VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Studies on the Bacterial Potassium efflux system Kef in Shewanella denitrificans SdKef
Keywords: chemical probes
novel mechanism
ion channel
bacteria
glutathione
antibiotic
antiporter
glutathione S-conjugate
efflux
Kef
potassium

The glutathione-gated potassium efflux system (Kef) is a K+/H+ antiporter found in the majority of Gram negative pathogens, which shows potential as a novel antibiotic target. Kef plays a vital role in the protection of bacteria against toxic electrophiles through the regulation of cytoplasmic pH. Kef is inhibited by glutathione (GSH), ɣ L-glu-L-cys-gly, and activated by glutathione S-conjugates (GSX). Healy et al. have quantified the affinities of GSH and a range of GSX for Shewanella denitrificans Kef (SdKef). GSH was found to have a weak affinity of 900 μM, whereas the strongest GSX, t
BuSG, was 400 nM.
This dissertation looks to understand the potency shown by t
BuSG for SdKef by exploring the binding contributions from each group of the tripeptide. Truncated analogues of tBuSG were synthesised and evaluated using a competition fluorescence assay and 1H CPMG NMR. In summary, removal of the glycine unit caused a complete loss in affinity for SdKef, whereas removing the glutamate unit resulted in a negligible loss. Interactions made by the Glu-Cys amide carbonyl oxygen, the Cys-Gly amide NH and a directional interaction of the conjugated thiol were also found to be important contributors to affinity.
The information obtained during this work allowed the development of a membrane permeant, truncated analogue of t
BuSG, which lacks the majority of the glutamate, for use in in vivo studies. The truncated analogue is able to activate SdKef to elicit K+ efflux, demonstrating that the majority of the glutamate is not essential for activity. Furthermore, application of this truncated analogue to Escherichia coli cells expressing the sdkef gene in a Kirby Bauer disc diffusion assay has demonstrated for the first time that small molecules activating SdKef can elicit inhibition of growth / cell death. Kef thus shows promise as a target for the development of novel antibacterial agents.
Suffering and Christianity: conversion and ethical change among the Newars of Bhaktapur
Keywords: ethics
Christianity

This thesis argues that conversion to Christianity in the Nepali city of Bhaktapur is closely connected with ethical attitudes towards suffering in Bhaktapurian churches. This argument is situated within broader debates in the anthropology of Christianity. Anthropologists have debated the extent to which Christianity is a force for cultural discontinuity, and have often connected it with modernity and individualism. I contribute to these discussions by showing how distinctively Christian conceptions of suffering may promote cultural change by stimulating new understandings of selfhood and ethics. The first three chapters explore the social life of Bhaktapur’s Hindu majority. I describe how the last fifty years have seen a process of cultural unsettlement in Bhaktapur; one aspect of this unsettlement has been a disruption of traditional norms of care and deference. It is in this context that the distinctive ethics of Christianity have proved attractive to some. Those who convert have typically experienced a significant episode of suffering, and have felt themselves to be failed by those around them. They find in churches a framework that emphasises the moral significance of inner experience (I call this ‘inwardness’) and addresses affliction more in terms of ethics than ritual. I describe these ethics in terms of ‘care’: they stress presence with the afflicted person, engagement with their experience, and appeal to God in prayer. After two chapters describing Christianity in Nepal and Bhaktapur in general terms, I devote four chapters to examining different categories of Bhaktapurian Christians: those who have experienced healing, women, leaders, and youth. I focus on four conversion narratives, and relate these narratives both to other ethnographic materials and to broader trends in Bhaktapurian and global Christianity. I highlight the significance of the values of inwardness and care, and of narrative itself, in the life-worlds of Bhaktapurian Christians.
The protesting youths of Hong Kong: post-80s reimaginings of politics through self, body, and space
Keywords: Youth Protest
Hong Kong
Politics

This thesis examines the political activism of Hong Kong youths known as the Post-80s. In contrast to dominant discourse in Hong Kong claiming that these youths are driven by economic concerns, based on 18 months of fieldwork, I suggest that the Post-80s are instead striving to reimagine what politics means as a part of life in the postcolonial city. It is emphasised that youths are 'protesting' as an act of rejecting mainstream politics, and as a means to realise their desire for a different form of politics to emerge in the city. By bringing youth voices to the forefront, this thesis addresses two broad themes—why and how the Post-80s protest. The thesis first provides an overview of Hong Kong politics, arguing that youths express a deep sense of dissatisfaction towards the political culture in society dictated by financial interests, and towards the hierarchical structures within the political domains that stifle the public voice. The thesis then reviews how the Post-80s challenge these conditions by positing a form of alternative politics predicated on individualistic self-representation manifesting through the self, body, and space. I look at youth claims that becoming political is an 'individual choice', and the ways in which their strong sense of individuality interacts with/counteracts the limitations on their political participation imposed by familial ties and gender roles. I then explore Post-80s attempts to dispel bodily passivity in protests through the incorporation of performance art into their political actions to empower the individual activist, and analyse youth attempts to reconfigure urban space into political sites of individualistic experimentation. The conclusion reviews the impact Post-80s activism has had on the realpolitik of the city, noting the inherent contradictions within the political efforts of the Post-80s and their limited ability to inflict widespread structural changes in Hong Kong politics.
Ottoman-Arab transatlantic migrations in the age of mass migrations (1870-1914)
Keywords: immigration
USA
Argentina
Syrian
Ottoman Empire
Lebanese

This thesis sketches out the history of Ottoman-Arab emigration from Greater Syria to the United States and to Argentina from the late nineteenth century up to the end of World War I, relying primarily (but not solely) on the related documents preserved in the Ottoman Archives. It depicts a wide range of this emigration history, including the scale and the number of immigrants, the causes behind emigration, the ways that emigrants managed to reach the Americas, the attitudes of Ottoman governments toward them, and the ways that emigrants adapted to their host societies. The thesis analyses the Ottoman-Arab emigration phenomenon from social and economic perspectives and in the larger context comprising other European population movements to the New World during this period, which has been called 'the Age of Mass Migrations.'
Perfusion imaging and tissue biomarkers for colorectal cancer
Keywords: Chemotherapy
Selective Internal Radiotherapy
Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI
Radiosensitisation
Perfusion CT
Radiotherapy
Nelfinavir

Background: Systemic chemotherapy and radiotherapy play an important role in the treatment of colorectal cancer. Tumour perfusion and oxygenation is known to influence radiosensitivity and chemosensitivity. In this thesis, I propose that the evaluation of changes in tumour perfusion using perfusion CT (pCT) and dynamic contrast-enhanced (Dce) MRI can guide the rational sequencing of drugs and radiation.
Methods: Dce-MRI and pCT scans were incorporated into a clinical trial of hypofractionated pelvic radiotherapy and nelfinavir in 10 patients with rectal cancer. Toxicity and tissue biomarkers (tumour cell density, microvessel density, CAIX, HIF1-alpha, phospho-Akt and phospho-PRAS40) were evaluated. pCT liver scans were incorporated into an imaging study in patients with colorectal liver metastases randomised to receive either oxaliplatin/ 5FU chemotherapy or oxaliplatin/ 5FU chemotherapy plus selective internal radiotherapy.
Results: After 7 days of nelfinavir concurrent with hypo-fractionated pelvic radiotherapy, there was a mean 42% increase in median Ktrans (P=0.03, paired t test) on Dce-MRI and a median 30% increase in mean blood flow on pCT (P=0.028, Wilcoxon Rank Sum), although no statistically significant changes in perfusion parameters were demonstrated after 7 days of nelfinavir prior to radiotherapy. The feasibility of evaluating tumour cell density in rectal biopsies before and after radiotherapy and a radiosensitising drug as an early endpoint of response was demonstrated. In patients with colorectal liver metastases who received oxaliplatin and modified de Gramont chemotherapy alone, after 4 cycles of chemotherapy, a 28% decrease in the mean hepatic arterial fraction was observed (P=0.018, paired t test). Between pCT scans 2 days before SIRT and 39-47 days following SIRT and continued 2-weekly chemotherapy, there was a mean 62% (P=0.009) reduction in Blood Flow and 61% (P=0.006) reduction in Blood Volume (paired t test).
Conclusions
This research does not support the hypothesis that nelfinavir before radiotherapy improves blood flow to human rectal cancer. Increases in rectal tumour perfusion during radiotherapy and concurrent nelfinavir are likely to be primarily explained by the acute biological effects of radiation. Four or more cycles of oxaliplatin and modified de Gramont chemotherapy may result in changes in tumour perfusion of colorectal liver metastases which would be detrimental to subsequent radiotherapy. Selective internal radiotherapy resulted in substantial reductions in tumour perfusion 39-47 days after the treatment. Perfusion imaging can be used to detect changes in tumour perfusion in response to radiotherapy and systemic therapy which have implications for the sequencing of therapies.
Education, work and family events in women's lives: Long-term developemnts and recent trends in East and West Germany
Keywords: Marriage

This thesis investigates how educational expansion, the trend towards the service society and the German unification affect East and West German women's life courses and family lives. It focuses on educational enrolment, educational attainment level, labour force participation, career resources, social origin, the educational match among partners as well as historical periods and examines their consequences on women's entry into first motherhood as well as partnership formation and dissolution processes. Using longitudinal data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we have applied multivariate methods such as event history analysis. The findings suggest that women's entry into motherhood during full-time education is highly dependent on women's age, social origin and the policy measures in a country. Furthermore, women's education has mainly an effect on the time structure of entry into first motherhood over the life course of differently qualified women but not on their final decision to enter into motherhood. Only if higher educated women can turn their educational investments into career resources, there is an effect on childlessness. This thesis also looked into women's partnership formation and dissolution processes. East and West German women do only differ slightly with regard to these transitions; nevertheless, the results showed that it is mainly West German women that transform their partnerships if they experience a pregnancy. Furthermore, the transmission of norms within a family seems to play an important role in women's partnership formation and dissolution processes. Based on a new theoretical model on educational assortative mating and divorce, this thesis is able to show that there are not only benefits from division of work but also benefits from communication within married couples. The empirical results show that the combined gains and losses of division of work and communication are different for educationally married up, homogamous or down women. Women's upward marriages are the most stable ones, with homogamous marriages ranking second, followed by married down marriages being the least stable ones.
Essays on fertility and family size
Keywords: fertility control
causal inference
fertility

In these papers I discuss the causal estimation of the effects of fertility and fertility planning developments on mother and child outcomes. A number of concerns are raised with existing identification techniques, and alternative methodologies to consistently estimate the effect of interest are proposed. These concerns and new techniques are illustrated using microdata on slightly more than 43,000,000 births ocurring between 1972 and 2013.
In the first substantive chapter (written with Sonia Bhalotra), we discuss the validity of the use of twin births in fertility research. We demonstrate that twin births are not random. Successfully taking twins to term depends upon positive maternal health behaviours and investments in the periods preceding birth. We show that this is of considerable concern for estimation techniques which rely on twin births being (conditionally) randomly assigned to identify causal effects. To illustrate, we consider the estimation of the child quantity–quality (QQ) trade-off, and show that existing instrumental variable estimates are inconsistent in the contexts examined. Upon partially correcting for the fact that twin births are not random, a statistically significant QQ trade-off begins to emerge. We close by examining a number of partial identification techniques to bound the true effect of fertility on child outcomes.
In the second substantive chapter, I examine the effect of fertility control policies on the fertility decisions and outcomes of women. I consider the case of the emergency contraceptive pill in Chile. The staggered arrival of this technology to Chile over the last decade has resulted in the availability of the first safe and legal post-coital birth control policies. In a context of high teenage pregnancy rates, difference-in-difference (DD) style estimates suggest that this policy has accounted for reductions in short-term teen childbearing by as much as 7%, an effect similar to the arrival of abortion in the USA. This policy is also shown to reduce fetal deaths reported in early gestation with no similar reduction in late gestation: suggestive evidence that an alternative fertility control policy may reduce costly and dangerous illegal abortions.
Finally, I turn to the use of DD estimators as a policy-analysis tool. I discuss how such estimators perform in the case of reforms which may not be sharply demarcated to treatment and control clusters, but rather subject to local spillovers or externalities. I propose an extension of the typical DD estimator: a spillover-robust DD estimator. This methodology is applied to estimate the effect of two localised fertility control reforms in Mexico and Chile, where women close to treatment clusters who were not themselves subject to the reform may nonetheless travel to access treatment.
Treading the path of salvation: The religious devotion of Shaqiq al-Balkhi, al-Harith al-Muhasibi, and Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz
Keywords: Religious Devotion
Islamic Spirituality

In the early ninth century Muslim renunciants developed the metaphor of devotion to God is a path to teach their disciples how to cultivate virtues that would enable them to escape attachment to the world. Alongside these virtues were ascetic practices, sometimes extreme, that demonstrated their commitment to God. The earliest example of this renunciant path is the ascetic manual &Amacr;d&amacr;b al-'ib&amacr;d&amacr;t attributed to Shaq&imacr;q al-Balkh&imacr; (d. 198/809–10). Al-Ḥ&amacr;rith al-Muḥ&amacr;sib&imacr; (d. 243/857–8) took exception to exaggerated practices of Shaq&imacr;q's path and insisted that religious devotion must adhere to the commands God gave in the Quran and in the Sunna. Unique in the ninth century, Muḥ&amacr;sib&imacr; also insisted that God's commands were not limited to exterior actions, but included specific expectations of the interior dimension of religious devotion. Ab&umacr; Sa'&imacr;d al-Kharr&amacr;z (d. 277/890–91 or 286/899) expanded the renunciant path of Saq&imacr;q's followers, but also responded to Muḥ&amacr;sib&imacr;'s censure and softened the more extreme practices of the renunciant path. He was firmly committed to the interior dimension of religious devotion, but gave no indication that he accepted Muḥ&amacr;sib&imacr;'s insistence that these virtues were incumbent. Rather, he argues that the noblest expression of these virtues exists only among God's friends, whose religious devotion has its origin in the excellence of their primordial condition.
This thesis will introduce a conceptual hierarchy of religious devotion that facilitates the analysis and comparison of each of these authors. Current discussions of ninth-century Islamic piety are limited by inadequate definitions of asceticism and mysticism. A holistic approach to their religious devotion will provide tangible indicators of the ascetic or mystical orientation of their piety. This provides better parameters for discussing the relationship between asceticism and mysticism in the ninth century.
Social learning of a foraging task in great tits: Population patterns and underlying mechanisms
Keywords: Social learning
Great tit

Certain bottlenose dolphin pods forage using sponges, while a subset of Japanese macaque troops wash sweet potatoes. These are just some examples of group-level patterns of behaviour that could have arisen by social learning. Understanding the scale at which social learning acts to result in such traditions can be informative of underlying mechanisms. In addition, studying how social learning can influence the occurrence and distribution of behaviour over space and time enables a better understanding of how selection acts on populations. Thus, in this thesis, I investigate the role of social learning on spatiotemporal foraging patterns and the underlying mechanisms in wild great tits (Parus major). To do this, I employed both field and captive experiments to examine learning at experimentally introduced foraging tasks. I found individual and spatial variation in coarse and fine-scale techniques used to solve a bidirectional control procedure task. Social learning of fine-scale solving behaviours was focused on location rather than actions, suggesting fine-scale local enhancement. I also found that social learning influences temporal behavioural patterns, with learning individuals benefiting from the improving skill levels of demonstrators. This however, was masked at a local scale by competition. Temporal changes in behaviour were influenced by potential 'habit forming', with individuals acting to increase their foraging efficiency of preferred techniques rather than adopting more efficient techniques. Finally, results from a captive open diffusion experiment using a two-action task, though inconclusive, supported fine-scale local enhancement in great tits when foraging. This thesis highlights the importance of examining the impact of social learning on behavioural patterns at different scales. It also emphasises the need to examine not only how social learning influences novel skill acquisition and the distribution of behaviour in populations, but also how it influences temporal changes in behaviours already within the repertoire of individuals.
Apologies and damages: the moral demands of tort law as a reparative mechanism
Keywords: Restorative Justice
Apologies
Distributive Justice
Corrective Justice
Tort Law

This thesis seeks to justify on moral grounds the existence of tort systems. The argument is that corrective justice is necessary but not sufficient to succeed at this task. Corrective justice is necessary because it is the only principle that can adequately justify the bilateral structure of tort litigation between claimants and defendants, and full compensatory damages as the default remedy in most tort systems. However, it is argued that the critiques to corrective justice lead us to the important lesson that tort law is more than just corrective justice. Three gaps of corrective justice are identified: the equivalence between gains and losses, the definition of what counts as a tort, and the diversity of remedies.
The thesis offers a solution to these problems based on the values of restorative and distributive justice. It is argued that restorative justice plays an important role in tort law, providing an apologetic framework for material compensation (the message that money awards communicate), but especially for symbolic remedies, such as apologies, nominal damages, non-pecuniary damages, punitive damages, and gain-based damages, solving the diversity of remedies problem. This restorative framework of tort remedies is compatible with corrective justice. Distributive justice also plays an important role in tort law. Even though corrective and distributive justice are conceptually separate concepts, in the context of tort law they cannot be separated. It is argued that the definition of what counts as a tort involves a distributive task. Following this argument, the thesis argues that there is a distributive uneasiness in tort law, because tort law protects some interests regardless of how they were acquired, and regardless of whether their distribution amounts to an unfair distribution of resources. It is suggested that the distributive mechanism of insurance can solve, or at least ameliorate, this uneasiness.
Multilevel collocation with radial basis functions
Keywords: Radial Basis Functions
Numerical Analysis
Multilevel
Collocation
Approximation Theory

In this thesis, we analyse multilevel collocation methods involving compactly supported radial basis functions. We focus on linear second-order elliptic bound- ary value problems as well as Darcy's problem. While in the former case we use scalar-valued positive definite functions for constructing multilevel approximants, in the latter case we use matrix-valued functions that are automatically divergence-free. A similar result is presented for interpolating divergence-free vector fields. Even though it had been observed more than a decade ago that the stationary setting, i.e. when the support radii shrink as fast as the mesh norm, does not lead to convergence, it was up to now an open question how the support radii should depend on the mesh norm to ensure convergence. For each case above, we answer this question here thoroughly. Furthermore, we analyse and improve the stability of the linear systems. And lastly, we examine the case when the approximant does not lie in the same space as the solution to the PDE.