VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in applied microeconomics
Keywords: Minimum wage
Political economy
Incentives
Equity plans
Public choice
Firm monopsony power
Estate tax
Random search
CEO pay

This thesis is made of three chapters. In Chapter 1 I investigate some of the potential effects of the interaction between minimum wages and job frictions on labour market outcomes in the UK. In a random search model with wage-posting and productivity dispersion across firms, under certain conditions, an increase in the minimum wage has stronger effects on separations between firms and workers facing relatively higher frictions than on separations between firms and workers facing relatively lower frictions. In this chapter, I test this prediction within two separate empirical settings, using two sources of UK data. I find some evidence that employment transitions of "high-friction" workers respond more strongly relative to the "low-friction" group’s.
In Chapter 2 I analyse voting behaviour of US House Democrats on two separate bills aimed at permanently repealing or reforming the estate tax. Existing analyses of politicians’ voting behaviour are consistent with a framework in which voting decisions result from the competing influences of politicians’ own ideology and interests, special interests, and the interests of their constituents. Recent analyses of roll-call votes in the US Congress suggest that local interests are more likely to influence political decisions when the issues at hand are prominent and when the stakes associated with them are clear. Making use of data on representatives’ wealth and personal characteristics, I am able to assess whether their private interests influence their voting behaviour. Further, I use data on campaign contributions and advertising, characteristics of electoral constituents, and measures of politicians’ ideology. My results confirm the predictive power of ideology and campaign contributions found elsewhere in the literature. I am not able to find clear evidence that local interests had an influence on voting behaviour. Finally, I find no evidence that politicians’ own wealth had an influence on their voting behaviour.
Chapter 3 is co-authored with Brian Bell and John Van Reenen. In this paper, we investigate whether moving to relative performance contracts has improved the alignment between CEO pay and performance. To address this, we use an original dataset on CEO contracts for almost 500 publicly listed UK companies. We find that pay responds more strongly to increases in firm performance than to decreases, and that this asymmetry is present only in weakly governed firms. Further, we find that CEO pay is still linked to positive random industry shocks. This result is due to the fact that failing awards in weakly governed firms are redesigned in ways that reduce the risks attached to them for the CEOs. These findings suggest that reforms to the formal structure of CEO pay contracts are unlikely to align incentives in the absence of strong shareholder governance.
Liberal organic democracy: a politics of active citizenship
Keywords: Wittgenstein
Hobson
New Liberal
Organic Democracy
Meaningful Democracy
Democratic Theory

This thesis outlines a new theory of democracy – Liberal Organic Democracy – that recovers the dynamic understanding of popular self-rule developed in the work of New Liberal theorists, and reconstructs it on much firmer philosophical foundations. It reframes the New Liberal principle of democratic self-realisation within a Wittgensteinian theory of language- and concept-use. And it advances an organic model of democracy grounded in the everyday practice of following a rule.
Early chapters of the thesis endeavour to reclaim New Liberal democratic thought from its current obscurity. The first chapter offers a detailed analysis of the ‘organic’ model of political development that shaped New Liberal demands for constitutional reform. Thereafter, the second chapter advances a new interpretation of Hobson’s democratic thought, acknowledging its theoretical limitations, while extolling the organic social ontology that grounds Hobson’s model of democracy in a framework of political engagement.
Subsequent chapters reframe this organic social ontology within a comprehensive philosophy of meaning. The third chapter begins the process of theoretical reconstruction by outlining a Wittgensteinian theory of rule-following practice. The fourth chapter maps the theory onto the normative claim that ‘every agent should have the opportunity to be understood’. And the fifth chapter illustrates the importance of the rule-following norm for politics, arguing that social development is defined by a holistic process of self-realisation.
The final chapters of the thesis apply this argument to political thought. The sixth chapter identifies three political characteristics that follow from the rule-following norm, and grounds meaningful democracy in a model of active citizenship. And the seventh chapter gestures towards a loose institutional framework for meaningful democratic rule. This theoretical model aims to democratise the development of political concepts: to uncover the holistic processes driving political engagement, and to demonstrate how they can be harnessed to the principle of democratic self-realisation.
The dual influence of tumour hypoxia on the activity of a group B oncolytic adenoviurs
Keywords: Adenovirus
Hypoxia
Oncolytic virus

Many oncolytic adenoviruses are in clinical development for the treatment of solid tumours and Enadenotucirev (EnAd), a chimeric group B adenovirus, is one leading candidate. Little is known about its activity in hypoxic regions, a feature present in virtually all solid carcinomas and well known to confer resistance to traditional therapies. Hypoxia may account for the long term persistence of adenovirus in tumours and incomplete tumour coverage, as intratumoral and even intravenous virus delivery may expose viruses to hypoxia due to perfusion changes in the tumour vasculature. We set out to define how hypoxia influences EnAd’s oncolytic activity through an in-depth analysis of the viral infection in cancer cells, its dissemination to bystander cells in hypoxic conditions in vitro, and characterisation of virus dissemination in animal tumour models. Work in this thesis showed that hypoxia in vitro actually boosts expression of virus early and late gene products leading to increased production of infectious virus (2 to 12-fold). It also increases expression of virus-encoded biotherapeutic agents. The mechanism appears to involve hypoxia specific over-expression of the immediate-early gene E1A, and we provide evidence that a hypoxia responsive element within the promoter of this key viral gene could be induced in a HIF 2α dependent fashion. Nevertheless, in conditions involving cell-to-cell spread in vitro, this ability of hypoxic cancer cells to produce greater number of virus particles is masked, due to poor paracellular spread reflecting the presence, or absence, of a factor smaller than 5 kilodaltons, yet to be characterised. We also assessed the impact of hypoxia in vivo by combining EnAd with atovaquone, a mitochondrial Complex-III inhibitor that reduces the cellular oxygen consumption rate, thereby alleviating hypoxia in tumours. Oral atovaquone treatment, which does not increase virus production in vitro, led to an unprecedented increase of tumoural viral spread while significantly reducing the hypoxic fraction, suggesting that hypoxia could be a key therapeutic barrier. In conclusion, hypoxia boosts the oncolytic activity of adenoviruses, but can inhibit intercellular spread. The overall impact of hypoxia upon the success of oncolytic adenovirus therapy will likely rely on the balance of improved expression of virus-encoded therapeutics, anti-tumour effects of pro inflammatory (antiviral) signalling, and limited viral spread.
Interpreting noun compounds
Keywords: Noun compounds
Natural language processing
Computational linguistics

Noun compounds, which are sequences of nouns functioning as a single noun, are abundant in both written and spoken English and their interpretation is crucial for many natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation or information retrieval. Therefore there is significant ongoing interest in their interpretation. Although it is an easy task for humans, it is rather challenging for computers.
The interpretation of a noun compound can be given with a list of suitable paraphrases that are ranked according to their aptness, where the paraphrases can be verbs and prepositions. The aim of this dissertation is to develop methods that can automatically interpret two-noun noun compounds by paraphrases using large corpora. A general paraphrasing method is proposed that searches for paraphrases in static corpora, and uses Web search engine queries to validate results. Furthermore, a method for the SemEval-2 Task #9 is developed from the validation part of the general paraphrasing method.
The results of the general paraphrasing method were evaluated by human judges; based on their aptness for the noun compound, the first three paraphrases returned for each noun compound were given a score between 1 and 5 by each judge. The paraphrases ranked first, second and third by the method proposed here received average scores of 3.1842, 2.7687 and 2.5583, respectively. Further, when comparing the returned paraphrase distribution for each noun compound with the judges’ distributions, it achieved an average Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.3108, an average Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.2738 and an average Kullback-Leibler divergence of 0.1589. The method for the SemEval-2 Task #9 was evaluated with the scorer provided for the task, on the test data set, by calculating the similarity of the returned paraphrase distribution for each noun compound with a gold standard. It achieved an average Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.3387, an average Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.3196 and an average Kullback-Leibler divergence of 4.1520.
Madness, medicine, and religious identity in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world
Keywords: American History
Illness Narratives
History of Religion
History of Evangelicalism
Atlantic History
British History
History of Psychiatry
History of Madness
History of Medicine
Religious Experience
History of the Emotions
Insane Asylums

This thesis explores the experience, interpretation and treatment of religious beliefs and behaviours that were considered ‘mad’ in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Challenging historiographical emphases upon a secularising transition in the long eighteenth century, it argues that there was considerable overlap between the religious beliefs and values of the people who were deemed religiously insane and the people who confined and treated them. Nevertheless, for various reasons—theological, therapeutic and socioeconomic—medical approaches to religious insanity developed in ways that undermined patients’ religious identities. In addition to tracing these medical developments, this thesis looks at how the ‘religiously insane’ used theological ideas and narrative strategies to challenge the theoretical underpinnings of nineteenth-century psychological medicine. Chapter One uses the writings of an alleged madwoman whose religious activism spanned British and American contexts to highlight key differences between cultures of religious madness across the Atlantic world. It emphasises the greater degree of latitude for religious deviance that was permitted within the revivalist cultures of the Second Great Awakening in America. Chapter Two looks comparatively at the autobiographical writings of two people—one British and the other American—who were confined to asylums for religious insanity. It contrasts the social and economic factors that led to their marginalisation as religious lunatics to the theological meanings they attached to their own madness and exclusion. Chapter Three explores practices of pastoral care, demonstrating the ways in which evangelical ministers integrated medicine and theology as a means of preserving the contentious emotional and psychological features of evangelical interiority. Chapter Four explores, in turn, the treatment of religious ‘enthusiasts’ in insane asylums. It argues that the religious identities of patients were negated as a consequence of the theological and philosophical considerations which shaped psychological medicine in the early stages of professionalisation. Chapter Five looks at how the ‘religiously insane’ interpreted their own experiences. It argues that their spiritual experiences, their marginalisation as mad-people, and their engagement with contemporary medical ideas underpinned a unique and potent challenge to the authority of psychological medicine.
The school magazine in Victorian England
Keywords: manuscript culture
history of childhood
girls' education
periodicals
school magazines
girlhood
history of education
boys' education
peer culture
boyhood

This thesis is the first detailed study of a neglected source: the school magazine. Most studies of secondary schools argue that the ideals and lifestyles of adult editors, teachers and parents defined a new cohesive middle class in nineteenth-century England, seeing pupils in terms of their conformity or rebellion to adult society. Yet this study traces middle-class ideals back to secondary schools which nurtured rich and lively youth cultures. School magazine production boomed from the mid nineteenth century, with hundreds of school magazines established across England, which remains a rich yet untapped body of periodical material. This thesis uses the archives of four secondary schools, containing an astonishing seventy-two magazines in total — alongside other pupil writings, and associational and institutional documents — to gain an insider’s view of social, cultural and educational developments in the lives of middle-class English youths. It analyses new ideals of youth and collective identity which were negotiated in magazines written and produced in schools and then circulated to create expansive educational networks across England, Britain, and the British Empire. The analysis reveals conformity and rebellion as too stark to account for a new youth-driven dynamic which was shaping middle-class ideals and lifestyles long before the turbulent youth cultures of the 1960s. In addition, the thesis argues that the school magazine was shaped by youths’ denominational, gendered, classed, local, and ethnic identities, complicating the picture of a cohesive middle class. By uncovering these youth-driven currents of social and cultural change, this thesis makes a substantial contribution to histories of print culture, education, and youth in the nineteenth century. It also challenges assumptions that all youths were passive witnesses or recipients of adult ideals by uncovering middle-class English teenagers as key beneficiaries and proponents of broader changes to culture, class, and imperialism.
Tweeting Islamophobia
Keywords: twitter
social media
political parties
islamophobia
prejudice
uk politics
hate speech
online harm

The great promise of social media platforms such as Twitter is to connect people separated across time and space. This has had far-ranging consequences for politics by changing discursive, participative and organisational practices. However, despite much early techno-optimism about platforms like Twitter, concerns are growing that they enable harmful, hateful and divisive behaviours. In this thesis, I focus on one of the most concerning and harmful behaviours on Twitter and in politics more broadly: Islamophobic hate speech. The socio-political consequences of hate speech are deeply concerning, and include causing harm to targeted victims, spreading divisiveness, and normalizing dangerous and extremist ideas.
The aim of this thesis is to enhance our understanding of the nature and dynamics of Islamophobic hate speech amongst followers of UK political parties on Twitter. I study four parties from across the political spectrum: the BNP, UKIP, the Conservatives and Labour. I make three main contributions. First, I define Islamophobia in terms of negativity and generality, thus making a robust, theoretically-informed contribution to the study of a deeply contested concept. This argument informs the second contribution, which is methodological: I create a multi-class supervised machine learning classifier for Islamophobic hate speech. This distinguishes between weak and strong varieties and can be applied robustly and at scale.
My third contribution is theoretical. Drawing together my substantive findings, I argue that Islamophobic tweeting amongst followers of UK parties can be characterised as a wind system which contains Islamophobic hurricanes. This analogy captures the complex, heterogeneous dynamics underpinning Islamophobia on Twitter, and highlights its devastating effects. I also show that Islamist terrorist attacks drive Islamophobia, and that this affects followers of all four parties studied here. I use this finding to extend the theory of cumulative extremism beyond extremist groups to include individuals with mainstream affiliations. These contributions feed into ongoing academic, policymaking and activist discussions about Islamophobic hate speech in both social media and UK politics.
Higher linear algebra in topology and quantum information theory
Keywords: quantum graph isomorphism
monoidal 2-category
group of central type
biunitary
noncommutative graph
quantum pseudo-telepathy
4-manifold invariant
unitary error basis
state-sum
topological field theory
graphical calculus
quantum information
categorification
fusion category

We investigate categorifications of linear algebra, and their applications to the construction of 4-manifold invariants, to the construction of a variety of linear algebraic structures in quantum information theory, and to the classification of certain instances of `quantum pseudo-telepathy', a phenomenon in quantum physics where two non-communicating parties can use pre-shared entanglement to perform tasks classically impossible without communicating.
This thesis is divided into four chapters, closely following arXiv:1812.11933, arXiv:1609.07775, and arXiv:1801.09705.
In the first chapter, we introduce semisimple 2-categories, fusion 2-categories and spherical fusion 2-categories. We prove that every finite semisimple 2-category is the 2-category of finite semisimple module categories of a multifusion category, and give examples of fusion 2-categories.
In the second chapter, we construct, for each spherical fusion 2-category, a state-sum invariant of oriented singular piecewise-linear 4-manifolds, and show that these invariants generalize various previous 4-manifold invariants, including the Crane-Yetter invariant and a recent invariant of Cui.
In the third chapter, we use biunitary connections in the 2-category of 2-Hilbert spaces to generate many new construction schemes for linear algebraic quantities of relevance to quantum information, including complex Hadamard matrices and unitary error bases, and we use these techniques to construct a unitary error basis which cannot be built using any previously known method.
In the fourth chapter, we classify quantum isomorphic graphs in terms of Morita equivalence classes of algebras in certain monoidal categories, give examples of such algebras arising from groups of central type, and discuss various applications to the study of quantum pseudo-telepathy in the graph isomorphism game.
Structural studies of icosahedral viruses
Keywords: Protein Structure
Geminivirus
Cell Penetration
Maize Streak Virus
Icosahedral VIruses
Bluetongue Virus

Described as “organisms at the edge of life”, viruses are the most abundant type of biological entity that can infect all types of life forms and are found in almost every ecosystem on Earth. Although virus capsids can be found with a wide range of shapes, around half of the virus families have an icosahedral arrangement. This thesis mainly focuses on structural studies of proteins from two types of viruses: the VP5 protein of Bluetongue Virus (BTV) serotype 15, and the capsid protein (CP) of Maize Streak Virus (MSV) (the Nigerian strain).
Bluetongue (BT) disease in ruminates is caused by BTV and is of important agricultural and economic impact. As one of the two proteins that comprise the outer capsid of the virus, VP5 has been shown to play an important role in membrane penetration. I describe structures of BTV VP5, at both high and low pH, both solved by X-ray crystallography to atomic resolution. These provide insights into the membrane penetration process for a non-enveloped virus at the molecular level. An atomic level mechanism of pH dependant conformation changes was revealed, including a re-arrangement of 3 bent helices into one long straight helix protruding out of the molecule, and a transformation from a β-sheet to an α-helix. The significant change due to the movement of the helix of the so-called unfurling domain could be caused by a conformation change of H386 pushing the conserved E316 residue in the so-called beam helix, α12, which contacts the anchoring domain. Our low pH structure fits well into the low pH cryo-EM image, clarifying the observed protruding density.
Geminiviruses cause diseases in various plants, leading to great economic loss. MSV is the type member of genus Mastrevirus of the family Geminiviridae. The MSV capsid is composed of a single protein, termed, CP. Infectious virus particle capsids are generally constructed from two incomplete T=1 icosahedra, joined to form a so-called geminated viral particle of dimensions 220 x 380 Å with a fivefold symmetry axis coincident with the long axis, so that the CPs are arranged with quasi-icosahedral symmetry. The MSV VLP (single icosahedral particles) and the geminated MSV virion structures were solved to resolutions of 9.5 Å and 7.4 Å, respectively, by cryo-EM. A localized reconstruction method was used in the processing procedure in the geminated MSV virion structure by treating each half of the geminated particle (one incomplete icosahedral half) as a new single particle. These structures revealed structural information about the virus and help our understanding of the assembly of geminiviruses. The MSV geminated virus particles are characterized by a twinned icosahedral capsid with distorted peripentonal pentamers and equatorial pentamers observed by us, and a 12˚ offset between the two halves of the particle.