VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Rising seas, surprising storms: temporalities of climate and catastrophe in Vermont, New York and the Florida Keys

The phenomenon of climate change exists in a liminal state between denial and acceptance, past and future, theory and reality, problem and catastrophe, unfolding in the spaces between apparently stable forms. This thesis considers different temporalities emerging within this transition through a creative exploration of extreme weather and climatic events that seeks to foreground the idea of change itself. Research centers around the Florida Keys, a low lying archipelago that is widely expected to become uninhabitable in the next half century due to sea level rise, but only if the islands do not suffer a similar fate much sooner with the sudden arrival of a catastrophic hurricane. While most Keys residents are unconcerned about the growing reality of sea level rise, hurricanes are a constant threat generating a palpable atmosphere of anticipation and corresponding precaution. In resonance with this regular storm activity in the Florida Keys, the project also reflects on the coincidental occurrence of Hurricanes Irene (2011) and Sandy (2012), two errant and devastating storms that visited the northeastern United States over the course of this project and personally affected the author. Thus, extreme weather provides a material entry point into the complex and far-reaching event of climate change, offering an opportunity to theorize transition and to reflect on what might be creatively recuperated from cross currents of climate and catastrophe. In conclusion, the thesis proposes an ontology inspired by the unique reproductive strategy of the mangrove plant that has thickly and extensively colonized the coastline of southern Florida and through which events are understood to possess qualities of latency, accrual and distribution and to give rise to a future that is germinal, a present that is continuously resignified and a past that remains profoundly creative.

Advisor: McCormack, D
An associative account of impaired inhibition in psychopathy: development of the psychopathy attention theory

Psychopathy, a multi-faceted construct characterised by antisocial behaviours and callous-unemotional traits, is associated with atypical learning. However, the nature of this atypical learning is unclear due to inconsistencies in the literature. Attentional and outcome processing theories of psychopathy do not provide an adequate explanation of these inconsistencies, but I argue that an attentional-associative account can. For instance, Mackintosh's (1975) theory can be used to interpret learning differences in psychopathy through disruption in establishing a cue's associability: a representation of the relative validity of a cue used to determine attentional allocation, and so how easily the cue is learnt about. The discrepancy between previous studies can be attributed to methodological differences and how these differentially influence the associability of a stimulus. In a series of experiments I test this hypothesis and the conditions under which learning differences are seen in psychopathy. I report that psychopathic traits predict altered learning about inhibitory cues, but not excitatory cues, and show that these effects are sensitive to manipulation of predictiveness and cognitive load. By incorporating principles of reduced processing capacity in psychopathic individuals into an attentional-associative model, I am able to explain the results of my experiments, and provide an account for previous discrepancies in the literature.

Advisor: Murphy, R
1603. The wonderfull yeare: literary responses to the accession of James I

1603. The Wonderfull Yeare: Literary Responses to the Accession of James I argues that when James VI of Scotland was proclaimed James I of England on 24 March 1603, the printed verse pamphlets that greeted his accession presented him as a figure of hope and promise for the Englishmen now subject to his rule. However, they also demonstrate hitherto unrecognized concerns that James might also be a figure of threat to the very national strength, Protestant progress, and moral, cultural, and political renaissance for which he was being touted as harbinger and champion. The poems therefore transform an insecure and undetermined figure into a symbol that represents (and enables) promise and hope.
PART ONE explores how the poetry seeks to address the uncertainty and fragility, both social and political, that arose from popular fears about the accession; and to dissuade dissenters (and make secure and unassailable the throne, and thereby the state of England), through celebration of the new monarch. Perceived legal, political, and dynastic concerns were exacerbated by concrete difficulties when James was proclaimed King of England, and so he was more than fifty miles from the English border (only reaching London for the first time in early May); his absence was further prolonged by plague; this plague also deferred the immediate sanction of public festivities that should have accompanied his July coronation. An English Jacobean icon was configured in literature to accommodate and address these threats and hazards, neutralizing fears surrounding the idea of the accession with confidence in the idea of the king it brings. In the texts that respond to James's accession we observe his appropriation as a figure of hope and promise. PART 2 looks to more personal hopes and fears, albeit within the national context. It considers how the poets engage with the King's own established iconography and intentions, publicly available to view within his own writing – and especially poetry. The image that is already established there has the potential either to obstruct or to enable national and personal causes and ambitions (whether political, religious, or cultural). The poetry therefore develops strategies to negotiate with and so appropriate the King’s own self-fashioning.

Keywords: James VI and I
accession
coronation
Elizabeth I
James I
poetomachia
succession
James VI
propaganda
Advisor: Stern, T
Some main aspects of state sovereignty, with special reference to the distinction between external and internal sovereignty

The problem at the heart of the Thesis can be formulated, in its simplest form, as follows: What is (the nature of) state sovereignty? I approach this problem with a view to deploying one of the methodologies developed by analytical jurisprudence in tackling the quaestio vexata: What is (the nature of) law? In particular, I seek to deploy a method of the sort employed by John Finnis in offering an explanatory definition of law. Accordingly, I focus attention on the characteristic features of the paradigm case of state sovereignty. The trajectory drawn by the six Chapters of the Thesis is impelled by the following research question: what are the standing human needs that make sovereignty (despite the risks associated with its exercise) necessary and desirable for a state, both internally and externally? In order to answer this question, I first consider how external and internal (state) sovereignty have been conceptualised in the context of analytical jurisprudence. This allows me to establish that (state) law and (state) sovereignty are co-related, and directs me toward a study of legal discourse. On the basis of this correlation, I show that the concepts of external and internal sovereignty are associated with a (meta-)claim to state legal independence and a (meta-)claim to state legal supremacy. By analysing those claims, in the context of public international law and constitutional law discourse, I demonstrate that two needs in combination, the need for self-determination and the need for autonomy, underpin those claims. I conclude by arguing that state sovereignty, both externally and internally, is made necessary and desirable (despite the risks associated with its exercise) by the state political community’s standing needs for self-determination and autonomy, which are rooted in the necessity and desirability of protecting a human person’s freedom in practical reasonableness.

Keywords: Sovereignty
Advisor: Finnis, J
Dynamics of grain boundaries in two-dimensional colloidal crystals

The dynamics of grain boundaries in two-dimensional colloidal crystals is studied using optical microscopy and holographic optical tweezing. First, grain growth in a polycrystalline monolayer is investigated. The bond-orientational correlation function is found to satisfy scaling features predicted for systems containing random domain walls. The time-evolution of the correlation length indicates abnormal grain growth, which is shown to be due to the preferential coarsening of the large angle grain boundaries. Next, the segregation of impurities to grain boundaries is studied by embedding large spherical impurities in a polycrystalline monolayer of small colloidal spheres. The segregation behaviour is found to be in very good agreement with equilibrium grain boundary segregation, which enables the direct measurement of the free energy of adsorption. Near saturation, the formation of clusters of impurities in the boundary region is found to strongly depend on the size ratio between the impurities and the small particles, due to non-additivity effects and geometrical constraints imposed by the lattice. In order to characterise the geometry of grain boundaries, a new method to extract their geometrical features directly from microscopy images is developed. This method is used to determine the local normal direction, tangent direction and curvature of a grain boundary in a two-dimensional colloidal polycrystalline material. Further insight between the geometry and dynamics of grain boundaries is gained by analysing the shrinking kinetics of circular grain boundaries created using optical vortices. Upon increasing misorientation, these strongly curved boundaries exhibit a geometrically determined transition between pure sliding and shrinkage. In addition, the shrinking rate is found to decrease when increasing the misorientation. Dislocation reactions, which cause the reduction of the grain boundary length, are directly visualised and correlated to the kinetics of shrinkage. Finally, the dynamics of the particles during the migration of circular grain boundaries is analysed. The presence of dynamical heterogeneities is shown to be strongly determined by geometry, especially in the case of coincident site lattice boundaries where coincident particles exhibit no motion during grain boundary migration. The particle displacements involved in the motion of dislocations, which constitute the elementary mechanism of grain boundary migration, are revealed.

Keywords: Colloids
Soft Matter
Dislocations
Crystals
Optical trapping
Grain boundaries
Optical microscopy
Advisor: Dullens, R
Scalable machine translation in memory constrained environments

Machine translation is the discipline concerned with developing automated tools for translating from one human language to another. Statistical machine translation (SMT) is the dominant paradigm in this field. In SMT, translations are generated by means of statistical models whose parameters are learned from bilingual data. Scalability is a key concern in SMT, as one would like to make use of as much data as possible to train better translation systems.
In recent years, mobile devices with adequate computing power have become widely available. Despite being very successful, mobile applications relying on NLP systems continue to follow a client-server architecture, which is of limited use because access to internet is often limited and expensive. The goal of this dissertation is to show how to construct a scalable machine translation system that can operate with the limited resources available on a mobile device.
The main challenge for porting translation systems on mobile devices is memory usage. The amount of memory available on a mobile device is far less than what is typically available on the server side of a client-server application. In this thesis, we investigate alternatives for the two components which prevent standard translation systems from working on mobile devices due to high memory usage. We show that once these standard components are replaced with our proposed alternatives, we obtain a scalable translation system that can work on a device with limited memory.
The first two chapters of this thesis are introductory. Chapter 1 discusses the task we undertake in greater detail and highlights our contributions. Chapter 2 provides a brief introduction to statistical machine translation.
In Chapter 3, we explore online grammar extractors as a memory efficient alternative to phrase tables. We propose a faster and simpler extraction algorithm for translation rules containing gaps, thereby improving the extraction time for hierarchical phase-based translation systems.
In Chapter 4, we conduct a thorough investigation on how neural language models should be integrated in translation systems. We settle on a novel combination of noise contrastive estimation and factoring the output layer using Brown clusters. We obtain a high quality translation system that is fast both when training and decoding and we use it to show that neural language models outperform traditional n-gram models in memory constrained environments.
Chapter 5 concludes our work showing that online grammar extractors and neural language models allow us to build scalable, high quality systems that can translate text with the limited resources available on a mobile device.

Advisor: Blunsom, P
Eine alltägliche Tätigkeit: performing the everyday in the avant-garde theatre scene of late nineteenth-century Berlin

This dissertation situates late nineteenth-century Berlin's reception of naturalist drama in contemporary discourse about European modernism, which to date has disregarded the significant impact of this cultural environment. Examining the Berlin avant-garde's demand for "truth" and "authenticity," this study highlights its legacy of promoting more honest and dynamic forms of human interaction.
Sketching the historical background, Chapter 1 demonstrates how the reception of Henrik Ibsen in Berlin fuelled creative strategies for a more honest approach to theatre. From literary matinees to more egalitarian ways of directing theatre, this moment in cultural history significantly shaped people's understanding of theatre as a tool for social criticism and as a means of creating a sense of intimacy. Two important figures are highlighted here: literary critic and theatre director Otto Brahm, central to the promotion of naturalism, and his more prominent protégé Max Reinhardt, who developed Brahm's legacy.
Situating these developments in a theoretical framework, Chapter 2 draws on the concept of "the everyday" as set out by Toril Moi, Stanley Cavell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to link the role of the ordinary on stage to the avant-garde's search for authenticity and truthfulness. Through this framework, Ibsen's social dramas from A Doll's House to Hedda Gabler (Chapter 3) can be seen perfectly to exemplify this shift in perspective from the 1880s through the 1890s, revealing the complexity of truthfulness in communications.
Tracing these themes in other dramatic works, innovative readings of Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei (Chapter 4) and Rainer Maria Rilke's Das tägliche Leben (Chapter 5) shed new light on these two fin-de-siècle authors. By highlighting these authors' previously unrecognised connections with Berlin's avant-garde theatre scene and their dramatic exploration of interpersonal connection, this study shows both how theatre functioned as a tool to examine human relationships and to what extent twentieth-century literature was grounded in this way of thinking.

Keywords: Otto Brahm
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951
Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906
authenticity
Max Reinhardt
skepticism
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926
ordinary language philosphy
theater-going culture
Schnitzler, Arthur, 1862-1931
Advisor: Morgan, B
Diogo Bernardes and 'O Lima' (1596): poetry, patronage, and print in early modern Portugal

This thesis examines how the fortunes of poets and the status of poetry were changing at the end of the sixteenth century in Portugal. Centring on the long-neglected verse epistles in Diogo Bernardes's 'O Lima' (1596), I re-evaluate our sense of what it meant to be a poet when writing verse was not a sure-fire way to earn a living and when lyric poetry was regularly lampooned as trifling and immoral. Bernardes's surprisingly forthright cartas, I argue, offer new insights into the protagonists and procedures of literary patronage in Portugal. I use a combination of close readings and sociological methods to illuminate the practical strategies and rhetorical brinkmanship that Bernardes deployed in his quest for favour and highlight the frustrations and moral dilemmas of seeking the support of powerful, but fickle, patrons. Bernardes was a particularly remarkable writer for having printed his verse during his lifetime, and so I also trace how lyric verse was slowly legitimated as a cultural product during the sixteenth century and offer a case study of how an author’s reputation was forged in the collaborative enterprise of print, then re-formed by the work of readers, thereby shedding light on the complex mechanisms of early modern canon formation. Paradoxically, I demonstrate that unequivocal praise of a writer's work can harm, rather than help, their chances of remaining in the canon. Although Bernardes's work is an echo chamber for these deep reverberations from the broader history of literature, this thesis also listens closely to Bernardes's distinctive poetic voice and allows it to speak out. Playful, candid, mercurial, it is a poetic voice that here seeks a wider audience.

Advisor: Earle, T
Selective release from carbon nanocapsules

The optimisation of drug delivery systems is challenging. The approach to drug delivery described here makes use of carbon nanocapsules, including fullerenes and nanotubes. Installation of a targeting moiety to carbon nanocapsules can be achieved via sidewall functionalisation. Carbon nanocapsules also have an unique capacity that can be used for the delivery of payloads such as drugs or imaging agents. In addition, selective release following the application of external stimuli can be used to advance the selectivity of the carbon nanocapsule delivery system. Herein, a photoirradiation reaction triggered reaction that releases a benzoic acid derivative from the carbon surface of fullerenes is described. Fulleropyrazolines were modified with an electron donating aryl group on a nitrogen of the pyrazoline ring. This modification renders the surface functionalisation reversible; the pyrazoline undergoes retro-cycloaddition in the presence of light. Investigations revealed that the method can be used in heterogeneous aqueous solutions. Cathepsin B is a protease that is overexpressed in inflammed cells, such as tumours and arthri- tis. The enzyme selectively cleaves the amino acid sequence phenylalanine-valine-arginine. The coupling of an enzymatically cleavable, designed peptide built around this amino acid sequence to a fulleropyrrolidine was realised. Covalent attachment of this fullerene 'cork' to the carbon nanotube was investigated and analysed by HRTEM/EDX, XPS, XRF, TGA, Raman, and IR spectroscopy. Carbon nanotubes filled with iodide were able to be corked by these modified fullerenes; preliminary studies towards Cathepsin B mediated cleavage were promising.
In conclusion, advances in using the unique capacity of carbon nanocapsules for drug delivery were made. In the future, the combination of targeted delivery, achieved by sidewall functionali- sation with a biomolecule, and the triggered release of payload from corked nanotubes may help to open up a new therapeutic field.

Keywords: characterisation
Carbon nanotubes
Fullerene
enzymatic triggered release
light triggered release
functionalisation
Advisor: Davis, B
Studies of histone modifications in yeast and humans

Epigenetic regulation is a complex biological process that has influence on the structure of chromatin and impacts on the regulation of DNA-associated events, including transcription, DNA replication, and DNA damage repair. Post-translational modifications (PTMs) to the tails of the core histone proteins are critically involved in epigenetic regulation.
The JmjC domain-containing histone demethylases play important roles in the regulation of chromatin structure and consequently gene regulation and biological events. The first aspect of my work was to explore the application of fission yeast to investigating human JmjC histone demethylase (KDM) function. The work focused on the human KDM4A and FBXL11 demethylases and investigation on the role of H3K36 modifications in the survival of wee1 mutant S. pombe. The roles of the JmjC domain function of KDM4A and FBXL11 were also investigated. The results reveal KDM4A mediated demethylation of histone H3K36me3/me2 has synthetic lethality with respect to wee1 mutant S. pombe, whereas FBXL11 mediated demethylation of histone H3K36me2 has more subtle effects.
Work on epigenetics is often limited by antibody properties. In the second and third parts of the work described in this thesis, mass spectrometric methods that are capable of histone profiling are described, with the aim of developing methods complementary to immunoblotting. An LC-MS-based method for profiling histones was developed and used for analysis of histone modification under different conditions. Using the high resolution of LC and MS instruments, this method provides robust analysis of modifications to intact histones. Histone profiles for human normal and cancer cell lines were investigated. Subsequently, the method was applied to analyse global changes in histone modification patterns under various conditions, focusing on hypoxia/ hypoxia related stresses. Hypoxia has effects on the activity of JmjC KDMs and the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) isoforms levels, so enabling regulation of expression. The effects of 2OG/Fe(II) oxygenase inhibitors of enzymes involved in hypoxic regulation on histone PTM patterns were also investigated. The results reveal that the extent to which hypoxia and hypoxia-mimetics (including inhibition that upregulate HIF-α levels) cause changes to histone profiles vary differently. The LC-MS-based method hence has potential application in drug discovery and in investigations on the role of histone modifications in healthy development and disease.

Advisor: Schofield, C