VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Heteroatom-substituted bicyclo[1.1.1]pentanes

The theme of this thesis is to explore novel methodologies to access useful heteroatom-substituted bicyclo[1.1.1]pentane (BCP) scaffolds. BCPs are utilised as non-classical bioisosteres and as a metabolically stable spacer unit in their own right within pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, they have also found application in materials chemistry.
Firstly, we investigated the addition of nitrogen-centred radicals across the strained central bond of [1.1.1]propellane as an efficient entry to iodo-bicyclo[1.1.1]pentylamines (BCPAs). In an atom-transfer radical addition (ATRA) process, we demonstrated fragmentation of α-iodoaziridines for the formal addition of N,I across [1.1.1]propellane to give BCPAs. The developed methodology demonstrates good functional group tolerance and applicability to pharmaceutical analogues.
Having discovered that BCPA iodides were significantly more challenging to functionalise than carbon-substituted BCPs, due to expulsion of the amine component from anionic BCPA intermediates, the development of a novel C–C bond formation tolerant of heteroatom-substituted BCP halides was required. Through investigation into the use of photocatalysis as a means to generate BCPA radical intermediates, we demonstrated that the resident iodide of BCP(A) iodide compounds could be functionalised through a photocatalysed silyl-mediated Giese reaction. This transformation enables access to challenging and desirable N,C-disubstituted BCPAs, for example α-amino acid analogues. In combination, these two methodologies contribute a significant advancement to the field and provide access to aniline and N-t-butyl bioisosteres.
Following a serendipitous result from the synthesis of BCPA iodides, we discovered that sulfonyl halides, generated in situ from readily accessible sulfinate salts, add rapidly to [1.1.1]propellane under mild conditions and in exceptional yields. This methodology represents the first synthesis of sulfonyl BCP iodides and bromides.

Keywords: Bioisosteres
Sulfonyl halide
Photochemistry
Bicyclo[1.1.1]pentane
Atom transfer radical addition
Nitrogen Radical
[1.1.1]propellane
Giese reaction
Advisor: Anderson, E
A framework for interpreting the right to freedom of association of workers and trade unions in European human rights law

The right to freedom of association, as a labour right, has long been protected by Conventions 87 and 98 of the International Labour Organization, and by the European Social Charter. The European Convention on Human Rights and European Union law have more recently emerged as sources of protection of collective labour rights. This thesis identifies a particular concern arising from this development, namely that ECHR and EU norms that diverge from and conflict with ILO and ESC freedom of association guarantees could displace and undermine the authority of the latter, specialist mechanisms, which provide an overall higher level of protection. This thesis proposes that this concern could be addressed to a significant extent through the interpretation of ECHR and EU freedom of association guarantees in closer alignment with ILO and ESC norms. It first argues that there is a normative, moral justification for convergence between ECHR and EU human rights norms, and ILO and ESC specialist labour law norms. On this basis, it proposes that in interpreting ECHR and EU freedom of association guarantees, the respective Courts should look to ILO and ESC norms as key sources of authority; and that a divergent interpretation of these norms should be justified on the basis of appropriate reasons. These could be reasons pertaining to the text or aims of the relevant instruments and legal systems, particular institutional characteristics, or the fact that the ECHR and EU enforcement bodies are courts and not committees. The analysis concludes that the institutional concern cannot be completely resolved through the interpretation of ECHR and EU freedom of association guarantees in line with ILO and ESC norms, since differences between norms are sometimes well-justified. Nevertheless, the proposed interpretive framework could go significant distance towards achieving this goal, and make a substantial contribution to strengthening the protection of collective rights in Europe.

Keywords: worker empowerment
trade unions
freedom of association
Article 11 ECHR
collective labour rights
Advisor: Adams-Prassl, J
Bogg, A
Measuring the masses of planets around young active stars

A quarter century after the famous discovery of 51 Peg b, the radial velocity (RV) method remains a key exoplanet detection and characterisation method. For transiting planets, RVs allow us to measure mean densities and draw conclusions about the planets’ compositions. This is particularly valuable for young planets, which are sensitive probes of formation and evolution models. Stellar activity is the main factor limiting RV searches for both young planets and small, temperate planets around older stars. In this thesis, I developed and tested novel approaches to extract RVs from spectra using Gaussian process (GP) regression. I then used a multi-dimensional GP framework to model the impact of stellar activity on those RVs and to disentangle activity-induced and planetary signals in the data from a year-long intensive RV monitoring campaign of the bright, young M-dwarf AU Mic using the HARPS spectrograph. This enabled me and my collaborators to measure the masses of two transiting planets, which have previously been discovered by the TESS satellite, finding Mb = 11.7±5.0 M⊕ and Mc = 22.2±6.7 M⊕. As both planets are similar in size to Neptune, their contrasting densities represent a challenge for current planet formation models, and warrant further investigation. Finally, I also present extensions to the standard Generalised Least-squares Periodogram (GLS), which attempt to account for stellar activity explicitly. I used these to search for additional planets in the AU Mic system using both archival and new HARPS data, excluding the presence of any additional planets with RV semi-amplitudes ≥ 50 ms−1 and periods 20 ≤ P ≤ 1000days.

Keywords: radial velocity
young planets
Exoplanets
exoplanet detection
stars
AU Mic
extrasolar planets
Gaussian process
Astrophysics
stellar activity
Advisor: Aigrain, S
Investigation of sleep homeostasis: a chronic imaging study


Drosophila shows complex behaviours but performs these with relatively few neurons. Genetic tools for mapping brain circuits and perturbing neurons, together with the ability to record neural activity, offer the potential to link behaviours with brain circuits and dynamics. Neurobehavioural dynamics are complex and short experiments do not capture dynamics occurring over multiple days.
To overcome this limitation, I developed a chronic imaging protocol which allows the recording of neurobehavioural dynamics of a fly living for days on a spherical treadmill under a two-photon microscope. To validate this approach, I followed the Ca2+ dynamics in a genetic line (23E10-GAL4) labelling the switch neurons controlling sleep and wake. Sleep was measured as locomotor inactivity lasting for 5 or more minutes.
I explored the relationship between the dendritic Ca2+ dynamics in the switch neurons and sleep. I found that some of the features describing the dendritic Ca2+ dynamics correlate with “future sleep” and the time of day.
To overcome another limitation of current experiments investigating sleep homeostasis, I developed a protocol to sleep deprive flies during imaging experiments. I proved that the protocol is effective in causing sleep rebound after sleep deprivation and does not affect the lifespan of the experimental fly.
Our study paves the way for new experiments investigating sleep homeostasis and the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation over extended periods of time. It is also a validation of the virtues of Drosophila as a model for systems neuroscience.

Keywords: long-term imaging
neurobehavioural dynamics
sleep homeostasis
Advisor: Hasenhuetl, P
An investigation into the interaction of dopamine and glutamate in behaviours relevant to schizophrenia

Aberrant dopaminergic activity is widely believed to underlie at least some of the symptoms seen in schizophrenia. This belief is partly based on all currently used antipsychotics antagonising the dopaminergic D2 receptor. However, there is less agreement on what causes this aberrant dopamine activity. One candidate is a glutamatergic change upstream of the dopamine system. I investigated this glutamate theory of schizophrenia by examining the effect of glutamatergic manipulations on the dopamine system during behaviours relevant to schizophrenia in rodents.
One of these manipulations consisted of systemic injections of the putative antipsychotic LY354740, a group II metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist. This revealed that the effect of LY354740 on the dopamine system was apparently dependent on the internal state of the animal. Even though it is proposed as a putative antipsychotic, LY354740 could actually enhance phasic dopamine responses to reward in the nucleus accumbens core as measured by fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FCV). Furthermore, at least under some circumstances, LY354740 appeared to exacerbate behavioural effects of amphetamine.
The second manipulation of the glutamate system consisted of a knockout of the GluA1 glutamatergic AMPA-receptor subunit in mice. These GluA1 KO mice displayed deficits in short-term memory and hyperactivity which may reflect an aberrant salience phenotype which could be relevant to schizophrenia. The group II metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist, LY354740, could ameliorate the hyperactivity but failed to rescue the cognitive, short-term memory deficits in a test of spatial working memory.
The phenotype of GluA1 KO mice was further investigated using FCV in tasks relevant to schizophrenia. These experiments showed that GluA1 KO mice exhibited a hyperdopaminergic phenotype. They had increased phasic dopamine responses to neutral stimuli which were slower to habituate. They also exhibited increased dopamine signals to reward delivery in an instrumental conditioning task. In a simple Pavlovian conditioning task, however, they did not show increased phasic dopamine responses.
In summary, two very different glutamatergic interventions relevant to schizophrenia could, under certain circumstances, increase phasic dopamine responses in tasks relevant to schizophrenia. This gives additional evidence for a role of glutamate in schizophrenia.

Keywords: Dopamine
Glutamate
Schizophrenia
Advisor: Bannerman, D
Walton, M
Harrison, P
An evaluation of three national high school English textbooks in Vietnam from a global Englishes language teaching perspective

This dissertation evaluated how successfully the English textbook series for grade 10, 11, and 12 in Vietnam helps prepare high school students to use English to communicate in an international and global context. Adopting the Global Englishes for Language Teaching framework (Rose & Galloway, 2019), this dissertation analysed English norms used in audio recordings and texts, origins of interlocutors categorized in the Kachruvian system, visual representations of characters in skin tones, and traces of multilingualism and translanguaging. The findings revealed a strong dominance of British English norms (and to a much lesser extent, American English norms) and an overrepresentation of characters with light skin tones. Data also indicated positive portrayals of Vietnamese characters as interlocutors and proficient users of English. Importantly, the dissertation included an in-depth interview with one participant deeply involved in the design of the textbook series. It provided some recommendations for textbook designers and teachers in the conclusion.

Keywords: Global Englishes
Vietnam
textbooks
World English
GELT
assessment
Engligh as a Lingua Franca
ELF
Advisor: Rose, H
Shaʿbi music and struggles over 'the popular': class, space and emotion in contemporary Cairo

Shaʿbi music is a contemporary urban style that emerged in late 1960s Cairo, Egypt. Literally meaning ‘popular’ or ‘of the people,’ it is valourised by some as an antithesis to cosmopolitan genres of the elite and criticised by others as an undesirable and backward genre of the uneducated masses. Its presence is pervasive, constituting a central part of Cairo’s soundscape: it can be heard blasting out of microbuses, taxis and cafes, and is performed live at weddings and nightclubs. This thesis examines contestations over ‘the popular’ in contemporary Cairo through an ethnography of shaʿbi musicians and their music.
Based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork with shaʿbi musicians, fans and detractors, including one year spent working as a violinist with several shaʿbi bands, I argue that contestations over shaʿbi music do not just reflect pre-existing class-cultural positions but actively redraw them. In doing so, this thesis contributes to understandings of class formation and expression in the Middle East. Deconstructing materialist Marxist-inspired notions of class, I examine how shaʿbi music’s production and circulation—and the position-taking surrounding it—enables social positions to be negotiated and instantiated.
I pay particular attention to the spatial-material and emotional-affective aspects of shaʿbi music, moving beyond discursive approaches that have recently dominated scholarship on popular culture in the Middle East. Attending to music’s unique spatialising qualities, as well as its ability to make people feel things, I highlight a specific complex of class, space and emotion that shaʿbi music indexes. Finally, while existing scholarship on popular culture in the Middle East makes almost no mention of production conditions, my focus on the labour that goes into music-making reveals the realities of cultural production in a context of political authoritarianism. I challenge existing literature which tends to present Egyptian popular culture in terms of state-sponsored highbrow culture in opposition to lowbrow street culture, instead showing how shaʿbi has shifted on the spectrum of taste and revealing musicians’ contradictory entanglements with state power.

Advisor: Olszewska, Z
Armbrust, W
Prioritising feature representations in visual working memory

Representations of our external environment and of our internal memories together guide our awareness and actions. While large numbers of features and objects from the boundless external environment compete for sensory processing, working memory capacity is highly limited. Though extracting and integrating features into relevant objects are major objectives of perception, feature integration and well separated object representations may be basic characteristics of working memory. As discussed in Chapter 1, attentional selection of both external and internal content is pivotal, but its workings may differ according to the distinct representational formats. This thesis investigates how attention prioritises feature information in working memory to guide future actions. To test my hypotheses, I design and conduct behavioural studies, analyse neurophysiological recordings, and apply computational modelling. My empirical findings describe two main ways through which feature representations in working memory can be modulated: through goal-related prioritisation and through interacting with lingering sensory history. Chapters 2 and 4 describe tasks in which internally maintained information can be prioritised based on task demands. They demonstrate prioritisation of items and feature dimensions during working-memory delays, as well as the ability to protect and update features during maintenance. Chapter 4 also outlines how stimulus history modulates sensory processing and interacts with goal-based influences. Sensory content from same-trial or previous-trial information exerts opposing systematic performance biases. Applying neural decoding methods that I develop in Chapter 3, I reveal in Chapter 4 that both same-trial and previous-trial sensory history generates a repulsive neural bias at encoding, modulated by task relevance of previous stimuli. The findings suggest that other biases at post-perceptual stages may also contribute to the final opposing biases in performance. Taken together, the studies in the thesis extend our understanding of how visual feature information in working memory can be modulated and prioritised to serve future behaviour adaptively.

Keywords: eeg
short-term memory
working memory
memory
supervised learning
decoding
meg
perception
attention
cognitive neuroscience
Advisor: De Ozorio Nobre, AC
Stokes, M
Van Ede, F
Strategic litigation in South Africa: understanding and evaluating impact

This Thesis analyses the impact of strategic litigation in South Africa, being litigation that concerns interests beyond the immediate parties and pursues generally forward-looking goals involving social change. Part I develops an analytical and evaluative framework to assess impact and its value. Part II applies that framework to two case studies concerning litigation on the right to education and the appointment and removal of government officials.
I situate strategic litigation in the litigation process, considering the models and forms that it may take and the range of remedies that may result from it. The analytical framework identifies the type, temporality, people affected and reach of impact as its main dimensions, and, in respect of type, proposes a typology of legal, material and political impact to analyse the effects of strategic litigation. Recognising that litigation in South Africa takes place in a constitutional context, the Thesis proposes the values of social justice, democracy and the rule of law as a normative framework to evaluate the effects of strategic litigation.
In Part II, this analytical and evaluative framework is applied to two case studies. The first case study concerns six streams of litigation to compel government to provide certain educational inputs, including infrastructure, textbooks, furniture, teachers and scholar transport. The second case study, arising in the context of the phenomenon of ‘state capture’, considers litigation seeking to remove allegedly unfit officials from key state institutions and to compel the appointment of suitable persons.
The conclusion to the Thesis consolidates insights from across the case studies, ultimately arguing that the South African litigation environment is generally conducive to strategic litigation and that, given adequate litigation resources and appropriate litigation decisions, strategic litigation in South Africa is capable of contributing to significant legal, material and political impact and therefore to social change.

Keywords: impact of litigation
South Africa
socio-legal studies
state capture
constitutional law
economic, social and cultural rights
public interest litigation
legal mobilisation
right to education
strategic litigation
Advisor: O'Regan, C
Fredman, S
Technology, information, and the governance of environmental risk

This DPhil is motivated by the impact that public data can have on the practise of sustainable finance. Disclosure guidance for environmental information is increasingly being used to compel companies to better manage their environmental risk exposure and environmental impacts. Data-driven technologies can ‘unravel’ company information related to environmental risk and are changing the information asymmetries between company managers, their investors, and society.
Three novel and rigorous data science papers have been prepared which provide new access to company environmental risk information. The first paper develops a global inventory of photovoltaic solar energy facilties using machine learning and earth observation and then uses this dataset to assess land cover impacts due to renewable energy siting decisions. The second paper develops asset-level data arrangements of the coal, oil, and gas supply chains, and identifies concentrations of environmental transition risk in the complex network topology. The third paper advances earth observation and computer vision technical methods, assessing the power of these techniques for producing company asset-level data even with limited training data.
In developing these papers, this DPhil has identified the opportunities and limits that technology might have in the provision of information for public and private governance of environmental risk and impact. These limits add clarity to the role that policy must play in meeting the diverse information needs of both company shareholders and stakeholders. A discussion chapter provides commentary on these limits; on how the needs of both shareholders and stakeholders can be met with company risk disclosure at the asset-level; and how innovation might be fostered in markets for environmental information. Policy recommendations are summarised and an agenda for further research is provided.

Keywords: earth observation
environmental risk
machine learning
solar energy
sustainable finance
Advisor: Hepburn, C
Caldecott, B
The history of Thessaly, 1266-1393

The history and historical geography of medieval Thessaly (Vlachia) is a subject which has recently been established by two monographs, but which both in conception and in detail must still be approached independently and through the primary sources.
Thessaly is an area of transition between the continental Balkans and the Aegean world, both climatically and as an 'antechamber' to central and southern Greece. It is a land of great contrasts: broad, level, end fertile lowlands surrounded by rugged and massive mountains; and a long” coast encompassing a large expanse of sheltered water, the Pagasitic Gulf. It thus provides, equal opportunities for transhumant nomad pastoralism, for agriculture, and for maritime commerce, and its history may be viewed in terms of an interraction between these three economic occupations, which could give rise to very different kinds of society. In the High and Later medieval periods the differentiation was especially sharp both in degree of social sophistication and in ethnic and political terms.
Maritime commerce was in the hands of the Italian traders, who with the Jews seem to have monopolised the only 'bourgeois' settlement for which there is evidence - Almyros.
As transhumant nomads, only the Vlachs and the Albanians are mentioned. Both groups reached Thessaly as a result of extensive migration, the Vlachs in the Middle Byzantine period and the Albanians in the 14th century. They appear to have been based in the mountains, particularly to the west in the Pindos chain , an extension of the more northerly mountain blocs where most of their races lived. . They were generally hostile to the plain-dwellers and resentful of government control; their migrations seem to have been connected with the expansion of Balkan rivals of the Byzantine empire. However, the transhumants' need for winter pasture in the lowlands gave them an important point of contact with civilised society, which valued their produce and their military potential. The local rulers of the 13th and 14th centuries who most successfully maintained their political independence seem to have cooperated with their Vlach and Albanian subjects.
Continued in thesis ...

Keywords: history
Greece
Byzantine empire
Thessaly
Byzantium