VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Encouraging growth in beginning mathematics
Keywords: MTEd
Mathematics
MTEd2016

This study explores the beliefs and practices of two beginning primary mathematics teachers participating in a short-term collaborative action research project. The aim of the project was to investigate how they asked questions, what kind of questions they asked and how they responded to children’s answers. It then investigated the impact of a short intervention that aimed to encourage growth in their questioning techniques, in particular growth in two of the domains of Clarke and Hollingsworth’s (2002) Interconnected model: their personal domain (knowledge and beliefs) and their domain of practice.
The study was carried out in a context where teachers generally have not participated in any pre-service education. The Ministry of Education curriculum and the approach to teaching and learning can be most accurately described as instrumentalist. The participating teachers work in a group of Egyptian schools where mathematics is taught through the medium of English. Improving the quality of classroom discourse is a priority for the owners of the group.
In the lessons before the intervention, questioning consisted predominantly of short, highly scaffolded testing questions asked of the whole class, with children ‘chorusing’ answers. Both teachers mostly reacted to children’s answers to acknowledge whether they were correct or incorrect or sometimes ignored incorrect answers. After the intervention the questioning was much more targeted. Both teachers asked considerably fewer testing questions and scaffolding was greatly reduced. There was qualitatively different discourse in the post-intervention lessons, with both teachers attempting to follow-up incorrect as well as correct answers and involve more children.
The study suggests that even a short intervention within this context can encourage growth in beginning teachers’ questioning techniques and highlights possible areas for further research and support.
Designing a teaching programme for student teachers of mathematics: A trigonometry case study
Keywords: MTEd2016
Mathematics
MTEd

This research investigated whether mathematics teacher education sessions on trigonometry which are planned, using the Knowledge Quartet (Rowland, Huckstep and Thwaites, 2005), develop the confidence of prospective teachers in their own ability to teach trigonometry.
The research was carried out in a Teaching School, which has a unique Schools Direct Mathematics programme, where the subject specific sessions are planned and delivered by two mathematics teachers working in the school. Through the use of an action research method it was found that mathematics teacher education sessions on trigonometry planned around the Knowledge Quartet improved the confidence of prospective teachers to teach trigonometry. This research goes onto to suggest that longitudinal research into the use of the Knowledge Quartet in planning teacher educational sessions would be the next intelligent step.
Atom probe tomography research on catalytic alloys and nanoparticles
Keywords: atom probe tomography
materials
nanoparticles

Catalyst is a key component in the chemical industry, with more than 90% of total chemical products reliant on their use. However, the working mechanisms are in many cases still not fully understood. For heterogeneous catalysts, in which the reactions normally occur on solid phase materials, a better understanding of the catalytic surfaces, and how they evolve under reactive environments is recognised as the next step forward in the field.
This work presents a study utilising atom probe tomography (APT), combined with an in-situ reaction cell, to understand the initial oxidation processes of catalytic NiFe and NiCo model alloy systems. In order to improve reliability of results, a protocol was developed to clean the sample surfaces by field ion evaporation, eliminate sample surface contamination before in-situ oxidation was then performed.
APT was successfully applied to these alloys to characterise oxide development as a function of exposure time and temperature. APT also demonstrated surface enrichment induced by oxide formation remained after reduction of the alloy. The successful application of APT on the model alloys led to the next goal which was to associate the data to real catalytic particles. To achieve this, work was extended into the field of nanoparticle catalysts.
Nanoparticles with similar compositions to the model alloys were fabricated by chemical synthesis and were examined initially by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The main goal of this phase was to investigate the surface segregation behaviour of the particles, identifying common behaviours with the model alloys. However, the presence of residual complex chemical environments around the particles following synthesis made APT analysis difficult. Therefore, an alternative method of particle fabrication was explored to better control the resulting materials for easier application of atom probe for nanoparticle analyses.
Metallic nanoparticles of Ag, AuCu, AuNi, and AuNiMo were made by an inert gas condensation method, deposited on suitable support materials and were subsequently analysed by APT, facilitated by an improved sample preparation method. Surface segregation on individual nanoparticles was detected. Together with other complementary surface-probing techniques, a complete understanding of these particles from micrometre down to the level of individual particles was achieved. The potential for APT is highlighted to play a key role in this approach to realise a complete understanding of the chemical order, microstructure in multimetallic nanoparticles designed for catalysis.
BLOCUL - an ethnography of a Romanian block of flats
Keywords: visual methods
urban anthropology
postsocialism

Based on a long-term ethnography inside a block of flats in Piatra-Neamț, Romania, this thesis explores how individuals, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, try to come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society — one caught between the vulnerabilities of both socialism and capitalism. It examines the inhabitants’ capacity for self-organization, with a focus on the daily life of a block administrator overseeing the maintenance and repair of his ageing building. By paying close attention to a range of infrastructural elements often taken for granted — from water taps and boilers, to balconies and windows — my research offers new insights into how people negotiate complex relationships of trust and suspicion in the light of degrading infrastructure. Within the context of increasingly decentralized resources, I also demonstrate various difficulties involved in sustaining day-to-day practices of energy-saving, and discuss the block inhabitants’ multifaceted understanding of the “common good”. Finally, I emphasize how apartment renovations are fuelled by motivations that are at once aesthetic and functional, and thus problematize the distinction between these two categories that has dominated anthropological studies of the built environment to this day. My thesis contrasts the well-established literature about the home — that pays attention to aesthetics and identity at the micro-scale of the domestic space — with recent studies about infrastructure that typically examine macro-scale, functional reasons for urban transformations. Overall, I argue for a more prominent role for the study of home infrastructures in anthropology, while also contributing to debates about housing and energy policies.
Expropriation, extraction, and evasion decisions in the design of taxation regimes for the natural resources industry
Keywords: Taxation
Political risk
Royalties
Multiple real option
Real options
Expropriation risk
Income shifting
Non-renewable resources

This dissertation provides three models pertaining expropriation and production decisions in the natural resources industries.
The first two chapters are intertwined: in these, the government relies on two tools to capture the rents from privately-owned Natural Resources Companies, a corporate income tax and the possibility of expropriating the assets. A real options model is used to assess the effect that progressiveness in taxation has on the political risk of a natural resources project.
In the first chapter, we discover that under certain conditions for the underlying commodity: –low prices or forward curves in backwardation– the introduction of an equivalent but more progressive tax regime decreases the political risk and the corresponding deadweight loss. However, when initial prices are too high or initial futures curves are in strong contango, the introduction of a progressive tax regime ends up significantly increasing the risks.
In the second chapter, producers are able to foresee the risks of expropriation and thus change their behaviour: the results are mixed. As in the previous case, with lower prices and less tendency to expropriate, the scheduling of production allows for gains in the value of the operation for the firms. More progressive tax regimes end up being detrimental to the government, which in some cases can even result in a non-stable equilibrium with the producers and governments trying to outguess each other and end up cycling both the production and the expropriation probability in order to maximise their respective expected value for the operations. This has a detrimental effect for all parties involved.
Finally, the third chapter introduces the possibility that a government levies royalties over sales. The development of home-based institutions is going to affect the amount of tax evasion that a government will face and thus determine the appropriate combination of taxes that it must choose. We find that when the host country's tax and technological capacity are too low, a state has no incentives to improve its institutions and becomes trapped in a low tax, low revenue situation: what we call a Royalty Trap. We end up by showing the evolution of tax capture in Chile during the 20th century to illustrate how these concepts might be applied.
Modelling the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of macromolecules for the treatment of wet AMD
Keywords: mathematical modelling
wet amd
PK/PD
IVT injection

Wet age related macular degeneration (wet AMD) is a highly debilitating retinal disease, the third leading cause of blindness in the world and one the most expensive ocular conditions to care for. Wet AMD is characterised by the proliferation of neovasculature through the retinal posterior and theorised to be, at least in part, induced and driven by excess vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Many current treatments for wet AMD utilise anti-VEGF macromolecules that bind to VEGF. The retina, however, remains a largely inaccessible, and delicate, anatomical region. Due to difficulties in collecting clinical and experimental data, mathematical modelling is playing an increasingly prominent role in understanding the distribution (Pharmacokinetics, PK) and drug-to-target interactions (Pharmacodynamics, PD) for treatments of wet AMD. This thesis will focus on ordinary/partial differential equation (ODE/PDE) models for the PK/PD of anti-VEGF therapeutics, administered via intravitreal (IVT) injection into the mammalian eye. We start in Chapter 2 with a 2-compartment PK/PD ODE model of drug-VEGF interactions in the eye, analysing a clinical dataset to estimate key binding parameters between VEGF and the typical anti-VEGF molecule, ranibizumab. In Chapter 3, we extend the PK ODE framework of the 2-compartment model to include a mechanistic description of the retina, to estimate retinal permeability to macromolecules used for treating wet AMD. In Chapter 4, using the retinal PK model, we reintroduce VEGF to predict concentrations of free VEGF in the retina post-IVT injection. Chapters 5 and 6 model a hypothetical class of anti-VEGF molecules designed to bind not only VEGF but also existing vitreal superstructures, analysing how dose and binding kinetics impact ocular retention. Alongside these models we present analogous PDE models, addressing whether the assumption that concentrations are homogeneous across anatomical regions, as implicit in ODE models, is appropriate for macromolecular PK/PD in the mammalian eye.
The synthesis and study of titanium amidinate complexes as olefin polymerisation catalysts
Keywords: reactivity studies
postmetallocene catalysis

This Thesis is concerned with the synthesis of post-metallocene group 4 amidinate complexes as pre-catalysts for the polymerisation and oligomerisation of α-olefins. Activation of half-sandwich group 4 amidinate complexes with 1,3-conjugated dienes is also investigated and their underlying chemistry is explored.
Chapter 1 introduces homogeneous Ziegler-Natta catalysis, with a specific focus on group 4 compounds. A review of metallocene and post-metallocene complexes of group 4 will also be presented and their behaviour in olefin polymerisation will be discussed.
Chapter 2 describes the synthesis and characterisation of k1-amidinate supported titanium complexes. Base-free activation of the titanium cyclopentadienyl-amidinate dialkyl complexes will be investigated and the resulting cationic species will be further explored with commonly applied trapping agents. The synthesis and characterisation of new titanium cyclopentadienyl-amidinate diene complexes and their corresponding tri(pentafluorophenyl)borane-activated zwitterionic compounds will also be described and their performance in the co-polymerisation of ethylene and propylene will be discussed.
Chapter 3 explores the addition of 1,3-conjugated diene reagents to titanium cyclopentadienyl-amidinate and guanidinate alkyl cations. Mechanistic and computational studies of allyl and diene formation will also be described. The polymerisation capabilities of the newly formed complex will be discussed and compared to previously reported dialkyl complexes.
Chapter 4 describes the synthesis and characterisation of aminopyridinato titanium complexes and k1-k2-bis(amidinate) titanium complexes. The activation chemistry of the newly formed dialkyl complexes will be investigated. Furthermore, the synthesis of a new bis(aminopyridinato) titanium complex will also be discussed alongside their activity in EPM and EPDM polymerisation.
Chapter 5 describes the performance of the aminopyridinato titanium complexes (synthesised in Chapter 4) in EPDM polymerisation. The sensitivity of the aforementioned complexes towards hindered phenols will also be discussed and their behaviour in ethylene oligomerisation will be explored.
Chapter 6 presents full experimental procedures and characterising data for the new complexes reported in this Thesis.
Peptidoglycan recycling in the Gram-positive bacterium Staphylococcus aureus and its role in host-pathogen interaction
Keywords: infection
staphyloccus aureus
aminosugar recycling
host-pathogen interaction
virulence
bacterial cell wall
peptidoglycan turnover
peptidoglycan hydrolase
peptidoglycan recycling

Bacteria are enclosed by a peptidoglycan sacculus, an exoskeleton-like polymer composed of glycan strands cross-linked by short peptides. The sacculus surrounds the cell in a closed bag-like structure and forms the main structural component of the bacterial cell wall. As bacteria grow and divide, cell wall remodelling by peptidoglycan hydrolases results in the release of peptidoglycan fragments from the sacculus. In Gram-negative bacteria, these fragments are efficiently trapped and recycled. Gram-positive bacteria however shed large quantities of peptidoglycan fragments into the environment. For nearly five decades, Gram-positive bacteria were thus assumed not to recycle peptidoglycan and this process has remained enigmatic until recently. In this thesis, the occurrence and physiological role of peptidoglycan recycling in the Gram-positive pathogen Staphylococcus aureus was investigated. S. aureus is an important pathogen, and is becoming increasingly resistant to many antibiotics. Through bioinformatic and experimental means it was determined that S. aureus may potentially recycle components of peptidoglycan and novel peptidoglycan recycling components were identified and characterised. Though disruption of putative peptidoglycan recycling in S. aureus appears not affect growth or gross morphology of this bacterium, potential roles for peptidoglycan recycling in cell wall homeostasis and in virulence were identified. This is to my knowledge the first demonstration of a potential role of peptidoglycan recycling in either of these aspects of bacterial physiology in any Gram-positive bacterium. This is an important step forward in understanding the basic biology of Gram-positive bacteria, and in understanding the mechanisms of virulence in S. aureus. Future study of this process in S. aureus and other Gram-positive bacteria promises to reveal yet further facets of this process and its functions, potentially leading to the identification of novel therapeutic approaches to combat infections.
Secular assemblages: affect, Orientalism, and power in the French enlightenment
Keywords: Descartes
Enlightenment
Holbach
Islam
The secular
Race
Montesquieu
Voltaire
Postsecularism
Charles Taylor
Secularism

Taking Saba Mahmood’s question ‘Can secularism be other-wise?’ (2010) as the starting point for a critical-historical investigation of the ‘secular body’ (Asad 2003; Hirschkind 2011), my thesis develops in two stages. In the first, I argue that current works of secular theory—particularly A Secular Age (Taylor 2007)—tend to rely on an excessively rationalistic conception of Enlightenment thought for the construction of their central conceptual categories (e.g. the ‘immanent frame’, ‘buffered self’, or ‘modern exclusive humanism’), thus reinforcing a double-binary linking rationality to Euro-American secularity, and emotion to subaltern ‘religion’. Against Taylor and others, I emphasise the contradictory, ‘assembled’ nature of Enlightenment discourse, and point to alternative, more body-centred strands of thought in key figures of the seventeenth-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, such as Descartes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, and Holbach. Against common perceptions, and drawing on a range of philosophical works, institutional reports, and stage plays in French and in translation, I suggest these figures in some ways reinstated emotion and the body against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. Insofar as ‘the secular’ was shaped by the Enlightenment, it emerged out of a conscious project of nationalist cultivation, based fundamentally on manipulating the body and emotions.
In the second stage, I consider the way Orientalist representations of non-Western religions meshed with prevalent theories of political manipulation to generate an affective system of anti-Catholic propaganda geared towards the national good. Though existing critiques of Taylor tend to focus on the importance of religious (i.e. Christian) constructions of Oriental religions for the genealogy of secularity (e.g. Mahmood 2010), I suggest a distinctively secular form of Orientalism emerged in the eighteenth century, in which anti-religion, racism, and nationalism merged into a powerful weapon of republican discourse, congruent with ambient theories of emotion. The aesthetic manipulation of racist and Orientalist tropes in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) and Voltaire’s Le Fanatisme (1741), for example, can be read as a practical response to existing theory on the power of images to regulate people’s passions in the national interest.
The three-dimensional regulatory landscapes of the globin genes
Keywords: Chromosome structure and organisation
Globin
Gene regulation
Genetics

One of the most important outstanding questions in biology involves the precise spatial and temporal regulation of gene activity, which enables different cell types to express the specific set of genes required for their function and is therefore a cornerstone for complex biological life. Cis-regulatory elements, such as gene promoters and enhancers, play a key role in controlling gene activity. These elements physically interact with the genes they regulate within structural chromatin domains. The organisation of chromosomes into these domains is critical for specific regulation of gene expression and disruption of these structures underlies common human disease. However, it is not understood how chromatin domains form, how interactions between the cis-regulatory elements contained within them are established, or how such interactions influence gene expression.
The major hurdles in addressing these questions are to determine chromatin structures with high resolution and sensitivity and to examine their dynamic nature within single cells. To overcome these, I have developed Tri-C, a new chromosome conformation capture assay that can analyse concurrent chromatin interactions at single alleles at high resolution. By combining Tri-C with conventional chromosome conformation capture techniques, I have analysed the three-dimensional regulatory landscapes of the well-characterised murine globin loci at unprecedented depth. Additionally, to examine the roles of cis-regulatory elements in establishing chromatin architecture, I have analysed how engineered deletions in enhancers and CTCF-binding elements in the murine alpha-globin locus disrupt its chromatin landscape.
These analyses reveal that the chromatin domains containing the globin genes represent compartmentalised structures, which are delimited by CTCF boundaries. The heterogeneity of interactions in these domains between individual cells is indicative for a dynamic process of loop extrusion underlying their formation. Within chromatin domains, preferential structures are formed in which multiple enhancers and promoters interact simultaneously. These complexes provide a structural basis for understanding how multiple cis-regulatory elements cooperate to establish robust regulation of gene expression. Importantly, these complex, tissue-specific structures, cannot be explained by loop extrusion alone and indicate other, independent mechanisms contributing to chromosome architecture, likely involving interactions mediated by multi-protein complexes. Together, these analyses show that the current view of genome organisation, in which chromosomes are organised by stable loops and domains that self-assemble into hierarchical structures, is not correct. Rather, chromatin architecture reflects a complex interplay between distinct molecular mechanisms contributing to the formation of regulatory landscapes that facilitate precise, robust control of gene expression.