VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature
Keywords: Tolkien
children's literature
medievalism
fantasy
medieval
Lewis
Oxford

This thesis names the Oxford School of children’s fantasy literature as arising from the educational milieu of the University of Oxford’s English School during the mid-twentieth century. It argues that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis lay the foundations for the children’s fantasy genre by introducing an English curriculum at Oxford in 1931 (first examined 1933) that required extensive study in medieval literature, and by modelling the use of medieval source material in their own popular children’s fantasy works. The Oxford School’s creative use of its sources produces medieval ‘afterlives,’ lending the Middle Ages new relevance in popular culture. This research directly compares medieval literature to children’s fantasy works by Tolkien, Lewis, and four other Oxford-educated children’s fantasy authors in order to reveal the genre’s debt to actual medieval texts and to the Oxford English syllabus in particular. The four authors are Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philip Pullman.
This thesis situates the tendencies of medievalised children’s fantasy in relation to Lewis and Tolkien’s personal and scholarly convictions about the patriotic, moral, and aesthetic qualities of medieval literature and folklore. Building on the theories of Michel de Certeau, this thesis demonstrates how Oxford School fantasy produces new mythologies for England and argues that, as children’s literature, these works have an implicit didactic function that echoes that of the English School curriculum. This thesis traces the attempts of some Oxford School authors to navigate or explode generic conventions by drawing upon new source material, and contends that the structures and hierarchies that underpin the genre reassert themselves even in texts that set out to refute them. It suggests that such returns to the norm can produce pleasure and invite diverse reading, growing out of the intertextual associations of each new rewriting.
A probabilistic approach to non-rigid medical image registration
Keywords: Bayesian inference
regularisation estimation
hierarchical models
variational Bayesian
registration uncertainty
image registration

Non-rigid image registration is an important tool for analysing morphometric differences in subjects with Alzheimer's disease from structural magnetic resonance images of the brain. This thesis describes a novel probabilistic approach to non-rigid registration of medical images, and explores the benefits of its use in this area of neuroimaging.
Many image registration approaches have been developed for neuroimaging. The vast majority suffer from two limitations: Firstly, the trade-off between image fidelity and regularisation requires selection. Secondly, only a point-estimate of the mapping between images is inferred, overlooking the presence of uncertainty in the estimation.
This thesis introduces a novel probabilistic non-rigid registration model and inference scheme. This framework allows the inference of the parameters that control the level of regularisation, and data fidelity in a data-driven fashion. To allow greater flexibility, this model is extended to allow the level of data fidelity to vary across space. A benefit of this approach, is that the registration can adapt to anatomical variability and other image acquisition differences.
A further advantage of the proposed registration framework is that it provides an estimate of the distribution of probable transformations. Additional novel contributions of this thesis include two proposals for exploiting the estimated registration uncertainty. The first of these estimates a local image smoothing filter, which is based on the registration uncertainty. The second approach incorporates the distribution of transformations into an ensemble learning scheme for statistical prediction. These techniques are integrated into standard frameworks for morphometric analysis, and are demonstrated to improve the ability to distinguish subjects with Alzheimer's disease from healthy controls.
Relations and agency in a transnational context: The Afghan diaspora and its engagements for change in Afghanistan
Keywords: Civic Engagement
Transnationalism
Structure and Agency
Afghanistan
Diaspora

This thesis is about the lives and civic engagements of Afghans in Germany and the UK. It shows how Afghans living in these two countries relate to Afghanistan, and to what extent they engage in transnational action aimed at promoting change there. In particular, it explores the emergence of diasporic communities and how members exercise agency as development actors in Afghanistan. The research rests on a qualitative case study conducted among Afghan populations in Germany and the UK. Semi-structured interviews and participant observation were primary methods of data collection. Relational sociology is used to capture emerging social identities, patterns of social organisation and forms of social engagement. A first notable finding is that Afghan populations abroad are fractured and cannot be seen as a united diaspora. People tend to coalesce in narrowly defined subgroups rather than under a shared national identity. Second, Afghanistan remains a crucial reference point, notwithstanding fragmented social organisation. Home country attachments tend to be tied to a desire for change and development in the country. Third, despite these shared concerns, transnational engagements are typically carried out by small groups and directed towards confined social spheres. Although people may take action in the name of an imagined Afghan community or an imaginary Afghanistan, this imagined community does not provide a basis for social mobilisation. Thus Afghans do not act as a cohesive diaspora. Fourth, transnational engagements are often a response to the specificities of the social environments in which people are embedded, notably their host countries. The findings show that a relational approach can specify how different dimensions of people’s social identities drive social action and are shaped in interaction with various elements of their social context. Such an actor-centred perspective helps to improve our understanding of how members of diasporas come to engage with their countries of origin.
Fluorescence studies of influenza RNA and RNA polymerase
Keywords: polymerase
RNA-dependent RNA polymerase
microscopy
influezna
fluorescence
RNA

The influenza A virus genome consists of eight single-stranded segments of negativesense viral RNA (vRNA) with highly conserved, partially complementary termini. These termini associate in a double-stranded RNA structure, known as a panhandle, which is bound by the viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase and can serve as a promoter in both viral transcription and replication.
In part A of this thesis, I use a combination of classical biochemistry techniques and fluorescence techniques (both at the ensemble and single-molecule level) for a quantitative investigation of the interaction between purified influenza A RNA polymerase and the individual 5' and 3' conserved termini of the vRNA segments, as well as the double-stranded vRNA promoter. Furthermore, I report the first direct, real-time observation of the promoter changing its structure when bound by the polymerase and show that the structure assumed agrees best with the corkscrew model.
In part B of this thesis, I use fluorescence to detect RNA: I design and test a singlemolecule biosensor aimed at probing the presence of influenza A RNA in a sample, on the one hand, and I use click-chemistry to fluorescently label very shorty RNAs (3-25nt) that have been generated in an in vitro transcription reaction, on the other. The biosensing assay I propose can be further developed for diagnostic purposed, while click-chemistry labelling of short RNAs can be optimised and extended such that it becomes a reliable alternative to the use of radiolabels.
Judicial decision in hostile environments: judges, executives, and the public in Argentina (2004-2010) 
Keywords: judicialisation of politics
judicial politics
law and politics

The central argument of this work is that the level of aggression of judges sitting in vulnerable courts is a function of their attempt to protect the institutional security of such courts. I argue that in contexts characterised by a lack of a culture of judicial independence, by high levels of judicial delegitimisation, and a high level of public visibility of judicial affairs, judges will attempt to simultaneously construct public support and avoid political conflicts with the Government. As a result, judicial decisions are driven by judges’ calculations of both the public’s reaction and the Government’s reaction to their rulings. I claim the level of aggression of judges’ interventions will increase when the Government's tolerance to decisions against its preferences was is higher and the public appears to be more supportive.
I empirically test this theory using the case of Argentine Supreme Court Justices between July 2004 and September 2010. The findings confirm the theoretical expectations according to which judges are simultaneously concerned with the construction of public support and the avoidance of conflicts with the Government. In addition, my study shows three relevant patterns in terms of judicial behaviour. First, the Justices increased their level of aggression by using different modes of involvement when the public appeared to be more supportive and the Government’s tolerance higher during the period under study. Second, the decreased level of aggression occurred by altering the features of the same remedy in response to the political conditions in which decisions were issued. Third, existing legal constraints prevented Justices from being more aggressive.
Economic evaluation of factorial randomised controlled trials
Keywords: clinical trial
economic evaluation
health economics
randomised controlled trial
factorial design

Factorial randomised controlled trials (RCTs) evaluate two or more interventions simultaneously, enabling assessment of interactions between treatments. This thesis presents literature reviews, methodological reviews, simulation studies and applied case studies that explore methods for assessing cost-effectiveness based on factorial RCTs.
My systematic review suggests that factorial RCTs account for around 3% of trial-based economic evaluations, although there is currently no guidance or methodological work indicating the most appropriate methods. Around 40% of published studies assumed no interaction between treatments and many were poorly-reported.
Various mechanisms are likely to produce large interactions within economic endpoints such as costs, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and net benefits. Failing to take account of interactions can introduce bias and prevent efficient allocation of healthcare resources. I developed the opportunity cost of ignoring interactions as a measure of the implications of this bias. However, allowing for small, chance interactions is inefficient, potentially leading to over-investment in research if trial-based evaluations are used to inform decisions about subsequent research. Nonetheless, analyses on simulated trial data suggest that the opportunity cost of adopting a treatment that will not maximise health gains from the healthcare budget is minimised by including all interactions regardless of magnitude or statistical significance.
Different approaches for conducting economic evaluations of factorial RCTs (including regression techniques, extrapolation using patient-level simulation, and considering different components of net benefit separately) are evaluated within three applied studies, including both full and partial factorials with 2x2 and 2x2x2 designs.
I demonstrate that within both trial-based and model-based economic evaluation, efficient allocation of healthcare resources requires consideration of interactions between treatments, and joint decisions about interacting treatments based on incremental cost-effectiveness evaluated “inside-the-table” on a natural scale.
I make recommendations for the design, analysis and reporting of factorial trial-based economic evaluations based on the results of this thesis.
Group structure and behaviour in microfinance: empirics from Sierra Leone
Keywords: microcredit
joint liability
spatial structure
cooperation
embeddedness
microfinance
economic sociology
Sierra Leone
group lending
behaviour

The use of group lending for poverty alleviation is a widespread feature of modern microfinance. The structure of joint-liability credit - if one member defaults the others are held financially responsible - produces a natural tension between a borrower's social and economic interests. This study integrates theory from economics, sociology, and behavioural experiments to address the question, "How do social and economic mechanisms interact to shape a microcredit group's financial behaviour?"
The empirical analysis involves an original dataset from a microfinance institution in Sierra Leone. The total dataset includes 7,025 joint-liability borrowers involved in 47,931 repayment transactions from 2005 to 2011. The empirical methods used are diverse: ethnographic fieldwork, GPS spatial analysis, social affiliation survey design, and multilevel statistical analysis of loan performance data. The original work is structured as three distinct papers.
In the first paper, I examine social collateral, the formal use of a borrower's relationships as security against loan default. How does a group's spatial structure affect the efficacy of social collateral? Spatial concentration improves a group's economic performance up to a certain level after which the effect reverses and performance declines. The relationship is driven by a social trade-off between ability and willingness to enforce the loan. Further, groups that consist of multiple spatial fragments produce worse performance. Spatially fragmented groups are prone to splitting into social factions.
In the second paper, I question what drives the self-selection process of microcredit group formation. The results show that group leaders prefer members with pre-existing social ties, who are spatially proximate, and have matching business types. The preference for socio-spatial factors is likely motivated by reducing the risk of strategic default by group members.
In the third paper, I explore how economic cooperation in small groups evolves over years of repeated interaction. Despite the selective retention of better performing groups, average cooperation rates consistently decline, in terms of contribution and effort. Further, variance across groups continues to increase over 30 months of repeated interaction, suggesting that convergence to a stable cooperation rate has not occurred. Given that group lending exhibits many of the factors found to promote cooperation in laboratory experiments, it is surprising to find such a marked decline in this field setting.
Overall, this thesis contributes to economic sociology by dissecting the difficult trade-offs between social and economic motives in group lending and offers policy implications for microfinance institutions regarding group formation heuristics, contract design, and loan management.
The Qajar jurist and his ruling: A study of judicial practice in nineteenth century Iran
Keywords: ligitation
religious endowments
Shiite law
decentralization
judicial system
Qajar Iran
ruling
jurist

Unlike in the Ottoman world, the exercise of judicial power in nineteenth century Qajar Iran was not contingent upon formal appointment by the political authority. In accordance with the dominant Uṣ&umacr;l&imacr; theory, it derived from the perceived intellectual ability of a cleric to infer the ruling of God (ḥukmull&amacr;h) from the sources of Twelver Sh&imacr;'&imacr; law through deductive effort (ijtih&amacr;d).
Like the Ottoman q&amacr;ḍ&imacr;, the Qajar Uṣ&umacr;l&imacr; jurist or mujtahid known as ḥ&amacr;kim-i shar' in a judicial context had both notarial and adjudicative powers. The Qajar jurist could thus authenticate, register, annul legal documents and act as an arbiter in lawsuits. The Qajar jurist could also, however, issue a legal opinion. This was the role of the muft&imacr; – a separate judicial office in other parts of the Islamic world. Qajar jurists exercised their extensive judicial powers through a network of informal shar&imacr;'a courts, which they came to operate in most Iranian towns and cities largely independent of direct state control.
While the notarial aspects of the Qajar shar&imacr;'a court have received some scholarly attention, this study aims to investigate the role of the jurist and his ruling (ḥukm-i shar') in shar&imacr;'a litigation (mur&amacr;fa'a pl. –&amacr;t).
Maori ways of knowing
Keywords: New Zealand
identity politics
Maori
museum objects

This research considers material culture, the politics of identity, and the role knowledge plays in a Maori community in relation to a nineteenth century historic collection held abroad. The Charles Smith collection came from the Nga Paerangi community in Whanganui, New Zealand. The importance of historic collections to Maori are described through the concept taonga, or treasured objects, which have been theorized in terms of kinship relationships to a certain class of social valuable. This research acknowledges that taonga uphold the continuity of historic relationships, but departs from other analyses in its focus on a previously unknown collection, introduced to the source community through photographs in an exploration of ways taonga interactions are historically and circumstantially informed. Visually focused research endeavors often present diverse responses in a meeting of the social life of objects and the politics of knowledge. Similarly, divergent responses to taonga arose that referenced the colonial contexts in which such taonga left Maori control, as well as losses to knowledge bases in the community. Endeavors to reclaim lands and cultural heritage through language and education initiatives operate at a local level of regeneration, but these goals become pertinent to larger issues of placing knowledge within a rights-based framework grounded in personal socializations of knowledge. The recognition that knowledge is taonga emerged as the framework for understanding ways Maori assert their authority over land, their language, and museum collections based in particular dispositions to knowledge. The control enacted over cultural representations in museums, land courts, and other political forums, asserts self-determinative positions, and also claims Maori knowledge as a scarce resource. Community speakers who have access to this powerful knowledge must therefore act on behalf of their communities as guardians of knowledge and taonga treasures, to redress historic losses, outsider appropriations of culture, and prevent further social disadvantages.
Innate sensing of bacterial flagellin in acute and chronic intestinal inflammation
Keywords: inflammasome
Mucosal immunology

Flagellin is a highly immunogenic, bacterial protein considered to be abundant in the intestinal lumen. It has been reported to be an immunodominant antigen in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In the work presented in this thesis several complementary murine models of IBD were employed to elucidate the role of innate immune sensing of flagellin in the development of intestinal inflammation. Pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) enable mammals to discriminate self from non-self through the recognition of microbial signatures, such as bacterial flagellin. Flagellin is detected by at least two distinct PRRs, NOD-like receptor 4 (NLRC4) and Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5). Our experiments revealed that NLRC4 promoted protective effects during acute intestinal inflammation mediated by infection with Citrobacter rodentium, a close relative of enteropathogenic E. coli. Following infection with C. rodentium, Nlrc4-/- mice developed more severe weight loss, increased bacterial colonisation levels and exacerbated intestinal inflammation compared to WT counterparts. Bone marrow chimera experiments revealed that NLRC4 expression in non-hematopoietic cells provided protection and intestinal epithelial cells expressed high NLRC4 mRNA levels. These results suggest that NLRC4 inflammasome activation in the intestinal epithelium provides potent, protective effects during infection with a mucosal pathogen. In contrast, TLR5 was shown to promote protective effects during chronic, T-cell mediated intestinal inflammation driven by adoptive transfer of naïve CD4+ T-cells into lymphopenic Rag-/- hosts. The absence of TLR5 in Rag-/- recipients resulted in accelerated and exacerbated IBD. Furthermore, chronic T-cell dependent colitis driven by Helicobacter hepaticus, a flagellated, enteric bacterium, was more severe in mice deficient in TLR5. Finally, construction of a H.hepaticus Type 6 secretion system deletion mutant revealed delayed pathogenicity in an innate model of intestinal inflammation, most likely due to reduced initial colonisation of mutant H.hepaticus.
Single particle tracking as a tool to investigate the dynamics of integrated membrane complexes in vivo
Keywords: single-particle-tracking SPT TIRF diffusion membrane membrane-proteins

The last decade has seen substantial advances in single-molecule tracking methods with nano-metre level precision. A powerful tool in single-molecule tracking is fluorescence imaging. One particular application, total internal reflection microscopy, can capture biological processes at high contrast video rate imaging at the single-particle level. This thesis presents methodologically novel methods in analysing single particle tracking data. Presented here is an application of a Bayesian statistical approach that can discriminate between the different diffusive modes that appear with the presence of membrane architecture. This algorithm is denoted BARD; a Bayesian Analysis to Ranking Diffusion. These algorithms are applied to a total internal fluorescence microscopy based experimental data of a novel membrane probe in Escherichia coli. This probe is a plasmid expressed, non-native membrane integrating trans-membrane helix and thus acts as an ideal protein based probe under no specific native control. Two experiments were performed using a combination of varying helix probe size and growth temperature experiments effectively altering the transition temperature of the membrane. These data are suggestive of a passive partitioning of the helix protein into mobile and immobile domains that emerge from the underlying phase behaviour of the membrane.