VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Secondary and intermediate female Islamic studies teachers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: understanding their teaching

The purpose of this study is to investigate how intermediate and secondary female Islamic studies teachers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, make sense of their teaching. The overarching aim was to produce a descriptive and interpretive account of what is it like to be an IS teacher teaching in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia today. The key questions that frame this study are: 1) How do female Saudi Arabian Islamic studies teachers teach in the classroom? 2) How do female Saudi Arabian Islamic studies teachers make sense of their teaching practices? 3) What is essential however implicit to the experience of being a female Islamic studies teacher in Saudi Arabia today? The study is positioned within a qualitative interpretive tradition, drawing on phenomenology as a guiding conceptual paradigm. The data for this study were collected by means of semi-structured interviews and classroom observations conducted with 24 teachers in six different schools in the city of Jeddah. The analysis of the data began at the individual level, capturing the patterns that emerged for each teacher. A cross analysis was then conducted to elicit key emergent themes for the whole group. However, even where the analysis was carried out primarily at the group level, themes are still illustrated with examples taken from the talk of individual teachers. While the data indicated similarities in substance in the ways in which teachers made sense of their teaching, there were differences in the manifestations of the themes, which are also reported in this study. The themes that emerged from this investigation suggest that the teachers talked about their teaching by referring most essentially to maintaining discipline, teaching as persuasion and dealing with dissonance. The findings suggest that the participating Islamic studies teachers both described and used a set of distinctive pedagogical devices to maintain discipline and to persuade students regarding 9and by means of) pre-planned and well-crafted messages. In both their talk and their practice, the teachers reported a transition from understanding their teaching as a process of transmission of sacred knowledge to understanding it as a process of persuasion. The findings also show that, at the surroundings level, the teachers struggled to deal with issues of dissonance between their commitment to their values and religious beliefs and their required role as teachers teaching under institutional pressures. The research outlines the tension and paradox between the two roles, describing how the teachers maintain this balance in their teaching from the perspective of the teachers themselves.

Keywords: education
Advisor: Childs, A
Choosing where to go: mobile robot exploration

For a mobile robot to engage in exploration of a-priori unknown environments it must be able to identify locations which will yield new information when visited. This thesis presents two novel algorithms which attempt to answer the question of choosing where a robot should go next in a partially explored workspace.
To begin we describe the process of acquiring highly accurate dense 3D data from a stereo camera. This approach combines techniques from a number of existing implementations and is demonstrated to be more accurate than a range of commercial offerings. Combined with state of the art visual odometry based pose estimation we can use these point clouds to drive exploration.
The first exploration algorithm we present is an attempt to represent the three dimensional world as a continuous two dimensional surface. The surface is maintained as a planar graph structure in which vertices correspond to points in space as seen by the stereo camera. Edges connect vertices which have been seen as adjacent pixels in a stereo image pair, and have a weight equal to the Euclidean distance between the end points. Discontinuities in the input stereo data manifest as areas of the graph with high average edge weight, and by moving the camera to view such areas and merging the new scan with the existing graph, we push back the boundary of the explored workspace.
Motivated by scaling and precision problems with the graph-based method, we present a second exploration algorithm based on continuum methods. We show that by solving Laplace’s equation over the freespace of the partially explored environment, we can guide exploration by following streamlines in the resulting vector field. Choosing appropriate boundary conditions ensures that these streamlines run parallel to obstacles and are guaranteed to lead to a frontier – a boundary between explored and unexplored space. Results are shown which demonstrate this method fully exploring three dimensional environments and outperforming oft-used information gain based approaches. We show how analysis of the potential field solution can be used to identify volumes of the workspace which have been fully explored, thus reducing future computation.

Keywords: exploration
computer vision
robotics
stereo
Advisor: Newman, P
Safety through security

In this thesis, we investigate the applicability of the process algebraic formal method Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) [Hoa85] to the development and analysis of safetycritical systems. We also investigate how these tasks might be aided by mechanical verification, which is provided in the form of the proof tool Failures-Divergences Refinement (FDR) [Ros94].
Initially, we build upon the work of [RWW94, Ros95], in which CSP treatments of the security property of non-interference are described. We use one such formulation to define a property called protection, which unifies our views of safety and security. As well as applying protection to the analysis of safety-critical systems, we develop a proof system for this property, which in conjunction with the opportunity for automated analysis provided by FDR, enables us to apply the approach to problems of a sizable complexity.
We then describe how FDR can be applied to the analysis of mutual exclusion, which is a specific form of non-interference. We investigate a number of well-known solutions to the problem, and illustrate how such mutual exclusion algorithms can be interpreted as CSP processes and verified with FDR. Furthermore, we develop a means of verifying the faulttolerance of such algorithms in terms of protection.
In turn, mutual exclusion is used to describe safety properties of geographic data associated with Solid State Interlocking (SSI) railway signalling systems. We show how FDR can be used to describe these properties and model interlocking databases. The CSP approach to compositionality allows us to decompose such models, thus reducing the complexity of analysing safety invariants of SSI geographic data. As such, we describe how the mechanical verification of Solid State Interlocking geographic data, which was previously considered to be an intractable problem for the current generation of mechanical verification tools, is computationally feasible using FDR.
Thus, the goals of this thesis are twofold. The first goal is to establish a formal encapsulation of a theory of safety-critical systems based upon the relationship which exists between safety and security. The second goal is to establish that CSP, together with FDR, can be applied to the modelling of Solid State Interlocking geographic databases. Furthermore, we shall attempt to demonstrate that such modelling can scale up to large-scale systems.
The Yang-Mills equations on Kahler manifolds

Two special classes of solutions to the Yang-Mills equations are studied in this thesis; Hermitian-Einstein connections on holomorphic bundles over Kahler manifolds, and self-dual connections on bundles over Riemannian 4-manifolds.
We give a new proof of a theorem of Narasimhan and Seshadri, which characterizes those holomorphic bundles over an algebraic curve admitting projectively flat connections, and describe a conjecture of Hitchin and Kobayashi that would extend this to Hermitian-Einstein connections over any smooth projective variety. This conjecture is proved to be true for the simplest interesting case: bundles of rank 2 over ℙ2.
Moduli spaces of self-dual connections are studied from the point of view of differential topology, For bundles of Chern class -1 over a simply connected 4-manifold this moduli space can be compactified in a straightforward way and is, in a generic sense, an orientable manifold with quotient singularities. Applying the theory of cobordism to this moduli space we deduce that there are severe constraints on the matrices which can be realised by the intersection pairing on the second homology group of a smooth 4-manifold.

Advisor: Hitchin, N
Notch signalling in Xenopus laevis haematopoietic stem cell programming

Multipotent haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) originate in the dorsal aorta (DA) during vertebrate embryogenesis, and after migrating to a permanent niche, give rise to a continuous supply of mature blood cells of all lineages throughout adult life. Previous cell tracing experiments have shown that the cells of the DA migrate here from an early collection of haemangioblasts (bipotential precursors of blood and endothelial cells) which reside in the dorsolateral plate (DLP) mesoderm. Development of HSCs is tightly regulated by a number of key signalling pathways in both the DLP and the DA. In particular, notch signalling is considered an important factor in vascular, arterial and HSC development. Here, the relatively slow development and the spatial separation of definitive haematopoiesis from primitive haematopoiesis in Xenopus laevis has been exploited to reveal the first defect of reduced notch signalling in the Xenopus DA.
Two notch inputs to HSC programming have been identified in Xenopus: notch4 and its target genes, esr7 and esr10, are expressed from stage 31, immediately after migrating haemangioblast cells reach the midline of the embryo to form the DA, whilst notch1 is expressed slightly later, from stage 34, and controls expression of two further notch target genes, esr1 and hesr1. Using both morpholino knockdown of these six genes, and chemical inhibition of notch signalling using a specific γ-secretase inhibitor, notch signalling has been demonstrated to be essential for HSC programming but dispensable for earlier haemangioblast and arterial programming. Furthermore, esr1, downstream of both notch1 and notch4, is shown to be responsible for repression of endothelial genes in the DA. Taken together, this demonstrates that a cascade of notch and notch effector genes are essential for the programming of Xenopus HSCs.

Keywords: Notch
Blood
Stem Cells
Xenopus
Haematopoiesis
Advisor: Patient, R
Exploring the fold space preferences of ancient and newborn protein superfamilies

Protein evolution is a complex and diverse process, yielding an incredible assortment of biological functions and pathways occurring in the cells of living organisms. The way in which a protein's structure is constrained by its functional role and its notable conservation across even distant evolutionary relationships highlight structure as an important unit when considering the evolutionary dynamics of proteins. This thesis attempts to place the structural landscape of the protein universe within an evolutionary framework.
We investigate potential evolutionary histories of protein superfamilies by introducing an age, which estimates when the ancestor of that superfamily first evolved. The range of ages of known protein superfamilies goes right back to those which evolved before the diversification of life into three major superkingdoms. The structures of these proteins are varied but those which have evolved more recently tend to be shorter and have a less elaborate globular packing.
Protein structures sit within a complex global landscape of three-dimensional folds and we attempt to model the dynamics of this space using networks of folds. These networks consist of a structurally diverse core of folds with older ages, and neighbouring folds tend to be of similar ages. Moreover, there are a few pivotal folds which appear repeatedly as central in the landscapes, connecting together otherwise disparate portions of the space.
Sequence profiles which capture patterns of conservation and variation amongst naturally occurring proteins within a superfamily can be compared to identify distant evolutionary relationships. The power of these profiles to detect such relationships is improved by seeding them with structural alignments. A landscape of evolutionary links crossing between different protein folds is presented.

Keywords: protein evolution
fold space
protein structure classification
protein structure
Advisor: Deane, C
Francesco Filelfo at the court of Milan (1439-1481)

The last comprehensive biography on Francesco Filelfo was written well over one hundred and fifty years ago. Since then the general state of knowledge about this humanist has been largely conditioned by G. Voigt's hostile assessment and G. Bendaucci's unsystematic and unreliable studies. Monographs on Filelfo's stay at Florence and Siena have been provided by G. Zippel and L. de Feo Corso, but the chief period in Filelfo's life, i.e. Filelfo at the court of Milan, has so far not been studied in adequate depth. E. Garin's recent account of Filelfo at Milan does not open up any new vistas. Yet Milan was the city where Filelfo spent half his life, where he wrote almost all his works and where he left a deep imprint in the development of humanistic culture. This thesis is therefore intended to fill this gap.
The recent publication of P.O. Kristeller's 'Iter Italicum' made it possible to base such a reappraisal on an extensive survey of Filelfo manuscripts in Italian libraries. Almost all the existing Filelfo manuscripts at Rome, Florence, Milan, Pisa, Lucca, Bergamo, Venice, Munich, Oxford, Holkham Hall and London have been examined for this thesis. All unpublished material found there had to be copied and editions had to be prepared. Only Vienna, Paris and Wolfenbüttel seem to hold still unknown works. Particularly in the archives of Florence and Milan a large amount of entirely new material has been discovered which is being edited for the first time in the appendix of this thesis. It throws a significant light on Filelfo's social and economic situation. It allows us to penetrate the curtain of rhetorical declamations of Filelfo's letters and to understand the economic and cultural reality that lay behind them. Another purpose of this thesis consisted in the compilation of a bibliography in which all the various publications on Filelfo since about 1870 are listed, for they are scattered in periodicals and sometimes difficult to trace.
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Being modern in Lahore: Islam, class and consumption in urban Pakistan

This thesis, based on 14 months of fieldwork, examines middle-class Lahore, a milieu that is not only anxious about the growing religious violence in the country but also feels disappointed by the state and its false promises of progress. The ethnography explores how such tensions shape ideas on personal and public piety which, in turn, influence conceptions of modernity and a ‘successful life’. I examine the growing presence of a form of religiosity that emphasises the personal study of the Quran and other Islamic texts. The rising popularity of Quran schools and study circles, talks by television-based Islamic scholars, and discussions in homes are indicative of a sensibility which encourages individuals to discover the ‘real’ and ‘rational’ Islam by understanding the Quran for themselves. Although this religiosity centres around the individual and the cultivation of personal ethics, it also has a significant public aspect. Many believe that acquired Islamic ethics will not only help attain success in this life and the hereafter but also solve societal problems such as corruption, nepotism and economic disorder. Although such ideas have developed alongside a belief that the state is incompetent, they nevertheless reproduce many state-produced discourses on religion, morality and modernity. At a broader level, my thesis is concerned with how middle-class Pakistan perceives itself and its position in the world. I argue that prevailing ideas on Islam have been shaped by increased communication with the South Asian diaspora abroad and have developed in response to two struggles. First, the emerging middle-class uses this religiosity to contest the moral and economic domination of the established old-money elite. Second, anxieties about the gaze of an abstracted outsider – usually the West on the Muslim world – shape middle-class representations of self.

Keywords: class politics
Lahore
middle-class culture
Islamic modernism
piety
Advisor: Dresch, P
Parkin, R
Ockham's conception of logic as a rational science. An inferentialist interpretation

This thesis is a detailed examination of the logico-semantic system propounded by the English philosopher and theologian William of Ockham (c.1287 – c.1347). It provides a reinterpretation of Ockham's account of mental content and mental-language semantics, as well as of his theory of consequential goodness. It does so from the standpoint of an inferentialist theory of meaning, in rejection of previous attempts made from the standpoint of internalist and externalist theories of mental content.
Chapter 1 ('The Scientic Status of Logic') provides an account of Ockham's understanding of logic as a rational, practical, ostensive science. Chapter 2 ('The Received Interpretation') presents and casts doubt upon the arguments put forward by the defenders of both externalist and internalist construals of Ockham's semantic theory. Chapter 3 ('An Inferentialist Construal') presents the central tenets of a inferentialist theory of meaning. In order to show how Ockham's system can be understood within such a semantic paradigm, we will have to set out at least three things. First, Chapter 4 ('Ockham's Propositionalism') argues that the mature Ockham actually embraced a propositionalist theory of meaning. Second, Chapter 5 ('Obligationes and the Normativity of Asserting') seeks to prove that such a theory of meaning can only be properly understood against the normative background provided by his theory of obligationes. Finally, Chapter 6 ('Consequences') argues that Ockham's theory of consequential goodness is materialist, not formalist. That is to say, that the goodness of a certain kind of consequence ultimately depends upon the meaning of its propositional parts, rather than upon its structure. It is then shown that all remaining kinds of consequences (syllogisms included) are to understood with respect to these material inferences.
The main sources of this research are Ockham's Ordinatio, his Summa logicae, and his Quodlibeta septem. As regards the inferentialist theory of meaning, Robert Brandom's Making it Explicit (1994) and Wilfrid Sellars 'Inference and Meaning' (1953) were essential to this research.

Keywords: Robert B. Brandom
normativity
Wilfrid Sellars
William of Ockham
logic
inference
obligationes
semantics
inferentialism
consequence
Advisor: Trifogli, C
Symmetric objects in multiple affine views

This thesis is concerned with the utilization of object symmety as a cue for segmentation and object recognition. In particular it investigates the problem of detecting 3D bilaterally symmetric objects from affine views.
The first part of the thesis investigates the problem of detecting 3D bilateral symmetry within a scene from known point correspondences across two or more affine views. We begin by extending the notion of skewed symmetry to three dimensions, and give a definition in terms of degenerate structure that applies equally to an affine 3D structure or to point correspondences across two or more affine views. We then consider the effects of measurement errors on symmetry detection, and derive an optimal statistical test of degenerate structure, and thereby of 3D-skewed symmetry. We then move on to the problem of searching for 3D skewed symmetric sets within a larger scene. We discuss two approaches to the problem, both of which we have implemented, and we demonstrate fully automatic detection of 3D skewed symmetry on images of uncluttered scenes. We conclude the first part by investing means of verifying the presence of bilateral rather than skewed symmetry in the Euclidean space, by enforcing mutual consistency between multiple skewed symmetric sets, and by drawing on partial knowledge about the camera calibration.
The second part of the thesis is concerned with the problem of obtaining feature correspondences across multiple affine views, as required for the detection of symmetry. In particular we investigate the geometric matching constraints that exist between affine views. We start by specilizing the four projective multifocal tensors to the affine case, and use these to carry the bulk of all known projective multi-view matching relations to affine views, unearthing some new relations in the process. Having done that, we address the problem of estimating the affine tensors. We provide a minimal set of constraints on the affine trifocal tensor, and search for ways of estimating the affine tensors from point and line correspondences.

Keywords: computer vision
multiple view relations
3D bilateral symmetry detection
affine geometry
multiple view geometry
Advisor: Murray, D
Freedom and the body: Sartre and Beauvoir on embodied consciousness

Jean-Paul Sartre is not traditionally thought of as a philosopher of the body and, until very recently, little critical attention has been paid to this aspect of his work. Nevertheless, since 2005 a number of articles have begun to appear which suggest that Sartre‘s account of the body in L’Être et le Néant may be worthy of more consideration than it has thus far received – perhaps most notably Joseph Catalano‘s 2005 article suggesting that the chapter on the body is central to a proper understanding of Sartre‘s philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir is often criticised for her writing on the body in Le Deuxième Sexe, with much of the criticism suggesting that Beauvoir‘s use of existential philosophy is to blame for her failings. Yet Toril Moi argues that Beauvoir‘s claim that the body is a situation, a claim that arises from existential philosophy, is a valuable contribution to feminism. In light of these developments, it seems pertinent to look again at Sartre‘s chapter on the body in L’Être et le Néant and at Beauvoir‘s work to try to understand exactly what is meant by the body as a situation and how this concept relates to Sartre and Beauvoir‘s well-known ideas on freedom and responsibility. The aim of this thesis is to examine the importance of the chapter on the body in L’Être et le Néant and to demonstrate its relevance to Sartre‘s philosophy as a whole, to look at how Beauvoir has used Sartre‘s philosophy in her own writing and to consider the relevance of that philosophy to more contemporary writing on the body. The thesis will focus on L’Être et le Néant, Le Deuxième Sexe, and La Vieillesse with references also made to both authors‘ fictional works, to Beauvoir‘s autobiographical writings, and to more contemporary work on the body.

Keywords: body
Existentialism
mind-body problem
Advisor: Howells, C