Estlund argues that the State's right to enforce the laws is justified independently of its capacity to obligate the subjects to obey the laws, and that the former right is uniquely conditional on the political decision-procedures' being democratic. Thomas Christiano argues that it is the ruler's 'right to rule', i.e. a claim-right correlative with the subjects' obligation to obey, which turns on the existence of a democratic assembly. These arguments fail to make sufficient room for the fundamental principle of political authority: as outlined in John Finnis's argument, political authority is required for the solution of a community's co-ordination problems for the common good, and it is to be exercised by those who have efficacious capacity to do so. Democracy does not change what it is to be justified authority in accordance with the fundamental principle. The second part supplements the fundamental principle by identifying two important ways in which democracy bears on the legitimacy of the State. First, democracy affects political legitimacy if and only if democracy is viable in the relevant community. Secondly, it is the laws that regulate legal change—as distinct from laws that regulate other official and social conduct—that depend for their authority on democracy.
Religious communities of the Near East from Roman to Islamic rule: sectarianism and identity in an age of transition (5th-8th C)
Keywords: Monophysite
Chalcedonian
Chalcedon

This study endeavors to set Christian writing about Islam from the period of the Islamic expansion in the broader context of Christian theological development in Late Antiquity. To this end, this study traces elements of continuity in Christian thought from the Christological debates of the fifth and sixth century, particularly from the Council of Chalcedon in 451and the resulting emergence of the communities of Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonian Monophysites as the dominant strands of Christianity in the Near East at the rise of Islam. In order to understand how Christians began to integrate the Islamic expansion into their thinking, this study focuses particularly on Christian writings about Islam and the descriptions of Muslims in Christian writings from the rise of lslam, through the seventh and early eighth centuries, up to the Abbasid revolution in 750. It also considers the contemporary descriptions of Christians in the Qur'an, in order to illustrate that these descriptions have both a different starting point and a different focus, suggesting that both Christian discussions about Muslims and Muslim discussions about Christians were internal discussions, taking place within each tradition, and do not represent true inter­ religious dialogue. In this way, this study attempts to illustrate how the rise of lslam, the emergence of the caliphate and the resulting separation of the Near Eastern churches from the Christian hierarchy in Rome and Constantinople influenced Christian identity in the Near East. The writings of the seventh century, and the Christian identity they preserve, emerge as a hybrid, integrating elements of the competing, pre-Islamic concerns of doctrinal purity versus church unity, but also attempting to address, in a variety of ways, the initial fear over Muslim victory and the eventual acceptance of Muslim rule as the new status quo in the Near East
Victim participation in international criminal justice: the case of the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia: real power or empty rhetoric?
Keywords: Victim participation

This thesis critically examines the role, scope and implications of victims' participation in international criminal proceedings, drawing from the development of human rights doctrine, victimology and practices in domestic and international criminal justice systems. The comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the complex and multifaceted legal mechanism of victim participation is conducted primarily through the lens of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), examination of which constitutes the core of this thesis. In light of the specific characteristics of international criminal law, this thesis analyses the statutory and jurisprudential developments that have defined the ambit and boundaries of the participation of victims in international criminal proceedings. The research is conducted against a theoretical and case law backdrop, drawing on interviews conducted with judges, lawyers and victims at the ECCC.
The interpretation of victims' participatory rights in international criminal proceedings has been significantly diffuse and at times divergent, betraying a far from cohesive and consistent approach, and making the study of civil party participation at the ECCC an excellent medium through which to explore the breadth of victim participation as a legal mechanism. Victim participation is still in its infancy in international criminal proceedings, and as such, the trials at the ECCC have appeared more as ‘experimenting laboratories' than as processes guided by sound and well-crafted rules and procedures. This thesis argues that whilst the apparent benefits of participation seem self-evident, and may lead, at least in theory, to the realisation of the aspiration of restorative justice for victims, the manner in which civil party participation has been crafted and interpreted in the trials before the ECCC has raised some important issues and questions regarding its role and impact with respect to the functionality of court proceedings, the rights of the accused, and the rights of victims themselves.
Direct laser micro-fabrication by adaptive optics
Keywords: Laser micro-fabrication
Optics and Photonics
Laser material processing
Diamond
Adaptive optics
Ultrafast laser phonomenon

Ultrafast lasers are widely used for the precise three-dimensional micro-fabrication inside transparent materials. The resolution of fabricated features depends upon the size of the focal spot, and the process efficiency depends upon the generation of short pulses at the focus. The performance is detrimentally affected by the presence of phase aberrations, which can be introduced by the optics of the system or by refraction at the surface of material. Efficiency can also be affected by other forms of aberration that are related to the ultra-short pulses, such as pulse front distortion or material dispersion.
Adaptive optics has in the past been introduced into laser material processing in order to overcome the problems caused by phase aberrations. However, there are related phenomena specific to systems using ultrashort pulses that have not been extensively studied, nor have benefitted from the application of adaptive optics. This thesis concerns the development of theoretical and practical techniques to address these issues and improve the performance of laser fabrication system. New applications are enabled with this technology.
Spatiotemporal modelling of laser focal intensity distribution is enabled by adopting the Fourier optics. The effects of phase aberrations and sample dispersion on the ultrafast laser focusing are studied in detail. Simulations for both conventional and temporal laser focusing methods are presented. I explore the significance of individual aberration and sample dispersion to investigate the benefit of their compensation in various practical scenarios.
A new method in controlling the ultrafast laser pulses - pulse front adaptive optics - is introduced. With the combination of a deformable mirror (DM) and a spatial light modulator (SLM), quadratic shape pulse fronts with different magnitudes are created. The results are demonstrated through wave-front sensor and auto-correlator measurements. In addition, I introduce the first application of this method into the pulse front correction for a two-photon microscope. An improvement of 1.4 times in the two-photon signal beyond the phase correction is demonstrated.
A series of new applications are enabled by adopting the adaptive optics into laser fabrication. In the adaptive laser fabrication in diamond, graphitic wires with any three-dimensional shapes are enabled. The resistivity of the wires is demonstrated to be reduced by more than 100 times compared to the previous reports. Non-reciprocal effects in the diamond fabrication are studied in detail. The influence of laser parameters, light polarization and pulse front tilt are investigated. I also explore several more advanced applications in the diamond fabrication. Specifically, initial results of the alternating conductor, micro-capacitor and electrode arrays for radiation detector are presented. Additionally, I discuss micro-fabrication of three dimensional funnel structures in silica glass for applications in neuroscience research.
Making law about power
Keywords: rule of law
Legal theory
Constitutional theory
Constitutional law
Law
Political theory
Jurisprudence
Political philosophy
Legal philosophy
constitutionalism

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the inhabitants of some parts of Europe and the North American colonies were confronted with proto-state institutional arrangements. In certain cases, they responded ambivalently. That ambivalence is at the heart of what I will call the 'limited government tradition'. The tradition’s adherents thought that long historical experience, not to mention the events of their own times, provided ample evidence of the corrupting effects of power on those who wield it. Power-holders, left to their own devices, are likely to succumb to the temptations of power by exercising it arbitrarily. Where they are able to do so comprehensively and systematically, the upshot is tyranny. How, then, to ensure that state power is constituted in a manner that is inhospitable to tyranny? The tradition envisaged a range of measures, including a distinctive vision of 'the Rule of Law'. The Rule of Law would both define and enforce certain limits on state power. This study argues that the tradition’s hostility to political absolutism is based on moral foundations which apply with equal force to economic power. The tradition ought to examine the modern constitution of economic power to determine whether it is hospitable to arbitrariness and tyranny. If such an examination is undertaken, we learn that modern economic power poses the kind of moral dangers that the tradition’s Rule of Law project is designed to combat. However, the tradition assumes that it need not treat economic power as even a potential target of the Rule of Law. I will call that assumption the 'Consensus'. This study's first major aim is to explain the origins and stubbornness of the Consensus. Its second major aim is to persuade readers that the Consensus is mistaken: the tradition must regard economic power as, at least, a potential target of the Rule of Law.
People power in struggling cities: Pressure groups in Liverpool and Baltimore, 1980-1991
Keywords: pressure groups
community power
Liverpool
Baltimore
urban governance

Liverpool and Baltimore in the 1980s were amongst the poorest cities in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. Since the 1960s, the ports on which they had built their economies and their reputations had all but collapsed and thousands of manufacturing jobs had been relocated or slashed. Property-led regeneration did more for the investors behind projects and the tourists who enjoyed them than for the cities' working classes. In such cities, battered by forces largely beyond their control, what could people disadvantaged by race and/or economic status do to compete for the resources necessary to improve their living conditions and wield power on a citywide level? This thesis explores the capacity of poor and middle-income people’s pressure groups to successfully accomplish their goals in Liverpool and Baltimore during the 1980s. To do so, it examines three case study groups in Liverpool, the Merseyside Community Relations Council, the Eldonian Community Association, and the Anti-Cuts Campaign; and one in Baltimore, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development. It follows their trajectories under unusually authoritarian local political regimes, the Militant Tendency-directed Labour city council in Liverpool and the Schaefer mayoral administration in Baltimore, through local elections in 1987, and finally under the more open local political regimes following those elections. Their success depended on three sets of factors. First, strong leadership and an animating cause were necessary conditions for groups to cohere, but were not sufficient to ensure their success. That further depended on a group's goals and the distribution of resources necessary to accomplish those goals, which in turn shaped the strategies each group chose to pursue its agenda. Third and finally, the effectiveness of those strategies depended on the group's ability to access and influence the resource-holders identified and, finally, on the scope for action of those resource-holders themselves.
MicroRNA-196a in human adipose tissue
Keywords: microRNA

MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that have been shown to play a role in adipose tissue biology. Adipose tissue depots differ in terms of the metabolic risk that they confer. Therefore, I aimed to identify microRNAs which regulate body fat distribution. An initial microarray screen of abdominal subcutaneous and gluteal adipose tissue, with validatory qPCR, identified microRNA-196a as being more highly expressed in gluteal adipose tissue. These expression patterns were retained in primary and immortalised pre-adipocytes from abdominal subcutaneous and gluteal adipose tissue. The precursor of miR-196a contains a single nucleotide polymorphism, rs11614913. Genotyping was performed on 5,823 individuals from the Oxford Biobank and combined with detailed information on body composition by DXA scanning and miR-196a expression determination in fat biopsies. This revealed that the rs11614913 TT genotype was associated with a 32% reduction in miR-196a expression in abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (p=0.002), an expansion in waist-to-hip ratio and an increase in mean adipocyte size in abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue in males. RS11614913 was also found to be associated with bone mineral density, and the relationship between bone mineral density and body fat distribution was explored using the Oxford Biobank. To establish a functional role for miR-196a, the Pt2 abdominal and gluteal cell lines were validated as models for pre-adipocyte proliferation and adipogenesis. MiR-196aKO pre-adipocyte cell lines were generated. MiR-196aKO was found to reduce proliferation in abdominal subcutaneous (p=0.002) and gluteal (p=0.002) pre-adipocytes, with no effect in adipogenesis. In addition, transcriptomic profiling of miR-196aKO pre-adipocytes revealed enrichment for GO term clusters related to extracellular matrix and angiogenesis, suggesting a mechanism by which miR-196a might regulate regional adipose tissue expansion.
Modernism in mainstream magazines, 1920-37
Keywords: Modernism
Modernist Periodicals
Modernist Literature

This thesis studies five mainstream British weekly magazines: 'Time and Tide', the 'Nation and Athenaeum', the 'Spectator', the 'Listener', and the 'New Statesman'. It explores how these magazines reviewed, discussed and analysed modernist literature over an eighteen-year span, 1920-37. Over this period, and in these magazines, the concept of modernism developed. Drawing on work by philosopher Ian Hacking, this research traces how the idea of modernism emerged into the public realm. It focuses largely on the book reviews printed in these magazines, texts that played an important and underappreciated role in negotiations between modernist texts and the audience of these magazines.
Chapter 1, on 'Time and Tide', covers a period from the magazine's inception in 1920 to 1926, and draws particularly on Catherine Clay's work on this magazine. It discusses the genre of 'weekly review' that this new magazine attempted to join, and the cultural place of modernism in the early 1920s. Chapter 2, on the 'Nation and Athenaeum', covers Leonard Woolf's literary editorship (1923-30), under the ownership of J. M. Keynes, and makes use of Keynes’s archive at King's College, Cambridge, and Woolf’s at the University of Sussex. Chapter 3, on the 'Spectator', covers Evelyn Wrench’s editorship (1925-32), and explores the relationship between this magazine, ideologies of conservatism, and modernism. Chapter 4, on the 'Listener', focuses on the magazine’s publication of new poetry, including an extraordinary 1933 supplement that printed W. H. Auden’s 'The Witnesses'. This work revolves around Janet Adam Smith, literary editor in these years, and draws on Smith’s archive at the National Library of Scotland as well as the BBC archives at Caversham. Chapter 5, on the 'New Statesman' in the 1930s under new editor Kingsley Martin, explores a period when modernism was more widely recognized, and pays particular attention to a short text by James Joyce printed in 1932, 'From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer'.
The abstract structure of quantum algorithms
Keywords: Frobenius algebras
Group homomorphisms
Monoidal Categories

Quantum information brings together theories of physics and computer science. This synthesis challenges the basic intuitions of both fields. In this thesis, we show that adopting a unified and general language for process theories advances foundations and practical applications of quantum information. Our first set of results analyze quantum algorithms with a process theoretic structure. We contribute new constructions of the Fourier transform and Pontryagin duality in dagger symmetric monoidal categories. We then use this setting to study generalized unitary oracles and give a new quantum blackbox algorithm for the identification of group homomorphisms, solving the GROUPHOMID problem. In the remaining section, we construct a novel model of quantum blackbox algorithms in non-deterministic classical computation. Our second set of results concerns quantum foundations. We complete work begun by Coecke et al., definitively connecting the Mermin non-locality of a process theory with a simple algebraic condition on that theory's phase groups. This result allows us to offer new experimental tests for Mermin non-locality and new protocols for quantum secret sharing. In our final chapter, we exploit the shared process theoretic structure of quantum information and distributional compositional linguistics. We propose a quantum algorithm adapted from Weibe et al. to classify sentences by meaning. The clarity of the process theoretic setting allows us to recover a speedup that is lost in the naive application of the algorithm. The main mathematical tools used in this thesis are group theory (esp. Fourier theory on finite groups), monoidal category theory, and categorical algebra.
The financial administration of the French navy during the War of the Spanish Succession
Keywords: Role of the trésoriers généraux de la Marine
Financial analysis of Louis XIV's navy
French naval spending during the War of the Spanish Succession
Financial aspects of naval warfare
Collapse of the French navy under Louis XIV

The prevailing historical narrative of the collapse of Louis XIV’s naval power has emphasised the importance of political decision-making, either in the strategic shifts between the guerre d'escadre and the guerre de course, or in the decision to reduce the naval budget in the midst of war in 1694 and 1707. As France faced massive financial overextension and an increasing need to fight for territorial survival in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), it was inevitable that Louis XIV's government would fund its armies in preference to its naval capabilities. However, a shift in priorities at Versailles does not provide a full explanation for the navy's decline. Recent works emphasise the effectiveness of the state’s revenue-raising capabilities and the importance of the fiscal intermediaries who financed royal expenditure. Yet, these connections between French naval power and Louis XIV's fiscal capabilities remain only partially explored and this thesis presents a fresh examination of the navy’s financing arrangements.
It is argued that the difficulties that Louis XIV faced in maintaining the fleet were rooted in a unique set of issues embedded in the navy's financing mechanism and the way it was managed. The problem was four-fold: the naval ministry consistently overspent its allocated funds; the navy’s budget was increasingly underfunded as a result of the finance ministry’s mismanagement and also of wider fiscal instability; the naval treasury was not fit-for-purpose since the navy's fiscal intermediaries, the trésoriers généraux de la Marine, lacked the capacity to sustain costly levels of borrowing; and the crown failed to meet the organisational challenges of war by not controlling spending and the activities of the trésoriers. These structural issues surfaced internally early in the war and would be progressively and disastrously exposed by the loss of liquidity and the mounting debts that affected France in the 1700s.