VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
An investigation into the interaction of dopamine and glutamate in behaviours relevant to schizophrenia
Keywords: Dopamine
Glutamate
Schizophrenia

Aberrant dopaminergic activity is widely believed to underlie at least some of the symptoms seen in schizophrenia. This belief is partly based on all currently used antipsychotics antagonising the dopaminergic D2 receptor. However, there is less agreement on what causes this aberrant dopamine activity. One candidate is a glutamatergic change upstream of the dopamine system. I investigated this glutamate theory of schizophrenia by examining the effect of glutamatergic manipulations on the dopamine system during behaviours relevant to schizophrenia in rodents.
One of these manipulations consisted of systemic injections of the putative antipsychotic LY354740, a group II metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist. This revealed that the effect of LY354740 on the dopamine system was apparently dependent on the internal state of the animal. Even though it is proposed as a putative antipsychotic, LY354740 could actually enhance phasic dopamine responses to reward in the nucleus accumbens core as measured by fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FCV). Furthermore, at least under some circumstances, LY354740 appeared to exacerbate behavioural effects of amphetamine.
The second manipulation of the glutamate system consisted of a knockout of the GluA1 glutamatergic AMPA-receptor subunit in mice. These GluA1 KO mice displayed deficits in short-term memory and hyperactivity which may reflect an aberrant salience phenotype which could be relevant to schizophrenia. The group II metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist, LY354740, could ameliorate the hyperactivity but failed to rescue the cognitive, short-term memory deficits in a test of spatial working memory.
The phenotype of GluA1 KO mice was further investigated using FCV in tasks relevant to schizophrenia. These experiments showed that GluA1 KO mice exhibited a hyperdopaminergic phenotype. They had increased phasic dopamine responses to neutral stimuli which were slower to habituate. They also exhibited increased dopamine signals to reward delivery in an instrumental conditioning task. In a simple Pavlovian conditioning task, however, they did not show increased phasic dopamine responses.
In summary, two very different glutamatergic interventions relevant to schizophrenia could, under certain circumstances, increase phasic dopamine responses in tasks relevant to schizophrenia. This gives additional evidence for a role of glutamate in schizophrenia.
An evaluation of three national high school English textbooks in Vietnam from a global Englishes language teaching perspective
Keywords: Global Englishes
Vietnam
textbooks
World English
GELT
assessment
Engligh as a Lingua Franca
ELF

This dissertation evaluated how successfully the English textbook series for grade 10, 11, and 12 in Vietnam helps prepare high school students to use English to communicate in an international and global context. Adopting the Global Englishes for Language Teaching framework (Rose & Galloway, 2019), this dissertation analysed English norms used in audio recordings and texts, origins of interlocutors categorized in the Kachruvian system, visual representations of characters in skin tones, and traces of multilingualism and translanguaging. The findings revealed a strong dominance of British English norms (and to a much lesser extent, American English norms) and an overrepresentation of characters with light skin tones. Data also indicated positive portrayals of Vietnamese characters as interlocutors and proficient users of English. Importantly, the dissertation included an in-depth interview with one participant deeply involved in the design of the textbook series. It provided some recommendations for textbook designers and teachers in the conclusion.
Prioritising feature representations in visual working memory
Keywords: eeg
short-term memory
working memory
memory
supervised learning
decoding
meg
perception
attention
cognitive neuroscience

Representations of our external environment and of our internal memories together guide our awareness and actions. While large numbers of features and objects from the boundless external environment compete for sensory processing, working memory capacity is highly limited. Though extracting and integrating features into relevant objects are major objectives of perception, feature integration and well separated object representations may be basic characteristics of working memory. As discussed in Chapter 1, attentional selection of both external and internal content is pivotal, but its workings may differ according to the distinct representational formats. This thesis investigates how attention prioritises feature information in working memory to guide future actions. To test my hypotheses, I design and conduct behavioural studies, analyse neurophysiological recordings, and apply computational modelling. My empirical findings describe two main ways through which feature representations in working memory can be modulated: through goal-related prioritisation and through interacting with lingering sensory history. Chapters 2 and 4 describe tasks in which internally maintained information can be prioritised based on task demands. They demonstrate prioritisation of items and feature dimensions during working-memory delays, as well as the ability to protect and update features during maintenance. Chapter 4 also outlines how stimulus history modulates sensory processing and interacts with goal-based influences. Sensory content from same-trial or previous-trial information exerts opposing systematic performance biases. Applying neural decoding methods that I develop in Chapter 3, I reveal in Chapter 4 that both same-trial and previous-trial sensory history generates a repulsive neural bias at encoding, modulated by task relevance of previous stimuli. The findings suggest that other biases at post-perceptual stages may also contribute to the final opposing biases in performance. Taken together, the studies in the thesis extend our understanding of how visual feature information in working memory can be modulated and prioritised to serve future behaviour adaptively.
Strategic litigation in South Africa: understanding and evaluating impact
Keywords: impact of litigation
South Africa
socio-legal studies
state capture
constitutional law
economic, social and cultural rights
public interest litigation
legal mobilisation
right to education
strategic litigation

This Thesis analyses the impact of strategic litigation in South Africa, being litigation that concerns interests beyond the immediate parties and pursues generally forward-looking goals involving social change. Part I develops an analytical and evaluative framework to assess impact and its value. Part II applies that framework to two case studies concerning litigation on the right to education and the appointment and removal of government officials.
I situate strategic litigation in the litigation process, considering the models and forms that it may take and the range of remedies that may result from it. The analytical framework identifies the type, temporality, people affected and reach of impact as its main dimensions, and, in respect of type, proposes a typology of legal, material and political impact to analyse the effects of strategic litigation. Recognising that litigation in South Africa takes place in a constitutional context, the Thesis proposes the values of social justice, democracy and the rule of law as a normative framework to evaluate the effects of strategic litigation.
In Part II, this analytical and evaluative framework is applied to two case studies. The first case study concerns six streams of litigation to compel government to provide certain educational inputs, including infrastructure, textbooks, furniture, teachers and scholar transport. The second case study, arising in the context of the phenomenon of ‘state capture’, considers litigation seeking to remove allegedly unfit officials from key state institutions and to compel the appointment of suitable persons.
The conclusion to the Thesis consolidates insights from across the case studies, ultimately arguing that the South African litigation environment is generally conducive to strategic litigation and that, given adequate litigation resources and appropriate litigation decisions, strategic litigation in South Africa is capable of contributing to significant legal, material and political impact and therefore to social change.
Technology, information, and the governance of environmental risk
Keywords: earth observation
environmental risk
machine learning
solar energy
sustainable finance

This DPhil is motivated by the impact that public data can have on the practise of sustainable finance. Disclosure guidance for environmental information is increasingly being used to compel companies to better manage their environmental risk exposure and environmental impacts. Data-driven technologies can ‘unravel’ company information related to environmental risk and are changing the information asymmetries between company managers, their investors, and society.
Three novel and rigorous data science papers have been prepared which provide new access to company environmental risk information. The first paper develops a global inventory of photovoltaic solar energy facilties using machine learning and earth observation and then uses this dataset to assess land cover impacts due to renewable energy siting decisions. The second paper develops asset-level data arrangements of the coal, oil, and gas supply chains, and identifies concentrations of environmental transition risk in the complex network topology. The third paper advances earth observation and computer vision technical methods, assessing the power of these techniques for producing company asset-level data even with limited training data.
In developing these papers, this DPhil has identified the opportunities and limits that technology might have in the provision of information for public and private governance of environmental risk and impact. These limits add clarity to the role that policy must play in meeting the diverse information needs of both company shareholders and stakeholders. A discussion chapter provides commentary on these limits; on how the needs of both shareholders and stakeholders can be met with company risk disclosure at the asset-level; and how innovation might be fostered in markets for environmental information. Policy recommendations are summarised and an agenda for further research is provided.
The history of Thessaly, 1266-1393
Keywords: history
Greece
Byzantine empire
Thessaly
Byzantium

The history and historical geography of medieval Thessaly (Vlachia) is a subject which has recently been established by two monographs, but which both in conception and in detail must still be approached independently and through the primary sources.
Thessaly is an area of transition between the continental Balkans and the Aegean world, both climatically and as an 'antechamber' to central and southern Greece. It is a land of great contrasts: broad, level, end fertile lowlands surrounded by rugged and massive mountains; and a long” coast encompassing a large expanse of sheltered water, the Pagasitic Gulf. It thus provides, equal opportunities for transhumant nomad pastoralism, for agriculture, and for maritime commerce, and its history may be viewed in terms of an interraction between these three economic occupations, which could give rise to very different kinds of society. In the High and Later medieval periods the differentiation was especially sharp both in degree of social sophistication and in ethnic and political terms.
Maritime commerce was in the hands of the Italian traders, who with the Jews seem to have monopolised the only 'bourgeois' settlement for which there is evidence - Almyros.
As transhumant nomads, only the Vlachs and the Albanians are mentioned. Both groups reached Thessaly as a result of extensive migration, the Vlachs in the Middle Byzantine period and the Albanians in the 14th century. They appear to have been based in the mountains, particularly to the west in the Pindos chain , an extension of the more northerly mountain blocs where most of their races lived. . They were generally hostile to the plain-dwellers and resentful of government control; their migrations seem to have been connected with the expansion of Balkan rivals of the Byzantine empire. However, the transhumants' need for winter pasture in the lowlands gave them an important point of contact with civilised society, which valued their produce and their military potential. The local rulers of the 13th and 14th centuries who most successfully maintained their political independence seem to have cooperated with their Vlach and Albanian subjects.
Continued in thesis ...
Developing translational tools for measuring pain in neonates
Keywords: EEG
neonatal
clinical trials
neuroimaging
analgesic interventions
pain

Despite the high burden of pain experienced by hospitalised neonates, there are few analgesics with proven efficacy. In part, this is due to the lack of a gold standard to measure pain in neonates. Assessing a complex experience like pain is challenging and, in the absence of self-report, all indicators of pain are surrogate measures. Clinicians often rely on behavioural and autonomic physiological responses which can be subjective and have limited sensitivity and specificity to detect pain. The pain experience requires the nociceptive signal to be processed in the brain. From a very young age, infants have the basic neural functional connectivity for pain perception. Thus, brain activity may provide a quantitative and objective measure of nociceptive processing in the infant brain.
Noxious-evoked brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) has been previously characterised following experimental noxious stimuli and heel lances. In this thesis, I assessed the generalisability of a brain-derived surrogate measure of pain across various body locations and stimulus modalities. The morphology and latency of the evoked potentials were characterised following clinically-required injections applied to the thigh, and the efficacy of paracetamol during routine immunisations was evaluated in a pilot study.
The magnitude of the brain activity response to the same stimulus intensity can be highly variable between infants. As a result, large sample sizes are often required in studies of analgesic efficacy to account for inter-individual variability. In the second study, I developed an EEG-based paradigm that can be used to determine the baseline sensitivity of individual infants to noxious stimuli and I demonstrated that this paradigm can help to reduce sample sizes in analgesic clinical trials in infants. The normal development of the nervous system is vulnerable to alterations by multiple factors, with the potential for long-term structural and functional detrimental outcomes. Immune function and sensitivity to pain are closely related, but the impact of early life inflammation on sensory nervous system development is poorly understood. In the final study, I used electrophysiological measures to investigate this relationship. I demonstrated in a cohort of term neonates that inflammation is associated with increased spinal cord excitability and hyperalgesia.
In summary, this thesis advances our understanding of the processing of nociceptive information in the infant brain and demonstrates how the use of brain-derived measures of pain can improve the evaluation of analgesic interventions.
'Wisdom's the noblest ware that Travel brings': English clerics and experiences of travel within the Mughal and Ottoman Empires, 1616-1724
Keywords: Anglican-Orthodox Relations
travel
superstition
Church of England
Edward Terry
travelling clerics
Islam
Anglican
Greek Church
sign of the cross
early modern England
paganism
Ottoman Empire
Eastern Christianity
religious diversity
Mughal Empire
Sir George Wheler
John Covel
travel literature
travelogues
Sir Thomas Roe
religion

This thesis centres on a small group of clerics within the Church of England, all of whom travelled throughout either Mughal India or the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century. It examines their understandings and perceptions of the myriad religious traditions that populated those states, most notably Eastern Christianity and Islam. In so doing, this thesis explores the impact of travel to the Mughal and Ottoman empires, and of first-hand exposure to their religious diversity specifically, on how English travellers thought about religious theory, ceremony and practice within the Church of England. In short, it considers how experiences of travel within the East shaped English travellers’ views of the right and wrong ways of worshipping God, and how they sought to apply this knowledge in their service of the English Church.
Within this broader framework, this thesis makes several interlocking arguments. Firstly, that our travellers used their experiences overseas to reflect on the role of Church-led education and learning in the cultivation and consolidation of right worship. Secondly, that there exists a uniquely English, as opposed to Western, or European, experience of the Mughal and Ottoman empires in the early modern period, insofar as that experience was shaped by uniquely domestic frames of reference, regarding, say, the Church of England. And finally, that our travellers, as a result of their experiences abroad, frequently thought and wrote about religious issues in ways that distinguished them from their non-travelling contemporaries, and that paved the way for new, and even controversial, intellectual and practical approaches to the established Church. In making these arguments, this thesis seeks to open up new avenues for the study of early modern English travel, on the one hand, and of the early modern Church of England, on the other.
'With the vision they see': identity and aesthetic experience in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica
Keywords: ethnicity
identity
Costa Rica
intellectual life
aesthetics
Puerto Limón
aesthetic experience

This thesis examines aesthetic experience as it relates to the formation of cultural identity in the urban environment of Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. Based on twelve months of fieldwork, the thesis presents an analysis of aesthetics as a cross-cultural process of value attachment which, like identity, is founded on the dialectical relationship between the discursive realm of conceptual meaning and the non-discursive realm of lived experience.
The first of two sections in the thesis shows how identity, as the dialectic between the ideal and the experiential, fits with the concept of a cultural aesthetic, where the discursive quality of art as a symbolic system is constantly negotiated by the non-discursiveness of aesthetic experience. The first section also introduces the city of Puerto Limon through a detailed history of its development, a presentation of the contemporary context, and an analysis of an emergent ideology of blackness.
The second section divides the aesthetic practices found in Limon into four principal forms: the built environment; canvas art and small crafts; music and performance; and literature. Chapter Four discusses the broad theme of the socialisation of space and place in both the national and local contexts. Chapter Five examines a community of canvas artists who participate in constructing an ideal notion of Limonense identity. Chapter Six focuses predominantly on street bands known as comparsas to demonstrate the power of embodied experience to transform idealised notions of identity. Chapter Seven examines the substantial body of literature to come out of the province of Limon, and the split between women as poets and men as novelists.
Finally, the thesis offers a narrative by way of conclusion to demonstrate the complexity of presenting an ethnography of aesthetics and encourage further research in this area.
The immune system and inflammation in cardiac dysautonomia during hypertension
Keywords: calcium imaging
sympathetic nervous system
hypertension
neuroimmunocardiology
Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat
immunopathology
stellate ganglia
cardiovascular disease
sympathetic neurons
macrophages
monocytes
co-culture
dysautonomia
flow cytometry

Essential hypertension, along with a number of other cardiovascular diseases, is characterised by a state of hyperactivity of the sympathetic nervous system. This pathological phenomenon may contribute to the aetiology of hypertension itself, and causes end-organ damage. Elucidating the underlying cause of this dysautonomic phenotype could therefore provide a more effective means of therapeutic intervention to improve outcomes. Essential hypertension also features a state of low-grade systemic inflammation, which is hypothesised to drive peripheral sympathetic hyperactivity. This thesis examined this potential link in the Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat (SHR). The resident immune cells of the sympathetic ganglia, blood and kidneys of the SHR were first, examined using flow cytometry, and compared to those of the Wistar rat. The main finding was a systemic reduction in the classical-to-non classical monocyte-macrophage ratio. However, preliminary data suggest this is not replicated in blood samples taken from a small number of essential hypertension patients and matched controls, which may reflect low statistical power. Using qPCR analysis, no differences were found in the expression levels of a range of inflammatory or anti-inflammatory cytokines, macrophage polarisation markers or oxidative stress markers between SHR and Wistar stellate ganglia, except for a significantly higher expression of the chemokine ccl2 in the SHR. Blood monocytes and bone-marrow derived macrophages (BMDMs) also did not show any inter-strain differences with regard to cytokines or polarisation markers. SHR stellate neurons were shown to exhibit greater [Ca2+]i transients than those of Wistar rats in response to either nicotinic stimulation or high [K+]o-evoked depolarisation. When co-cultured with blood leukocytes, Wistar stellate neurons showed increased responsiveness to these stimuli, while SHR neurons did not. Interestingly, Wistar neuron [Ca2+]i transients were enhanced by the presence of BMDMs, those from the SHR only increased in responsiveness with their own, and not Wistar, BMDMs. This BMDM-induced enhancement of Wistar neuron [Ca2+]i transients were not affected by combined blockade of IL-1β, TNF-α, and IL-6, nor did IL-1β or TNF-α affect stellate neurons in mono-culture, suggesting these classical inflammatory cytokines are not involved in this effect. The results of this thesis suggest that SHR macrophages may play a role in driving stellate neuron hyperactivity in this model. Further elucidation of the role of this immune-neuronal axis may help uncover new pathophysiological nodes for effective therapeutic intervention in essential hypertension and other dysautonomic conditions.