VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Non-linear analysis of jack-up structures subjected to random waves

There is a steadily increasing demand for the use of jack-up units in deeper water and harsher environments. Confidence in their use in these environments requires jack-up analysis techniques to reflect accurately the physical processes occurring. This thesis is concerned with the models appropriate for the dynamic assessment of jack-ups, an important issue in long-term reliability considerations. The motivation is to achieve a balanced approach in considering the non-linearities in the structure, foundations and wave loading. A work hardening plasticity model is outlined for the combined vertical, moment and horizontal loading of spudcan footings on dense sand. Empirical expressions for the yield surface in combined load space and a flow rule for prediction of footing displacements during yield are given. Theoretical lower bound bearing capacity factors for conical footings in sand have been derived and are used in a strain-hardening law to define the variation in size of the yield surface with the plastic component of vertical penetration. The complete incremental numerical model has been implemented into a plane frame analysis program named JAKUP. The spectral content of wave loading is considered using NewWave theory, and the importance of random wave histories shown by constraining the deterministic NewWave into a completely random surface elevation. Using this technique, a method for determining short-term extreme response statistics for a sea-state is demonstrated. A numerical experiment on an example jack-up and central North Sea location is shown to emphasise the difference in long-term extreme response according to various footing assumptions. The role of sea-state severity in the variation of short-term extreme response statistics is also highlighted. Finally, probabilistic methods are used to develop further understanding of the response behaviour of jack-ups. A sensitivity study of influential variables (with probabilistic formulations as opposed to deterministic values) has been conducted using the response surface methodology.

Keywords: foundations
offshore
jack-up
Advisor: Houlsby, G
Eatock Taylor, R
Similarity, properties and concepts

This thesis argues that one can fruitfully think of Nelson Goodman's New Riddle of Induction as a reductio ad absurdum of a certain set of views of the relationship between similarities, on the one hand, and properties, concepts, or predicates, on the other. It argues that any view which takes similarities between particulars to be most fundamentally explained by those objects' sharing a property, satisfying a concept, or falling under a predicate leaves itself without the resources to provide a satisfying answer to a Goodmanian sceptic who proposes that inductive inferences using "grue" are equally as warranted as those using "green".
I argue for an alternative view of similarity and inductive warrant which holds that the content of perceptual experience includes non-conceptual content the satisfaction conditions of which include that concept-independent similarities obtain. I argue further that it is only on the basis of that non-conceptual content that we are able satisfactorily to distinguish predicates like "grue" from those like "green." We must make such a distinction if we are to provide an acceptable account of inductive warrant.
In the course of developing this view, I critique a range of mainstream, contemporary accounts of the relationship between similarities, concepts and properties, and of the role of perceptual experience in justifying empirical beliefs. Chapter 1 argues for a realist view of similarities between particulars which takes our concepts of properties to spring from our observations of those similarities. This view is contrasted with David Armstrong's universal realism, which is rejected. Chapter 2 argues that Goodman's approach to his New Riddle based on entrenchment fails, and argues that if and only if one embraces the view of similarity and concepts that I favor then the New Riddle can be reduced to traditional Humean concerns about induction. Chapters 3 through 5 discuss difficulties for Donald Davidson's approach to the New Riddle, his account of the justification of empirical belief, and his rejection of the very idea of a conceptual scheme, tracing each of these difficulties to Davidson's view that similarities must always be understood in terms of concepts under which particulars fall. Using John McDowell's Mind and World as an example, Chapter 6 argues that any account of perceptual justification of empirical belief according to which the content of perception is limited to conceptual content will fall into the New Riddle, while accounts which permit non-conceptual content can avoid this problem.

Advisor: Logue, J
Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet

This thesis examines the effects of Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's intertextual relationship upon the development of their literary careers. Previous critics have predominantly studied the two writers within the mutually exclusive discourses of feminism and structuralism, with the result that the extensive areas of common ground between them have been overlooked. In order to compare their works and to read between the lines of existing criticism, a comparative and double-gendered approach, termed 'reading in pairs', is adopted.
Chapter 1 provides the contextual framework for the paired readings of the subsequent four chapters: it explores the main parallel shifts between Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's corpuses, and examines how these betray the workings of a sustained, permutating psychodynamic rivalry. Chapter 2 studies how similarities of practice in works of the 1950s and early 1960s reflect a brief period of emulative alliance. Chapter 3 focuses on the combative dynamics which characterize their intertextual relationship during the 1970s and 1980s, following Duras's adoption by feminist theorists. Comparison of Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's treatment of explicit sado-erotic thematics brings into question some of the gender-related assumptions of previous approaches. Chapters 4 and 5 then study the final stages of the two writers' rivalry within the appropriately narcissistic genre of autobiography. They examine how Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's respective portrayals of the self and of literary history are influenced by the reversal in fortunes brought about by the phenomenal success of Duras's L'Amant.
By comparing Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's treatment of similar thematic and generic elements, this study sheds new light on both writers' oeuvres and reassesses many of the assumptions and findings of existing criticism. The Concluding Remarks suggest that the 'reading in pairs' method might fruitfully be applied to the study of other writers of the opposite sex, and thus contribute to a more rounded picture of literary history.
Personal piety in the study of the psalms

The predominant view in psalmic studies holds that the appropriate context for the interpretation of the psalms is the Israelite cult. By contrast, this thesis demonstrates that insufficient attention has been paid to the personal insights and life-experiences of the psalmists themselves. If one view is cult-centred, this approach is life-centred.
The first chapter reviews psalmic studies over the last century in order to place the cult-functional approach in its own cultural setting. The second chapter examines the confessions of Jeremiah, and shows that these are best understood as genuine personal prayers which use psalmic language and forms. This opens up the possibility that the psalms themselves are expressions of personal piety, which have used and adapted the traditional liturgical conventions of the day.
The remaining six chapters assess the extent to which the psalms might be understood in this way. Six characteristics of personal piety are selected. These are trust in God, penitence before God, reflections on death and life with God, communion with God, suffering before God and pleasing God. They combine to show that the universal validity of the Psalter is due as much to the way the psalmists speak of common life-experiences, as to the way the psalms have been composed as repeatable cultic texts.
The thesis concludes that because the cult-centred approach has been so concerned with the cultic functions of the psalms, it has failed to appreciate the personal contributions of the psalmists, and in so doing has often misinterpreted the primary purpose of a psalm. A life-centred reading of the Psalter is therefore a vital component in correcting this imbalance in psalmic studies today.
After civil war: the demobilization of armed forces in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala

This thesis examines the factors that explain success in demobilization efforts after the termination of civil conflict by evaluating the scope of the capstone peace agreement, degree of international brokerage, strength of political parties, and effectiveness of socioeconomic policies targeting ex-combatants across three Central American cases: Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. It contributes to the post-conflict literature by providing insight into factors that facilitate or hinder the demobilization process, a subject that has heretofore only been addressed obliquely in the literature. The end of the Cold War precipitated the end of civil wars across several countries in Central America. The strategies used to meet the challenges of the post-conflict environment resulted in varying experiences with demobilization. Demobilization is the first step toward maintaining peace following the end of civil war but often one of the hardest tasks to achieve. At the most elementary level, what is missing is clear knowledge of those factors that make the difference between successful peace implementation and failure, between the assurance of peace and the resumption of war. This thesis redresses the shortcomings of the literature by attempting to identify those factors.

Keywords: comparative politics
demobilization
civil war
Central America
Advisor: Power, T
Fathoming the depths of Thoreauvian time

This thesis endeavors to engage in contemporary Thoreauvian scholarship by providing an original reading of Thoreau’s works using a critical framework based on Wai Chee Dimock’s concept of “deep time.” As such, it argues that Thoreau’s infamous embrace of political and rhetorical dissent takes shape in his writings most strongly in his construction of time-frames that break with or stand against his contemporaries’ own use, sense, and measuring of time in antebellum New England. Focusing on two aspects of Henry David Thoreau’s work, the thesis argues firstly that Walden’s resistance to familiar, sequential understandings of time manifests in myth, wherein time and history are shaped holistically rather than sequentially. Secondly, it posits that Thoreau’s excursion narratives resist the dominant recordings of history of his time by forming alternative historiographies within their structures, accommodating otherwise silent or ignored historical elements, at the expense of otherwise smooth, uninterrupted narratives. Having thus established Thoreau’s temporal structures, the thesis goes on to look at Annie Dillard and Susan Howe in order to trace out Thoreau’s previously unacknowledged formation of temporal structures in his texts as a genealogy that emerges in late twentieth-century American literature. Consequently, the thesis provides an alternative reading of Thoreau that moves toward a rethinking of his location in nineteenth-century America and its twentieth-century literature.

Keywords: C19th American Literature
Thoreau
Advisor: Pratt, L
Bush, R
The peopling of Europe: a genetic perspective

Following their dispersal out of Africa, humans colonised all continents of the world save one, Antarctica. Whilst Europe was initially peopled soon after this exodus, paleoclimatic, archaeological, and historical evidence suggest that successive waves and migrations of people have contributed to the population resident in Europe today. I therefore examined the impact of past events on the European population through the analysis of DNA sampled both from contemporary Europeans, and from worldwide populations pertinent to its history. I genotyped and analysed data from the Y chromosomes of over 2,000 haplogroup R-M269 European men from over 30 different populations and, in combination with comparable datasets gathered from the literature, show that there it is not possible to assign a date to the origin of this lineage in Europe, and thus that any conclusion as to the ancient or recent spread of this lineage in Europe is unfounded. I also show that commonly used Y chromosome lineage dating techniques based on STR variation are biased by the markers used and conclusions based on such dates should be viewed with a large amount of caution. I next use genome-wide SNP data from 1,550 individuals from 95 worldwide populations to explore the population structure of Europe and present an analysis of the detailed structure of Europe in a novel analytical framework using ChromoPainter and fineSTRUCTURE. Admixture analysis based this data reveals distinct genomic inputs to peripheral European populations, from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia, and provides dates for this admixture within the last 1,000 years that correspond to the emergence and decline of empires and kingdoms in these regions of Europe. This novel analysis highlights the importance of recent historical events on European population structure, but also suggests a degree of ancient structure across European populations. Taken together, these analyses demonstrate the substantial effects of both ancient and recent migrations and mixture on the contemporary genetic structure of Europe.

Keywords: Europe
Y chromosome
genomics
human evolutionary genetics
admixture
Advisor: Capelli, C
Rare monosaccharides and biologically active iminosugars from carbohydrate chirons

Iminosugars are polyhydroxylated alkaloids, and can be viewed as sugar analogues in which the endocyclic oxygen atom has been replaced with nitrogen. These compounds are highly medically relevant and their biological activity is largely due to their inhibition of glycosidases. Several examples of the iminosugar class are currently marketed as drugs, and many more are in earlier stages of development for a variety of diseases and disorders. The most fruitful approaches to the chemical synthesis of iminosugars have utilised carbohydrate starting materials as optically pure chiral building blocks, or chirons. Most of the monosaccharides are not readily available, but the relatively few naturally abundant cheap sugars have been exploited as chirons for over a century. The availability of the rare sugars is growing with the development of a new biotechnological approach to their synthesis, known as Izumoring.
This thesis is primarily concerned with the chemical synthesis of iminosugars from carbohydrate starting materials. The synthesis of unnaturally functionalised sugar polyols and their suitability as substrates for the Izumoring process is also discussed.
Chapter 1 provides a brief general overview of the history, natural occurrence and therapeutic application of iminosugars. General strategies for their synthesis from carbohydrate chirons are discussed.
Chapter 2 concerns divergent syntheses of several iminosugar targets from both enantiomers of glucuronolactone and their biological evaluation. A new scaleable synthesis of the natural product 1-deoxynojirimycin is presented that has since been adopted for commercial purposes, as well as an efficient strategy for the synthesis of both enantiomers of 2,5-dideoxy-2,5-imino- mannitol and their novel amino acid analogues. Access to hexosaminidase inhibiting acetamido- substituted piperidines is presented, including 2-acetamido-1,5-imino-1,2,5-trideoxy-D- galactitol, which has been found to be one of the few known potent and specific inhibitors of α- N-acetyl-galactosaminidase. This inhibitory profile may allow the compound’s use for further investigation of a strategy for cancer treatment.
Chapter 3 concerns the synthesis of carbon branched pyrrolidines and their biological evaluation. A novel and highly potent α-glycosidase inhibitor has been discovered, synthesised by a strategy that utilises the benzhydryl ether as key protecting group. A mild method for the introduction of this protecting group has been shown to be general to a range of sterically congested and/or acid/base sensitive carbohydrate lactones.
Chapter 4 concerns the synthesis of deoxygenated and fluorinated sugar alcohols and their successful biotechnological transformation into ketoses by the Izumoring process.
Publications arising from this work are included in the Appendix.

Keywords: Izumoring
carbohydrate
monosaccharide
Iminosugar
glycosidase inhibitor
hexosaminidase inhibitor
Advisor: Fleet, G
The dosimetry of small, megavoltage photon fields: correction factors, dose area products and detector designs

In recent years, small fields have come to play a key role in advanced radiotherapy, yet protocols to perform dosimetry under small field conditions are still in their infancy. In 2008, the IAEA and AAPM published a formalism [Med. Phys. 35, 5179-5186] recommending the use of point-dose correction factors. This thesis uses Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that the values of these correction factors depend strongly on both detector design and field size, as well as other variables such as detector off-axis position and detector azimuthal angle.
Mass density is found to be the principal determinant of detector water non-equivalence. Furthermore, it is shown that it is possible to compensate for the mass-density of a detector cavity by incorporating additional components of contrasting mass-density into that detector’s design. For small cavities, such design modifications enable the detector’s small- to large- field response ratio to be matched to that of a “point-like” water-structure: ideal detector performance can be achieved across a variety of irradiation conditions.
For existing commercial detectors, a Dose Area Product (DAP) formalism is also developed and shown to be much more robust than the point-dose correction factor approach.
In conclusion, correction factor values for existing detector designs depend on a host of variables and their calculation typically relies on the use of time-intensive Monte Carlo methods. This thesis indicates that future moves towards density-compensated detector designs or DAP-based protocols can simplify the methodology of small field dosimetry.

Keywords: small photon fields
megavoltage
detector designs
radiation
dosimetry
medical physics
Advisor: Fenwick, J
Hill, M
Winter, H
The intellectual development of E.B. Pusey, 1800-1850

As far as I am aware, no one has studied Pusey's life afresh in any real detail since the publication of Liddon's biography (1893-1897). Without exception, all authors subsequent to this, who have dealt with Pusey, have relied very heavily on Liddon. In a sense this was inevitable; Liddon's four volumes were painstakingly detailed, and his quotations extensive; there seemed little left to say. Liddon's Life of E.B. Pusey was indeed a remarkable achievement. Unfortunately, however, the deep respect which Liddon rightly earned for his labours, has mezmerised later historians into an uncritical acceptance of his portrayal of Pusey and his times; the biography was and is too frequently approached with an emotion akin to awe. So great has been Liddon's success that, though some readers may not have liked what they found in the biography, they have largely considered it an accurate interpretation of Pusey and his era. Hitherto, it has seldom been appreciated that Liddon was too much an immediate disciple of Pusey and too close to him in time, to sea either his master objectively or the historical events of the period in perspective. Nevertheless, any analysis of the intellectual development of Pusey during the first fifty years of his life must of necessity take Liddon's picture into account; throughout this thesis, therefore, I have indicated where I differ from Liddon in my views...
Plasmodium falciparum population genetics in northern Ghana

The main thrust of this thesis was to characterize P.falciparum genetic diversity in northern Ghana. To do this, I used simple techniques to purify P. falciparum DNA from clinical samples across a rural setting for whole-genome sequencing. The goal was to provide a framework for exploring host-parasite genetic interactions. Utilizing Illumina deep sequencing data for 277 isolates I analyzed P. falciparum genetic diversity and described within-host diversity across this area.
I observed random mating (ie no population structure) in the local parasite population, and a high genetic diversity indicative of high out-crossing. Moreover, when I aggregated my data with similar published data from Burkina Faso and Mali (sites ≈500km apart), no population structure was evident. In contrast, sites sampled in Cambodia and Thailand (≈ 800km apart) were found to have greater population structure and high potential for inbreeding. This may be driven by differences in transmission intensity between the sites sampled in West Africa and southeast Asia.
To demonstrate the utility of deep sequencing data, I focused on the genomic regions of pfdhfr, pfdhps and pfcrt, known to be under antimalarial drug selection. I surveyed the full diversity of point mutations already characterized in these genes and discovered previously unknown variants. However, in order to provide a means to follow up on new variants or interesting candidate regions in large clinical samples with limited parasite DNA, I assessed the Sequenom iPLEX platform for high-throughput genotyping of P. falciparum polymorphisms. This necessitated developing a method appropriate for assigning genotypes in haploid genome mixtures common in natural infections. Finally, I used this method to type host and parasite markers in a case-control sample set from this region for exploring host-parasite genetic interactions. I found that children who have the sickle-cell trait and carry parasites that have pfdhfr resistant alleles lose their protection against severe malaria as compared to children who have normal haemoglobin and are infected with parasites with these resistant alleles.

Keywords: genetic
Population
diversity
malaria
Advisor: Kwiatkowski, D
Rockett, K