VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Donkey work: redefining the Democratic Party in an 'age of conservatism,' 1972-1984

This thesis argues that much of the political historiography is mistaken in portraying the post-1960s United States as a nation moving inexorably to the right. It also argues that historians should not understand the Democratic Party as being in terminal decline between 1972 and 1984, marginalised by a coalescing conservative Republican majority.
Indeed, taking as its focus the U.S. Congress, this thesis asks why the remarkable resilience of the congressional Democratic Party has been overlooked by historians. It further asks why that resilience did so little to help the party in subsequent years. The Democratic revival in the elections of 1974 and 1976, so often dismissed as a post-Watergate aberration, was in fact an authentic political opportunity that the party failed to exploit. Exploring various Democratic factions within Congress that competed to shape their party's public philosophy, this thesis seeks to show how grander liberal ambitions were often subordinated to the logic of legislative politics and policymaking.
The underlying theme is the unsuitability of Congress as an arena for the discussion and refinement of post-Great Society liberalism. Again and again, the legislature displayed a remarkable facility for undermining iconoclasm and stalling policy experimentation. Institutional reforms in the early 1970s, supposed to reinvigorate the Congress and the congressional Democratic Party, actually succeeded only in intensifying the fragmentation of both. Congressional politics became more entrepreneurial and less party-oriented, leaving legislators with few incentives to look beyond their own political fortunes to the party’s future prospects.
Enduring Democratic strength in Congress meant that Capitol Hill remained at the centre of the party's efforts to reclaim its preeminent position in American politics. The fact that the Democrats never experienced a protracted period of minority status, as the Republicans did during much of the mid-twentieth century, left them ill-equipped and without a powerful incentive to think in broader terms about their party’s mission.

Keywords: U.S. Congress
Liberalism
U.S. Democratic Party
U.S. Political History
Oxford University in the reign of Mary Tudor

This thesis addresses a significant, though largely unexplored, part of the Marian Counter- Reformation. Queen Mary and her ministers expected the University of Oxford’s contribution to the success of their plans for the English Church to be decisive. From her letter to the University in August 1553, only weeks after her accession, in which she announced her intention of laying the foundations of her ecclesiastical policy in Oxford, the academy underwent a transformation. After decades of trauma which had left the University poor, empty and (literally, in some parts) crumbling, Mary’s reign gave the University a purpose, something which had been difficult to discern since the Dissolution of the Monasteries had deprived it of a large proportion of its students and lecturers. Mary and, after November 1554, Reginald Cardinal Pole undertook an extensive programme designed to reform and restore the University, a programme which was willingly and tirelessly taken up by those sympathetic to it in the University. This had its theological, ecclesiastical, liturgical and architectural elements, each of which will be considered in this thesis. Its central claim is not just that the existing picture of Mary Tudor’s Church is incomplete without the inclusion within it of the restoration of Catholicism in Oxford, but that it is in Oxford, and perhaps only there, that all the different elements of her religious policy can be seen for what they are: a consistent whole, conceived and executed with one purpose: the reintegration of the English Church into the universal Catholic body.

Advisor: MacCulloch, D
Maximising expected value under axiological uncertainty

The topic of this thesis is axiological uncertainty – the question of how you should evaluate your options if you are uncertain about which axiology is true. As an answer, I defend Expected Value Maximisation (EVM), the view that one option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. More precisely, I explore the axiomatic foundations of this view. I employ results from state-dependent utility theory, extend them in various ways and interpret them accordingly, and thus provide axiomatisations of EVM as a theory of axiological uncertainty.
Chapter 1 defends the importance of the problem of axiological uncertainty. Chapter 2 introduces the most basic theorem of this thesis, the Expected Value Theorem. This theorem says that EVM is true if the betterness relation under axiological uncertainty satisfies the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms and a Pareto condition. I argue that, given certain simplifications and modulo the problem of intertheoretic comparisons, this theorem presents a powerful means to formulate and defend EVM. Chapter 3 then examines the problem of intertheoretic comparisons. I argue that intertheoretic comparisons are generally possible, but that some plausible axiologies may not be comparable in a precise way. The Expected Value Theorem presupposes that all axiologies are comparable in a precise way. So this motivates extending the Expected Value Theorem to make it cover less than fully comparable axiologies. Chapter 4 then examines the concept of a probability distribution over axiologies. In the Expected Value Theorem, this concept figures as a primitive. I argue that we need an account of what it means, and outline and defend an explication for it. Chapter 5 starts to bring together the upshots from the previous three chapters. It extends the Expected Value Theorem by allowing for less than fully comparable axiologies and by dropping the presupposition of probabilities as given primitives. Chapter 6 provides formal appendices.

Keywords: Decision Theory
Axiology
Moral Philosophy
Moral Uncertainty
Advisor: Broome, J
Greaves, H
The development of alliterative metre from Old to Middle English

The thesis deals with the history of the alliterative long line from Old English to both early and late Middle English, and demonstrates that the differences between the metrical systems of those periods are explicable in their entirety by the historical changes in the linguistic prosody rather than a discontinuity of the alliterative tradition.
The first three chapters of the thesis examine the alliterative metre in Old English (primarily on the basis of Beowulf), early Middle English (primarily on the basis of Layamon's Brut), and late Middle English (primarily on the basis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Morte Arthure, and the Siege of Jerusalem). The discussions pay particular attention to those points that are subsequently used in the historical reconstruction presented in the final chapter. At the same time, each of the period chapters aims to provide a coherent systemic formulation of the particular metre.
The chief method employed by the study is the standard procedure of matching the linguistic and metrical data, as described in the introduction. The historical reconstruction is based on the premise that in particular types of poetic environments certain changes in the linguistic prosody will automatically result in a restructuring of the metrical system. The premise leads to a new version of the history of English alliterative poetry based on the concrete evidence of the extant texts.

Advisor: Hanna, R
Irradiation effects on the deformation of oxide dispersion strengthened steels

This study concerns four high performance structural alloys designed to withstand the extreme temperature and irradiation environment inside fusion and fission fast breeder reactors: two Reduced Activation Ferritic Martensitic (RAFM) steels (Fe-14wt%Cr and a European standard alloy EUROFER97) and two equivalent Oxide Dispersion Strengthened (ODS) steels (Fe-14wt%Cr ODS (CEA ODS) and EUROFER ODS).
Neutron irradiation of the samples was impractical due to timescale and specific handling requirements for radioactive samples. Instead, ion implantation was used to simulate the helium and damage of neutron irradiation. Samples of each alloy were subjected to a range of ion implantations: 75appm He, 2000appm He, 2000appm He + 4.5dpa Fe and 2000appm Ne. The matrix of four materials and five implantation conditions was analysed using the following experimental techniques: nanohardness indentation, Vickers hardness testing, micropillar compression, microcantilever bending, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX).
These techniques were used to compare the properties of the unimplanted materials and their response to implantation. Yield stress (σy) was comparable across hardness testing and microcantilever bending, and consistently showed σy Fe-14wt%Cr &LT; EUROFER &LT; EUROFER ODS &LT; CEA ODS. When subject to helium implantation, 75appm He caused insignificant changes in σy while 2000appm He increased σy in all materials. This increase was most significant in Fe-14wt%Cr due to its low grain boundary density and lack of oxide/carbide particles. The particle dispersions in the other materials act as helium traps, preventing the formation of TEM visible bubbles and reducing the hardening effects of the helium.
Across all results it becomes clear that, although not to the degree of the ODS materials, EUROFER is more radiation resistant than Fe-14wt%Cr. It therefore appears that it is the presence of a complex microstructure including small grains and a distribution of oxide or carbide particles, rather than the specific inclusion of oxide nanoparticles, that provides RAFM steels with superior irradiation resistance properties.

Keywords: fusion
irradiation
micromechanics
steel
fission
ODS
nanoindentation
ion implantation
Advisor: Roberts, S
The role of whole-genome sequencing technology in the control and treatment of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection

In 2013 an estimated 9 million patients were diagnosed with tuberculosis across the globe, leading to 1.5 million deaths. In the UK, just under 8,000 cases were notified. Where resources allow, tuberculosis control is based on the identification of outbreaks, and the timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment of infected patients. However, current methods for identifying tuberculosis outbreaks are limited in their specificity, whilst the definitive diagnostic tests remain culture-dependent and can hence take weeks before producing a result. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) technology is now affordable, rapid and accurate, and in this thesis I explore its potential both for detecting transmission and for identifying the genetic variation underlying drug resistance.
Understanding the degree of M. tuberculosis genetic diversity within and between epidemiologically related individuals is a prerequisite to using WGS to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis transmission. In chapter 3 I outline how this diversity is rarely greater than 5 nucleotide variants and also describe how the pattern of genetic diversity within an outbreak relates to the epidemiologically recognised transmission patterns. In chapter 4 I apply the findings from chapter 3 to all tuberculosis cases in Oxfordshire over a 6-year period to show that although most patients with tuberculosis were born in a high-incidence country, the odds of transmission among UK-born patients are in fact greater. These findings have contributed to the decision by Public Health England to invest in the routine whole-genome sequencing of M. tuberculosis from 2015. In chapter 5 I explore whether the potential utility of future sequence data can be increased by also predicting phenotypic drug susceptibility. I therefore devise an algorithm to characterise relevant genetic variation associated with phenotypic drug resistance or susceptibility.
I conclude that WGS has a significant contribution to make towards improving patient outcomes and decreasing onward transmission of disease.

Advisor: Peto, T
The computational modelling of electromagnetic acoustic imaging

The Electromagnetic Acoustic (EMA) technique is a novel multi-modal technique for medical imaging. It is sensitive, in principle, to contrast in mechanical properties and electrical properties and has potential in a number of applications such as breast tumour detection where there will be contrast between diseased and healthy tissue and high intensity focused ultrasound monitoring, where there will be contrast when tissue is ablated.
A complete computational model for the EMA imaging is developed. The model considers the linear or nonlinear propagation of ultrasound in soft tissue, the dynamic response of the viscoelastic soft tissue to acoustic radiation force (ARF) stimulation and scattering of electromagnetic waves with and without the Doppler effect.
The suitability of the EMA imaging for breast tumour detection is evaluated, modelling a tumour as a spherical inclusion in an infinite homogeneous background tissue with clinically relevant material properties. The results show that variations of the mechanical properties of underlying healthy breast tissue and tumour tissue in clinically feasible range should result in a change in the amplitude of the first Doppler component (FDC) of up to 50%, and varying the electrical contrast leads to a change in the ratio of the FDC and unshifted component (UC) of less than 1 dB. The relative difference between the first Doppler component and the unshifted component is greater than 68 dB and therefore the frequency demodulation may pose a significant challenge if EMA imaging is used for breast tumour detection.
The feasibility of using the EMA imaging for real-time monitoring of High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) therapy is also investigated. Simulations conducted with realistic liver tissue properties show that the induced Doppler effect in the scattered EM wave is not well correlated with the growth of thermal lesion, therefore it is unlikely to be a good indicator of the lesion size. EMA imaging may not be appropriate for monitoring HIFU therapy.

Advisor: Cleveland, R
Edwards, D
Variety for security: A case study of agricultural, nutritional and dietary diversity among smallholder farmers in Western Kenya

Agricultural biodiversity, commonly referred to as agrobiodiversity, is that part of biodiversity that is geared towards agriculture and food production. Agrobiodiversity is said to contribute much to food and nutrition, but there is lack of data confirming this, particularly from Eastern Africa. To assess the extent of agrobiodiversity on smallholder farms and in local markets and to connect these to food intake and perceptions of food security among smallholder farmers in Western Kenya, the thesis asks four main research questions: (i) What is the extent of food plant diversity in smallholder farms, the bio-physical and socio-economic factors influencing it and the contribution of this diversity to the household's food needs? (ii) What is the relationship between agricultural and dietary diversity? (iii) What linkages are there between agricultural and nutritional diversity? (iv) How does access to agrobiodiversity in local markets contribute to meeting household food needs and what is the extent of smallholder farmers' integration into these markets? Through a combination of focus group discussions, farm and market surveys conducted across three time points, results indicate that: (i) higher food plant species richness is found on farms managed by wealthier and older households. However, these households are not more food secure than the rest, (ii) while there is a lack of a strong relationship between agricultural and dietary diversity, dietary diversity is instead significantly influenced by socio-economic factors including a household's wealth status, ethnicity and education level, (iii) despite a diversity of locally available on-farm and market food species meeting existing macro-and micro-nutrient needs, there is a general lack of understanding of this diversity as food shortage months coincide with a lack of maize despite high availability of a diversity of other foods not only to replace the maize but also to contribute to a diverse diet, (iv) smallholder farmers rely on multiple food sources, with markets mainly for sourcing cereals, fruits and animal source foods. There is also low integration of smallholder farmers as sellers in local markets. Together, the four case studies show interlinkages across food availability, accessibility and utilisation, which when addressed with equal weight, could unlock local agrobiodiversity's potential as a path to food and nutrition security of smallholder farming households.

Keywords: rural Kenya
agricultural biodiversity
food and nutrition security
Advisor: Daley, P
Bhagwat, S
Mobile phone diffusion and rural healthcare access in India and China

Three decades of mobile phone diffusion, thousands of mobile-phone-based health projects worldwide ("mHealth"), and tens of thousands of health applications in Apple's iTunes store, but fundamental questions about the effect of phone diffusion on people’s healthcare behaviour remain unanswered. Empirical, theoretical, and methodological gaps in the study of mobile phones and health reinforce each other and lead to simplifying assumptions that mobile phones are a ubiquitous and neutral platform for interventions to improve health and healthcare. This contradicts what we know from the technology adoption literature.
This thesis explores the theoretical link between mobile phone diffusion and healthcare access; develops and tests a new multidimensional indicator of mobile phone adoption; and analyses the effects of phone use on people's healthcare-seeking behaviour. My mixed methods research design—implemented in rural Rajasthan (India) and Gansu (China)—involves qualitative research with 231 participants and primary survey data from 800 persons.
My research yields a qualitatively grounded framework that describes the accessibility and suitability of mobile phones in healthcare-seeking processes, the heterogeneous outcomes of phone use and non-use on healthcare access, and the uneven equity consequences in this process. Quantitative analysis based on the framework finds that mobile phone use in rural India and China increases access to healthcare, but it also invites more complex and delayed health behaviours and the over-use of scarce healthcare resources. Moreover, increasing phone-aided health action threatens to marginalise socio-economically disadvantaged groups further.
I present here the first quantitative evidence on how mobile phone adoption influences healthcare-seeking behaviour. This challenges the common view that mHealth interventions operate on a neutral platform and draws attention to potential targeting, user acceptance, and sustainability problems. The framework and tools developed in this thesis can support policy considerations for health systems to evaluate and address the healthcare implications of mobile phone diffusion.

Keywords: qualitative
technology
diffusion
survey
capability approach
grounded theory
health action
mobile phones
sequence analysis
mHealth
low- and middle-income countries
healthcare seeking
quantitative
local innovation
rural
mixed methods
digital divide
health behaviour
satellite-aided sampling
international development
healthcare pathways
China
healthcare
social implications
adoption
health system
India
Advisor: Ariana, P
Fu, X
Reed-Tsochas, F
An observation of the electroweak production of a W-boson with two associated jets in a vector-boson fusion topology

An observation of Electroweak production of a W-boson in association with two jets at high dijet mass is performed, using &Sqrt;s = 8 TeV pp collision data from the Atlas detector, corresponding to 20.2 fb−1 of data. The process is observed to greater than the 5σ level and a fiducial cross section of σFid = 387.9 &PlusMinus;20.4 (stat.)&PlusMinus;5.4 (lumi.) (&plus;34.8)−27.3 (syst.) (&plus;34.9)−34.6 (theo.) fb is extracted.
Optimizing a universal mosaic T cell vaccine for HIV-1

The development of an effective human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) vaccine is the best solution to the global HIV-1 pandemic. This has proven difficult due to the high mutation rate and genetic diversity of the virus. One way to overcome this is for a T-cell vaccine to target highly functional conserved regions of HIV-1 across all clades, mutations would typically incur a cost on viral fitness. Our first conserved vaccine, HIVconsv, is a clade alternating consensus immunogen comprised of 14 conserved regions across the HIV-1 proteome. HIVconsv showed very promising results in mice and human clinical trials, inducing HIV-1 specific CD8+ T cells of high magnitude and breadth.
In my work, four conserved mosaic immunogens were designed in-silico, to maximize the coverage of potential 9-mer T cell epitopes. The aim was to develop a new conserved mosaic vaccine to enhance the breadth and depth of the vaccine elicited responses. The first, tHIVcmo, designed to complement tHIVconsv and tConsv1, tConsv2 and tConsv3 were designed to complement each other in a trivalent vaccine. The immunogens were expressed from a plasmid DNA (D), ChAdV63 (C) and a MVA (M) vector, used in heterologous prime boost regimens DDDCM and CM. HHD transgenic mice, expressing a chimeric human HLA-A*02:01 were used to asses the breadth and depth of vaccine elicited T cells. I assessed whether or not combining tHIVcmo to tHIVconsv had any benefits, and compared this bivalent combination to the trivalent conserved mosaic vaccines. Over 70 known human HLA-A*02:01 epitopes of HIV-1 across major clades where used for analysis. The trivalent mosaic vaccines elicited T cell responses with greater breadth, depth, magnitude and killing efficacy compared to that of the bivalent or HIVconsv elicited responses. These are the first data on mosaic vaccines with regards to known human epitopes, using a model with a human HLA molecule and the first conserved mosaic vaccines tested.
In a separate series of experiments, the effects of the tPA leader sequence were examined, comparing HIVconsv with and without tPA. Experiments in BALB/c mice have revealed that the addition of a tPA leader sequence had no added benefit on our T cell vaccine. Specificity, magnitude, breadth, depth and killing efficacy were all not affected by the addition of tPA to the vaccine.

Advisor: Hanke, T
Dorrell, L