VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Does teaching values improve the quality of education in primary schools?

This thesis has been undertaken to consider whether values education, as conceived in Palmer Primary School, improves the quality of educational provision. To do this, it explores the research question:
Does teaching values improve the quality of education in primary schools?
The research study seeks evidence to analyse whether moral education in positive values, in the form of values education, is fundamental to the purposes of developing quality education. Significantly, the study considers whether values education can enable pupils to internalise, and act on, a code of personal ethics. It considers the argument that values education may have positive qualitative effects on the attitudes and behaviour of adults and pupils in state primary schools. Furthermore, the study seeks to ascertain whether the methods and pedagogy of values education can be an effective means of implementing the second aim of the revised National Curriculum, which is concerned with the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils.
This research study seeks to establish whether values education, as the embodiment of the aim, can pass on what the National Curriculum describes as enduring values and help pupils to be caring citizens capable of contributing to the development of a just society. It reflects on whether values education can be an effective means for reestablishing the moral purpose of education and thereby affect the quality of education in the state sector of schooling.
The thesis is coherently structured in ten chapters that cover: the theoretical background to values education; a philosophical framework; a literature review, case studies, examination of data; conclusions and recommendations. The research methodology is designed to collect and analyse data from a main and subsidiary case study. It focuses on data from semi-structured interviews with fulltime teachers; pupil interviews; parent interviews; documents from Ofsted, governors' meetings and sample lessons.
The potential significance of this study is whether the research produces evidence that will support further, more extensive, research that will consider whether values education represents a positive paradigm shift in the way that schooling in primary schools is conceived.
A functional database

This thesis explores the use of functional languages to implement, manipulate and query databases.
Implementing databases. A functional language is used to construct a database manager that allows efficient and concurrent access to shared data. In contrast to the locking mechanism found in conventional databases, the functional database uses data dependency to provide exclusion. Results obtained from a prototype database demonstrate that data dependency permits an unusual degree of concurrency between operations on the data. The prototype database is used to exhibit some problems that seriously restrict concurrency and also to demonstrate the resolution of these problems using a new primitive. The design of a more realistic database is outlined. Some restrictions on the data structures that can be used in a functional database are also uncovered.
Manipulating databases. Functions over the database are shown to provide a powerful manipulation language. How to make such functions atomic is described. Such atomic transaction-functions permit consistent concurrent transformations of a database. Some issues in the transaction model are also addressed, including nested transactions.
Querying databases. Others have recommended list comprehensions, a construct found in some functional languages, as a query notation. Comprehensions are clear, concise, powerful, mathematically tractable and well integrated with a functional manipulation language. In this thesis comprehensions are proved to be adequately powerful, or relationally complete. Database and programming language theories are further integrated by describing the relational calculus in a programming language semantics. Finally, the mathematical tractability of the notation is used to improve the efficiency of list comprehension queries. For each major conventional improvement an analogous comprehension transformation is given.
The contribution of early education to vulnerable and resilient developmental pathways

This study investigates the relationship between early education and cognitive and social development in young British children between the ages of 3-7 years. It is hypothesised that pre-school education might facilitate resilience in children's developmental pathways that have proved vulnerable due to the significant impact of risks. This study aimed to provide a systematic examination of the relationship between cognitive and social development, child or family specific developmental risks, and the structures and processes of early education.
Adopting the methodology of secondary analysis, this study re-examined the data of the Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) project that followed the developmental progress of nearly 3,000 British young children as they experienced different kinds of early education from 1997 to 2001 and later primary school. Three sets of longitudinal statistical analyses were carried out. First, a new method was developed for measuring the relative weight of different kinds of risks as they predict development.
Second, the impact of different kinds of risks upon development during the pre-school period (ages 3-5) was examined to see whether it was lessened by high quality early education.
Third, the developmental skills and abilities of children at exit from early education were studied in terms of their prediction of developmental pathways during the first two years of school (ages 5-7).
Results from these three sets of analyses suggested the following: (1) validity of the new method of measuring developmental risks, (2) strong evidence of partial protection of young children's general cognitive ability when examining child level developmental risks and the quality of the processes that take place in programmes of early education, (3) that high quality early education can contribute to resilient developmental pathways during the first two years of school by boosting the vital cognitive and social skills of children at entrance to primary school.
In policy terms, high quality early education programmes have the potential to serve as interventions within normal populations. Further, high quality early education programmes also have the potential to act as a type of primary prevention in a manner similar to targeted Early Interventions for children already at risk.
The investigation of some chemical problems by Raman spectroscopy

The Work described is concerned with the vibrational spectra of
(a) compounds containing phosphorus trifluoride and related ligands,
and
(b) highly-coloured halogen compounds of transition metals.
Despite extensive research into compounds of phosphorus trifluoride very little is known about the vibrational spectra of these compounds. To date, the only compound of phosphorus trifluoride to have itse Roman spectrum characterised is tetrakistrifluorophosphinenickel, Ni (PF₃)₄, studied in the Oxford Laboratory by L.A.Woodward and J.R.Hall. Infra-red work on similar compounds has been incomplete and normally only the phosphorus-fluorine stretching vibrations have been recorded. A testing of the predictions of much theoretical discussion on the bondin in such zerovalent metal-trifluorophosphines may be afforded by a spectroscopic examination of a series of M(PF₃)₄ compounds.
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Catholicism in the second Spanish Republic: religion and politics in Salamanca, 1930-36

The research for this thesis has been confined in space and time in order to facilitate an investigation of the Church at several levels: the study is as concerned with the faith and the faithful as with the official presence of the hierarchy. It examines questions of religious identity in an area of high Catholic practice, conservative politics and, eventually, genuine popular support for the Nationalist rising.
The province of Salamanca, in the north west of Spain, is a particularly appropriate focus for such a study. Part of the Castilian heartland of traditional Spain, it was the home province of Jose Maria Gil Robles and a major area of strength for the parliamentary Catholic right, which mobilised here before anywhere else in Spain. This has led to Salamanca receiving some attention from historians. Scholars such as Paul Preston and Juan Jose Castillo use it to provide examples of the Catholic right's techniques and rhetoric, arguing that the innate conservatism of the Castilian smallholders was manipulated by the great landlords.
However, perhaps the most interesting feature of the history of the province in the 1930s is how its story differed from that laid out in Madrid. The historiography of the Second Republic has concentrated - perhaps inevitably - on political and parliamentary struggles. While issues such as disestablishment and the fate of the religious orders were of crucial importance at institutional and governmental level, the impact they had outside the professional circles of church and state is far less certain.
This study has moved outside the administrative world of the capital to investigate the impact of the Republic on ordinary Catholic citizens. The minutiae of church/ state relations and the undoubted injustice of the treatment of the religious orders may have outraged the Catholic deputies representing Salamanca in the Cortes, but their Catholic constituents had different concerns. By examining these concerns, this thesis throws new light on the process of breakdown of the Second Republic.
Strontium isotope studies of sedimentary rocks

The present investigation has been undertaken in an attempt to clarify the effects of hte physico-chemical conditions encountered during burial diagenesis and very low-grade metamorphism on the Rb-Sr systems of the various components of argillaceous sediments. Two methods of study have been used: 9a) comparison of Rb-Sr data from suites of variably metamorphosed argillites, and (b) an investigation of the mobility of Rb and Sr in a clay-water system under metamorphic conditions simulated in teh laboratory.
A suite of Lower Silurian (Upper Llandovery) mudstones (clay fraction consisting of mixed-layer illite-smectite+kaolinite) gives whole-rock RbSr isotope date which form a non-linear array on an isochron diagram. A best-fit line through all data points represents an age of ca. 510 m.y., which may be compared with an estimate of ca. 420 m.y. for the true stratigraphic age. This is interpreted as reflecting the multi-component nature of the sediment, the components ranging from detrital minerals (e.g. kaolinite and possibly illite) and partially transformed mixed-layer minerals, to authigenic phases (e.g. calcite). This interpretation is amplified by data from within-sample size-fractions, whose Rb-Sr model ages decrease towards the estimated age of deposition as the grain size decreases.
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A study of the influence of hormones on the synthesis of ribonucleic acids and proteins in animal tissues

Part One of this thesis descirbes studies on the counter-current distribution of rapidly-labelled RNA. Other workers had previously reported that several hormones, when injected into rats, altered the counter-current distribution profiles of the rapidly-current distribution profiles of the rapidly-labelled RNA isolated from their livers. It was hoped to use counter-current distribution, in this thesis, to study the RNA synthesised by mammary glad slices incubated with different hormones.
Initial experiments were performed to see if hormones influenced the counter-current distribution profiles of rapidly-labelled RNA formed in lover slices. Double-labelling was employed to eliminate differences in isolation and fractionation of control and experimental RNA: control slices were incubated with (14c) adenine, and experimantal slives with the hormone and (3H) adenine. The slices were then combined for RNA isolation and fractionation and the 14C and 4H in each fraction measured simultaneously.
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War by other means : the politics of peace negotiations in Sudan

This thesis follows two equally important lines of inquiry. First, it offers a detailed account of the politics of peace negotiations in Sudan between the late 1990s and 2004, when the country's two decades-long second civil war reached a mediated settlement, but large-scale violence erupted in the western region of Darfur. Second, it proposes a new approach to studying peace negotiations. By analysing how key ideas that constitute peace negotiations institutions are contested, this thesis demonstrates how the politics of peace negotiations go far beyond the parties' bargaining at the negotiating table to include the actions of, and effects upon, a wide range of actors seeking to shape or reshape the 'negotiating table' itself. In order to examine peace negotiations in this way, close attention must be paid to how battles over peace take on increasingly institutionalised and discursive forms, while at the same time the communicative and coercive dimensions of political violence remain in play.
These arguments are developed through a close-range empirical examination of how and why the January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army and the Government of Sudan was achieved, and with what wider effects, including upon organised political violence in Darfur and the international response to that conflict prior to the signing of the CPA. 'Peace' in Sudan was open to being the name given to diverse possible political trajectories. Much depended on how those who prevailed in shaping the making of peace reduced these many futures to few, and then fewer still. This thesis argues that the CPA negotiations institution - constructed as bilateral 'north-south' talks to end the 'southern war' - was productive of violence in Darfur because of the way these constitutive ideas, and contestations over them, enabled and constrained political actions that fomented violence in northern Sudan.
Investigations of the production of excited states in ions

Excitation by thermal energy charge transfer has been postulated as the pumping mechanism responsible for laser action in certain transitions of the recently announced He-Cd and He-Zn laser systems. In this thesis a study of these reactions and others of the same class is presented. The technique employed in the present work overcomes the difficulty in interpretation of data present in previously published studies of this class of reaction, which arose from the failure to distinguish between charge transfer excitation, electron collisional excitation and Penning excitation. The reactions are studied in a flowing afterglow of a rare gas under conditions such that the plasma electrons have insufficient energy to cause appreciable optical excitation. Discrimination between excitation due to charge transfer and Penning reactions is achieved by selective modulation of the relevant reactant particle concentrations. Measurement of the relative emission intensities of transitions in the daughter metal ion enables the relative charge transfer rate to each level in the ion to be determined.
A review is presented of the current state of theories of thermal energy charge transfer reactions. In particular, the prediction that the cross section should be largest for reactions in which the energy defect is positive and of order 1000 cm⁻¹ is found to be in accord with the experimental results. Further experimental conclusions relate to the influence of statistical weight and spin of the final level on the reaction rate. Evidence is presented that in certain cases a third body may enhance the reaction rate.
An examination of bureaucratic motivations focusing on the federal agency of the United States Environmental Protection Agency

The primary aim of this thesis is to examine the question:
What is it that motivates bureaucrats?
This thesis tests four models of bureaucratic motivation against data obtained during interviews conducted at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington DC and the field offices in Wheeling, West Virginia. Each of the models assumes that bureaucratic motivation can be explained by a characterisation of bureaucrats as rational self-interested maximisers. The four chapters in this thesis examine what is meant by motivation and rationality and assess what it is that motivates bureaucrats in the EPA. The argument in this thesis is that non-rational accounts of motivation are essential to an understanding of the motivations of EPA officials. The conclusion assesses why it is that the data in this thesis can be interpreted as supporting the argument presented in the following work.
Aspects of nucleic acid metabolism during nutritional deficiency in Escherchia coli

This thesis concerns an investigation of the effects of thymine deficiency in thymineless mytants of Escherichia coli. Evidence was available which implicated damage to the DNA of the cell as the cause of the loss of viability (thymineless death) which accompanies thymine deficiency. DNA has been extracted from bacteria before and after thymineless death and examined for chemical and physical differences. There was evidence that the DNA extracted after thymineless death was labile to alkali shince it could not be reprecipitated with acid after the accompanying RNA had been destroyed by alkali according to the method of Schmidy and Thannhauser. It had also been observed that incubation of the acid-insoluble residue from bacteria after thymineless death in N alkali for 16 hours at 37 degrees resulted in an apparent decrease in material which reacted in the diphenylamine assay for DNA. It has been shown that the inability to reprecipitate the DNA is not a function of the DNA itself since if herring sperm DNA is added to the alkaline incubation mixture it too cannot be reprecipitated. The apparent decrease in diphenylamine-reacting material was shown to be due to the production during thymine deficiency of some material which when treated with alkali produced an inhibitor of the diphenylamine reaction. It has further been shown that incubation in alkali reduces the viscosity of DNA extracted after thymineless death by about the same amount as that of DNA extracted before thymineless death. [please see PDF to read the rest of the abstract]
Fabrication and properties of oxide

The present research addresses some of the major problems pertaining to two different types of ceramic nanocomposite; viz. participate reinforced polycrystalline alumina-based nanocomposites and multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) reinforced aluminoborosilicate glass/ceramic (ABS) nanocomposites. With respect to the former, a novel and economical processing route based upon solid solution-precipitation technique is explored. Dense and homogeneous solid solutions of 10 wt.% Fe2O3 in Al2O3 were produced by pressureless sintering at 1450°C in air. Aging of the solid solutions in a reducing atmosphere at temperatures in the range 1250°C-1550°C for different durations (up to 50 h) resulted in the precipitation of FeAl2eO4 as second phase particles throughout the bulk of the samples. The optimum aging schedules resulted in a final microstructure comprising nanosized (~ 100 nm) intragranular FeAl2eO4 particles, along with coarser micro-sized particles along the matrix grain boundaries and triple point corners. The hybrid nano/micro composites possessed improved fracture toughness (by ~ 40%), flexural strength (by ~ 50%) and abrasive wear resistance (by a factor of ~ 2.5) with respect to monolithic Al2O3.
With respect to the ABS - MWCNT nanocomposites, we report here the ability to develop dense nanocomposites, containing uniformly dispersed nanotubes up to a content of 10 wt.%, by an ultrasonication-assisted sol-gel technique followed by hot pressing. The optimised ABS - 10 wt.% MWCNT nanocomposite possessed nearly double the strength, and a fracture toughness improvement of ~ 150% with respect to the unreinforced ABS. The carbon nanotubes have been observed to bridge crack openings of the order of ~ 100 nm which provides the major contribution towards the improvement in fracture toughness. The nanocomposites, showed an electrical percolation threshold of between 2.5 to 5 wt.% MWCNT and possessed significantly higher electrical conductivities (by a factor of 106) with respect to the unreinforced ABS glass/ceramic. Furthermore, 40% improvement in thermal conductivity (~ 1.8 W m-1 K1) over that of unreinforced ABS glass/ceramic was recorded with ABS - 15 wt.% MWCNT nanocomposite.
Statistical methodology for QTL mapping and genome-wide association studies

This work deals with statistical tests of association between genetic markers and disease phenotypes. The main criterion used for comparing the tests is statistical power. First we consider animal models and then data from association studies of humans. For the animal section, we analyse a dataset from a prominent mouse experiment which developed a heterogeneous stock of mice via multiple crosses. This stock is characterised by small distances between recombinants which allows fine mapping of genetic loci, but also by uncertainty in haplotypes. We start by highlighting the disadvantages of the currently used approach to deal with this uncertainty and suggest a method that has greater statistical power and is computationally efficient. The method applies the EM algorithm to the broad class of exponential family distributions of phenotypes. We also develop a Bayesian version of the method, for which we extend the widely used IRLS algorithm to maximisation of the weighted posterior.
Then we move on to genome-wide association studies (GWAS), where two situations are considered: known and unknown minor allele frequency. First we develop an innovative Bayesian model with the optimal prior for the known population MAF. We demonstrate that not only it is more powerful than any frequentist test considered (the size of the advantage depends on prevalence of the disease and MAF), but also that the frequentist tests change ranking in terms of power. A remarkable property of the frequentist tests, the advantage of discarding part of the data to gain power, is highlighted.
The second chapter on GWAS considers the currently more common situation of the unknown MAF, when the Armitage test is known to be the most powerful frequentist method. We show that the suggested model is more powerful in the broad selection of settings considered, including the three different allele effect models: additive, dominant and recessive.
For both known and unknown MAF cases we point out that the parameters are constrained and demonstrate how to gain power by taking this constraint into account.