VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The decarbonization identity and pathways to net-zero
Keywords: committed emissions
atmospheric sciences
environmental economics
power generation
carbon budgets
decarbonization identity
climate change
stranded assets
energy
global warming

Success or failure of climate policies in limiting warming to beneath particular thresholds depends on several physical, economic and social uncertainties. Whilst scenario analysis can be informative as to the types of policies that are required to achieve these goals, the complexity of scenario analysis often masks the underlying fundamental choices. This dissertation introduces the concept of the ‘decarbonization identity’ to simply and systematically describe the mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive range of choices available in future climate policy decisions. The simple identity states that the remaining carbon budget [B] for a given level of warming can be partitioned into four areas: the already committed ‘baked-in’ emissions from existing capital stock [E]; new commitments arising from investments in additional capital stock yet to be made [N]; less the stranding of existing or future capital stock [S]; and the additional atmospheric space created by negative emissions technologies (NETs) [A]. This dissertation finds that currently operating electricity generators [E] would already emit more CO2 (~300 GtCO2) then is compatible with currently available generation-only carbon budgets [B] for a temperature rise of 1.5-2°C (~240 GtCO2). In addition, the current pipeline of planned fossil fuel power plants would add almost the same amount [N] of emission commitments (~270 GtCO2) to this capital stock again. Finally, these carbon budgets are inherently uncertain and depend on future, yet to be achieved, reductions of short-lived climate pollutant (SLCP) emissions. Should those reductions not be achieved today’s remaining carbon budgets could be up to 37% smaller. Policymakers have now five choices to achieve the Paris climate goals: (1) protect and enhance carbon budgets by early and decisive action on SLCPs; (2) retrofit existing power generators with carbon capture and storage (3) ensure that no new polluting capital stock is added; (4) strand a considerable amount of global electricity generation capacity; and (5) create additional atmospheric space by scaling up NETs. Over the coming years and decades, the challenge will be to identify the most efficient balance of these options.
Principles of implementation: a comparative analysis of the Cape Town Convention’s remedies
Keywords: Cape Town Convention
Aircraft Protocol
Comparative Law
Transnational commercial law
International Commercial Law

The Cape Town Convention and the Aircraft Protocol came into force on 1st March 2006. To date, the Convention has seventy-four States Parties, the Aircraft Protocol sixty-eight States Parties, and together they can be regarded as one of the most successful recent commercial law treaties. The Convention's overriding object is to offer creditors the highest possible protection in the form of an effective, speedy and strong legal remedial framework for the international enforcement of creditors rights in the event of the debtor’s default or insolvency. The underlying rationale is that this will lead to significant reductions in borrowings costs for lenders to the advantage of all interested stakeholders in the aircraft sector. However, without effective implementation of the remedial system of the Convention and the Aircraft Protocol, it is difficult for financiers to have confidence that they are able to defend their legal rights effectively.
This thesis investigates the structure and contents of the Convention's remedial system in a chronological order, but it does not purport to be a comprehensive and systematic monograph on the Convention's remedies as already done by the Convention's Official Commentary. It consists of four parts each of which investigates a particular core aspect of the implementation and operation of the Convention's remedial system in practice. In particular, it investigates the Convention's declaration system, and its procedural, substantive and insolvency remedies to ensure an effective and comprehensive protection of creditors in aircraft finance. In doing so, it identifies critical lessons for the implementation of the treaty in civil and common law jurisdictions.
Monitoring and analysis of antenatal and postnatal changes in maternal vital signs
Keywords: early warning score
mobile healh
accelerometry
vital sign
pregnancy

Pregnancy-related complications affect approximately 15% of pregnancies and, if severe, can have long-term consequences. Timely recognition of physiological deterioration is known to reduce the prevalence and severity of complications. However pregnancy-associated changes in vital signs (blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, oxygen saturation, and respiratory rate) complicate the detection of abnormal physiology, and these changes are not well documented. This thesis describes the development of algorithms to ensure the collection of good-quality vital-sign data during the antenatal and postnatal stages of pregnancy, and the design of an evidence-based obstetric early warning score.
Vital-sign information from 1,000 pregnant women during pregnancy, labour, and after delivery was collected during the 4P study using pulse oximetry, oscillometry for blood pressure measurement and a tympanic thermometer. Dynamic time warping was used to assess beat-by-beat quality in the photoplethysmograph (PPG) waveform obtained from the pulse oximeter. The resulting signal quality index enabled the exclusion of poor-quality sections and their associated measurements of heart rate and peripheral oxygen saturation. A robust measurement of respiratory rate was obtained by combining information from the PPG waveform, and accelerometer and gyroscope waveforms from a smartphone. After processing, frequency-based techniques, such as Fourier analysis and auto-regressive modelling, and time-domain peak detection were fused to estimate respiratory rate. When compared with the reference respiratory rate obtained from midwife measurement, the lowest mean absolute error of 1.16 breaths per minute was obtained from respiratory rate estimates from the y-axis of the gyroscope.
Antenatal and postnatal reference ranges for each vital sign were developed with a standard polynomial multilevel (hierarchical) model using 10,000 vital sign measurements from 620 healthy women in the 4P study. Vital-sign trajectories confirmed known trends of blood pressure and heart rate changes during pregnancy, and provided new information about other vital-sign trends. Additional covariates were included to investigate the effect of parity and body mass index (BMI) on vital-sign trends. The outer centiles of the vital sign reference ranges were used to design an obstetric early warning score (C-ObsEWS) that took into account gestational age or time after delivery.
The investigations in this thesis contribute additional knowledge of pregnancy-associated vital-sign changes, and lead to an initial proposal for an evidence-based obstetric early warning score specific to the stage of pregnancy.
Genetic approaches to the development of novel designs for population control of two vector mosquitoes: Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus.
Keywords: CRISPR/Cas9
Engineered lethality
Aedes aegypti
Culex quinquefasciatus
Gene editing
Actin-4 gene
Vector control
Transgenic mosquito(es)

The prevention or reduction of infectious pathogen transmission is essential for safeguarding human health and species conservation, and can be achieved through vector control. New genetics-based innovations have proven to be a viable solution for the successful suppression or eradication of insect vectors, whilst also providing opportunities for further improvements and enhancements. In this thesis, I examine a vector control approach incorporating genetically engineered late-acting lethality, and investigate the character and function of the genetic elements that could lead to improvement of this approach. I start by assessing the functionality of the late-acting, doxycycline-repressible lethal system in transgenic Aedes aegypti. I find that the induced lethality is specific to the late developmental stage and occurs in the vast majority of the individuals carrying the lethal transgene. I also show that the induced phenotype is strongly repressible in the presence of the antidote, which is a crucial prerequisite of a practical RIDL (Release of Insect carrying Dominant Lethal gene) system. Next, I investigate the Culex quinquefasciatus Actin-4 gene and its potential use to induce a flightless phenotype. I find that the expression of the Actin-4 is sex-specific and, by generating a novel mutant via gene editing, that the gene is haploinsufficient or dominant negative in inducing the flightless phenotype in females. Additionally, I provide further support for the effectiveness of the recently discovered CRISPR/Cas9 system by showing that it successfully induces targeted editing of the Actin-4 gene. My findings provide novel genetic tools for the development of various genetics-based strategies for control of invasive vector mosquitoes.
A Study of the Term 'Politique' and its Uses During the French Wars of Religion
Keywords: politique, politics, word history, French Wars of Religion, polemic

This study of the term politique during the French Wars of Religion (c. 1562-98) argues that it is a keyword in the sense that it is is active and actively used in French explorations of the political, in the forming and undermining of collective identities in a period of civil crisis, and in the self-fashioning gestures of a shifting political class. I sample and analyse a range of texts – from treatises that form part of the canon of early modern French political writing (such as Bodin’s Six livres de la Republique [1576] and the Satyre ménippée [c. 1593]) to anonymous polemical pamphlets – all of which feature prominent uses of the term politique. Certain of these sources gave rise to a longstanding historiographical impression that politique referred, in the period, to a coherent third party in the religious wars as well as to a related kind of expertise and its practitioner. This thesis builds on and extends recent work showing that there was no such party and no one in the period who directly identified as politique. Rather than seeking to identify the 'real' politiques or to establish a corrected definition of the term as used in sixteenth-century French, I argue that the term is strikingly and increasingly mobile across the period, coming at times to refer to mobility itself in conceptions of politics and political action. Dialogue emerges in the thesis as a key conceptual arena and discursive mode for writers attempting to work out what they and others mean by the term politique. I use philological and word-historical methods to examine writers of the period who seek to determine what makes a good or bad politique, to present themselves as politique, or to condemn politiques as morally bankrupt, and – in some cases – to do all of the above in the same text. Almost every text I analyse in the thesis offers its own definition of politique, and attempts to be definitive, but I show that all these attempts to make the reader recognise the ‘true' meaning of politique are extending the drama rather than concluding it.
Descartes and education: risk and Reception, 1637-48
Keywords: Utrecht
Descartes
education
scepticism

This thesis discusses Descartes' conception and negotiation, in the period from 1637 to 1648, of the responsibilities arising from teaching. His concerns spring particularly from the teaching of sceptical arguments, and from his efforts to maintain his project's integrity as his followers take it up. My argument is twofold: that such responsibilities were a persistent and prominent concern through this crucial period in his career, and that they offered terms of criticism within which major early responses to his work, friendly and hostile, were formulated. In Chapter 1, I show how these concerns shape the Principia. Chapter 2 argues that Descartes' conception of his responsibilities are rooted in a widespread early modern conception of the risks of scepticism, and that they are visible, within the Discours, in his remarks about exemplarity and publication, as well as in the actual business of publishing the text. In Chapter 3, these concerns are linked to a positive conception of the gains Descartes hoped to secure for his students against pressures within Aristotelianism. Finally, in Chapter 4, I show that Descartes' critics mobilise this understanding to frame early attacks on the interactions between Cartesianism and existing scholastic institutions. In closing, I suggest three directions in which to develop historiographical issues raised in the thesis.
The war criminals investigate
Keywords: Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle
war crimes
atrocities
war crimes investigations

This thesis uses the war crimes investigations carried out by the Wehrmacht between 1939- 1945 to explore the creation and development of the narrative which the Nazi regime constructed to justify its war of aggression, conquest, and extermination. This source has been sorely underused and provides deep insight into the regime’s official narrative – a narrative which seems fundamentally at odds with its true aims and its murderous actions. It claimed that the Reich was waging a war in self-defence and for humanitarian reasons. These justifications were designed to convince both the German population and international audiences. The regime did not simply lie, however, but gathered empirical evidence which it then used selectively to legitimise the war.
By reconstructing this process, the thesis aims to understand the degree to which the regime was able to make its arguments convincing. This allows us to better understand how it was possible to mobilise so many ordinary Germans to support and fight the war and, indeed, to perpetrate horrendous crimes.
In particular, this thesis seeks to explore the tension between the official narrative and the Reich’s own crimes, arguing that these two were not diametrically opposed, but that there was a direct justificatory link between them. Crucial in this context was the degree to which the regime could portray its criminal actions as a response to those of the enemy.
In doing so, this thesis develops on a historiography which has acknowledged the importance of the regime’s justificatory framework, but which has yet to study the foundations on which this was based and how it developed over the course of the war.
In short, this is a study of the German narrative of victimhood which underpinned the brutal war of extermination.
Effect of exposure to electromagnetic fields on brain function and behaviour in mice
Keywords: Brain function
Circadian rhythm
Electromagnetic fields
Memory
Hippocampus

There is a need for improved understanding of interactions between electromagnetic fields and biological tissues. In this thesis, the effects of exposure to 50 Hz magnetic fields, associated with power generation and use, and 1800 MHz fields associated with mobile phones were investigated with particular focus on the plastic processes that are involved in cognitive function.
After repeated, daily exposure of young adult C57Bl/6J mice to an 1800 MHz field at 3 W/kg, very subtle changes in expression of genes involved in synaptic plasticity were found (p˂0.05). Spatial memory as measured in the water maze was not significantly affected by exposure. Exposure at 0.3 W/kg did not significantly affect any of the endpoints (p˃0.05). Indications of a greater sensitivity to exposure at 3 W/kg were seen in a senescence accelerated prone mouse model (SAMP8) compared to a resistant strain (SAMR1). However, only subtle effects of exposure were seen.
Exposure of young C57Bl/6J mice to a 50 Hz field at 100 or 300 μT induced small but significant changes in expression in synaptic plasticity related genes (p˂0.05). Furthermore, repeated exposure significantly increased microglial density in the dorsal hippocampus (p˂0.05) and slightly decreased proliferation in the dorsal hippocampus (100 μT, p˂0.05). Spatial memory was not significantly affected by exposure.
Acute exposure to a 50 Hz magnetic field for 30 minutes at 300 or 580 μT did not affect the adrenal response to a nocturnal white or blue light shock, while exposure at 580 μT in the absence of light significantly decreased per1 expression in the adrenal glands (p˂0.05), but not in the liver or dorsal hippocampus. Exposure at 580 μT for 24 hours had only minor transient effects on the rhythmic expression of the core clock genes.
In summary, exposure to 50 Hz or 1800 MHz fields caused subtle and transient changes to some molecular mechanisms and cells involved in cognitive function and circadian rhythm control.
Challenges and possible solutions for ensuring health of urban migrants as a part of India's agenda for a sustainable urban growth story
Keywords: health and social security policies
Low and middle income countries
exclusion
Internal migration
livelihood migration
vulnerability

Internal labour migration is an important livelihood strategy for poor groups worldwide.
Aims and objectives
This research aims to answer the question "What is appropriate policy framework to address the health needs of the Indian urban migrants?" The research analyses existing policies and compares policies in arrange of countries that have developed mechanisms to address migrant's health needs. Transferable lessons will be drawn to develop a policy framework to address health needs of Indian migrants. Recommendations to improve the health of urban migrants will be made.
Methods
The research involves a mixed methods approach - literature review, questionnaire survey, qualitative interviews and site visits to understand successes and challenges in the implementation of migration and health policies in India and other countries. A literature review was conducted to understand the impact of migration - its health outcomes and policies in India and abroad. A pre-tested, interviewer-administered questionnaire survey was conducted using random sampling with 4000 migrants in Nashik to understand their access to health care. In-depth interviews were conducted with policy makers in ministries including health and labour, migrant's organizations and international agencies in India, China, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam to understand the successes and challenges in the implementation of migration and health policies and learn from their experiences.
Conclusions
Internal migration is rising in India mainly from the scheduled tribes and castes. Lack of migration specific data, state specific programmes/policies linked with state citizenship and lack of federal structures are key challenges to meet the unique needs of Indian migrants.
Lessons for India were learnt from other countries included initiating a migration census, introducing a national portable health insurance and a comprehensive 'whole government approach'.
Recommendations were made to enable the government to facilitate appropriate policy to improve the health and status of the migrants.
Macro, household and individual level explanations for the geographic differences in poverty levels in Indonesia, 2000–2009
Keywords: Female headship and poverty
Measuring subnational poverty
Level of education and poverty
Geographic differences in poverty in Indonesia
Informal employment and poverty
Economic growth and poverty

Measuring and explaining poverty and its geographic differences in Indonesia is mostly confined to a single measure of poverty and to macro-level explanations. This thesis moves beyond these constraints to investigate regional poverty trends using multiple measures of poverty and to explore household and individual level explanations. The analyses in the thesis are undertaken using data from the SUSENAS core, covering the period 2000–2009.
Different measures of poverty produce different numbers of poor. Some 33 million additional Indonesians were identified as poor using the $1.25 a day poverty measure than the official measure used by the government. The differences between both measures of poverty are, however, driven by poverty trends in the early 2000s, following the devastating impact of the 1997–1998 financial crisis. In the latter part of the 2000s, poverty trends were converging between the two poverty measures, suggesting some degree of reliability of Indonesia’s official poverty measure.
At the macro level, on average, increasing GDP is significantly associated with falling levels of poverty. The association is reduced marginally when the share of the informal workforce is taken into account, but in general the negative relationship remains robust. Regional analyses, however, reveal that GDP has a very small, insignificant negative association with poverty in the poorest region.
At the individual level, education strongly determines poverty, independently of employment status. A substantial share of the primary and lower secondary qualified population is employed in informal work, yet their risk of poverty is substantially lower when compared to those with no formal qualification engaging as informal workers. More importantly, the highest risk of poverty exists among the unemployed who lack a formal education. This finding is highlighted because unemployment is often seen as having little relevance to poverty, since a higher proportion of the unemployed are tertiary educated. The 'penalty' on poverty for those occupying the lower tiers of educational qualification is heavier in less developed regions.
Household level analysis show that the different groups of female-headed households (de facto, widows and divorcees) are less likely to be in poverty than male-headed couple households. After controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and the number of young children within households, however, female-headed divorcee households are found to be marginally poorer than male-headed couple households. Regional level analyses reveal that poverty is significantly higher in female divorcee-led households than in male-headed couple households in all regions, except in the most and least developed ones, where poverty is comparable between both groups.