VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
De-mystifying asylum adjudication - judicial perspectives on law and experience in German Administrative Courts 
Keywords: Socio-Legal Studies
Asylum Adjudication
Refugee Studies
Courts
Judgecraft
Judicial Decision-Making
Germany

Refugee status determination is often described as one of the most complex adjudication functions in industrialised democracies. Such statements are driven by the legal and factual complexities of asylum adjudication. As a result, refugee law and status determination are seen as different to other legal areas and described as particularly ambiguous and discretion-heavy. At the same time those legal professionals who make asylum decisions every day - like judges - lack attention. This study therefore interrogates how judges in German administrative courts make asylum decisions and how they deal with uncertainty, investigating asylum adjudication from the perspective of the judge.
This research is based on extensive fieldwork at two different administrative courts in Germany, including courtroom observations, case and file material and semi-structured interviews with judges. It argues that judges use different strategies and techniques, referring both to law and experience to make sense and solve a case reaching a rationally justifiable decision. Thereby it promotes a holistic idea of decision-making or ‘judgecraft’ in which elements like professional experience and intuition become active parts of the reasoning and decision-making process, questioning the binaries of reason and emotion, rules and discretion that underpin much of the decision-making literature. This thesis further argues that a crucial part of judges’ experience is formed by those cases a judge decided in the past, the dialogue, discourse and exchange between colleagues and his or her chamber, as well as the use and acceptance of intuition as a technique, such as letting time pass and writing. By revealing how these strategies interlock in the daily decision-making practices of judges, this thesis’ findings challenge the assumption that asylum decisions are arbitrary, subjective or akin to a ‘lottery’. Instead, this research nuances these debates by showing how legal norms and professional methods come together, and how judges employ intuition, experience and emotions pro-actively as part of a decision-making strategy underpinned by the rationalizable confines of procedure and principle.
Justice in armed humanitarian intervention
Keywords: international law
justice
defensive harming
ethics
humanitarian intervention
human rights
war

This thesis throws new light on a central question in the normative theory of armed humanitarian intervention. Assuming that it is, under certain conditions, permissible to employ lethal force to protect people from atrocity crimes, what are the principles governing wars fought for distinctly humanitarian purposes?
The thesis comprises seven self-standing chapters, each of which makes a distinct contribution to philosophical debates about the moral nature of other-defence, the just distribution of risks of harm between morally innocent persons, the legal regulation of just conduct in humanitarian intervention, and rectificatory duties that arise once hostilities have ceased.
Chapter 2 argues that duties to rescue may take the form of a duty to harm in other persons’ defence. Chapter 3 defends a conception of the requirement to minimise harm that extends across multiple agents, which entails that victims’ and rescuers’ respective permissions to harm in victims’ defence may become interdependent. Chapters 4-6 argue that key considerations to which philosophers and militaries have appealed - intending to benefit vulnerable people, the lesser evil, and acting in supererogatory fashion - do considerably less to justify harms to non-liable people than is commonly assumed. Chapter 7 questions the moral adequacy of international humanitarian law in light of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect,’ and explores a case for affording morally innocent people greater legal protection from being harmed in military rescue operations. Chapter 8 defends duties of compensation for harmful military acts that were all-things-considered permissible on lesser-evil grounds.
Collectively, these chapters show that the conditions under which carrying out a military intervention may be permissible is not all that matters. The way in which such operations are conducted is just as critical. There are weighty constraints on how intervening forces may seek to bring about good consequences, even in pursuit of distinctly humanitarian aims.
Three-dimensional colloidal crystals: Crystallisation, deformation and grain boundaries
Keywords: Confocal microscopy
Small angle X-ray scattering
Crystallisation
Grain boundaries
Colloidal crystal
Deformation
Homogeneous crystal nucleation
Flow alignemnet

In this thesis, the crystallisation, deformation, and grain boundaries of three-dimensional colloidal crystals are studied in real space using confocal laser scanning microscopy, CLSM, and in reciprocal space using small angle X-ray scattering, SAXS. Two instances of crystallisation are studied, the first being crystallisation under shear induced by capillary action. Using CLSM and SAXS, we find that drawing a high volume fraction suspension of colloidal particles into a flat and narrow capillary creates a large random hexagonal close packed, RHCP, crystal with long-range orientational order over tens of thousands of colloidal particles. Subsequently, we monitor the deformation of the shear aligned crystals under a gravitational field using CLSM and SAXS. We find that at low enough crystal volume fractions, the initial single orientation of the crystal breaks apart into many crystallites and thus, form grain boundaries at their interfaces. We characterise the rotations of the crystallites during deformation and reveal the mechanism initiating the break-up of the uniform crystal orientation. We develop a method to locate and characterise grain boundaries which can measure local grain boundary misorientations and structure as well as determine the crystal structure of the grains either side. We demonstrate the method’s utility by applying it to experimental real space coordinates of colloidal particles. In particular, we consider particle coordinates obtained from an epitaxially templated colloidal Σ17 (a coincident site lattice grain boundary) bicrystal, finding a mosaic of different grain boundary types instead of only Σ17. We conclude with the second study of crystallisation: homogeneous crystal nucleation in a colloidal fluid. This time, crystallisation produces a crystal with many differently oriented grains and provides an opportunity to study grain boundaries and the misorientation structural changes of nuclei during nucleation. We examine the spatial misorientation variation during nucleation and growth to reveal changes with time. At early times, nuclei exhibit exclusively high misorientation angles, however, at late times, misorientation angles at the surface are higher than the angles within the nuclei cores. Thus, we show that nuclei exhibit structures intermediate between the liquid and the crystal structure at late times during nucleation and growth.
Multi-isotope tracing of complex crustal fluid systems
Keywords: noble gas
clumped isotopes
stable Isotopes
helium
carbon capture and storage
enhanced oil recovery

There is significant societal concern regarding environmental issues, including ensuring safe long- term CO2 storage and safeguarding against groundwater pollution. However, the complex nature of the crustal systems mean there are still many questions surrounding fluid behaviour within the subsurface. This study utilises noble gas, stable and clumped isotopes to investigate, constrain and predict subsurface fluid behaviour within the context of CO2 storage and hydrocarbon contamination of shallow aquifers. Firstly, a novel method was developed that enabled the first noble gas analysis of multi-phase fluids. This approach was validated by comparing casing gas and produced fluids samples from oil fields in California. We then characterised the noble gas isotopes and abundances in these reservoirs and found a clear relationship between noble gas compositions and injected volumes. This allows for the prediction of both pristine and evolved reservoir compositions, which represents a crucial first step in characterising the various endmember compositions in groundwater contamination studies. Secondly, we use an integrated isotope approach to place constraints on both physical and biogeochemical processes resulting from CO2 injection into a depleted hydrocarbon reservoir CO2 storage target. We show that a significant proportion of the injected CO2 has been consumed by microbial methanogenesis and estimate a rate for this process. These findings are significant as methanogenesis can affect the trapping efficiency of a given system and thus it is a paramount consideration in site selection for future CO2 storage projects. Finally, the Paradox Basin (Colorado Plateau) is used to investigate the utility of noble gases to understand the role of basin architecture in controlling subsurface fluid composition and connectivity. Here, we use noble gas data to inform conceptual models in order to show that subsurface fluid composition and extent of fluid migration is controlled by the presence of a thick evaporite unit. The data and interpretation presented in this thesis, greatly expands our understanding of both noble gas behaviour in response to anthropogenic perturbations and the resulting processes. Additionally, this study demonstrates the utility of a multi-isotope approach for probing subsurface processes.
Why parades are peaceful: a study of mobilisation, segregation and authority in Northern Ireland, 2006-2016
Keywords: orange order
parades
northern ireland
segregation

Across the world, from India to Israel, it is common for parades to trigger episodes of ethnic violence. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants have sometimes come to blows over parades, however the number of parades-related riots is small. This is puzzling, because between 2006-2016 over 30,000 parades associated with Northern Ireland’s Protestant & Catholic populations took place. If parades are indeed a spur to ethnic enmity, we should expect Northern Ireland to experience far more violence than it does. This thesis seeks to explain why this is not the case.
First, I demonstrate that there is indeed a link between ethnic conflict and the desire to parade. I show that threats to the status of one’s ethnic group correlate with increased participation in parades.
Second, I find that PUL parades that march in the vicinity of borders between majority-Catholic and majority-Protestant areas, are more likely to be protested. The fact that such borders are rare in Northern Ireland constitutes one explanation for the absence of parades-related violence.
Third, I assess the role played by local leaders in preventing violence. By examining Belfast’s Crumlin Road parade dispute, I show that peace activists can prevent violence under certain conditions. These conditions prove to be far more common outside of Belfast. This offers another explanation for why parades-related violence is unexpectedly rare in Northern Ireland.
In making this argument I draw upon both quantitative and qualitative sources. My study of parade motivation and protests depends upon a previously-unused dataset obtained from the Parades Commission of Northern Ireland. My study of the Crumlin Road parades dispute uses a combination of interviews and analysis of newspapers and archival material. In summary, I use this evidence to argue that parades in Northern Ireland should trigger more ethnic violence, but the absence of hard borders and the presence of peace activists ensures they do not.
On the adversarial robustness of Bayesian machine learning models
Keywords: Bayesian inference
adversarial robustness
machine learning

Bayesian machine learning (ML) models have long been advocated as an important tool for safe artificial intelligence. Yet, little is known about their vulnerability against adversarial attacks. Such attacks aim to cause undesired model behaviour (e.g. misclassification) by crafting small perturbations to regular inputs which appear to be insignificant to humans (e.g. slight blurring of image data). This fairly recent phenomenon has undermined the suitability of many ML models for deployment in safety critical applications. In this thesis, we investigate how robust Bayesian ML models are against adversarial attacks, focussing on Gaussian process (GP) and Bayesian neural network (BNN) classification models. In particular, for GP classification models, we derive guarantees for the robustness against adversarial attacks that facilitate the evaluation of their suitability for a given safety critical application. Furthermore we investigate whether better posterior approximations benefit the adversarial robustness of BNNs, comparing the adversarial robustness resulting from high quality posterior approximations to that resulting from deterministic approximations in a range of experiments. We find that well approximated BNNs tend to be empirically more susceptible to adversarial attacks than deterministic neural network models for most popular priors. This calls for caution when deploying such BNNs in safety critical applications. Lastly, we show that using GPs in a Bayesian optimisation framework, it is possible to craft successful adversarial perturbations in black-box scenarios (where the attacked model is a priori unknown and can only be studied by querying it) with fewer model queries than previously needed. This facilitates a better evaluation of the adversarial robustness of a model in black-box scenarios.
First measurement of reactor antineutrinos in scintillator at SNO+ and study of alternative designs for large-scale liquid scintillator detectors
Keywords: neutrinos
oscillation
particle physics
antineutrinos
scintillator
nuclear reactor

This thesis presents the first measurement of oscillation in antineutrinos from nuclear reactor cores, detected in liquid scintillator at SNO+. The small cluster of reactor cores along the Canadian-American border creates a distinct oscillated antineutrino energy spectrum, from which oscillation parameter values can be extracted. A likelihood analysis is presented, measuring the sensitivity to neutrino oscillation parameter ∆m 221 based on 100 tonne-years exposure. The Covid-19 pandemic forced a halt of the SNO+ scintillator fill, however stable data was recorded over 127 days in an approximately half-full detector. BiPo214 coincidence pairs provided an in-situ calibration of the LAB + 0.5g/L PPO scintillator cocktail. The reduced scintillator volume and livetime in the partially filled detector lead to limited sensitivity to the neutrino oscillation parameter ∆m^{2}_{21} . Strong agreement was seen between the 44 events measured in data and the total 45±6.7 stat events expected due to signal reactor antineutrinos and background geoneutrinos and α-n. Due to the limited statistics, two values of ∆m^{2}_{21} were favoured,8.8(+1.1,-1.3) and 12.6(+1.6,-1.3) ×10^{-5} eV^2. The current global PDG value of ∆m^{2}_{21} = 7.53±0.18×10^{-5}eV^{2} was found to be within a 1σ frequentist confidence interval of the smaller of the best-fit ∆m^{2}_{21} value. Following a successful first measurement of reactor antineutrinos, the analysis will be continued into the fully filled scintillator phases of SNO+. Simulation studies show that a precise measurement of ∆m 221 may be possible, where the current global uncertainty (dictated primarily by the KamLAND measurement) can be surpassed in 3-5 years of livetime in the Te-loaded scintillator phase, depending primarily on continued reactor activity and α-n levels. The uncertainty in ∆m^{2}_{21} impacts the interpretation of neutrino beam experimental results, making its measurement particularly relevant. Also discussed in this work, is a novel design for the next generation of large-scale liquid scintillator detectors (comparable to JUNO in size). The proposed ‘SLIPS’ design may allow for a much more simple and economical construction of large-scale liquid scintillator detectors, potentially impacting a number of areas, 0νββ and solar, supernova and geoneutrinos along with long baseline monitoring of reactors. Potential detector designs are discussed, with simulation studies demonstrating the possible quality of event reconstruction.
Prehistoric aesthetics: an ontology of Stone Age art from the Lower Palaeolithic until the Neolithic
Keywords: Neolithic Art of Britain and Ireland
Aesthetic Autonomy
Modern and Contemporary Art
Process Metaphysics (Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead)
Upper Palaeolithic Cave Art
Philosophical Aesthetics (Immanuel Kant, Theodor Adorno)
Lower Palaeolithic Art
Prehistoric Art

Within this thesis I examine how the phenomenon of ‘prehistoric art’ can be defined. The difficulty is situated within the fact that the concept of ‘art’ cannot be understood apart from the autonomy of art and the aesthetic within Western modernity. This would mean that the condition of art is contradictory to the active role of ‘prehistoric art’ in the constitution of the social. I argue that this apparent opposition is incorrect, as it is precisely the autonomous dimension of art and the aesthetic that allows understanding art’s capacity for social agency. ‘Autonomy’ should not be understood in terms of detachment from the everyday, but in terms of a universal principle. The universal principle of the aesthetic is situated within its capacity to operate as a form of plateau-constitution or world creation. Within the first part of the thesis I examine how the autonomy of art and the aesthetic can be reworked for animism through an analysis of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Immanuel Kant and Theodor Adorno. This theoretical examination provides the basis for the second part of the thesis, in which I theorize three different types of aesthetic experience for three different prehistoric periods: the Early Palaeolithic, the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic. Whereas it is necessary to understand the universal principle of art and the aesthetic, it is equally necessary to understand that this principle can only take up a particular form and therefore can be modified in different ways. By theorizing three different modifications of aesthetic experience across prehistory, I argue that one develops insight into the way prehistoric art takes up different forms through time. I construct a definition of prehistoric art by examining whether one can detect continuity across the three different types of aesthetic experience that I propose.
Homer's comparisons: types, patterns, and effects
Keywords: simile
Homer
typology
comparison
gradation

Comparisons are an integral part of language and literature, but there are no comprehensive studies that take into account both their linguistic features and literary effects. There are four kinds of comparisons, comparatives, superlatives, equatives (expressing similarity in degree), and similatives (expressing similarity in kind), but most linguistic and literary studies focus on only one or two. Typological and language-specific studies tend to look at the dominant types, and do not include every comparison found in their corpus.
In this study all of Homer’s comparisons are collected and categorized according to their syntactic structure. The differences between the four kinds of comparisons and the concepts they express are described in semantic and cognitive terms. Not only complete comparisons are taken into account, but also those in which one element, for example the standard of comparison (i.e. the entity with which another entity is compared), is missing.
The complete comparative and superlative constructions in Homeric Greek are presented according to the syntactic types in which they appear, followed by an analysis of incomplete expressions. Equatives and similatives are discussed together since they are not consistently distinguished in ancient Greek. They are presented according to the semantic and cognitive relationship between the comparee (the entity about which the comparison is made) and the standard of comparison. Their syntactic types are analysed in light of the comparatives and superlatives, and two special structures are examined separately: comparison compounds and the extended Homeric simile.
The final part is concerned with the narrative and rhetorical function of com- parisons, starting with ‘hybrid’ comparisons, which are the result of negation or syntactic/semantic peculiarities. The linguistic features of comparatives and su- perlatives provide the basis for analysing their use by characters in speeches and by the narrator for creating suspense and tragic effect. The Homeric similes and shorter comparisons of similarity are approached not as aids to communication and interpretation, but as poetic devices that make the epic story and its characters more complex.
Evaluating medical leadership development programmes
Keywords: Medical Education
Programme Evaluation
Medical Leadership
Evaluation
Leadership Development

In recent years, effective medical leadership has been recognised across healthcare as being a vital component in the saving of money, staff turnover and patient lives. Increase in the perceived importance of medical leadership has resulted in an explosion of both medical leadership development programmes and investments of public money into these programmes.
These investments into medical leadership development programmes rely on the assumption and conviction that such programmes lead to significant clinical impact. The current lack of effective evaluation of these programmes leaves this an untested assumption. My research has therefore been focused on developing insights into evaluation of medical leadership development programmes.
In Part I of my thesis, I establish a lack of effective evaluation methods for medical leadership development. In Part II, I establish a gap in medical leadership development in medical schools through a needs analysis and a systematic review. In Part III, I shift my focus to qualified doctors and I develop, pilot and critically appraise medical leadership development programme evaluation questionnaires. At the end of Part III, I return to programme stakeholder interviews to more carefully establish their expectations for the medical leadership development programmes and evaluations. In Part IV, to better understand the state of current research and to focus future research, I conduct a second more extensive review of studies evaluating medical leadership development programmes for qualified doctors. Finally, in Part V, I discuss limitations of this research and possible implications for evaluations and future research.
One theme recurs throughout this thesis. If we want to ensure that investment into medical leadership development programmes achieves the ends that commissioners, organisations and politicians intend, we need to get better at questioning our assumptions and evaluating our investments into medical leadership development programmes.
One theme recurs throughout this thesis. If we want to ensure that investment into medical leadership development programmes achieves the ends that commissioners, organisations and politicians intend, we need to get better at questioning our assumptions and evaluating our investments into medical leadership development programmes.