VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Secured Transactions in Movable Assets Act, company charges and funding micro, small and medium enterprises under Nigerian law

Having attained a feverish pitch, the clamour for the reform of Nigeria’s law of secured transactions has culminated in the recent enactment of the Secured Transactions in Movable Assets Act, 2017 by Nigeria’s National Assembly to amongst others ‘stimulate responsible lending to micro, small and medium enterprises.’ This thesis evaluates the impact of the Act on the Nigerian law of secured transactions and specifically, the implication of the autonomy it gives to companies to continue to grant charges, pursuant to the old system and presumably outside the ambit of the Act. The thesis hypothesizes that despite the Act’s obvious similarity to reformed systems of personal property security laws, a reform now being driven by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), expectations of the Nigerian Act having similar reformative impact and meeting its key objective of stimulating credit to MSMEs may be misconceived.

Keywords: Company Charges
Funding MSMEs in Nigeria
Secured Transactions
Advisor: Gullifer, L
CP violation measurements using B± → DK*± decays at LHCb

Measurements of CP violation in B-→ DK*- decays, including the sensitivity to the CKM angle gamma, are presented in this thesis. Decays of the D0 meson to K-π+, K-K+, π-π+, π-K+, K-π+π-π+, π-π+π-π+, and π-K+π-π+ are investigated. Observables are measured that are sensitive to the CKM angle gamma and the hadronic parameters of the decay rB and deltaB. These measurements are performed using proton-proton collision data collected by the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment from 2011 to 2016. These data correspond to the largest yields observed in these modes. The world's first CP violation measurements in four-body D0 decay modes using the B- → DK*- channel are presented. The first evidence of the B- → DK*- mode, where the D0 decays to π-K+, is also obtained with a signal significance of 4.2sigma. A value of gamma = 40.9° is measured with a 1 sigma confidence interval of [25, 58]°, and 2sigma confidence intervals of [10, 87]° and [97,167]°, which is consistent with the world average measurement of gamma. The world's most precise value of rB = 0.113+0.017-0.019 for B- → DK*- decays is measured.

Keywords: LHCb
Flavour physics
Particle physics
Physics
Large Hadron Collider
Advisor: Malde, S
Harnew, N
Minds at war: dual mindset theory and the psychology of Europe’s descent into the First World War

Discrepancies in how leaders and political elites react to the escalation of international crises and to the possibility of war, even when confronted with the same or similar international constraints and decision-making dilemmas, is a puzzling phenomenon not comfortably accounted for by either traditional rational actor or earlier ‘cognitive miser’ psycho-dynamic models. A new psychological theory — the dual mindset theory — suggests that the mindsets of individual leaders act as an intervening variable that can help to account for these puzzling discrepancies and, thereby, to explain certain historical paradoxes as they concern variation in war and peace outcomes in international affairs.
According to the dual mindset theory, individual mindsets can be broadly categorised into two basic types: reflexive and reflective. The dominance of a reflexive mindset implies the rapid operation of intuitive, and often emotional, thought processes that are automatically performed as a reflex, or without much conscious thought. By contrast, the dominance of a reflective mindset implies the application of conscious, effortful deliberations that attempt to restrain the impulsive and rapid thought processes of the former without getting rid of them altogether. As they relate to decisionmaking in international relations, reflexive mindsets are hypothesised to increase the probability of aggression and conflict breaking out, while reflective mindsets are hypothesised to reduce this probability.
Our dual mindsets are hypothesised to originate from two very different but interconnected systems of the human brain that provide the foundation for all human reasoning. These systems have been variously labelled as ‘Systems 1 and 2’, ‘automatic and effortful reasoning’ and, more popularly, ‘blinking and thinking’. These mindsets, and the dual systems of the brain from which they originate, are proposed to contribute to the observed variation in war and peace outcomes in international relations through the influence of three causal mechanisms: sensitivity to threats, propensity for risk and temporal discounting. The dual mindset theory is applied to the historical puzzle of why the First World War broke out when it did in the summer of 1914, during a relatively calm period of European politics, and not in response to earlier pre-war crises, in particular the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, when the European continent appeared to be on the brink of conflict.

Keywords: crisis decision-making
dual systems
stress
mindsets
heuristics
reflective
reflexive
First World War
Advisor: MacFarlane, N
Algorithms for the correction of photobleaching

The measured intensity (ideally in units of photon counts) of a fluorescent sample over time constitutes a time-series called an intensity trace. The idea of fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy (FFS) is to extract information from intensity traces.
Photobleaching is the phenomenon of the breaking of fluorophores (light emitters) over time. Photobleaching causes fluorescent signal to diminish over time. This changes the intensity trace, introducing a downward trend.
Many quantitative methods in FFS implicitly assume that there is no bleaching in the data. Hence, data with significant levels of photobleaching must be corrected prior to the application of equations and algorithms in these fields. This correction is often termed detrending, since its aim is to remove the downward trend in the data introduced by photobleaching.
Previous detrending methods have two main caveats:
1. They rely on either fitting or smoothing, both of which approximate data as continuous. This is inappropriate for fluorescence intensity data, which is count data (i.e. discrete, not continuous).
2. They require the user to choose a detrending parameter. The choice of this parameter is crucial to the success or failure of the detrending routine, yet instructions on how to choose it did not exist.
The work in this thesis solves problems 1 and 2 above by means of an automatic (no user input required) parameter finding routine and a new detrending algorithm which treats the data as discrete and avoids fitting and smoothing, thereby avoiding the approximation of non-continuous data as continuous.
These advancements are then used in a study investigating the stoichiometry of the interaction of the HIV-1 virus’ envelope with its cellular receptors and coreceptors over time. This is the first study of its kind in live cells and it was facilitated by the advances in detrending presented in this thesis.

Keywords: FCS
HIV
FFS
Image Analysis
Fluorescence
Microscopy
Advisor: Padilla-Parra, S
A linguistic description of Istro-Rumanian

This work is a synchronic linguistic description of Istro-Rumanian, in accordance with certain principles of functional linguistics, as developed by the neo-Prague school. Although the work does not set out to be a linguistic theory, certain of the linguistic concepts which I have borrowed have, in the interests of the description, been extended and adapted, and in one case a new notion has been introduced.
The description is in two parts, which correspond to Martinet's distinction between the first and the second articulations of language; the two parts are respectively the grammar and the phonology. The concepts which I have borrowed, and in some cases adapted and extended, are those of the phoneme, the simultaneous bundle, the distributional unit, the position, the moneme and the grammateme. These concepts are used extensively throughout this work.
Istro-Rumanian is the language, or closely related group of dialects, spoken in two small "linguistic islets" in the Istrian peninsula in Yugoslavia. In cases where there is linguistic divergence between the two "islets", I have taken the forms of the Northern one as representing the "standard" dialect, and noted the divergent Southern forms where appropriate. As its name suggests, Istro-Rumanian is a Romance language, from the historical point of view a dialect of Daco-Rumanian, but one which has been heavily contaminated by other languages, particularly by Serbo-Croat. The latter language is spoken by virtually all of the speakers of Intro-Romanian, and is the language in which the children are being currently schooled. Istro-Rumanian, even for its native speakers, is not a written language, and this factor is an important agent contributory to the decline of the language and to its presumed eventual demise. The written representations of Istro—Rumanian speech occurring throughout this work are therefore in my own notation and are based on the "broad" transcription of recorded material collected by me. The recordings were obtained during two separate periods of field research in Istria during the Long Vacations of 1966 and 1967; they amount to forty hours of recorded Istro-Rumanian speech taken from thirty six informants, all of whom are native speakers. My "broad" transcription derives from the "narrow" transcription which I first made from my field recordings.

Keywords: dialect
linguistic
Istro-Romanian
Advisor: Barnett, F
Mulder, J
Towards regulatory acceptance for innovations

This thesis is devoted to the study of innovations that are ambiguous to existing regulatory frameworks. The problem is how these ambiguous innovations achieve regulatory acceptance. I start by proposing an analogy between a social movement and the process of achieving regulatory acceptance for innovations. It enables me to introduce social movement theories to systematically explain the variation of regulatory outcomes of an innovation. I then turn to the discursive side of this problem, that is, how companies influence policymakers’ interpretations of an innovation in their favor. Drawing on the framing perspective, I explore which aspect of the innovation a company chooses to promote would work for policymakers. Finally I consider how regulatory acceptance for an innovation is possible in a non-democratic setting, where companies are unable to influence policy making through democratic participation. I find that the substitute to democratic participation is to utilize the divisions within the state to push the frontier of what is permissible.

Advisor: Thun, E
Sako, M
Samel, H
The emerging social sciences and editorial practice in poetry and the crisis in the early twentieth century

This thesis seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the emerging social sciences influenced literary constructions of racial and national identity in American poetry at the turn of the twentieth century. Using methodologies derived from the fields of literature and science and periodical studies, along with an underlying theoretical framework adapted from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on fields of production, I argue that the dominant approaches to ideas of race and culture in the fields of anthropology and sociology directly shaped the ways in which poetry was curated for the public by the editors of two influential magazines: Poetry under the editorship of Harriet Monroe, and The Crisis under the editorship of W.E.B. Du Bois.
Chapter One examines the cultural contexts which fostered the availability and popularity of science as a source of authority deployable in other fields in the early twentieth century. To differing extents, both Monroe and Du Bois specifically sought to sway their respective audiences by strategically substituting a form of borrowed scientific capital for the cultural capital they initially lacked.
Chapter Two traces the development of institutionalized anthropology in the United States and Harriet Monroe’s deployment of anthropological materials and authority to build a specifically American poetic tradition within and beyond the pages of Poetry that would minimize its indebtedness to European verse. This chapter is supported by original archival research which reveals Monroe’s preoccupation with Native American cultures as a revitalizing resource for American poetry, and includes examinations of poetry by Carl Sandburg, Mary Austin, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Vachel Lindsay.
Finally, Chapter Three explores the poetry and editorial material printed in The Crisis and the ways in which they reflect Du Bois’s attempts to combine strategies from contemporary sociology and anthropology in order to establish the validity and authenticity of African American identity and culture. This chapter draws on analyses of writings by Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Fenton Johnson, and Langston Hughes to demonstrate the ways in which the poetry of black writers was deployed in and actively participated in scientific debates surrounding race in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America.

Keywords: race
Poetry
The Crisis
Native American
literature and social science
Advisor: Whitworth, M
Kinetic treatment of magnetized and collisionless plasma near a wall

Charged particles gyrate around magnetic field lines, a property that is exploited to confine plasma in magnetic confinement fusion devices. Typically, the gyroradius is small compared to the system size and thus the gyromotion can be averaged out. The resulting charged particle motion closely follows a magnetic field line. At the edge of fusion devices, the magnetic field usually impinges on a wall at a shallow angle. A boundary layer forms in which the plasma density changes over a characteristic distance from the wall of the order of the ion gyroradius, as ions are absorbed during their gyromotion. This boundary layer is called magnetic presheath, and is typically collisionless and quasineutral. Importantly, the electric field in this region distorts the ion gyro-orbits, making them non-circular and thus affecting the ion density profile. Solving the magnetic presheath amounts to obtaining the self-consistent electric field for which the net charge density is zero.
In this thesis, I assume a small magnetic field angle and small gradients parallel to the wall to develop an asymptotic theory for the magnetic presheath, which is used to obtain the ion density. The small, yet crucial, contribution of the part of the orbit near the wall is included. To demonstrate the theory for a case without any gradients parallel to the wall, I calculate numerically the self-consistent electrostatic potential by assuming the electron density to be a Boltzmann distribution. The model is used to study the dependence of magnetic presheath characteristics on magnetic field angle and ion temperature. The distribution function of ions that have traversed the magnetic presheath is obtained, which is important to predict the amount of sputtering and erosion at the wall of a fusion device.

Advisor: Diaz, F
Organometallic routes to colloidal zinc oxide nanoparticles and layered zinc hydroxides

The thesis focuses on the controlled hydrolysis of organozinc precursors to form colloidal, surface-functionalised, ZnO nanoparticles (2–4 nm) and exfoliated nanosheets of layered zinc hydroxides (3 nm thick), with a primary application in the catalytic hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol.
An introduction to the topic and a literature review are provided in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 entails a description of characterisation techniques.
Chapter 3 presents the synthesis of layered zinc hydroxides, intercalated with a range of carboxylates (acetate, hexanoate, decanoate, oleate and benzoate). Exfoliation of layered zinc hydroxide into monolayers was achieved by stirring the material intercalated with oleate ligand, in toluene, for 2 h. The dimensions of the nanostructures are 3 nm thick × ~ 26 nm (AFM and TEM). In addition, a nanoporous ZnO film (1 μm thick) was formed after annealing a film of solution-deposited material at 500 °C, for 15 mins.
Chapter 4 details the synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles (&LT; 3 nm) by hydrolysis of diethylzinc, with di(octadecyl)phosphinate (5 : 1 Zn/ligand loading) . The use of such ligand halts the solid-state ripening of the nanoparticles. The ZnO nanoparticles, combined with Cu(0) or Cu2O nanoparticles, demonstrate catalytic activity for the hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol, using a liquid-phase continuous flow stirred tank reactor (mesitylene, 210 °C, 50 bar, 3:1 molar ratio of H2:CO2, 150 mL min-1 flow). The colloidal Cu/ZnO nanocatalysts exhibit 2-3 times higher rates when compared to the standard commercial heterogeneous Cu-ZnO-Al2O3 catalyst (~20 vs. 7 mmolMeOH gCuZnO-1 h-1). The use of either Cu(0) or Cu2O nanoparticles results in the same catalytic activity and selectivity, but the use of smaller ZnO nanoparticles results in slightly higher activity. Post-catalysis analysis shows an increase in the oxidative stability of Cu(0) nanoparticles. One explanation may be the migration, under catalytic conditions, of ZnO onto Cu(0) nanoparticles that generates a protective layer against oxidation.
Chapter 5 describes the substitutional doping of ZnO nanoparticles, with 5 mol% of Mg(II), Al(III) and Cu(I). Characterisation of electronic properties (UV-Vis, Tauc plot), solid-state structure (XRD) and composition (ICP-OES, XPS) confirms the substitutional doping in all cases. Under the same catalysis conditions outlined in Chapter 4, all the nanocatalysts display higher activity and better stability than the commercial heterogeneous catalyst. Nonetheless, when compared to ZnO, Mg-doping reduces activity, whilst Al-doping increases activity (600 vs. 1020 μmol mmolmetal-1 h-1).
Chapter 6 summarises the findings from Chapter 3, 4 and 5, followed by the outlook of these chapters. Finally, the experimental methods are presented in Chapter 7.

Advisor: Williams, C
The Augustinian use of Oseney Abbey

Only one liturgical manuscript from Oseney Abbey survives, a compendium bound in the fifteenth century whose main parts are a text known as the Oseney Ordinal, a processional and a tonale; in addition it contains a manual, a collection of vesper responsory and alleluia verses, a kalendar and extracts from the customary and diurnal, as well as miscellanea copied into the manuscript at a later date. The components of the manuscript are of various dates from the late thirteenth century onwards.
The principal aim of this thesis is to present edited texts of the three main portions of the manuscript, the ordinal, processional and tonale, together with the kalendar, the extracts from the customary and diurnal, and some of the shorter texts in the manuscript. In addition these texts are comprehensively indexed.
Some attempt has also been made to identify a putative ‘Oseney group’ of related manuscripts and a hypothesis is advanced concerning the existence of a group of Augustinian houses with a related use which shows some degree of independence from contemporary secular and monastic uses. Although other writers have identified a group of Augustinian uses related to the ordinal of St Ruf (known as the Letbert ordinal), the Oseney use is not related to this group. Instead it appears to be part of a separate group of houses, including at least Haughmond, Ranton, and probably St Osyth. Firm conclusions concerning the origins of this use have not been possible, and directions for further research are outlined towards the end of the thesis.

Keywords: Austin
Ordinal
Processional
Tonale
Oxford
Oseney
Augustinian
Haughmond
Osney
Advisor: Caldwell, J
Chadd, D
Can courage be a modern virtue? Seeking insight in Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt

This dissertation examines the role of political virtues in modern contexts, and in particular, the role of courage as a potential modern political virtue. Despite frequent commentary on the importance of virtues, many political theorists have exhibited a strange reluctance to discuss the virtue of courage, at least in the sort of depth that it merits. This thesis puts forward the suggestion that courage is one of the most important modern political virtues and one ripe for rediscovery by political theorists and historians of political thought alike. Following the Ancient Greeks, the dissertation defines courage as the virtue which aids us in the proper assessment of threats and, where appropriate, the overcoming of fear in the service of causes we deem worthy, while emphasizing the contexts in which it is deployed. The dissertation also seeks to outline several reasons for the seemingly problematic relationship courage has with modernity, given its historical nexus with war and conquest, the striving for difference and distinction, and exclusionary notions of masculinity. The dissertation moves on to examine the role of courage in the thought of three thinkers—Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt—all of whom have their doubts about the existence of courage in the modern world. Chapter 2 examines the role of courage in Tocqueville’s early modern America, swept up in Americans’ economic pursuits and captured by the soothing nature of consumer appetites. Chapter 3 examines the role of courage in Mill’s thought, arguing that Mill’s liberalism inherits many of the driving political and social concerns illuminated by Tocqueville, his friend and correspondent; however, Mill’s advocacy for a politics free from the crushing weight of inherited dogmas and traditions leads him to fall into the modern trap of jettisoning courage, even as his politics makes abundantly clear the need for it. Chapter 4 turns to Arendt’s skepticism that courage can ever exist in the modern world short of a fundamental act of recovery from the ancients, with a concomitant willingness to accept all of the problematic elements of courage as practiced by the Greeks. The dissertation concludes by stating that newer schools of thought on virtue, like liberal virtue theorists, have neglected the virtue of courage, which must be considered a modern political virtue, as there has been a proliferation of modern political contexts in which it is absolutely critical that we muster nothing short of courage. Courage is presented as a potential solution to the modern challenges facing liberalism from within, such as safe spaces, political correctness, no platforming, and trigger warnings, amongst others.

Keywords: Virtues
Liberalism
Courage
Advisor: Bejan, T
Radiolabelling of aryl boronic esters with 18F and 123I: method development and application

The overarching theme of this thesis is the application of aryl boronic esters to the fields of PET and SPECT radiochemistry.
Chapter 1 provides an introduction to positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), in conjunction with an introduction to the utility of arylboranes as precursors for radioisotope incorporation.
In chapter 2, a general method for the copper-mediated nucleophilic 123I-iodination of (hetero)aryl boronic pinacol esters and acids is disclosed. This methodology was applied toward the successful radiosynthesis of four commonly used SPECT radiotracers, [123I]DPA- 713, [123I]IMPY, [123I]MIBG and [123I]IPEB.
In chapter 3, the copper-mediated nucleophilic 18F-fluorination of aryl boronic pinacol esters, developed in the Gouverneur group, has been applied to the field of prosthetic group 18F-radiochemistry. This protocol was utilised to synthesise four popular prosthetic groups in a single radiosynthetic step.
Chapter 4 describes the radiosynthesis and biological evaluation of [18F]DPA-713 and [18F]CF3DPA-713, two novel analogues of the Translocator Protein (TSPO) ligand N,N-diethyl-2-(4-methoxyphenyl)-5,7-dimethylpyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidine-3- acetamide-713 (DPA-713).
Finally, chapter 5 details experimental procedures and characterisation for all compounds.

Advisor: Gouverneur, V