VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Nature, grace and religious liberty in Restoration England

This thesis demonstrates the importance of scholastic philosophy and natural law to the theory of religious uniformity and toleration in Seventeenth-Century England. Some of the most influential apologetic tracts produced by the Church of England, including Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Robert Sanderson's Ten lectures on humane conscience and Samuel Parker A discourse of ecclesiastical politie are examined and are shown to belong to a common Anglican tradition which emphasized aspects of scholastic natural law theory in order to refute pleas for ceremonial diversity and liberty of conscience. The relationship of these ideas to those of Hobbes and Locke are also explored.
Studies of Seventeenth-Century ideas about conformity and toleration have often stressed the reverence people showed the individual conscience, and the weight they attributed to the examples of the magistrates of Israel and Judah. Yet arguments for and against uniformity and toleration might instead resolve themselves into disputes about the role of natural law within society, or the power of human laws over the conscience. In this the debate about religious uniformity could acquire a very philosophical and sometimes theological tone. Important but technical questions about moral obligation, metaphysics and theology are demonstrated to have played an important role in shaping perceptions of magisterial power over religion.
These ideas are traced back to their roots in scholastic philosophy and the Summa of Aquinas. Scholastic theories about conscience, law, the virtues, human action and the distinction between nature and grace are shown to have animated certain of the Church's more influential apologists and their dissenting opponents. The kind of discourse surrounding toleration and liberty of conscience is thus shown to be very different than sometimes supposed. Perceptions of civil and ecclesiastical power were governed by a set of ideas and concerns that have hitherto not featured prominently in the literature about the development of religious toleration.

Advisor: Mortimer, S
Models of systemic risk in financial markets

This thesis studies systemic risk in financial markets and how it emerges through dynamical and structural amplification mechanisms.
In part (1) I study the dynamics and control of Basel leverage cycles. For this I develop a simple model of a financial system consisting of leveraged banks and an unleveraged fundamentalist investor (fund). Banks trade a risky asset with the fund and rely on historical information to estimate their portfolio risk. This risk estimate determines the banks' leverage limit. I show that these simple ingredients can lead to endogenous, irregular oscillations, which I call Basel leverage cycles.
I then proceed to evaluate alternative regulatory capital requirements based on their impact on endogenous risk. I find that in the microprudential limit, when the bank is small and exogenous volatility is high, the optimal policy is simply given by a Value-at-Risk constraint. However, when the bank is large, the optimal policy is constant leverage.
In part (2) I study contagion in financial networks for two examples. First, I study how intra-institutional linkages can amplify financial contagion when financial institutions are active in multiple over-the-counter markets. In particular, spillover within a diversified financial institution allows for contagion from one over-the-counter market to another. Using recent methods for coupled networks I illustrate that under certain circumstances, the presence of intra-institutional spillover can lead to the amplification of small shocks to the extent that trading across all markets collapses abruptly.
Finally, I develop a simple model of social learning in the context of a financial network. I study how banks' portfolio decisions can synchronize if banks rely both on outside information and information from their social network to compute the expected payoff of an investment opportunity. In the same model, I propose a simple boundedly rational decision mechanism for endogenous network formation based on the information content of a bank’s neighbors' decisions.

Advisor: Farmer, J
Light-level geolocation reveals winter migration of the endangered Hutton’s Shearwater (Puffinus huttoni)

The Thesis comprises a general introduction and discussuion plus two result chapters. The first result chapter is about the correction of latitudinal error around the equinoxes in GLS loggers. The second results chapter describes the previously unknown winter migration of the endangered Hutton's shearwater (Puffinus huttoni).

Keywords: GLS
Latitudinal error
seabird
equinox error
Hutton's shearwater
New zealand
winter migration
Advisor: Guilford, T
Ventral prefrontal cortex structure and function in behavioural change

There is a considerable interest in the neural correlates of cognitive flexibility, language, valuation, credit assignment and decision-making. The ventrolateral, orbital and medial prefrontal cortex together with their long-range connections with the rest of the brain are thought to be critically involved in these cognitive processes. My thesis explores human and monkey ventrolateral, orbital and medial prefrontal cortex and their potential role in flexible adaptation and choice. In the introductory chapter I review neuroeconomic and neuro-ecological views of decision making, as well as modular versus connectionist views of brain structure and function. In the second and third chapter I investigate the connectivity of ventrolateral, orbital and medial prefrontal cortex and compare their sub-regions between humans and monkeys. Overall I report a striking degree of similarity of connectivity profiles across species even though these regions are thought to support uniquely human cognitive abilities such as language, social cognition, prospective planning and strategic decision-making. This may be taken to suggest that higher order cognitive functions “re-use” a neural apparatus that is shared with macaque monkeys. In the fourth chapter I present a parcellation of the white matter into the major long-range association fibre systems based on their projection patterns to the cortical surface. These findings may have implications not only for the cross-species comparison of connectivity-profiles but also for understanding some psychiatric and neurological disorders as "disconnection syndromes". I conclude by evaluating whether a modular view of brain structure and function is consistent with a view that portraits the brain as changeable, highly adaptive and strongly interconnected.

Advisor: Rushworth, M
Mars, R
The martial Christ in the sermons of late medieval England

Current scholarship on the devotional practices of late medieval England has emphasized two representations of Christ. The first, considered the dominant trend, is that of the suffering Christ; the second, a minor, but important trend particularly for female audiences, is the maternal Christ. Both are revealing of the nature of late medieval Christo-centric devotion. This project contributes to the understanding of late medieval Christocentric devotion in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by examining the representation of Christ in a martial role, as presented to clerical and lay audiences through the medium of popular sermons. It is a new contribution to the scholarship of late medieval devotion in its demonstration of a multifaceted Christ; the martial Christ echoes, but in many ways also contrasts, the images of the suffering and maternal Christ, in order to provide its audience with a more complex rendering of the human Christ, one which may have been more accessible to a lay populace seeking to form a relationship with him.
This project also contributes to the growing field of sermon studies, intended to be comprehensive in nature. It uses a different approach to sermon studies, in that the entire corpus of nearly 4,500 sermons was reviewed. This was done in order to provide the most complete picture of the martial Christ. As a result, this project examines Christ in various martial roles, as well as his modelling of knighthood for kings, knights, preachers, and the laity. These representations were utilised by preachers to instruct their audiences in devotional practice, specifically forms of affective meditation; it was used as a didactic tool to teach the laity the complex doctrines of redemption and atonement; and finally, it was employed as a means to demonstrate the importance of right living in order to fulfill what Christ had promised on the cross, that is eternal salvation.

Keywords: sermons
medieval devotion
martial christ
Advisor: Forrest, I
Structure, properties, and chemistry of iron-based superconductors

This thesis reports the synthesis and characterisation of several layered pnictides, chalcogenides, and oxychalcogenides, with an emphasis on materials that exhibit high temperature superconductivity. High and low temperature techniques have been used to synthesise new materials and modify their properties.
The majority of this work has been focused on the synthesis of superconducting materials with the general formula Ax(NH3)y(NH2)zFeSe, where A is an alkali metal. These materials are formed from a co-intercalation of alkali metals, ammonia, and alkali metal amides into the interlamellar space of pre-formed tetragonal FeSe. There is a remarkable increase in Tc associated with this intercalation, from 8 K in FeSe to a maximum of 46 K in the products. A range of characterisation techniques including neutron and X-ray diffraction, EXAFS, and SQUID magnetometry have been used to identify a variety of crystal structures, compositions, and properties adopted by these materials. The synthesis procedure of these materials where, A = Na and K, has been studied in-situ via powder X-ray diffraction at world-class central facilities, revealing new phases, intermediates, and activation energies. The Kx(NH3)y(NH2)zFeSe phases are found to undergo a topotactic decomposition step to become Kx'Fe2-y'Se2 phases on annealing, which has also been studied by in-situ powder X-ray diffraction.
Additional studies on Na1-xFe2-yAs2 and CaFeSeO have been performed. Na1-xFe2-yAs2 is the product of a room temperature deintercalation of sodium and iron from NaFeAs, which changes the superconducting properties of the material. XAFS measurements have been used to characterise the local structure of the materials, which supports the conclusion that iron is deintercalated from the parent material and gives new insight into the effect of the iron vacancies on the local structure. CaFeSeO is a newly discovered material that adopts a never-before-seen crystal structure, which has been solved from powder X-ray diffraction data. Intricate vacancy ordering exists in the material, which contributes to a peculiar mixture of magnetic behaviours including signatures of a spin glass, ordered antiferromagnet, and an ordered ferromagnetic component. All of these behaviours however, can be rationalised by the nuclear and magnetic structure of the material that have been refined using powder neutron diffraction.

Advisor: Clarke, S
Coloured graph models: Associating emitters and ships

This thesis examines graph-theoretic approaches to problems arising in emitter- to-platform association, for example in associating emitters and ships. The first part of this thesis focuses on emitters that are observed by two different sensors, which can only determine the bearing the observed signal was emitted from. The aim is to pair observations from the two sensors, that originate from the same emitter. In this thesis it is shown that different types of observations can be represented as one of c colours and each observed bearing as a row or a column in an n by n grid. Given the horizontal and vertical projections of a coloured grid, the aim is to reconstruct the original layout of the coloured squares on the grid. Deciding whether two sets of positive natural numbers are the horizontal and vertical projections of a coloured grid is NP-complete for two or more colours [24, 35, 47] and has close connections to colour degree matrix problems.
Necessary and sufficient conditions are known for a demand matrix to be a colour degree matrix of an edge-coloured forest [9, 22]. In this thesis the first step beyond forests is taken: necessary and sufficient conditions for a demand matrix to be realisable by a graph with at most one cycle are proved. As part of the proof some directly forced structures are discovered, that is, structures that must exist in every realisation. Moreover, corresponding results for multi-graphs and pseudoforests with at most k cyclic components are presented. This part concludes with O (n2 ) time algorithms to check these conditions and return a witness if one of the conditions is violated. Finally O(n3) time algorithms to find a realisation, if one exists, are described.
The second part of this thesis introduces the coloured L-model. This is an original idealised graph model, developed to explore the combinatorial properties of the emitter-to-platform association problem, referred to as the reverse radar problem in this thesis. The aim is to decide which groups of observed radars originate from the same ship, taking into account which combinations of radar models are known to be carried by different types of ships. It is shown what exactly makes finding a solution to this idealised version of the reverse radar problem NP-hard, and that there are tractable cases equivalent to finding (weighted) matchings in related graphs, which have bounded pathwidth. Restricting to graphs with bounded pathwidth is a reasonable simplification, as signals come in along bearings (i.e. along a cycle) and a cycle has pathwidth two. New algorithms to find (weighted) matchings in graphs with bounded pathwidth and treewidth are presented, which can be used to solve the reverse radar problem in this model.
Finally, the likelihood and two-time models are introduced, which complement the coloured L-model by generalising measurement errors and by introducing time. It is shown that the problem remains NP-hard, even for very simple cases and some tractable cases are described.

Keywords: emitter-to-platform association
graph models
graph algorithms
Advisor: McDiarmid, C
Scott, A
Bullets over ballots: How electoral exclusion increases the risk of coups d'état and civil wars

Does banning opposition candidates from ballots increase the risk that they will turn to bullets instead?
Globally, since the end of the Cold War, blatant election rigging tactics (such as ballot box stuffing) are being replaced by 'strategic rigging': subtler procedural manipulations aimed at winning while maintaining the guise of legitimacy in the eyes of international observers. In particular, incumbents (in regimes stuck between democracy and authoritarianism) are turning to 'electoral exclusion', neutralizing key rivals by illegitimately banning certain candidates, in turn reducing the need for cruder forms of election day rigging.
I used mixed methods—combining insights from an original global dataset with extensive elite interviews conducted in five countries (Madagascar, Thailand, Tunisia, Zambia, and Côte d'Ivoire)—to establish that electoral exclusion is an attractive short-term election strategy for vulnerable incumbents that produces a much higher chance of victory but comes with high costs in the longer-term. Global probit modeling (using electoral exclusion as an independent variable and coups d'état and civil wars as separate dependent variables) suggests that, since the end of the Cold War, excluding opposition candidates from the ballot roughly doubles the risk of a coup d'état or quadruples the risk of civil war onset. In spite of these risks, incumbents fall into this 'exclusion trap' because of the shortened time horizon that frequently accompanies competitive multi-party elections. Vulnerable incumbents worry more about the short-term risk of losing an election than the long-term but ultimately unknown risk that political violence will ensue after the election.
Finally, the inverse corollary of these findings is that inclusion of opposition candidates during multi-party elections can be a stabilizing factor. Though it may seem counterintuitive, fragile 'counterfeit democracies' – and so-called 'transitional' regimes – may be able to stave off existential threats to regime survival by extending an olive branch to their fiercest opponents.
These findings combine to form the overarching argument of this dissertation: when opposition candidates are excluded from the ballot, they become more likely to turn to bullets by launching coups d'état and civil wars.

Advisor: Bermeo, N
Cheeseman, N
Electronic excitations and rational design of novel light sensitisers for photovoltaics

The development of scalable and cost-efficient solar cell technologies constitutes a priority in the field of photovoltaics research. Semiconductor sensitised solar cells (SSSC) and hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite solar cells (HOPSC) are two emerging technologies that have been actively pursued in the search for the most efficient, cost-competitive, stable and nontoxic photovoltaic devices. The HOPSCs have been polarising the attention of the photovoltaics community in the past three years due to their ever-increasing efficiencies, currently exceeding 20% while SSSCs have increased in popularity in the last decade, showing a steady increase of their efficiency and emergence of new materials implemented as light sensitisers. Improvement of these novel technologies relies on understanding of the physical properties of the materials components and on efficient strategies towards the discovery of novel compounds. In this thesis, we address these requirements by modelling the electronic structures of novel light sensitisers from first principles. We focus on the analysis of two groups of materials, the hybrid organic-inorganic lead-iodide perovskites and the metal chalcogenides of the stibnite family. We study the electronic structure of CH3NH3PbI3 within density functional theory and obtain the quasiparticle band gap for this material within the GW method in good agreement with experiment. Further, we conduct a systematic study of the interplay between the electronic properties of hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites and the structure of the inorganic perovskite network. As a result, we obtain a simple strategy for tuning the band gap of perovskite light absorbers by changing the size of the central cation, and propose AsH4PbI3 and SbH4PbI3 as potential novel light sensitisers for HOPSC. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to the study of the electronic structure of four isostructural metal chalcogenides of the stibnite family, stibnite, antimonselite, bismuthinite and guanajuatite. A study of the quasiparticle band gaps of these materials is conducted, similar to the approach used for CH3NH3PbI3. By using the Shockley-Queisser analysis, we obtain that all four materials are promising for application as light sensitisers.

Advisor: Giustino, F
Biological investigation of glycosylated macromolecular structures

Carbohydrates play a key role in many biological processes. The complex pool of information that these structures are able to express forms the glycocode. Our understanding of this language is limited, due to the complexity of the sugar structures and the diversity of their functions. The work presented in this thesis aims to contribute to our knowledge of their biological significance by building what we will call a Glycomap, a selection of biologically relevant sugars specifically picked to map the in vivo interactions of carbohydrates and explore some of their applications to different macromolecules: proteins, nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes.
The controlled glycosylation of proteins still represents a challenge, hence we decided to exploit the ability to diversify carbohydrates from a common precursor, and developed three glycosylating reagents which allowed the use of different glycosylation strategies on different protein structures.
In order to follow the in vivo distribution of the selected carbohydrates, we activated them into the 2-imino-2-methoxyethyl derivatives and used them to decorate amino-functionalised magnetic nanoparticles. These nanoparticles were isolated from different tissues after testing in animal models, and their distribution was recorded.
As sugars can also be applied to drug delivery systems as targeting agents, we explored the potential of glycosylated carbon nanotubes in the delivery of radionuclides for imaging and radiotherapeutic purposes. Single-walled carbon nanotubes were filled with a radionuclide and after proper functionalisation decorated with different sugars to deliver them to different targets.
Finally, we dedicated one last section to the design of functionalised fullerenes as support for the solid-phase synthesis of oligosaccharides. Fullerene derivatives are able to perform homogenous solution phase synthesis with all the advantages of a solid-phase work-up through precipitation. In this thesis we touched several aspects of carbohydrate synthesis, manipulation and applications, to provide new tools which will help elucidate the role of carbohydrates in biological systems.

Advisor: Davis, B
Spectral properties of finite groups

This thesis concerns the diameter and spectral gap of finite groups. Our focus shall be on the asymptotic behaviour of these quantities for sequences of finite groups arising as quotients of a fixed infinite group.
In Chapter 3 we give new upper bounds for the diameters of finite groups which do not depend on a choice of generating set. Our method exploits the commutator structure of certain profinite groups, in a fashion analogous to the Solovay-Kitaev procedure from quantum computation. We obtain polylogarithmic upper bounds for the diameters of finite quotients of: groups with an analytic structure over a pro-p domain (with exponent depending on the dimension); Chevalley groups over a pro-p domain (with exponent independent of the dimension) and the Nottingham group of a finite field. We also discuss some consequences of our results for random walks on groups.
In Chapter 4 we construct new examples of expander Cayley graphs of finite groups, arising as congruence quotients of non-elementary subgroups of SL2(&Fopf;p[t]) modulo certain square-free ideals. We describe some applications of our results to simple random walks on such subgroups, specifically giving bounds on the rate of escape from algebraic subvarieties, the set of squares and the set of elements with reducible characteristic polynomial in SL2(&Fopf;p[t])
Finally, in Chapter 5 we produce new expander congruence quotients of SL2 (&integers;p), generalising work of Bourgain and Gamburd. The proof combines the Solovay-Kitaev procedure with a quantitative analysis of the algebraic geometry of these groups, which in turn relies on previously known examples of expanders.

Advisor: Lackenby, M