VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Pope Innocent I : the Church of Rome in the early fifth century
Keywords: Early church
Church history
Pope
5th century
Papacy
Innocent I
Fifth century
Church of Rome
Primitive church
Catholic Church

The framework of this study is formed by Innocent's letters. These, though presenting few personal traits and no biographical details, are yet sufficiently varied to enable the student to gauge from them the relationship of the church of Rome to the rest of Christendom and to assess Innocent's handling of the various crises with which he was confronted.
His first letter was addressed to Anysius of Thessalonica. The ties between Anysius and Rome were unusually close, since he had demonstrated in the past, as he was to do again under Innocent, that he was willing to look to Rome for guidance on all major matters. This willingness on Anysius' part led Innocent to develop the concept of the papal vicariate which he was able to impose, more or less successfully, on Rufus, Anysius' successor. It is a development which was to prove fruitful for Innocent's successors in other areas of the West.
In conformity with his policy of encouraging the Western churches to look upon Rome as the source of discipline and doctrine, Innocent was anxious to encourage the habit of consultation of Rome in cases of doubt or disagreement. He therefore replied fully to such enquiries and requested that his replies be given the widest circulation. His letters to Victricius of Rouen, to Exsuperius of Toulouse, to the Macedonian and Dacian bishops and to Decentius of Gubbio are thus most instructive as to current Roman practice in liturgy and church order. They are also found in a very large number of canon collections, which suggests that Innocent's aim was successful.
Continued in thesis ...
Neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making in the fruit fly
Keywords: drosophila melanogaster
neuroscience
decision-making
neural circuit
optogenetics

A mobile organism is faced with the challenge of having to decide, moment by moment, its next course of action. Despite extensive efforts in mapping decision-making circuits across many species, the current understanding of neural mechanisms underlying the decision process remains scarce. Fruit flies can perform an odour discrimination task with difficulty-dependent reaction times and choice accuracies, in a framework well-described by a process of evidence accumulation to bound. A subset of third-order olfactory neurons, the αβ core Kenyon cells (αβc KCs), appears to act as a temporal integrator of sensory information, encoding the amount of summed evidence in their subthreshold voltage. However, explicit demonstration of a causal role of these neurons is lacking.
Combining molecular cloning, patch-clamp electrophysiology, closed-loop optogenetics, and drift-diffusion modelling, I establish a causal relationship between the neural activity in αβc KCs and the fly’s olfactory decision-making. First, I discover that a short motif from AMPA receptors can target the optogenetic activator to the somatodendritic compartment of the cell, enabling the optical injection of small dendritic currents. I also modify the genetic construct of the optogenetic inhibitor such that its expression is restricted to the decision-relevant neurons. Second, the functionality of these tools is characterised by whole-cell recordings of αβc KCs. Third, I bidirectionally manipulate the activity of these neurons during the perceptual task to test for behavioural consequences in speed and accuracy. I find that photostimulation quickens reaction times as a function of odour contrast and light intensity. This is mainly explained by a reduction of the bound height in drift-diffusion models, consistent with the representation of the integrated amount, rather than the momentary level, of evidence in αβc KCs. This work sheds light on the mechanisms by which decision-making is implemented in a biological substrate.
Exploring social metacognition
Keywords: rmarkdown
metacognition
echo chamber
judgement
open data
agent-based model
advisor choice
egocentric discounting
advice
decision-making
social influence

This thesis explores two questions: does the way individuals seek advice produce echo chamber-like networks; and is the well-established phenomenon of egocentric discounting explicable as a rational process? Both parts are presented within a framework of advice as information transfer; the implications for wider interpretations of advice are discussed in the conclusion. Both parts are investigated with a mixture of computational simulations and behavioural experiments.
For the first question, behavioural experiments implementing a Judge-Advisor System with a perceptual decision-making task and a date estimation task are used to characterise people’s propensity to use agreement as a signal of advice quality in the absence of feedback. These experiments provide moderate evidence suggesting that people do do this, and that experience of agreement in the absence of feedback increases their trust in advisors. Agent-based computational simulations take the results of the behavioural experiments and simulate their effects on trust ratings between agents. The simulations indicate that including the kind of heterogeneity seen in the participants in the behavioural experiments slows down the formation of echo chambers and limits the extent of polarisation.
In the second part, I argue that egocentric discounting deviates from a normative model of advice-taking because it is a rational response to concerns that always accompany advice: that the advice might be deliberately misleading, lazily researched, or misunderstood. Evolutionary computational simulations of advice-taking illustrate that when any of these circumstances might be true, egocentric discounting emerges as an adaptive response. Behavioural experiments using a date estimation task within a Judge-Advisor System test whether people respond adaptively to alterations in the circumstances explored in the evolutionary simulations. These experiments show that people respond flexibly to changes in the probability that their advisor will attempt to mislead them. Experiments attempting to explore people’s ability to flexibly respond to acquiring information about an advisor’s confidence calibration were inconclusive.
A web-book version of this thesis is available at https://mjaquiery.github.io/oxforddown/. Its RMarkdown source code is available at https://github.com/mjaquiery/oxforddown.
Unbiased molecular definition of epithelial barrier formation and defects driving inflammatory bowel disease
Keywords: intestinal development
intestinal disease
gene expression
congenital disease
single-cell RNA-sequencing
inflammatory bowel disease
intestinal crypt
stem cells
spatial transcriptomics
human development
mesenchymal cells

The intestinal epithelial barrier is one of the body’s largest mucosal surfaces. The cells involved reflect the numerous functions the epithelium must perform. The barrier requires time critical co-ordination with other intestinal cell compartments in utero for normal development. In maturity, dysregulation of the barrier or cross-talk can lead to disease such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Despite the importance of the intestinal epithelium in development and health, characterisation of the origins of dysregulation are lacking. Questions also remain about the full spectrum of epithelial cell diversity and its mutualistic relationship with other intestinal compartments.
This project characterises the development of the epithelial and mesenchymal cross talk in utero, in health and in IBD at high resolution using single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNAseq). Studying intestinal epithelial diversity in health and disease, isolating epithelial cells from IBD and controls and mapping over 11,000 cells from health and UC inflammation, mapped cell diversity through the maturation of epithelium. This identified a hitherto unappreciated BEST4/OTOP2 cell that sensed pH and was dysregulated in inflammation and cancer.
Furthermore, a second project mapped human intestinal development from 8-22 post conceptual weeks. This charted 101 cell types across developmental time and through spatial transcriptomics (ST) could map these to tissue revealing origins of diverse cellular compartments along with fibroblast and intestinal stem cells across space and time. These results provide a platform that maps the human intestinal epithelium and previously unappreciated resolution and from which the normal developmental cues can be established and allow identification of the drivers of dysregulation in IBD.
The role of epigenetic modulators on circadian rhythms and metabolism
Keywords: T2D
obesity
epigenetics
metabolism
circadian rhythms
bromodomain inhibitors

The earth’s rotation on its axis with a 24-hour period gave rise to circadian rhythms, which originated pervasive biologic fluctuations in gene expression, cellular physiology and whole-organism behaviour. The advancements in technology and culture accentuated behaviours and phenomena that implicated a disruption in the synchronisation between our inner circadian clock and the outer environment. This desynchrony was associated with a deregulated molecular clock and an increased incidence of metabolic disorders. We have identified circadian rhythm enhancers as a potential chronotherapeutic mechanism in tackling the circadian deregulations that could be key in the pathogenesis of these associated metabolic deregulations.
Here, we describe the characteristics and efficacy of bromodomain inhibitors, a novel class of epigenetic modulators, in enhancing the amplitude of mammalian circadian clock, with the aim of improving on the pathophysiologies correlated with dampened circadian rhythms. IBET-762, a selective and potent bromodomain inhibitor, is shown to enhance the expression of several clock genes including Bmal1 and Per2, via BRD4 and Specificity Protein 1 (SP1), a transcription factor with widespread metabolic effects, and impact on metabolic pathophysiology at least partially through SP1.
IBET-762 reduces both glucose uptake and adipogenesis in 3T3-L1 cells, giving rise to the potential of being useful in tackling obesity and diabetes. The drug was further tested in-vivo in a C57BL/6 mouse model of diet-induced obesity, and showed to be efficacious in reducing weight gain and hepatosteatosis. This demonstrates the usefulness of BRD inhibitors in tackling obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). However, IBET-762 also induced a pre-diabetes like phenotype that was not associated to either insulin insensitivity or to β-cell toxicity, but rather to an acute inhibition of several genes involved in glucose metabolism and transport. It is therefore pivotal to further dissect the mechanism of action behind the metabolic effects of IBET-762 and identify the molecular mechanisms and pathways activated, such that one could be tackled independently from the deleterious effects of the others.
The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events
Keywords: 9/11
reflexivity
event as concept
Panh
Rouch
militant cinema
film and violence
political cinema
Godard
media and violence
September 11
cinema and violence
Oppenheimer
Arab Spring

I begin this thesis by exploring the postmodern status of the camera, theory, and audio-visual art in early reactions to 9/11. I outline my theoretical framework: from the concepts of weaponisation and the frame to the responsive eye and reflexive intervention. In Chapters 2 and 3, I offer a genealogy of the ‘weaponised camera’ by showing how Jean-Luc Godard has visibly practiced his own frame-work in his explicitly political films. Beginning with a modernist self-obsession with failing to enact a political event in the 1960s, he moved further into strident Maoism after the failure of May ’68, attempting to immerse himself in collectivist filmmaking. By Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), he was using montage and sustained juxtaposition to force a series of postmodern confrontations with the ‘cinematographic form’ of twentieth-century French history and collective memory.
Chapter 4 traces how the concept of ‘the event’ has developed across academic disciplines and the arts. Chapter 5 considers ethnographic docufiction films by Jean Rouch, Joshua Oppenheimer and Rithy Panh which, through acts of performance and reconstruction, have made reflexive interventions into significant political events in national histories. Each filmmaker stages confrontations with and through ritual, propaganda, trauma, and culturally enforced silences. These films, I argue, are positioned as performative, Austinian ‘film acts’: they reorganise the enduring narrative and ‘documentary’ forms of past events. In turn, they are intended to provoke ‘film events’, which might reorganise cultural understandings of the past. In Chapter 5, I describe how some protesters of the Arab Spring sought to use the distributed technology of the ‘global village’ as a weapon of revolution: not simply to record the event as it happened, but using this mediatisation as a reflexive frame itself, to bring the event into being as a global event and simultaneously as an act of postmodern filmic autoethnography.
Crafting a continent: Jesuits, Puritans, Franciscans, and the creation of an early American missiology, 1542-1763
Keywords: early America
missionaries
Franciscans
Indians
Puritans
Jesuits
Missiology

Over more than two centuries, Christian missionaries laboured to convert Indians across early America. The effect on Indian individuals, communities, and nations has been emphasised in recent scholarship on the religious encounter; this thesis focuses instead on the reciprocal effects on the missionaries themselves. The religious encounter in early America had profound and varied effects on missionaries in each space that they claimed. Letters, speeches, and publications produced by Jesuits, Franciscans, and Puritans are analysed as discursive spaces through which missionaries interrogated, adapted, and added to the complex of concepts, paradigms and strategies that guided their evangelical endeavour. This thesis traces the subsequent evolution of their respective missiologies in New France, the Spanish borderlands, and New England, a process understood as inextricable from the broader dynamism of Indian and colonial power. Through a deliberate process of manipulation by the missionaries themselves, all three missiologies were localised as early American phenomena, suitable to the colonial spaces that members of each tradition encountered on the continent. Then, from the early-eighteenth century, those who continued to articulate the logic of missionization in each region began expressing common missiological themes, finally forging a continental, early American philosophy of mission. These successful transformations of each missiological tradition sustained missions as institutions promoting imperial-colonial, diplomatic and commercial interests; the conclusions of this thesis therefore necessitate analysing the history of colonialism across the continent as, in part, shaped by the dynamic intellectual response of Jesuits, Franciscans and Puritans to the early American cultural encounter.
The political psychology of issue selection in transnational advocacy networks
Keywords: international relations
heuristics
decision-making
INGOs
selection

Why do international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) expend considerable resources to alleviate some forms of humanitarian crises, while other crises fail to attract similar levels of attention? How can we explain why some humanitarian issues are selected for attention by transnational advocacy networks (TANs) over others? Existing scholarship suggests that issue attributes help determine the advocacy agendas of transnational actors. Issues which fit well with pre-existing national and international political agendas, resonate with accepted transnational norms, or exude a simple causal chain of blame, are putatively conducive to selection. However, explanations emphasising these factors remain without empirical corroboration. Recent empirical studies suggest such factors co-occur with instances of non-selection and that variation in choice outcomes cannot be accounted for through existing explanatory frameworks. This study advances a political psychology approach to the question of issue selection by INGOs. Drawing on insights from behavioural decision research, it empirically tests the proposition that heuristic-led judgment on the part of key decision-makers is a central determinant in the (non-)adoption of issues by INGOs. The proposed explanation is investigated empirically through a mixed-method research design, encompassing case studies of three major INGOs and a conjoint survey experiment with INGO practitioners. The study finds both qualitative and experimental evidence that heuristic-led judgment contributes to choice outcomes across organizational contexts. Additional factors such as access to reliable information, probability of policy impact, and issue coverage by other INGOs, also appear to affect patterns of selection.
'In no time': representations of suspended time in contemporary literature
Keywords: time
affect
contemporary literature
suspended time

In consciousness and literature, it is through narrative that meaning is habitually constructed, but in Anglo-American writing of the twenty-first century the relationship between time and meaning is studied, rather than routinely produced. Considering texts in which temporality is of explicit concern, my thesis interrogates how suspended time works at once in opposition and conjunction with narrative, as a being beyond meaning is explored. In representation, suspended time embeds the unseen, unknown, or unrealized within causality, and so forces texts too into suspension. Through metafiction, ekphrasis, intertextuality, and invocation, a lyric temporality is established within prose.
My first chapter reads works by Don DeLillo, Tom McCarthy, and Ben Lerner to consider how suspended time opens the narrativization that consciousness enforces, deferring closure in its recognition of the unknown. Pursuing the ethics to which these authors gesture, my second chapter explores the writing of Ali Smith, in which the plurality of time is consistently revealed through encounters with temporal absence or suspension. In Smith’s fiction individual perceptions of time are relativized; it is an affective mode of meaning-making that succeeds. Discussing works by Denise Riley, Joan Didion, Helen Macdonald, Max Porter and Yiyun Li, my final chapter explores the genre of grief writing, which, prominent within the current period, uncovers the affective potential of suspended time itself. Imagining a disjuncture from time that is shared, the atemporality of grief, and, indeed, of the literary, maintains for these writers the connection between the living and the dead.
Contributing to recent discussions of ‘the contemporary’ and of literature’s affective turn, my conclusion contends that in its representation of suspended time, twenty-first century writing enforces the detemporalization of its reader, promoting an affective mode of interpretation as it enables new ways of being in and being with time.
On the International Monetary System (IMS): A case of background injustice and parasitic exploitation 
Keywords: International Monetary System
Financial Crises
Central Banks
Parasitic Exploitation
Foreign Exchange Market
Background Injustice

In this thesis I discuss three stylized scenarios of the International Monetary System (IMS): one with floating exchange rates, one with fixed exchange rates and one with closed capital markets. Within the first scenario, I identify two problems of background injustice: the problem of monetary spillovers and the problem of currency speculation. The first problem happens because exchange rates are relative to one another, hence, when the central bank of a country applies monetary policy, it also changes the exchange rate of all other countries vis-à-vis this country. In order to address this problem, I offer a Limited Regressiveness Principle (LRP) and argue for the creation of a global fund. In order to address the second problem, I offer a framework of parasitic exploitation, which includes three conditions of build in mechanisms, vulnerability, and non-proportionality. I argue that the case of currency speculation, is not only a problem of background injustice, but also a case of parasitic exploitation. Then, I discuss the scenario of fixed exchange rates. I consider two stylized but historical cases, the Gold Standard and the Reserve Currency Standard. I also consider a hybrid case, the case of the Eurozone. I argue that the framework of parasitic exploitation can be extended to the stylized fixed scenarios. However, I suggest that both the principles and the responsibilities that arise in the fixed cases are different from those that arise in the general floating case. Finally, I address the case of closed capital markets, or financial autarky, such as the system that existed during Bretton Woods. I argue that a generally open system with embedding institutions - which may include non-extensive capital controls - is better than a completely closed scenario of extensive capital controls, such as the one that existed during Bretton Woods.
Confidence and information seeking in decision making under uncertainty
Keywords: cognitive
information seeking
individual differences
confidence
decision making
metacognition
psychiatric
decision
uncertainty

Confidence and information-seeking are aspects of metacognition that help people make better choices under conditions of uncertainty. However, previous research has found that these metacognitive functions can vary greatly between individuals and can become maladaptively decoupled or decalibrated in psychiatric disorders. This thesis explores the relationship between confidence and information-seeking behaviour when making decisions under uncertainty, and individual differences in these measures.
This work begins with the development of two decision tasks that provide parallel measures of confidence and information-seeking in the domains of perceptual judgment and probabilistic reasoning. I then investigate whether psychiatric dimensions of interest might be reliably associated with certain patterns of confidence and information-seeking. I present data showing that, while trait anxiety tended to be associated with a small underconfidence bias across domains, psychiatric dimensions on the whole fail to be consistently predictive of confidence or information-seeking.
I then proceed to explore specific aspects of confidence and information-seeking. While previous literature and preliminary findings had suggested that people might employ strategies other than information-seeking to manage uncertainty during decision-making, I present results suggesting that participants do not typically engage in time-effective strategies like seeking feedback or opting out of decisions, even when they are available as alternatives to information-seeking.
I then look more closely into the relationship between choice and confidence in the decision process. I report a robust increase in confidence at the point of decision, even after accounting for differences in the objective probability of being correct. After investigating possible mechanisms for this effect, I suggest that the act of committing to a decision evokes a boost in confidence, but that this decision-evoked confidence boost fails to have lasting effects on subsequent confidence, information-seeking, or choices.
Overall, my results suggest that confidence and information-seeking generally help us make more adaptive decisions under uncertainty. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of the broader implications of the findings for psychiatric and cognitive research.