VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Argentine navy as an autonomous actor in Argentine politics

Virtually the entire corpus of literature on military intervention in politics treats "military" as synonymous with "army". In contrast, this thesis focuses on the Argentine Navy, other political actors being studied only tangentially, to the extent that they interact with the naval institution.
The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part is a study of the Argentine Navy as a political actor from 1810 to the present day. This part of the thesis seeks to analyse the extent of, and limits on, naval political autonomy. Periods in which the Navy played a leading rôle are therefore emphasised: the Revolucién Libertadora that overthrew Perón in September 1955, the Azul-Colorado factional struggles of September 1962 and April 1963, and the Proceso de Reorganisacién Nacional (1976-83) with the so-called "war against subversion" (or “dirty war") and the South Atlantic War of 1982.
The second part analyses the Argentine Navy thematically as a military institution and social group. It deals with factors such as the influence of foreign navies and the social origins of the officer corps, which have been suggested in the past as reasons for political differences between the Argentine Army and Navy. Explanations are sought for important characteristic features of the Argentine Navy such as its strong institutional cohesion and its laissez-faire liberal economic ideology. The indoctrination and socialisation process within the Navy and its presumed anti-clerical and/or masonic orientation are also considered. Various aspects of inter-Force relations are studied: the annual struggle over budgetary allocations and the Navy-Air Force rivalry over military aviation. Finally, naval "jurisdictional hegemony" with regard to certain regions (Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica) and issues (the atomic energy programme) is analysed.
The major conclusion is that the political behaviour of the Argentine Navy differs from that of the Army due to endogenous factors (naval comradeship and discipline) rather than to exogenous factors (social origins of naval officers and external institutional links). In other words, the political behaviour of the Argentine Navy differs from that of the Army not because it is Argentinian but because it is a navy, implying thereby a certain universality in naval political behaviour.

Keywords: Argentine navy
Argentina
political activity
Armed forces
Argentine politics
autonomous actor
Advisor: Whitehead, L
Continuity and change in the northeastern Sertão of Brazil

This work deals with cultural change in the semi-arid Sertão of Northeast Brazil. Since 1940, the Sertanejo way of life has undergone considerable modification provoked by a process of increasing economic and cultural integration into the national society.
The hardships caused by recurrent drought have been reduced and widescale famine no longer occurs. Also, improved transport facilities, together with new market opportunities, have enabled the limited introduction of irrigation and intensification of stock-raising. These activities are less susceptible to drought but dry farming has been little changed and crop failure is still frequent. This, combined with increasing population pressure and low produce prices, have depressed farming.
Monetarization of the local economy caused growth in other sectors but this was offset by greater unemployment problems created by large-scale substitution of local crafts by manufactured goods. Hence, emigration continues, although drought is no longer the principal cause.
Landless peasants have left the country, thus lessening class disparity here but only shifting it to town. The urban upper classes increasingly accept the national lifestyle and the poor have improved their lot, but the gap between the two is growing.
The kinship system has become more bounded because of the effects of monetarization and the shift away from a rural lifestyle. However, concepts of family honour and morality have changed little and feuding persists.
Political power has shifted from rural to urban groups but leaders are descendants of the traditional families of the past. The structure of the political system, with strict control of higher level politicians over county leaders and the latter over the local people, remains intact.
New religious sects have been introduced and are related to increasing urbanisation. Protestant and Afro-Brazilian sects appeal to some dissatisfied urban merchants and poor labourers but the sects have encountered many obstacles to wider acceptance and so the majority. of Sertanejos are still Catholics.

Keywords: Northeastern Brazil
Social change
Brazil
Social conditions
Sertão
Rural conditions
Advisor: Riviére, P
Structural changes in heart and kidney tissue in response to modification of substrate availability

Introduction
Diabetes is a disease of impaired metabolism caused by a disparity between the insulin secretion necessary to maintain normoglycaemia and the ability of β-cells to secrete insulin. In all types of diabetes this results in hyperglycaemia which may lead to tissue damage. This project investigates the structural changes in human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM) as a result of maturation and insulin resistance.
Separately, this project also briefly investigates the effects of hyperglycaemia on the structure of glomeruli in a mouse model of diabetic nephropathy (βV59M).
Methods
hiPSC-CM in monolayer and in 3D as engineered heart tissue (EHT) were treated with oleic acid to increase maturity, and with palmitic acid and high insulin to induce insulin resistance. Previous work in the Carr group had shown that both treatment with oleic acid and culture as EHT induced a switch from glycolysis to oxidative metabolism and induction of insulin resistance impaired glucose metabolism. Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) was used to produce high magnification images which were assessed for quantitative analysis of muscle, nuclear area and mitochondrial area and structure. Statistical analysis was performed using R.
Sections of diabetic and control mouse kidney were stained with periodic acid Schiff’s assay (PAS), and confocal microscopy was used to observe mesangial matrix expansion. The glomeruli in these images were graded to produce quantitative data.
Results
Nuclear area, muscle area, as well as mitochondrial size, number and total area, were all increased by culturing hiPSC-CM in EHT. However only mitochondrial size and muscle area were further increased by oleic acid treatment. Insulin resistance had a significant effect only on average muscle area and on the distribution of the data for mitochondrial size and nuclear area.
There was a significant increase in mesangial matrix expansion in 12-week diabetic mice compared to non-diabetic mice.
Conclusions
Transmission electron microscopy images of hiPSC-CM showed changes in muscle area and mitochondrial morphology in hiPSC-CM cultured in 3D as EHT. Induction of insulin resistance caused increased disorder of mitochondria. Image analysis using FIJI and statistical analysis using R enabled some conclusions to be supported quantitatively. Orientation of slicing and separating mitochondrial populations would be important aspects of future work.
The βV59M mouse model shows significant indications of mesangial matrix expansion. Further work should include identifying the cause of the PAS staining using glycogen anti-bodies.

Keywords: electron microscopy
engineered heart tissue
cardomyocytes
mitochondria
Advisor: Carr, C
Christian, H
Energy sector development and carbon abatement challenges in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar

The issue of climate change is high on the global agenda, and the hydrocarbon-rich countries of the Gulf region are no exception. While the Gulf countries initially resisted the drafting of an international climate agreement for many years, they have now finally realized that decarbonization is not only necessary for their continued existence due to the threat of climate change, but that it would assist in reducing their hydrocarbon demand and meeting their economic diversification goals.
This research focuses on how Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar could achieve the decarbonization goals of their Paris Agreement (COP 21) pledges by analyzing the potential impact that various carbon reduction frameworks, such as carbon trading, carbon taxation, and command and control regulations, would have on their economic development. The key questions posed in this paper are whether carbon reduction mechanisms could be a viable way to reduce domestic hydrocarbon demand, and if so, which carbon reduction model would be preferable, and how it should be optimally designed to meet the Paris Agreement commitments?
These questions are answered by examining the contours of the energy sectors of the three selected countries, the evolution of their negotiating positions during the various international climate negotiations, and an analysis of the various carbon reduction frameworks and how they might best be designed to optimally decarbonize their macroeconomies.
My principal findings are that Saudi Arabia and the UAE would be best placed to implement national carbon markets in their respective jurisdictions, due to their large industrial bases and downstream sectors, as well as their relatively mature economies and growing populations. In Qatar’s case, my research discovered that a command-and-control carbon reduction framework would work optimally because Qatar’s small size, both in population and industrial base, would more efficiently allow direct regulation.
This research is an important contribution because as it showed that the Gulf countries may have taken a circuitous route to recognize the importance of combatting climate change, but now they are investing billions of dollars in alternative (nuclear+renewable) projects, implementing robust energy efficiency codes, and announcing, in the case of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, ambitious net-zero goals. As a result, understanding how they may arrive at their Paris Agreement pledges is critical for understanding the potential evolution of the region’s development and the contours of the future global energy market.

Keywords: Energy Sector
Carbon Taxation
Arabian Gulf
Oil
GCC
Renewable Energy
Natural Gas
Carbon Markets
Gulf Cooperation Council
Carbon Trading
Persian Gulf
OPEC
Climate Change
Paris Agreement
Advisor: Stern, J
Wojcik, D
The effect of adiponectin and adiponectin receptors in bone

The adipokine adiponectin exerts many complex endocrine and paracrine biological effects, particularly regulation of insulin sensitivity and glucose homeostasis. Despite bone marrow cells producing the majority of adiponectin, its role in bone accrual and homeostasis remains controversial, with contradictory reports from human and mouse studies. Adiponectin receptors AdipoR1 and AdipoR2 are expressed widely in cells of the bone and bone marrow and signal primarily through activation of AMPK and PPARa. The aim of this project was to characterise further the role of adiponectin in bone using novel mouse models and epidemiological data from a large cohort study.
In the first prospective study of its kind, analysis of a large, population-based cohort of healthy, post-menopausal women revealed adiponectin to be negatively associated, and the leptin to adiponectin ratio to be positively associated, with hip BMD both crosssectionally and five years prospectively following adjustment for age, BMI and smoking status. Circulating leptin levels did not associate with hip BMD and showed a significant relationship only with prospective lumbar spine BMD. These results indicate adiponectin and the adiponectin to leptin ratio as significant clinical correlates of osteoporotic development and progression.
Female mice deficient in AdipoR1 or AdipoR2 showed significantly retarded bone accrual and accelerated bone loss in middle age as compared with controls as determined by µCT analysis, and in AdipoR1 females, this low bone volume was associated with significant alterations in the biomechanical properties of the bone throughout life. Young female AdipoR1 knockout mice were further characterised by histology, and while osteoblast and osteoclast parameters were unchanged, osmium tetroxide staining showed significantly increased bone marrow adiposity. FACS-based isolation and RNASeq of bone marrow stem cells did not suggest any mechanistic genes for these changes. The altered blood chemistry profile of young female AdipoR1-deficient mice indicated a whole-body alteration in mineral metabolism, although a significant indirect effect on the bone was not conclusively identified. In vitro investigation found stimulation of AdipoR1 inhibited the osteogenic potential of a murine pre-osteoblast cell line while knockdown of AdipoR1 stimulated it, in contrast with the in vivo findings.
The epidemiological data identifying adiponectin as a negative correlate of BMD suggests adiponectin could represent a valuable candidate for the unmet clinical need of a biomarker of osteoporotic incidence and development. In two pre-clinical murine models, the association between adiponectin and bone volume was positive, although this response was inverted in vitro. These results suggest adiponectin has complex effects on the bone, with indirect endocrine effects having a positive effect on bone, and direct local effects negatively regulating bone and bone marrow adipose tissue itself.

Advisor: Edwards, J
Olechnowicz, S
Strategically training and evaluating agents in procedurally generated environments

Typically in reinforcement learning, agents are trained and evaluated on the same environment. Consequently, fine-tuning to the specific nuances of the environment is encouraged for both the researchers and the agents in order to maximise evaluation performance. However, while this train/test methodology can produce impressive results, it can also lead to the risk of overfitting. In such occurrences, even minor variations in the environment can cause dramatic reductions in performance or lead to unintended behaviours emerging. Indeed, for many practical applications such as self-driving cars, healthcare, and finance, the consequences of overfitting can be catastrophic. It is therefore crucial to develop training methods which can produce robust agents that can generalise to unseen settings, as well as evaluation techniques to quantitatively analyse their capabilities.
A promising approach to help alleviate the concern of overfitting is the use of procedurally generated environments. As such environments are created automatically using algorithms rather than by hand, a single procedurally generated environment is able to provide significant variation for agents during training. Therefore, agents are encouraged to learn general strategies for solving the problem rather than overfit to a specific instance. However, despite the increasing prevalence of procedurally generated environments in the literature, their use remains relatively understudied.
This thesis helps to address this gap in the literature by presenting an investigation into the use of procedurally generated environments for training and evaluating deep reinforcement learning agents. To begin, the generalisation benefits of training agents on procedurally generated environment are demonstrated with improved average-case performance at test time. Next, the failures that can emerge from training using these environments are highlighted through a worst-case analysis of state-of-the-art agents. This is achieved through the introduction of various methods for finding adversarial examples which lead agents to catastrophic failure, with such examples shown to be simple, robust, and transferable across agents. To help alleviate these failures, an adversarial training approach is then presented which improves the performance of agents by incorporating adversarial examples into training. The thesis is concluded with the proposal of a general method for evaluating agents and influencing their emergent behaviour through modifying the environment.

Keywords: procedurally generated environments
deep reinforcement learning
overfitting
evaluation
Advisor: Roberts, S
Women's voices in Old Norse-Icelandic poetry

This thesis examines the multiplicity of ways in which Old Norse-Icelandic authors represented women’s voices in poetic form, in a wide variety of genres. It undertakes a detailed analysis of a selection of these verses, considering how they function as poetry, how they function in relation to their prose context, and the (literary) effect of the prose author’s attribution of the verses to a woman. It considers the many and varied ways in which poets and saga authors represent the female poetic voice, including ways in which this voice may be used to evoke a mythological past, create a sense of nostalgia, destabilize or support established gender norms, function as performative speech, structure an episode or a longer poem, or allow an author/compiler to engage with contemporary societal tensions and concerns. It is not a comprehensive survey of all existing examples of women’s voices within Old Norse-Icelandic poetry, but examines a range of (largely secular) verses along a continuum from the entirely fictional to the ostensibly historical.
The introduction provides a survey of existing scholarship, including relevant scholarship in women’s studies and gender studies, and problematizes the frequent separation of eddic-style and skaldic-style verses in past analyses. Chapter 1 examines supernatural and legendary women’s voices, and draws parallels between the structural effects of verses within prosimetric texts, and the structural effects of speech acts within longer poetic works. Chapter 2 analyzes women’s dream verses, particularly in Sturlunga saga, and the effects of women’s roles as both speakers and dreamers of verse. Chapter 3 briefly charts the representation of women’s relationship with literary culture in indigenous romance, and considers the fusion of skaldic verse and chivalric tradition in the verses spoken by women in Víglundar saga. Chapter 4 turns to the women of the Íslendingasögur and konungasögur, including both the traditionally recognized skáldkonur as well as many other women whose verses have regularly been subject to questions surrounding attribution. The chapter conducts a detailed analysis of the many ways such verses function within the sagas.
Throughout, this thesis reveals the extent to which careful arrangement of verses allows an author or compiler to highlight relationships between characters, argues for the (intentional) effectiveness of women’s verses as structural markers, and demonstrates that women’s roles, and women’s engagement with poetic composition – far from being a monolithic or fixed state of affairs – are a site of tension, conversation, and ongoing debate throughout these texts.

Keywords: prosimetrum
skáldkonur
verses
poetry
gender
voice
composition
poetics
women
Old Norse
Advisor: O'Donoghue, H
Urban precarity: affordable art studios in contemporary London

This thesis contributes to critical understandings of the changing geographies of artist studios by examining how political-economic change and urban precarity manifest themselves in different working conditions for artists in those studios. Against the backdrop of recent debates in geography about the status of the art studio, as well as a series of changes around the organisation and delivery of artists workspace in London since the mid-2000s, this thesis determines what effect a series of recent transformations in London’s political economy is having on the availability and organisation of affordable studios and the consequences of this for the ways in which artists use, experience and value studios. Taking the growing precariousness of affordable workspace to be both symptomatic and expressive of London’s political economic condition, it poses a number of questions about the spatial and material practices through which precarity is made present within the studio, and how urban precarity is being brought to bear in artists’ everyday studio activities and practices. These questions are addressed through interviews with those involved in the organisation and delivery of affordable artist workspaces in London, and the visual artists who rent and occupy these spaces. Bringing these two sets of responses together, this thesis develops the argument that the relationship between the studio and the city is one that is not only economic but also affective, material and experiential, and as such, it is impossible to think about studio provision in London without thinking about urban precarity. In other words, we cannot think about the artist’s studio outside of the political-economic specificities of its urban context.

Keywords: urban precarity
Advisor: McCormack, D
Jellis, T
Coarse-grained modelling of a DNA origami force sensor

We have simulated large-scale DNA nanostructures using the oxDNA software which uses coarse-graining at the nucleotide level. These simulations can complement experiments as they typically allow greater structural resolution and give access to a range of properties that are otherwise hard to measure (e.g. internal forces).
To address the challenges associated with parallelised force spectroscopy, we report the development of a bottom-up approach for manipulating the mechanical forces experienced by target biomolecules. We have used molecular dynamics simulations to study the mechanical unfolding of DNA hairpins using an origami-polymer force clamp which allows ensemble scale parallelisation. The target molecules are sandwiched between a rigid DNA origami and a thermo-responsive polymer particle that shrinks upon a rise in temperature. This technique does not need any dedicated single-molecule force spectroscopy instruments or surface tethering. The key features of the origami-polymer force clamp are discussed along with the characterisation of the mechanical unfolding of DNA hairpins, and how these simulations aid in the interpretation of experimental results from these devices.
In eukaryotic cells, the basic structural unit into which DNA is packaged is a nucleosome. We have developed models of the nucleosome in its fully wrapped and partially unwrapped states to enable the design of DNA origami force clamps that will allow the structure of the nucleosome to be determined by cryoEM while subject to force. Our work focuses on molecular dynamics simulations of the nucleosome core particle obtained from a species of African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis). We have looked at the response of our nucleosome models to external force and determined the parameters needed to simulate it in a partially unravelled state. The next step in this study would be to optimise clamp designs that utilise the entropic spring behaviour of ssDNA to exert forces that stabilise the nucleosome in the partially unwrapped state. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a DNA origami based force-sensor that can exert the appropriate force to cause unfolding of nucleosomes.
The equilibrium structure of a DNA origami can be manipulated in a controlled way using engineered defects within the design. We have explored how to use the insertion or deletion of base pairs to generate complex structures out of a 6 helix-bundle DNA origami. The particular target is a three-dimensional trefoil knot. The designs considered involve a complex interplay between twist and curvature and we report the progress we have made towards that target.

Keywords: DNA modelling
coarse-grained modelling
molecular dynamics
Advisor: Doye, J