VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Sustaining family life in rural China: reinterpreting filial piety in migrant Chinese families
Keywords: rural-urban divides
Sichuan Province
left-behind
Filial Piety
Hukou Registration
filial care
China
Asia
one China policy
gender
intergenerational relationships
migrant labor
elderly well-being
ethnography
rural education

This study explores the changing nature of filial piety in contemporary society in rural China. With the economic, social and political upheavals that followed the Revolution, can 'great peace under heaven' still be found for the rural Chinese family as in the traditional Confucian proverb,"make yourself useful, look after your family, look after your country, and all is peaceful under heaven"? This study explores this question, in terms not so much of financial prosperity, but of non-tangible cultural values of filial piety, changing familial and gender roles, and economic migration. In particular, it examines how macro level changes in economic, social and demographic policies have affected family life in rural China. The primary policies examined were collectivisation, the hukou registration system, marketization, and the One-Child policy.
Ethnographic interviews reveal how migration has affected rural family structures beyond the usual quantifiable economic measures. Using the village of Meijia, Sichuan province, as a paradigmatic sample of family, where members have moved to work in the cities, leaving their children behind with the grandparents, the study demonstrates how migration and modernization are reshaping familial roles, changing filial expectations, reshuffling notions of care-taking, and transforming traditional views on the value of daughters and daughters-in-law.
The study concludes that the choices families make around migration, child-rearing and elder-care cannot be fully explained by either an income diversification model or a survival model, but rather through notions of filial piety. Yet the concept of filial piety itself is changing, particularly in relation to gender and perceptions about the worth of daughters and the mother/ daughter-in-law relationship. Understanding these new family dynamics will be important for both policy planners and economic analysts.
John Aubrey's antiquarian scholarship: a study in the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters
Keywords: antiquarianism

The writings of John Aubrey (1626-1697) cover a variety of subjects, including natural philosophy, mathematics, educational theory, biography, and magic, among others. His principal scholarly interest, however, was antiquarianism, the early modern discipline which embraced subjects such as archaeology, anthropology, and palaeography. This thesis is a study of Aubrey’s antiquarian writings within the context of the European Republic of Letters.
It begins with a revisionary survey of antiquarianism in England, 1660-1720, and proceeds to map his personal contacts and library before studying each of his major antiquarian works in detail. Aubrey emerges from this as a product of his time, but somewhat unusual in his eclectic use of the antiquarian tradition and his blending of antiquarian and natural philosophical methodologies. He was receptive to the latest scholarship, regardless of its origin, and his antiquarian writings were never mere antiquarianism, but moved beyond technical scholarship to address wider issues concerning the origins of English culture, the evolution of religion, the antiquity of the earth, and the nature of human invention.
Aubrey is now best known for his so-called Brief Lives, a series of biographies of contemporaries, and this thesis also includes a chapter studying the Lives as a form of antiquarianism. It argues that their keen observation and unconventional form are due to a mixture of antiquarian minuteness with traditions of Theophrastan character-writing and Tacitean historiography and that previous readings of them rely too heavily upon an outdated view of Aubrey as eccentric and peripheral to the larger intellectual movements of the century.
This thesis concludes with a reassessment of Aubrey’s scholarship and an argument that the patterns revealed highlight the insufficiency of current theories of antiquarian development in the early modern period. It also argues for the “literary” quality of Aubrey’s work and emphasises the importance of reading his antiquarian texts within the context of early modern definitions of literature.
Proton scattering studies: 70 to 140 Mev
Keywords: nucleon-nucleon scattering

The work reported in this thesis covers the latter part of a programme undertaken at A.E.R.E. Harwell to collect data on the nucleon-nucleon scattering problem at energies accessible to the Harwell 280 cm synchrocyclotron. The experiments described belong to the second phase of data collection at these energies in that they do not of themselves determine a unique set of phase shifts in a modified phase-shift analysis, but resolve ambiguities in the earlier data available, or improve the precision to a significant degree. The first chapter contains a review of the nucleon-nucleon scattering problem, and provides a common context for the different types of experiment described. The second chapter is devoted to a description of the development and final form of a polarised proton target for use in the 70-150 Mev region for proton-proton scattering. Radiation damage resulted in a decay of the polarisation produced in this target, and a brief study of this phenomenon (described in Chapter II) was required to supplement the polarisation decay data collected in the spin correlation experiment reported in the third chapter. The third and fourth chapters contain the experimental method and analysis of experiments using the polarised target to determine the spin correlation parameter Cnn in proton-proton scattering at 90° centre of mass for three energies: 74, 98, and 143 Mev; and at 61.8° centre of mass at 143 Mev only. A typical precision of ± 0.05 was obtained for this parameter. The fifth chapter contains a description of the apparatus and methods used for measurements of polarisation in the 98 Mev region: the experiment at 98 Mev to determine P(θ) in p-p scattering is described and analysed in chapter six. Due to a recent remeasurement of the polarisation of the Harwell 142 Mev polarised proton beam, absolute polarisation values were obtained, to a typical precision of ± 2% of the peak value of the asymmetry. The 98 Mev data provide a notably more stringent restriction on phase-shift fits at this energy than previous polarisation information. The preliminary results of a measurement of the absolute differential cross section for p-p scattering at 98.8 Mev are briefly discussed, and the chapter concluded with a compilation of the N-N scattering data now available in the energy range 60-160 Mev.
Cyclisation cascades via reactive iminium intermediates
Keywords: Enatioselective
Silane
Chiral
Phosphoric acid
Organocatalyst
Cascade
Cyclisation
Iridium
Gold
hydroamination

The aim of this D.Phil was to develop a range of cyclisation cascades, which initially form a reactive iminium intermediates that can then be attacked by a pendant nucleophile resulting in novel polycyclic structures.
This concept has been applied to the development of three methodologies and has resulted in the discovery of new reactivity as well as the synthesis of a wide range of interesting novel structures
Chapter 1: Enantioselective chiral-BINOL-phosphoric acid catalysed reaction cascade
A highly enantioselective hydroamination / N-sulfonyliminium cyclisation cascade using a combination of Au(I) and chiral phosphoric acid catalysts has been developed. Proceeding by an initial 5-exo-dig hydroamination and a subsequent phosphoric acid catalysed Pictet- Spengler cyclisation, the reaction provides access to complex sulfonamide scaffolds in excellent yields and with high levels of enantiocontrol. The scope can be extended to lactam derivatives, with excellent yields and enantiomeric excesses of up to 93% ee.
Chapter 2: Iridium catalysed nitro-Mannich cyclisation
A new chemoselective reductive nitro-Mannich cyclisation reaction sequence of nitroalkyltethered lactams has been developed. An initial rapid and chemoselective iridium(I) catalysed reduction of lactams to the corresponding enamine is subsequently followed by intra molecular nitro-Mannich cyclisation. This methodology provides direct access to important alkaloid, natural product-like structures in yields up to 81% and in diastereoselectivities that are typically good to excellent. An in-depth understanding of the reaction mechanism has been gained through NMR studies and characterisation of reaction intermediates. The new methodology has been applied to the total synthesis of (±)-epi-epiquinamide in 4 steps.
Chapter 3: Iridium catalysed reductive interrupted Pictet-Spengler cyclisation
A novel reductive interrupted Pictet-Spengler cyclisation reaction cascade has been created. An iridium(I) catalyzed partial reduction of lactams/amides to the corresponding iminium is subsequently trapped by a pendant indole nucleophile. Interruption of the Pictet-Spengler reaction by indolium reduction provides a wide range of novel spirocyclic indoline moieties in excellent yield and diastereoselectivity.
The North Atlantic Triangle and the genesis and legacy of the American occupation of Greenland during the Second World War
Keywords: Greenland
Mackenzie King
cryolite
Arctic
Monroe doctrine
Denmark
Churchill
Second World War
Roosevelt
meteorology
hemispheric security
nationalism
resources
technology
aluminium
empire
Germany
Canada
United States
aviation
Hitler
United Kingdom
Kauffmann

On April 9, 1940, Germany invaded Denmark. Instantly, the fate and status of Greenland, a Danish colony, was thrust into limbo. During the war, Greenland’s vital mineral resources and location made it significant for the warring parties on both sides of the Atlantic. However, conflicting international corporate and political interests made any act to defend the island on the part of the Allies, or the officially neutral Americans, problematic.
Within a year of the Danish occupation, the American government had signed an agreement for the defense of Greenland, extending the protection of both the Monroe Doctrine and the American military to the island. This action was an important step in the formal expansion of American influence in the Western Hemisphere that occurred during the Second World War.
This thesis argues that global economic, political, and technological changes led to Greenland’s increased geopolitical significance and set the stage for a shift in the balance of power within the North Atlantic Triangle. It demonstrates how decisions relating to the security of the island came to be made and how conflicting interests within and between governments affected the genesis of the occupation. It explores how Winston Churchill’s decision to mine the North Sea led to the American occupation of Greenland and examines the ways in which the effects of Churchill’s actions raised concerns in Canada about the possibility of a British defeat, which in turn led Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, to align his foreign policy closer to that of the United States’ President Roosevelt. This thesis also asserts that Roosevelt successfully used the potential foreign occupation of Greenland to demonstrate to the American public the dangers of foreign conflicts to the United States and to further his hemispheric security objectives both domestically and abroad. These events had a profound and lasting impact on the relationships within the North Atlantic Triangle and on political identity in Greenland, and signalled an important shift in the foreign policy of the United States toward greater American involvement in world affairs.
Probabilistic modelling of morphologically rich languages
Keywords: distributed feature representations
language modelling
morphology
neural language model
morpheme vectors
machine translation
Bayesian non-parametrics

This thesis investigates how the sub-structure of words can be accounted for in probabilistic models of language. Such models play an important role in natural language processing tasks such as translation or speech recognition, but often rely on the simplistic assumption that words are opaque symbols. This assumption does not fit morphologically complex language well, where words can have rich internal structure and sub-word elements are shared across distinct word forms.
Our approach is to encode basic notions of morphology into the assumptions of three different types of language models, with the intention that leveraging shared sub-word structure can improve model performance and help overcome data sparsity that arises from morphological processes.
In the context of n-gram language modelling, we formulate a new Bayesian model that relies on the decomposition of compound words to attain better smoothing, and we develop a new distributed language model that learns vector representations of morphemes and leverages them to link together morphologically related words. In both cases, we show that accounting for word sub-structure improves the models' intrinsic performance and provides benefits when applied to other tasks, including machine translation.
We then shift the focus beyond the modelling of word sequences and consider models that automatically learn what the sub-word elements of a given language are, given an unannotated list of words. We formulate a novel model that can learn discontiguous morphemes in addition to the more conventional contiguous morphemes that most previous models are limited to. This approach is demonstrated on Semitic languages, and we find that modelling discontiguous sub-word structures leads to improvements in the task of segmenting words into their contiguous morphemes.
Abstraction versus causality in Chinese law: lessons from English law
Keywords: Right in rem
Constructive Trust
Abstraction
Proprietary Restitution
Separation

Rules in English law regarding transfer of rights with respect to land and movables can generally fit into the framework of the abstract system. As a default rule throughout English property law, a separate stage of conveyance is necessary to complete the transfer of title, although in cases of unconditional sale of ascertained goods, it is possible to transfer title by the transferor’s intent alone. A study of the Sale of Goods Acts and detinue demonstrates that the contract of sale itself has never been a means of conveyance throughout English legal history. No matter whether a conveyance is made by solo consensu or by additional means, a separate intent to convey remains distinct from the intent to bargain. So long as the conveyance is valid according to its own rules, invalidating factors in the underlying basis of that conveyance in principle do not infect the validity of the conveyance itself. Revesting of title by rescinding the contract of sale induced by fraudulent misrepresentation is an exception, but the underlying rationale in those cases is flawed. From a normative perspective, the alleged ‘unfairness’ to the transferor under extreme circumstances is not self-evident. Arguments such as ‘initial impaired consent subtraction’ or ‘assumption of insolvency risk plus swollen assets’ might serve as possible ways to determine such ‘unfairness’. Nonetheless, these arguments remain problematic if employed to justify the need for causality. A unique characteristic of English law is that in certain impaired consent transfer cases, although title transferred cannot revest at law, equity may grant a right under a constructive trust with numerous proprietary attributes. However, this is nevertheless consistent with the operation of the English abstract system, for such an equitable interest acquired by the transferor, unlike what he could acquire under a causal system, is by its nature not a right in rem. With these observations, English law could provide at least three lessons for the ongoing debate in Chinese academia about whether Chinese law should adopt the principles of separation and abstraction.
Intimacy in contemporary digital cinema
Keywords: digital cinema
amateur film-making
intimacy
Digital media

Critical discourses on contemporary digital cinema tend to be either overtly negative, framed within a rhetoric of loss or disenfranchisement, or unilaterally positive, celebrating the user agency and freedom digital technologies enable. Both these conceptual positions are unhelpful because they either focus on what contemporary digital cinema fails to do or what it should do, without examining more closely how it actually functions. What is needed is a third, neutral approach which takes both sides into consideration but is also aware of their limitations and weaknesses.
This thesis takes as its impetus Giles Deleuze’s suggestion that, just like the cinemas of the movement-image and the time-image before it, contemporary digital cinema needs a basic will to art – a new aesthetic principle, a new function of the image, a new politics, a new representational potential distinct from those that have come before it. The aim of this thesis is therefore to establish this will to art and explore its ramifications for and manifestations in contemporary digital cinema.
Taking into consideration a variety of filmic texts from the 1980s to the present day which prominently feature diegetically recorded footage, as well as amateur film-making practices from the home movies of the 1960s to the video clips now uploaded to online media sharing platforms, the increasing relevance of home media in the reception of contemporary digital cinema, and most crucially the process of convergence inherent in digital media, this thesis argues that the will to art of contemporary digital cinema is intimacy.
The effect of uncertainty in composition on laser-induced grating thermometry
Keywords: thermometry
engine
frequency doubling
laser
fuel temperature
Laser Induced Grating Thermal Spectroscopy
combustion engine
Laser physics
combustion

The effect of uncertainty in gas composition on the accuracy of gas-phase thermometry using Laser-Induced Thermal Grating Spectroscopy, LITGS, is studied. Temperatures are obtained from measurements of the sound speed derived from the frequency of oscillations ƒOSC imposed upon the LITGS signal arising from the transit of acoustic waves across the density modulation feature. The dependence of the sound speed, cs on √γ/m, where γ is the ratio of specific heats and m is the mean molecular mass leads to a dependence upon gas composition.
LITGS signals were generated in acetone vapour in a variety of gas mixtures in a temperature controlled cell at 4 bar total pressure using pump pulses from a frequency quadrupled Q-switched Nd:YAG laser at 266 nm and a cw diode pumped solid state probe laser at 671 nm. Studies were undertaken of the variation in ƒOSC with gas composition using gas mixtures of O2 and N2 with component concentrations in the range 0-100 %, and was found to agree with theoretical predictions. Measurement precision of the data (one standard deviation in 50 measurements) was found to be typically ± 1.7 % for measurements at 4 bar total pressure.
The effect of varying concentrations in exhaust gas residuals (EGR) typical of pre-ignition gases in a spark ignition internal combustion engine were studied using synthetic air (N2/ O2 mixtures) containing variable amounts of simulated EGR components, CO2 and H2O. The effect of variation in CO2 concentration in dry synthetic air was measured at 4 bar and 30°C and found to agree with theoretical predictions. Experiments conducted at 30°C, with the addition of a saturated vapour pressure of water indicate that the effect of a saturated vapour pressure of water on the oscillation frequency in synthetic EGR is on the borderline of resolution.
The effect of variable amounts of typical hydrocarbon fuel vapour on ƒOSC was studied using 2,2,4-trimethyl-pentane in gas mixtures composed of synthetic air and variable amounts of EGR and water vapour at 80°C.
Kinetic theory was used in order to model the dependence of the oscillation frequency ƒOSC on various gas compositions containing fuel and EGR, in order to construct an error surface for comparison with experimental measurements. Experimental data were found to agree with the model predictions to within experimental error for a representative data set within the range of calculated values. The results indicate that uncertainties in temperature values derived from LITGS thermometry can be estimated with confidence within reasonable estimates of composition variations in an internal combustion engine, and should lead to absolute temperature accuracy of within 2-3 %.
Glycine receptor antibodies: pathogenic mechanisms and clinical corrlates
Keywords: Animal model
Progressive Encephalomyelitis with Rigidity and Myoclonus
Glycine receptor
Autoantibody
Stiff person syndrome

Glycine receptor antibodies have been identified in a few patients with progressive encephalomyelitis with rigidity and myoclonus (PERM), a highly disabling disorder characterised by rigidity, spasm and brainstem symptomatology. The clinical characteristics of patients with glycine receptor antibodies have not yet been fully described and it is not clear whether GlyR-Abs are pathogenic or just an epiphenomenon.
This study examined the clinical features and immunotherapy responses of 45 patients; characterised the GlyR-Ab pathogenicity, subunit specificity and binding to different brain region in vitro, and examined mice injected with GlyR-Abs to model the disease in vivo.
Most of the patients were classified as PERM but some patients had symptomatology beyond the classical motor manifestations and there were four patients with tumours (thymomas and lymphomas). GlyR-Ab titres were varied in serum and CSF, but there was intrathecal synthesis in the six patients with suitable samples. Most patients were very disabled but almost all showed excellent responses to immunotherapies. The antibodies were mainly IgG1 and IgG3 subclasses, activated complement on glycine receptor-transfected HEK cells at room temperature, and caused internalisation and lysosomal degradation of the glycine receptors at 37°C. GlyR-Abs bound to rodent spinal cord and brainstem co-localising with monoclonal antibodies to GlyRα1 on the surface of neurons.
GlyR-IgG injected intra-peritoneally led to impairment in forced walking ability, sensorimotor function and coordination. Analysis of the brain showed that animals injected with patients' IgG, but not control IgG, had antibodies bound to the brainstem, spinal cord, cerebellum and caudate, co-localising with GlyRα1 monoclonal antibody. Intra-cerebroventricular injection of GlyR-IgG caused an anxiety-like behaviour in mice but no evident motor disturbances.
These results provide the first evidence of in vitro and in vivo pathogenicity of the GlyR-Abs, supporting the use of long term immunosuppression in these patients to provide them with a good prognosis.