VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The law of nuisance and the rule in Rylands v. Fletcher

The thesis is concerned with the law of private nuisance and the rule in Rylands v. Fletcher, but not with public or statutory nuisance. It is submitted that every case of nuisance is determinable according to the same general principles. The thesis explores the "state of affairs" concept and who the appropriate defendant is. Knowledge of the state of affairs and foreseeability of harm by the defendant are seen as essential to the formation of liability; the suggestion that there are “intentional (or strict) protected nuisances" and "negligent nuisances" is rejected. The right by nuisance is the right to the ordinary enjoyment of land, and the person entitied to this right is the occupier. The nature of this right and the extent of the remedies available are discussed.
The case of Rylands v. Fletcher is seen as but another nuisance case. All the suggested differences between nuisance and Rylands v. Fletcher are explored and found to be illusory. Theories that Rylands v. Fletcher is an application of the "risk-duty" concept of negligence or of a tort of strict liability for “ultrahazardous activities" are examined but found wanting.
The vague concept of "reasonableness" often associated with nuisance is redefined in terms of a defence of ordinary use; the defendant must prove that the state of affairs was ordinary and that the activity causing harm was reasonably done.(This is the defence to Rylands v. Fletcher often "natural user".) Other defences are statutory authority, consent, and contributory negligence, all of which are analysed. Alleged defences found to be without justification in the light of the juristic basis of nuisance are act of a stranger, Act of God, coming to the nuisance, prescription, and the Fires Prevention (Metropolis) Act 1774, s.86.

Keywords: Rylands v. Fletcher
Rylands versus Fletcher
England
nuisances
law of nuisance
Advisor: Davies, JW
The riddle of spiritual pedagogy: how is authoritative spiritual teaching possible?

This thesis asks: can a spiritual teacher be said to teach with authority, as much of the Christian tradition holds and, indeed, requires to continue itself? To answer this question, a secondary question is pursued: what is the relationship of spiritual authority to other types of authoritative teaching? The spiritual pedagogue attempts to form others to live according to God’s will, which is mysterious in principle. Unlike most other disciplines, the spiritual teacher cannot claim authoritative knowledge of the essence of her discipline. Nevertheless, I argue that spiritual teaching authority is a legitimate though limited form of authority, and that a sign of such authority is a self-consciousness of its own limitations.
Drawing on Wittgenstein and Aquinas, I argue that spiritual teaching authority is a riddling form of prudential counsel. Wittgenstein’s account of language within shared activities provides the “rough ground” to speak of the activities associated with spiritual pedagogy while distinguishing the inarticulable mystery at the heart of such teaching. The language of spiritual pedagogy is riddling in Cora Diamond’s sense in that such language fails to make sense but lies within a cultivated, intelligible set of questions and activities. This Wittgensteinian account is joined with Thomas’s two rules for prudential human action, the eternal law of God’s own being, and human reason. The eternal law is, in principle, mysterious yet it formally orders human reason. The spiritual pedagogue becomes authoritative by becoming riddling herself, i.e., by being transformed through her engagement with scripture and tradition in community. This ongoing transformation allows her to creatively and richly speak and act around the riddle of God without ever claiming to solve that riddle.

Keywords: Thomas Aquinas
Wittgenstein
religious language
Anselm
spiritual pedagogy
Advisor: Ward, G
Mulhall, S
The Franciscan observants in England, 1482-1559

Chapter 1. The early development of the northern European Observant movement and the apparent lack of demand for Franciscan reform in England. The English Observant foundations as products of the interest of the monarchy based upon European court fashion allied to their own dynastic purposes.
Chapter 2. The standards of Apostolic Poverty which the northern Observants professed and the extent to which the English friars lived up to them. Numbers of friars and patterns of recruitment. The extent of royal patronage and its reflection in the court. The friars' intellectual temper.
Chapter 3. Suspicions of Lutheranism at Greenwich and Cardinal Wolsey’s attempts to visit and reform the Greenwich friary in 1524-5. The flight of William Roy and Jerome Barlow to the Continent. Wolsey’s employment of another Greenwich friar, John West to track down English protestants on the Continent and the danger of divided loyalties inherent in external patronage of individual friars.
Chapter 4. Friar William Peto’s sermon before Henry VIII (Easter 1532) and the friars’ opposition to Henry VIII’s divorce and the break with Rome. Thomas Cromwell’s attempts, with the aid of a disaffected faction among the friars led by John Lawrence, to control their public opposition and his ultimate failure. The suppression of the friaries as the consequence of the friars” refusal to accept the Royal Supremacy over the English Church.
Chapter 5. The aftermath of the suppression. The friars were not so brutally treated as Franciscan tradition has alleged and they continued to cause trouble. Their rôle in the 'Pilgrimage of Grace'. The case of friar John Forest and the compilation of a list of former Observants. The refoundation of the convents at Greenwich and Southampton under Queen Mary.
An index of biographical data is appended.

Keywords: observants
Church history
England
Franciscans
Advisor: Davies, CSL
Antigen presentation and T cell regulation by intestinal epithelial cells

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II expression by intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) has been described in inflammatory bowel disease patients. However, the role of epithelial antigen presentation in the maintenance of immune homeostasis remains unclear. We determined that colonic IECs possess important features of antigen presenting cells, as they express MHC class II in response to IFNg signalling, are able to take up and to process antigen and express the co-inhibitory molecule programmed death-ligand 1. Using targeted deletion of MHC class II expression in IECs, we demonstrated that colonic IEC antigen presentation plays a minor role in controlling colonic inflammation but might be important in facilitating the resolution of chronic inflammation. Small intestinal IECs express MHC class II at steady state and loss of epithelial antigen presentation at this tissue site resulted in the near loss of CD8aa+ CD4+ IELs. However, the functional consequences of this loss remain to be determined. In addition, we investigated the role of epithelial antigen presentation in modulating regulatory T cell responses and demonstrated that loss of caecal IEC MHC class II expression resulted in increased FoxP3 expression and IL-10 production by H. hepaticus-specific CD4 T cells in H. hepaticus colonised mice during intestinal inflammation. An experimental repeat, characterised by lower caecal IEC MHC class II expression, did not show these CD4 T cell changes, highlighting the importance of the tissue microenvironment in supporting antigenspecific CD4 T cell responses by IECs. To further dissect the importance of epithelial antigen presentation, in vitro colonic organoid and H. hepaticus-specific CD4 T cell co-cultures were established. This co-culture system revealed that IECs activate microbe-specific CD4 T cells in an antigen specific manner and modulate their effector phenotypes and functions. These results show, that IECs can function as non-conventional antigen presenting cells but the functional consequences of epithelial antigen presentation in vivo require further investigations.

Keywords: intestinal epithelial cell
mucosal immunology
antigen presentation
CD4 T cell
MHC class II
non-conventional antigen presenting cell
Advisor: Maloy, K
Powrie, F
Pott, J
Thornton, E
Mass photometry: weighing single molecules with interferometric scattering microscopy

Interferometric scattering microscopy (iSCAT) has emerged in recent years as a highly sensitive imaging technique, capable of detecting the scattering signal even from single unlabelled proteins in suitably designed in vitro single molecule assays where the scattering background is kept to a minimum. Here we present numerical aperture filtering in an iSCAT microscope for enhanced contrast of point-like scatterers, and show that it can lead to improved sensitivity through enabling the use of higher incident light intensities.
We apply this development to measuring the scattering contrast of proteins at the single molecule level. This scattering contrast shows the expected linear dependence on molecular weight, allowing the extraction of mass distributions built up from the quantification of one molecule at a time, an approach we refer to as mass photometry. The mass measured in this way shows ∼2% mass accuracy and ∼2% precision. Distinct species are resolved with a full width at half maximum as low as 20 kDa, although this increases with mass, sufficient for low-order homo-oligomeric resolution. These capabilities are exemplified with measurements of the equilibrium constants for the BanLec- induced aggregation of the HIV protein Env, and dynamic imaging of the early stages of α-synuclein aggregation on supported lipid bilayers. We conclude with a detailed discussion of considerations relevant to the acquisition and analysis of high quality, reproducible mass photometry data.

Keywords: single molecule
interferometric scattering microscopy
mass photometry
label free
Advisor: Kukura, P
The effects of microstructure on strength and fracture resistance of nuclear graphite

Cracking from stress concentrations of the graphite neutron moderator, or keyway root cracking, is a potential limit for the lifetime of the UK Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGR), and there is a need to better understand how damage occurs prior to fracture. Gilsocarbon graphite is a heterogeneous and quasi-brittle material, a class that includes concretes and natural materials such as bone. This project has made use of, developed, or participated in the development of advanced neutron and X-ray synchrotron techniques to improve the understanding of the deformation of Gilsocarbon graphite. In-situ High-Resolution Tomography and X-ray Diffraction Mapping has confirmed the non-linearity of graphite deformation in compression of a flattened disc and has highlighted the heterogeneity of the microstructure’s response to stress. To this extent, codes have been written to process and match the DVC and XRD strains and extract comparative strain quantities. A novel in-situ technique and associated post-processing routines have been developed with Neutron Bragg Imaging to investigate grain reorientation, and combined with In-situ Three-dimensional X-ray Diffraction (3DXRD) they reinforced indications that this mechanism is recoverable. In-situ High Speed Synchrotron Tomography provided unique time-resolved observations of crack initiation, propagation and coalescence away from a stress concentration, indicating the prevalence of lenticular cracks. With as much as 72 hours of beamtime, this project has developed reusable techniques and provided unique insight of the damage accommodation in nuclear-grade graphite.

Keywords: tomography
diffraction
DVC
crystallography
synchrotron
correlation
graphite
elastic strain
x-ray
brittle fracture
neutrons
Advisor: Marrow, T
Liu, D
Arbitrage-free neural-SDE market models of traded options

Modelling joint dynamics of liquid vanilla options is crucial for arbitrage-free pricing of illiquid derivatives and managing risks of option trade books. This thesis develops a nonparametric model for the European options book respecting underlying financial constraints while being practically implementable. We derive a state space for prices which are free from static (or model-independent) arbitrage and study the inference problem where a model is learnt from discrete time series data of stock and option prices. We use neural networks as function approximators for the drift and diffusion of the modelled SDE (stochastic differential equation) system, and impose constraints on the neural nets such that no-arbitrage conditions are preserved. In particular, we give methods to calibrate \textit{neural-SDE} models which are guaranteed to satisfy a set of linear inequalities.
We validate our approach with numerical experiments using both (i) synthetic data generated from a Heston stochastic local volatility model and (ii) real world data. In both cases, we assess how well the model captures option price dynamics, and therefore its capacity as a realistic option market simulator. However, the presence of arbitrage in the real world option price data causes difficulties in the calibration of our models, making pre-processing of the data to eliminate arbitrage necessary. We formulate the arbitrage repair as a linear programming (LP) problem, where the no-arbitrage relations are constraints, and the objective is to minimise prices' changes within their bid and ask price bounds. Through empirical studies, we show that the proposed arbitrage repair method gives sparse perturbations on data, and is fast when applied to real world large-scale problems due to the LP formulation. In addition, we show that removing arbitrage from price data by our repair method can improve model calibration with enhanced robustness and reduced calibration error.
Finally, we explore the capacity of the model in two important applications for managing risks of option books, namely the Value-at-Risk (VaR) calculation and hedging. In terms of calculating VaR, we show that our models are more computationally efficient and accurate for evaluating risks of option portfolios, with better coverage performance and less procyclicality than standard filtered historical simulation approaches. In the hedging application, we derive sensitivity and minimum variance based hedging ratios under neural-SDE market models, and compare the performance of hedging various option portfolios with standard Greeks-based hedging under the Black--Scholes model, demonstrating favourable performance of our approach.

Keywords: option market simulators
quantitative risk management
no-arbitrage
neural-SDE
statistical inference
constrained diffusion processes
option market models
Advisor: Cohen, S
Reisinger, C
Epidemiology and health burdens of antimicrobial resistant bacterial infection in Southeast Asia and impact of antibiotic use on patient survival

Antimicrobial-resistance (AMR) is a global health concern. Data to support estimates of the AMR health burden are important to guide policy makers in developing appropriate interventions. The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of the epidemiology of AMR in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), where data is scarce.
A prospective surveillance study on hospital-acquired infection (HAI) was conducted to estimate excess mortality attributable to AMR infection in a LMIC. Evaluating all types of infections and seven priority bacteria, I estimated that 16.0% of deaths involving bacterial infections were attributable to AMR. This is higher than is observed in high-income countries (HICs).
One of the barriers in sharing AMR data in LMICs is a lack of expertise, time, and resources to analyse the data and write reports. I developed an open-access, offline, and easy-to-use application to fill in this gap. The tool was tested in seven hospitals in seven countries. AMR surveillance reports from those hospitals were shared on an open-access data repository platform and each has a digital object identifier that can be appropriately cited when re-used.
It is known that low blood culture usage can bias the estimates of health burden of AMR. However, the magnitude of this effect is largely unknown. I performed a retrospective study with bootstrap sampling to illustrate the potential magnitude of biases in the estimates of AMR prevalence and incidence rates due to low blood culture utilisation rates.
Finally, using a large retrospective data set, I applied a counterfactual framework to estimate the impact of delays in concordant antibiotic treatments. Attempts were made using observational data to emulate randomised controlled trials that are otherwise unethical to perform.
This thesis describes work which generated data, provided evidence, and created a new tool for quantifying the health burden of AMR infections in LMICs.

Keywords: causal inference
discordant empirical antibiotic
hospital-acquired infection
blood utilisation rate
antimicrobial resistance
application
prospective surveillance
Advisor: Limmathurotsakul, D
Cooper, B
Day, N
Thwaites, G
China's new Marxist nationalism: defining Xi Jinping's ideological worldview

The thesis argues there has been a significant change in China’s ideological worldview under Xi Jinping compared with previous ideological orthodoxies under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. I summarise Xi’s worldview as a new form of “Marxist-Leninist Nationalism” (which I shorthand as “Marxist Nationalism”). I have chosen this term because it contains within it three core propositions. First, I argue Xi’s Leninism has taken both the party and Chinese politics in general to the left - where I define “left” as the reassertion of the power of the party over all public policy as well as elevating the position of the individual leader against the rest of collective leadership. Second, Xi’s notion of Marxism has similarly taken the centre of gravity of Chinese economic thought to the left - where I define “left” as meaning a new priority for party-state intervention in the economy, state-owned enterprises over the private sector and a new ideology of greater income equality. Third, Xi has also taken Chinese nationalism to the right - where I define “right” as a new assertion of Chinese national power as reflected in a new array of nationalist “banner terms” that are now used in the party’s wider ideological discourse. Furthermore, I argue these three sets of changes have occurred as part of a wider reification of the overall role of ideology under Xi Jinping. This has been seen in the fresh application of Marxist Leninist concepts of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, the primary stage of socialism, contradiction and struggle across the range of China’s current domestic and international challenges. The role of nationalism has also been enhanced within Xi’s new ideological framework. This hybrid form of Marxist Nationalist ideology is also being increasingly codified within the unfolding canon of Xi Jinping Thought.
Finally, the thesis argues that there is a high degree of correlation between these ideological changes on the one hand and changes in the real world of Chinese politics, economic policy and a more assertive foreign policy on the other - including a different approach to Chinese multilateral policy as observed by diplomatic practitioners at the UN in New York. The thesis concludes that these changes in Xi Jinping’s ideological worldview and its impact on Chinese politics and public policy is best explained by a theoretical framework that integrates Authoritarian Resilience Theory, the realist and constructivist insights of the English School of International Relations Theory, and Foreign Policy Analysis.

Keywords: Xi Jinping
China ideology
Advisor: Irwin Crookes, P
Mitter, R
Relational representations for composition of knowledge and plans

Humans have a remarkable capacity to understand and act in situations they have not encountered before. This capacity relies on clever representations of what is common across experience. Relational representations are particularly powerful for this purpose, because they allow for composing novel situations from familiar building blocks. In this thesis, I use neuroimaging and computational modelling to investigate how the brain constructs knowledge and plans.
In a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment I study the origin of knowledge about objects and situations. Bar stools look like tables, but are conceptually more similar to sofas. What is the source of these abstract similarities? I hypothesise that the compositional regularities of experience induce meaning in objects and situations, reflected in brain activity along the temporal to the frontal lobe. To test this hypothesis, I designed a paradigm that probes neural representations from shape to understanding. In a controlled experiment with precise quantitative neural predictions, I do not find convincing evidence of the hypothesised abstract representations in the brain.
Through a computational model I propose a mechanism for constructing plans. When navigating a new city, we know that to visit a sight on the other side of the river, we have to find a bridge first. I show how building cognitive maps from relative positions of such common structural elements allows to immediately reuse previously learned plans. Object vector cells in entorhinal cortex are an attractive neural substrate to represent these relative positions, because they imply actions and path integrate. I propose a central role for replay in constructing the compositional map in hippocampus. The resulting model generalises plans, suppresses path integration noise, and extends naturally to hierarchical tasks.
This thesis thus suggests a central role for relational representations and composition in making sense of the world and making decisions in it.

Keywords: generalisation
reinforcement learning
representation
neuroimaging
navigation
compositionality
Advisor: Behrens, T
Woolrich, M