VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Roman de la Rose: nature, sex, and language in thirteenth-century poetry and philosophy

Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose), written in Paris in the 1270s, presents a vast amount of philosophy and natural science in vernacular poetry, while engaging thoroughly with contemporary, local philosophical and institutional debates. Taking this into consideration, this study investigates how the Rose depends for its meaning on questions around human nature, natural philosophy, and the philosophy of language that were being discussed and debated in the University of Paris at the time of its composition. It suggests a reading of the poem as a work of philosophy that uses Aristotelian ideas of nature and what is natural to present a moral framework – at times explicitly, at times implicitly – within which to assess and critique human behaviour. The concepts of the unnatural and the artificial are used to discuss sin and its effects on sexuality – a key concern of the Rose – and on language. The Rose is shown to present itself as artificial and compromised, yet nevertheless capable of leading imperfect and compromised humans to moral behaviour and towards knowledge which can only ever be imperfect. It is read as a presenting a rhetorical kind of philosophy that is sui generis and that appeals to human desire as well as to the intellect. The specific issue of usury and its relation to avarice is examined, studying contemporary theological and philosophical treatments of the question, in order to illustrate similarities and contrasts in the Rose's theoretical methodology to more orthodox modes of philosophical enquiry. Finally, the poem's valorisation of pleasure and of the perversity inherent in artificial productions is explored to show how poetry, though deviating from the strictures of dialectical language, is nevertheless productive and generative.

Keywords: usury
ethics
philosophy
artificial
science
rhetoric
sodomy
Roman de la rose
Aristotle
Guillaume de Lorris
poetry
nature
Jean de Meun
dialectic
Advisor: Swift, HJ
Trifogli, C
Fast model predictive control

This thesis develops efficient optimization methods for Model Predictive Control (MPC) to enable its application to constrained systems with fast and uncertain dynamics. The key contribution is an active set method which exploits the parametric nature of the sequential optimization problem and is obtained from a dynamic programming formulation of the MPC problem. This method is first applied to the nominal linear MPC problem and is successively extended to linear systems with additive uncertainty and input constraints or state/input constraints. The thesis discusses both offline (projection-based) and online (active set) methods for the solution of controllability problems for linear systems with additive uncertainty. The active set method uses first-order necessary conditions for optimality to construct parametric programming regions for a particular given active set locally along a line of search in the space of feasible initial conditions. Along this line of search the homotopy of optimal solutions is exploited: a known solution at some given plant state is continuously deformed into the solution at the actual measured current plant state by performing the required active set changes whenever a boundary of a parametric programming region is crossed during the line search operation. The sequence of solutions for the finite horizon optimal control problem is therefore obtained locally for the given plant state. This method overcomes the main limitation of parametric programming methods that have been applied in the MPC context which usually require the offline precomputation of all possible regions. In contrast to this the proposed approach is an online method with very low computational demands which efficiently exploits the parametric nature of the solution and returns exact local DP solutions. The final chapter of this thesis discusses an application of robust tube-based MPC to the nonlinear MPC problem based on successive linearization.

Keywords: active set methods
robust model predictive control
dynamic programming
Advisor: Cannon, M
Kouvaritakis, B
Rules, reasons, and acceptance

In law as well as in ordinary life, it matters what rules societies have; but what does it mean for a society to have a rule? HLA Hart’s famous answer is that for a society to have a rule is for there to be a certain social practice in that society, consisting of an external, behavioural aspect and an internal, attitudinal aspect. Hart’s ‘practice theory’ dominates thinking in jurisprudence about social rules, but, I argue, there are serious problems with it. It would be better to adopt what I call the ‘acceptance theory’.
In the early chapters of this thesis, I argue that the practice theory is both overinclusive and underinclusive. It is overinclusive because Hart’s description of the ‘internal aspect’ is too general. It is underinclusive because the ‘external aspect’ is unnecessary. Once these criticisms are taken into account, what remains of the practice theory is the idea that a society has a rule because its members have a certain attitude. I spend much of this thesis determining the features of this attitude.
Ultimately, I focus on the attitude known as “acceptance” in the philosophy of action. Acceptance of a proposition simulates belief in that proposition, though it may be held independently of that belief. I argue that a person or society has a rule when that person, or that society’s members, accept that some action ought to be performed, whatever their beliefs about the matter. This theory incorporates the plausible core of the practice theory, while avoiding its problems.

Keywords: rules
reasons
acceptance
Advisor: Green, L
Broome, J
Resilience and emotional distress in young people: risk, promotive and cultural factors

Resilience, as a trait, process or outcome, is the negation of an undesirable outcome or of an expected maladjustment in the context of an adversity. Young people represent a developmental stage in which there is a vulnerability to experience deleterious outcomes during adversity. The literature on risk and promotive factors for resilience in youth is compounded by narrative reviews which have not applied a rigorous search methodology and which have failed to operationalise resilience. To date, the majority of research in resilience for emotional distress has focussed on data collected in high income countries. The first paper presents a systematic review of the literature on risk and promotive factors for trait resilience in youth. The findings indicate that there are differences in the magnitude of association between trait resilience and various risk and promotive factors, which were conceptualised into biological, intrapersonal, interpersonal and environmental factors. The largest body of evidence reviewed pertained to intrapersonal risk and promotive factors for trait resilience. Factors predicting trait resilience were also identified. Implications for future research include addressing the methodological and sampling limitations of the reviewed studies. The second paper presents an empirical study investigating factors within a microsystem which differentiate adolescents with resilience for emotional distress and those vulnerable to emotion distress in India (N = 967) and in Peru (N = 606). Factors which predict low emotional distress in each country and factors which differentiate between low emotional distress Indian and Peruvian adolescents were additionally investigated. A cross-sectional exploratory investigation of secondary data was employed. The findings suggest that the profile of low vulnerability for emotional distress differs between different cultural contexts and contribute to an extraordinarily limited evidence-base in low and middle income contexts. Extensive additional research is required to delineate culturally-specific profiles of resilience for emotional distress in a bid to develop culturally-sensitive treatment targets.

Keywords: socioecological
low and middle income countries
emotional distress
risk factors
clinical psychology
protective factors
resilience
cultural differences
adolescents
youth
promotive factors
systematic review
Advisor: Cooper, M
Islam, N
Nutrient assimilation and amino acid utilisation in Pseudomonas syringae

The aim of this study was to increase understanding of amino acid utilisation and amino acid permease (aa_permease) genes in the plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae, which inhabits the nutrient-limited environment of the plant surface and intracellular apoplast. aa_permease genes are significantly reduced in P. syringae genomes compared to non plant-pathogenic Pseudomonas. Accordingly, this work demonstrates that P. syringae can utilise a restricted number of amino acids for growth compared to non plant-pathogenic Pseudomonas. The remaining aa_permease genes in Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato are annotated as transporting GABA, ethanolamine, proline and aromatic amino acids. Sequence analyses, phylogenetic analyses, chemotaxis assays and gene expression analyses supported the functional annotations of the GABA, ethanolamine and aromatic aa_permeases, but showed that expression of the proline permease was specifically induced by histidine, which suggests that this encodes a histidine transporter. Expression of the GABA and histidine permeases was also induced in the presence of tomato apoplast, indicating that these amino acids may be assimilated during apoplast colonisation. P. syringae pv. tomato exhibited chemotaxis towards tomato apoplast and several constituent amino acids, which may be important for invasion of the apoplast from the plant surface. Uptake of several amino acids including GABA and histidine appeared to be negatively affected in alkaline media. The aa_permeases use electrochemical potential energy to transport substrates and this mechanism may be affected by pH. The plant apoplast becomes increasingly alkaline during infection and this may select against the retention of particular transporters in P. syringae. As GABA is an abundant amino acid in the apoplast and can be used by P. syringae strains for growth, the growth of P. syringae pv. tabaci was monitored in transgenic tobacco plants with increased GABA. Although growth was similar in all plants, significantly fewer symptoms and more callose deposition was observed upon infection.

Keywords: pseudomonas syringae
microbiology
Advisor: Preston, G
The Labour Party and the Labour Left

This Thesis examines the relationship between the organisational and ideological transformation of the Labour Party, and the decline of intra-party factionalism by the groups of the Labour Left during the period from 1979 to 1997. Two central questions are considered. First, whether the fragmentation and decline of the Left during this period can best be understood by examining the interplay between organisational and ideological factors at both the party and individual group levels. Second, whether 'New Labour' continues to exhibit some of the key traits of attitudinal dissent among its grassroots membership, despite the lack of an organisational apparatus within which sub-groups of activists could challenge the centralising tendencies of party leaders and influence the direction of party policy.
Labour's ideological and organisational transformation had a number of important consequences for the prevalence of intra-party factionalism. The organisational reforms meant that Labour ceased to represent Duverger's 'branch-mass' type of party. Furthermore, party leaders regained centralised control over members and activists through the resurgence of Michels' 'iron law of oligarchy'. The depth of Labour's ideological transformation also reinforced the narrowing of the ideological gap between (radical) grassroots members and ordinary (moderate) voters, such that May's 'law of curvilinear disparity' appeared extinct inside Blair's New Labour. Labour's transformation had a remarkably fragmenting effect at the group-level. The Labour Left was a collection of various groupings, each of which displayed different structural properties and ideological characteristics. There was no single organisational form of Labour Left factionalism, nor was their any common sense of ideological purpose. The processes of party transformation would act only to further the Left's fragmentation and cement its decline.
However, it would be premature to talk of New Labour as a party free from dissent. Despite the dissolution of the Labour Left, New Labour's grassroots membership has retained some of the principal features of factionalism. Using data from original survey research among party members, it is suggested that New Labour has encouraged new types of 'objective' and 'subjective' factionalism. The kind of factionalism typified by the Labour Left of the 1970s and 1980s may have disappeared, but we should not preclude the growth of new dimensions of conflict between party leaders and grassroots members.

Advisor: Professor Anthony Heath, M
Strong correlations in ultracold atomic gases

In this thesis we investigate strongly-correlated states of ultracold bosonic atoms in rotating ring lattices and arrays of double-well potentials. In the first part of the thesis, we study the tunneling dynamics of ultracold bosons in double-well potentials. In the non-interacting limit single-particle transitions dominate, while in the interaction-dominated regime correlated tunneling of all particles prevails. At intermediate times of the many-particle flopping process correlated states occur, but the timescales of these processes increase dramatically with the number of particles. Using an array of double-well potentials, a large number of such few-particle superposition states can be produced in parallel. In the second part of the thesis, we study the effects of rotation on ultracold bosons confined to one-dimensional ring lattices. We find that at commensurate filling there exists a critical rotation frequency, at which the ground state of the weakly-interacting gas is fragmented into a macroscopic superposition of different quasi-momentum states. We demonstrate that the generation of such superposition states using slightly non-uniform ring lattices has several practical advantages. Moreover, we show that different quasi-momentum states can be distinguished in time-of-flight absorption imaging and propose to probe correlations via the many-body oscillations induced by a sudden change in the rotation frequency. Finally, we compare these macroscopic superposition states to those occurring in superconducting quantum interference devices. In the third part of the thesis, we demonstrate the creation of entangled states with ultracold bosonic atoms by dynamical manipulation of the shape of the lattice potential. To this end, we consider an optical superlattice that allows both the splitting of each site into a double-well potential and the variation of the height of the potential barrier between the sites. We show how to use this array of double-well potentials to perform entangling operations between neighboring qubits encoded on the Zeeman levels of the atoms. As one possible application, we present a method of realizing a resource state for measurement-based quantum computation via Bell-pair measurements. In the final part of the thesis, we study ultracold bosons on a two-dimensional square lattice in the presence of an effective magnetic field and point out a couple of features this system has in common with ultracold bosons in one-dimensional rotating ring lattices.

Keywords: entanglement
strongly correlated systems
optical lattices
macroscopic superposition states
quantum information science
ultracold bosons
Advisor: Burnett, K
Walmsley, I
Facilitating visual target  identification using non-visual cues

The research presented in this thesis was designed to investigate whether and how the temporal synchrony and spatial congruence of non-visual cues with visual targets could work together to improve the discrimination and identification of visual targets in neurologically-healthy adult humans. The speed and accuracy of participants’ responses were compared following the presence or absence of temporally synchronous and/or spatially congruent or incongruent auditory, vibrotactile, and audiotactile cues in the context of dynamic visual search and rapidly-masked visual target identification. The understanding of the effects of auditory, vibrotactile, and audiotactile cues derived from these laboratory-based tasks was then applied to an air traffic control simulation involving the detection and resolution of potential conflicts (represented as visual targets amidst dynamic and cluttered visual stimuli). The results of the experiments reported in this thesis demonstrate that, in the laboratory-based setting, temporally synchronous and spatially informative non-visual cues both gave rise to significant improvements in participants’ performance, and the combination of temporal and spatial cuing gave rise to additional improvements in visual target identification performance. In the real-world setting, however, only the temporally synchronous unimodal auditory and bimodal audiotactile cues gave rise to a consistent facilitation of participants’ visual target detection performance. The mechanisms and accounts proposed to explain the effects of spatial and temporal cuing, namely multisensory integration and attention, are examined and discussed with respect to the observed improvements in participants’ visual target identification performance.

Keywords: perception
audition
visual search
multisensory integration
attention
vision
Advisor: Spence, C
A comparison of the imaginative response of Donne and Milton to a selection of theological doctrines

This comparative study of the response of Donne and Milton to a selection of theological doctrines is made in an attempt to reach a deeper understanding of their imaginations. It is divided into three main sections, dealing with the creation of the world; the soul; and the Incarnation of Christ. In order to establish first the position of their theology in relation to Christian tradition, I begin each section with a discussion of the development of the beliefs with which it is concerned, dealing with classical, patristic, scholastic, and Reformation writers. The purpose of this is not so much to trace influences, as to show what beliefs were available to the poet, and thus what personal choices he made.
But if a poet is to be understood as a poet, rather than as a theologian, we must look not only at what he believes, but at how he believes it. The mere statement of belief, faithfully held, does not indicate in itself either its imaginative or emotional significance to the poet. Therefore, the comparison of one poet with another reveals more clearly the imaginative response of each to his beliefs; and both Donne and Milton have left ample evidence both of what they believed, and of its imaginative expression. Thus I make a careful, chronological study of what Donne and Milton state themselves to believe, based particularly on Donne's sermons, and Milton's De Doctrina Christiana, and then I exa-nine how consistently these beliefs are upheld both explicitly and implicitly in their poetry and prose works. I discuss the aspects of doctrine which seem most attractive to them, and the images in which they choose to express them. Thus their attitude towards quite minor points of dopma can be seen as part of a much wider imaginative emphasis, and certain preoccupations may be found afrain and afain in the context of different doctrines.
Ion rarefaction waves and associated phenomena

This thesis contains an experimental and theoretical study of the response of a plasma to the motion of the positive space-charge sheath which bounds it. It is known theoretically that, if a sheath edge is moved at a speed less than the speed of ion acoustic waves, a region of ion rarefaction propagates into the plasma at the ion acoustic speed. In the past, difficulty has been encountered with the theory of ion acoustic wave generation from moving sheath edges, where compressions are necessary in addition to rarefactions. The initial conditions of many previous calculations omit the formation of a steady-state presheath where ions are accelerated to form the sheath.
Some calculations are described which include the effects of an initial presheath by constructing a one-dimensional plasma solution where a production term balances the losses of ions to the walls. The plasma response to the motion of one boundary is found using the method of characteristics with appropriate boundary conditions. Ion rarefaction waves are associated with expanding sheaths while ion 'enhancement' waves (compressive features) are formed on sheath collapse. In each case the wave front moves at the local ion acoustic speed which includes the effects of ion drift. The presence of the presheath is essential to the generation of enhancements.
The constructional details of a multidipole device are discussed, and the results of Langmuir probe and ion acoustic wave experiments are used to determine the parameters of a quiescent argon plasma. Some experiments on moving sheaths in such a plasma are then considered. Negative voltage ramps are applied to a plate and the plasma response is measured using sampled probe techniques. As the plate-plasma voltage increases, the ion-rich sheath expands at a speed which depends on the applied voltage waveform. For sheath edge speeds less than the ion acoustic speed, an ion rarefaction wave is formed. As the voltage decreases, the sheath collapses and an ion enhancement wave propagates into the plasma. Both wavefronts are observed to move at the local ion acoustic speed which increases with distance from the plate in agreement with theory.

Advisor: Allen, J
Edgley, P
Allen, D
p-block hydrogen storage materials

The development of a clean hydrogen economy will aid a smooth transition from fossil fuels which is required to stem the environmental impact and economic instability caused by oil dependency. For vehicular application, in addition to being cheap and safe, a commercial hydrogen store must contain a certain weight percentage of hydrogen to provide a reasonable range (~300 miles). It must also be able to release hydrogen under near-ambient conditions (80-120°C) and have a reasonable cycling capacity (~1000 cycles). The primary motivation of this thesis is to gain a fundamental understanding into the sorption processes of hydrogen on carbon- and aluminium-based materials to improve their hydrogen storage capacity. The sorption processes of hydrogen on mechanically milled graphite have been investigated, primarily using Electron Spin Resonance Spectroscopy and Inelastic Neutron Scattering. An investigation into the storage properties of tetrahydroaluminates, primarily NaAlH4 and LiAlH4, is performed in the presence and absence of a catalyst, and a new phase of NaAlH4 is observed prior to its decomposition. Variable temperature neutron and synchrotron diffraction, in conjunction with gravimetric and mass spectroscopy data were obtained for several mixtures of tetrahydroaluminates and alkali amides and the hydrogen desorption processes are shown to be quite different from the constituent materials. The structure of Ca(AlH4)2 has been experimentally determined for the first time and a complete set of equations describing its decomposition pathway is given.

Keywords: Solid-State
p-Block
Hydrogen
EPR
Diffraction
ESR
Synchrotron
Hydrides
Storage
Crystallography
Alanates
Milling
Advisor: Edwards, PP
David, WIF