VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A theory of reasonableness in administrative law

Administrative law requires that public authorities do not make decisions that are, in a particular sense, unreasonable. Yet there is remarkably little clarity about what this requirement amounts to. This thesis develops a new theoretical account of the reasonableness standard and argues that such a standard is a moral imperative in administrative law.
There are four central components to my account. The first is an organising distinction between substantive reasonableness (the reasonableness of what is decided) and deliberative reasonableness (the reasonableness of the process of reasoning leading to a decision). The second component is a conception of reasonableness as a standard of relativised justification. Substantive reasonableness, I argue, requires a decision to be justified relative to, or from the perspective of, some eligible view of the balance of reasons, where the range of eligible views reflects the court’s institutional and constitutional position, at some distance from the primary decision.
Third, I show how reasonableness requires adequate deliberation in the process of reaching a decision. Deliberative reasonableness includes requirements to gather sufficient evidence, to weigh and balance the relevant considerations, and to avoid substantial ‘structural’ irrationalities—incoherent relations between beliefs, intentions, and other attitudes.
The final component of my argument is a moral principle that places special emphasis on the idea of safeguards. In the absence of appropriate safeguards, those affected by government decisions are subjected to an unjustifiably high risk of wrongdoing, and if the state proceeds without such safeguards it manifests insufficient moral regard for those under its authority. I argue that a standard of substantive reasonableness is an appropriately general safeguard against heterogenous wrongs that might be committed in public administration. The standard of deliberative reasonableness, meanwhile, reduces the risk that government decisions are wrongful by ensuring that they proceed on the basis of sufficiently reliable reasoning.

Advisor: Endicott, T
Procedural fairness at the police station

This thesis questions whether it is right to allow the police to detain and interrogate suspects at the police station. It asks whether there are procedures in place to ensure that suspects are not coerced or intimidated into confessing falsely; whether it is consistent with adversarial ideals of adjudication for the courts to endorse confessions of guilt which have been made in an inherently coercive atmosphere; and whether it is justifiable to use powers of arrest to facilitate interrogation. The thesis provides some historical background to current police powers, and then goes on to demonstrate that controls on police questioning were gradually relaxed in the period of the Judges' Rules (1912-84). It is shown that the arguments put forward to justify the increase in police powers, namely that the police were neutral investigators from whom suspects had nothing to fear and that powers of questioning were vital for crime control, could not be sustained in the light of then known facts. The legal framework which currently regulates police powers is described, and it is argued that it pays insufficient regard to due process values. The thesis draws upon interviews with defendants in order to address the issue of whether those who go through the process perceive police station procedures as fair or unfair. Through a combination of interview and observational data, the thesis seeks to establish that granting legal 'rights' to those detained at the police station does not always empower them to resist police pressure and coercion.\The thesis concludes that police powers of detention and questioning contribute little to the task of identifying and convicting offenders, sometimes lead to miscarriages of justice, and may be used to inflict arbitrary and summary punishment. It is therefore recommended that the police right to interrogate suspects be abolished.

Keywords: fairness
police station
police questioning
England
arrest
Advisor: Hood, R
Measuring the effect of heterogeneity and trust on cooperation in common-pool resources

In this doctoral thesis I measure the effect of economic and sociocultural heterogeneity on cooperation through trust in the context of common-pool resources, using different techniques. The thesis is made up of three separate papers that are all trying to answer the same overarching question: how and to what extent does heterogeneity affect cooperation between appropriators of common-pool resources, and what is the role of trust in this process? The first paper applies innovative imputation techniques to use the famous CPR Database, compiled by the Nobel- prize winner Elinor Ostrom, to its full potential. The second paper uses data from a CPR laboratory experiment conducted in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, in which a cooperation dilemma is simulated that is experienced in fishing grounds. The third paper uses data from the earlier experiment and an additional CPR experiment conducted in India, and analyses and interprets the difference in behaviour between the two experiments by using player type classification and agent-based models. Findings of this thesis suggest that heterogeneity does not necessarily impact cooperation negatively: sociocultural heterogeneity is not found to be negatively related to cooperation, economic heterogeneity is found to be positively related to cooperation under certain conditions and the combination of economic and sociocultural heterogeneity is found to be positively or negatively related to cooperation in CPRs depending on the operationalisation of sociocultural heterogeneity. In addition, it is found that trust has a positive effect on cooperation and that heterogeneity may impact trust negatively under some conditions.

Keywords: Sociocultural Heterogeneity
Trust
Cooperation
Economic Heterogeneity
Common-Pool Resources
Advisor: De Graaf, ND
The Press and English local authorities

For over a century the press hag been engaged on a battle for certain rights and facilities which it considers necessary to the reporting of local government, some of these rights, like that of attending council meetings, secure for the journalist opportunities to obtain news and information:others, like the defence of qualified privilege in libel actions, secure a right to print and publish it. In both aspects of the problem the press still feels that it has a grievance, and the controversy persists.
Continued in thesis

Keywords: English local authorities
Press
Newspapers
Journalism
Great Britain
The Protestant cause : religious alliance with the West European Calvinist communities as a political issue in England, 1585-1630

It has long been accepted that protestant ideological aspirations played an important role in the foreign policy of England in the period from the Henrican Reformation to the Civil War; but little attempt has been made systematically to analyse the effects of this role. Most discussions of the question have been characterised by a lack of sympathy for protestant aspirations, and have concentrated upon anti-catholicism,relegating the Protestant Cause to the rank of provincial bigotry.
This study has been undertaken with the contrary assumption ~ that the Protestant Cause should be seen not merely as a response to catholic threats, but as a positive force which posed the central problem to English foreign policy in this period. Not only did England have the central role to play in the creation of working religious alliances with continental protestant states; but the defence of religion was the leading motive for English intervention on the continent beyond the coastal periphery. The years between Leicester's expedition to the Netherlands in 1585 and England's withdrawal from the Thirty Years War in 1630 mark the period in which the issue had the greatest political effect, for with Leicester's expedition the English monarchy came the closest to undertaking the leadership of the Cause, which it rejected finally upon withdrawal from the Thirty Year’s War.

Keywords: Europe
Calvinism
England
Protestant cause
religion and politics
West European
Calvinist
religious alliance
Multi-scale coarse-graining for the study of assembly pathways in DNA-brick self-assembly

In this thesis, we develop a novel approach for modelling self-assembling systems that use the single-stranded-tile (SST) assembly method, an increasingly popular nanoconstruction approach in the field of DNA nanotechnology, developed primarily in the Molecular Systems Lab (Harvard University). In the SST method, a desired target structure is produced by mixing together a set of short DNA molecules (called SSTs) where each SST is provided with a judiciously chosen base sequence such that it will bind to a predetermined set of local neighbours in the target structure. Our approach for modelling these systems involves the use of simulations with a relatively fine-grained model of DNA (here we opt for oxDNA [1]) to parametrise coarser stochastic models that represent these systems at the level of the SST (the basic subunit of the method), and can probe effectively the timescales required for self assembly. As a test system for our approach we choose a rectangular-shaped SST-based object made out of 334 42-base-long SSTs, first reported in Ref. [2].
We first introduce a stochastic model that describes the growth of one target structure under a fixed background concentration of SSTs. We use the model to study nucleation pathways, finding that structures with a high number of bonds between SSTs and compact shapes are typically the most likely to form. However, we also find that for certain (recurrent) sizes, maximally-bonded structures are actually disfavoured due to statistical factors. We then devise a simple model that describes the bonding of incorrect SSTs to a (otherwise correctly formed) structure, finding that these bonds are typically very weak, and have a relatively minor impact on the overall kinetics and thermodynamics of self assembly.
We then introduce a stochastic model that describes the simultaneous growth of multiple target structures in a system where subunits are present in finite numbers (rather than present at constant supply). Under isothermal conditions the model predicts that there is only a small temperature window (∼2ºC) where self assembly is not hindered by excessively high nucleation barriers nor depletion traps. Finally, we simulate a cooling ramp similar to the original experiments of Refs. [2, 3]. The model predicts a peak in base-pairing formation in close agreement with Ref. [3]. However, the models predicts assembly yields that are significantly above those achieved in experiments. This differences are attributed to non-specific contacts between structures, a type of assembly that is not yet well understood, and thus not described by the model.

Keywords: Self-assembly
DNA nanotechnology
Chemical kinetics
Complex systems
Statistical mechanics
Molecular simulations
Advisor: Louis, A
Democratising public reason

This thesis is about the relationship between liberalism and democracy. It argues that so-called public reason liberalism, a view of legitimacy that says that citizens must have sufficient reason to accept the laws that bind them, does not pay enough attention to democratic values. It then shows what public reason must look like to uphold the values of both liberalism and democracy.
The first part of the thesis is devoted to the critical argument. It argues that the value of civic equality, the idea that citizens are and should be fundamentally equal before the state, can explain why we should care about both liberalism and democracy. The idea is formalised as a principle of liberal collective self-legislation that says that citizens must be able to democratically choose to enact laws and policies that do not violate civic equality. Prominent versions of public reason liberalism fail to satisfy the principle – either because they do not leave enough room for democratic decision-making, or because they have not provided answers to known problems from social choice theory.
The second part of the thesis develops and defends a democratic form of public reason, built on the ideal of civic equality. To respect the civic equality of all, laws must be justified with reasons that are accessible to each citizen in light of evaluative standards that they themselves hold. This view leaves sufficient room for democratic decision-making and it can provide a previously unexplored escape route to the social choice problems. For this argument to work, individual citizens must offer one another public reasons in their political advocacy. The thesis ends by showing that such public-reason-giving requirements should be assigned asymmetrically in debates over invasive laws.

Keywords: Political liberalism
Justificatory liberalism
Public reason
Democracy
Legitimacy
Advisor: Miller, D
Stemplowska, Z
Using the penguin watch network to examine phenology and breeding success in pygoscelis penguins

Remote time-lapse cameras can facilitate high-frequency monitoring of wild animal populations over large spatial and temporal scales, yet the volume of imagery they produce can be overwhelming for small research teams. As ecological studies transition towards a ‘big data’ approach, we must develop ways to deal with the ‘data deluge’, in the form of integrated processing frameworks. In this thesis, I present and examine data-processing pipelines for the Penguin Watch project – a network of approximately 80 time-lapse cameras positioned in penguin colonies across the Scotia Arc region of the Southern Ocean. I show that both the Penguin Watch online citizen science project and the Pengbot computer vision algorithm are efficient and reliable image annotation tools, which can be used in combination to maximise output and minimise error. I present new methodologies to extract biologically meaningful metrics from citizen science annotations, and show that spatial data – for example ‘nearest neighbour distances’ – can be used to examine behaviour, such as chick huddling.
Seabirds, including penguin species, are often considered indicators of marine health. As such, effective monitoring of their populations offers an invaluable opportunity to assess the health of the wider marine ecosystem. An essential part of this process is obtaining baseline data, and here I use the Penguin Watch project to extract phenological dates for a number of new Chinstrap penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus) colonies and seasons – a species which has historically been understudied. Through a ‘virtual’ mark-recapture study I examine breeding success in Gentoo penguin (P. papua) colonies across a substantial part of their range in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. Investigation of the impact of three key anthropogenic stressors (precipitation, the krill fishery, and tourism) on breeding success revealed no significant effects over the study period. However, there is evidence that the relationship between chick survival and precipitation could be highly non-linear, with severe precipitation events associated with high chick mortality. This has implications for a number of Southern Ocean bird species, and with precipitation levels expected to increase under climate-change scenarios, continued monitoring is essential. Repetition of this study on Adélie (P. adeliae) and Chinstrap penguins – species which have a higher dependency on krill than Gentoos – is a key future research priority.

Keywords: pygoscelis
chinstrap
marine conservation
penguin
machine learning
breeding success
citizen science
fisheries
adelie
climate change
South Georgia
krill
gentoo
Antarctic tourism
Southern Ocean
Falkland Islands
phenology
Antarctica
Advisor: Hart, T
Lintott, C
Equivariant Seidel maps and a flat connection on equivariant symplectic cohomology

We construct shift operators on equivariant symplectic cohomology which generalise the shift operators on equivariant quantum cohomology in algebraic geometry. That is, given a Hamiltonian action of the torus
T
, we assign to a cocharacter of
T
an endomorphism of
(
S
1
×
T
)
-equivariant Floer cohomology based on the equivariant Floer Seidel map. We prove the shift operator commutes with a connection. This connection is a multivariate version of Seidel's
q
-connection on
S
1
-equivariant Floer cohomology and generalises the Dubrovin connection on equivariant quantum cohomology. We prove that the connection is flat, which was conjectured by Seidel. As an application, we compute these algebraic structures for a few specific examples and provide a method to compute them for toric manifolds using the moment polytope.

Keywords: Seidel map
floer cohomology
equivariant symplectic cohomology
Advisor: Ritter, A
Effectiveness and decision-making in a health planning context of measures for the prevention of perinatal mortality and morbidity:t he case of outpatient ante-natal care

This thesis draws on the current literature on need and demand to provide some empirical evidence of the cost, effectiveness and implied values associated with current and alternative forms of provision of ante-natal care in the St. Pau's Hospital, Barcelona.
The study is set against the background of a review of the relevant methodology and concepts concerning, particularly, the nature of the goods ‘health'’ and ‘health care’. This serves as a base for investigating the concepts of demand, need and the agency relationship.
Given the importance of cost-effectiveness analysis in the applied study, a review is presented of the evaluative role of economics in healthcare. A full description of ante-natal care generally and that specific to this study are presented and the important notion of ‘risk’ is highlighted. The way in which need has been defined and the general setting of the empirical study are outlined, together with the design,nature and use of the data in the surveys conducted.
The findings of the study are presented together with the difficulties arising in interpretation but the results appear sufficiently clear-cut to allow confidence to be expressed in the main policy recommendations outlined,i.e. in terms of efficiency, to increase ante-natal visiting of infrequent attenders, particularly those at high risk, even if this has to be done at the expense of frequent attenders, particularly those at low risk.

Keywords: ante-natal care
prenatal care
decision-making
morbidity
outpatients
perinatal mortality
infant health services
mortality
maternal health services
outpatient
perinatal morbidity
health planning
Approximate dynamic programming for revenue management in attended home delivery

We consider the problem of finding profit-maximising prices for delivery time slots in the context of attended home delivery. This is a multi-stage optimal control problem that admits a dynamic programming formulation. However, this formulation is intractable for realistic problem sizes due to the so-called "curse of dimensionality''. To facilitate an approximation of this problem, we characterise some mathematical properties of the dynamic program: We show that the underlying Bellman operator has a unique fixed point and provide a closed-form expression for it. Moreover, we show that – under certain technical assumptions – the value function, which has a discrete domain and a continuous codomain, admits a continuous extension, which is a finite-valued, concave function of its state variables, at every time step. Motivated by these results, we develop an approximate dynamic programming algorithm for a more general class of problems, characterised by value functions that are concave extensible and submodular in their state-space. Our new algorithm computes deterministic upper and stochastic lower bounds of the value function in the realm of dual dynamic programming. We show that the proposed algorithm terminates after a finite number of iterations. Moreover, we also derive probabilistic guarantees on the value accumulated under the associated policy for a single realisation of the dynamic program and for its expected value. Furthermore, we compare our algorithm with two other approximate dynamic programming solutions proposed in the literature. Our analysis entails a theoretical examination from a control-theoretical perspective and a parametric numerical case study. Our experiments are based on real-world data, from which we generate multiple scenarios to stress-test the robustness of the pricing policies to errors in model parameter estimates. Our analysis shows that the proposed algorithm dominates the others with respect to computation time and profit-generation capabilities of the delivery slot pricing policies that it generates.

Keywords: approximate dynamic programming
dynamic pricing
revenue management
Advisor: Goulart, PJ
Margellos, K
Estimates and regularity for some fully nonlinear PDEs in conformal geometry

In this thesis we obtain new estimates and regularity results for some fully nonlinear elliptic equations arising in conformal geometry.
Our first set of new results concern local pointwise second derivative estimates for elliptic solutions to the σk-Yamabe equation. In Chapter 2 we obtain such estimates for W2,p-strong solutions on Euclidean domains, addressing both the so-called positive and negative cases. We explore two methods for obtaining these estimates: an integrability improvement argument coupled with Moser iteration, and a method using the Alexandrov-Bakelman-Pucci estimate. Our estimates are obtained in the more general context of augmented Hessian equations. In Chapter 3 we obtain similar estimates for smooth solutions on manifolds when k = 2. Our work here contributes to a growing literature on the regularity theory for the σk-Yamabe equation and, from a broader perspective, the regularity theory for fully nonlinear, non-uniformly elliptic equations.
In Chapter 4 we study the existence of conformal metrics satisfying g-1 Agτ ∈ Γ2+, where Agτ is the trace-modified Schouten tensor. When τ = 1, this is an important question in the context of the σ2-Yamabe problem, and it is also of independent geometric and topological interest when τ ≤ 1. Our focus will be on three dimensions; we prove a new existence result when τ < 1, and obtain a new proof of a result of Ge, Lin & Wang [GLW10] when τ = 1, with an eye towards tackling some related problems.
In Chapter 5 we obtain integral estimates for a fourth order perturbation of the (trace-modified) σ2-Yamabe equation in three dimensions, in the spirit of Chang, Gursky & Yang [CGY02b]. Our study of this equation is partly motivated by the existence problems considered in Chapter 4, but also from the analytic viewpoint of using fourth order regularisations to study non-uniformly elliptic PDEs of second order.

Keywords: regularity
Yamabe
conformal
fully nonlinear
augmented Hessian equations
second derivative estimates
Advisor: Nguyen, L