VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Comparing the social structure in Beijing and London: Towards a more equal, cosmopolitan landscape of urban theories

The purpose of this thesis is to help reconfigure the landscape of urban theories to become more equal, cosmopolitan, and closer to that of the real urban world. Conceptually, this thesis criticises the Western-centred production of urban knowledge, suggests a new step to decentre this production, and highlights the comparative gesture that can be used to support this step. Empirically, this thesis puts this new step into practice. It compared Beijing and London, via the quantitative analysis of secondary data, in terms of the demographic compositions of the labour force, earnings inequality, and socio-spatial inequality, with each comparison confronting a conventional idea in urban research.
The step proposed in this thesis to interrupt the Western-centred knowledge production is that: imagined geographic divisions should be unlearned, places kept apart by these divides should be drawn into conversation, and the resulted conversation should be used to help urban theories achieve a more pluralistic universalism. The underpinning idea is that: urban research should preserve a sense of worldly curiosity, urban theories should be subject to constant remaking, and a world of cities should no longer be as crudely analytically divided as before. To take this step, comparative methods are suggested to be reformatted: comparisons should be rethought of as a way of thinking, be made across cities kept apart by the imagined geographic divides, and be used to reconstruct existing concepts.
Beijing and London, two cities kept apart so often today by these divides, were compared. Results show that urban life in the two cities is subject to the dialectics of global-local dynamics, and that the demography of the labour force of the two cities both resonates to, and differs from, each other. I confront the idea that cities across the geographic divides are too different to be compared. In addition, contrary to what is conventionally believed, the two cities did not follow a similar path to deal with inequalities, and their levels of inequalities changed differently. These results confirm how limited much of our existing urban knowledge is, and how great the potential of a wider set of urban comparisons could be in renewing them.
It is hoped that this thesis can encourage more research in this area, and provide future researchers with some additional conceptual and analytical tools to engage with the project of decolonising urban knowledge.

Keywords: Global city
Comparative urban studies
Beijing
Social structure
London
Advisor: Dorling, D
Messina, J
An eleventh-century liturgical homiliary : the Evergetis Katechetikon

The Katechetikon, a liturgical homiliary composed by Paul (†1054) higoumenos and founder, in 1048-49, of the monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis near Constantinople, is an unpublished collection of monastic catecheses dating to the middle of the eleventh century.
The collection is divided in two tomes. The first part is extant in two manuscripts, Marcianus graecus App. II. 40 and Atheniensis graecus 215, probably dating around the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century. The second part is extant in codex Athos, Esphigmenou 45, dated by its colophon to 1108 and used at the monastery of Christ Philanthropos in Constantinople. Single catecheses are also preserved in the fragments of Athos, Vatopedi 1216, and among the catecheses of Theodore Studite in Atheniensis graecus 295, Serdicensis graecus Dujcev 222 and in Sinaiticus graecus 482. Codex Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Cromwell 22, signed by the hieromonachos Mark and dated 1315, bears the only explicit attribution of the catecheses to Paul of Evergetis. In it, the catecheses are adapted for a feminine audience.
The Katechetikon provides liturgical readings for the morning office for each day of the year and functions according to the movable cycle of the liturgical year dependent on Easter, just as a Gospel Lectionary. Texts are selected from the following authors: Theodore Studite, Maximos Confessor, Pseudo-Makarios, Dorotheos of Gaza, Ephrem, Mark the Monk and Pseudo-Mark (Marcian), Neilos/Evagrios, John of Karpathos, Diadochos of Photike. The sources are edited with varying degrees of alteration. The Apophthegmata Patrum and passages from John Klimakos' Ladder are also quoted. In addition, the sources of forty-two texts remain unidentified.
The purpose of the catecheses is to exhort the monks to virtue and assist them through difficulties in their monastic experience, thereby revealing the monastic ideals of the Evergetis founder.

Keywords: 11th century
homiliary
Evergetis Katechetikon
Paul, of Evergetis
11th-century
eleventh century
liturgical
eleventh-century
Paul of Evergetis
Securities regulation, enforcement and market integration in the development of sub-Saharan Africa's capital markets

This thesis examines securities market development in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on securities law, securities law enforcement and securities markets integration.
Adopting a primarily comparative methodology, the thesis examines the continued relevance of securities markets in sub-Saharan Africa; the way selected countries in the region regulate their markets and enforce compliance with securities law; and the potential of market integration to promote market development.
This thesis advances 4 main claims. First, empirical evidence supports the link between liquid securities markets and economic growth, independent of the level of banking development. In this sense, securities markets can act as good complements to banks in providing capital to the real economy. Second, at the minimum, there is an arguable preliminary case that rules of securities regulation can hinder market development in select countries in sub-Saharan Africa, by imposing high compliance costs and eligibility requirements, without commensurate benefits in greater liquidity or reduced cost of capital. Third, enforcement of securities regulation in sub-Saharan Africa is generally weak. Whilst public regulators often have formal powers, budgets and staff; actual enforcement activity is sometimes limited by inadequate market monitoring and reliance on criminal as opposed to administrative sanctions. Poor public enforcement, in turn, reinforces poor private enforcement, leading to reduced market participation, illiquidity, and ultimately market underdevelopment. Fourth, although increased market integration can go a long way in facilitating market development in the region, integration cannot be a short/medium term solution to market underdevelopment in sub-Saharan Africa, given the significant economic, political and socio-cultural barriers to integration initiatives in the region.
Ultimately, to develop their securities markets, policymakers in sub-Saharan Africa must focus their attention on making and credibly enforcing market-friendly rules of securities regulation. The thesis explores some ways this may be realistically accomplished.

Keywords: Fintech
Market Integration
Securities Law
Sub-Saharan Africa
Capital Markets
Securities Law Enforcement
Africa
Advisor: Enriques, L
Marginal zone SIGN-R1(+) macrophages are essential for the maturation of germinal centre B cells in the spleen

The germinal centre (GC) response is an essential component of adaptive immunity, crucial for the generation of high-affinity antibodies, long-lived memory and plasma cells and is the basis for most current vaccines. While the dynamics of cognate B and T lymphocytes during the GC response are extensively studied, the roles of resident tissue macrophages in this process are less well understood, particularly in the spleen. A unique compartment to the spleen, called the marginal (MZ), is known to be important for adaptive immunity and harbours at least two distinct MZ-resident macrophage subsets. Both MZ macrophage populations are essential for capturing and preventing systemic dissemination of pathogens. However, their individual functions and potential role in adaptive immunity are not established.
Here we used pharmacologic and genetic approaches to deplete SIGN-R1+ MZ macrophages and showed that these cells were specifically required for the optimal development of germinal centre responses in the spleen. SIGN-R1+ macrophages were dispensable for the initial GC establishment but were required for optimal maintenance of the response. The GC defect could be partially corrected by boosting T follicular helper (Tfh) cell responses or by inducing Tfh help prior to macrophage ablation. Furthermore, in the absence of SIGN-R1+ macrophages, 33D1+ DCs, a key population involved in Tfh priming, was displaced from the interfollicular regions to the MZ. Reconstituting the SIGN-R1+ subset restored DC positioning and rescued the GC phenotype. This work advances our understanding of how the splenic marginal zone regulates adaptive immunity, highlights the functional diversification of MZ macrophages, and provides the first genetic mouse model allowing for the specific depletion and modification of SIGN-R1+ cells.

Keywords: marginal zone
SIGN-R1
mouse spleen
macrophages
dendritic cells
germinal centre
Advisor: Arnon, TI
Dustin, ML
On low-rank plus sparse matrix sensing

Expressing a matrix as the sum of a low-rank matrix plus a sparse matrix is a flexible model capturing global and local features in data, and is the foundation of robust principal component analysis (Candès et al., 2011). This thesis is concerned with low-rank plus sparse matrix sensing - the problem of recovering a matrix that is formed as the sum of a low-rank and a sparse matrix, and the two components, from a number of measurements far smaller than the dimensionality of the matrix.
It is well-known, that inverse problems over low-rank matrices, such as robust principal component analysis and matrix completion, require a low coherence between the low-rank matrix and the canonical basis. However, in this thesis, we demonstrate that the well-posedness issue is even more fundamental; in some cases, both robust principal component analysis and matrix completion can fail to have any solutions due to the fact that the set of low-rank plus sparse matrices is not closed. As a consequence, the lower restricted isometry constants (RICs) cannot be upper bounded for some low-rank plus sparse matrices unless further restrictions are imposed on the constituents. We close the set of low-rank plus sparse matrices by posing an additional bound on the Frobenius norm of the low-rank component, and ensure the optimisation is well-posed and that the RICs can be bounded. We show that constraining the incoherence of the low-rank component also closes the set provided μ < √mn/ (r √s) and satisfies a certain additivity property necessary for the analysis of recovery algorithms.
Compressed sensing, matrix completion, and their variants have established that data satisfying low complexity models can be efficiently measured and recovered from a number of measurements proportional to the model complexity rather than the ambient dimension (Foucart and Rauhut, 2013). This thesis develops similar guarantees showing that m × n matrices that can be expressed as the sum of a rank-r matrix and a s-sparse matrix can be recovered by computationally tractable methods from 𝒪(r(m+n-r)+s)log(mn/s) linear measurements. More specifically, we establish that the RICs for the aforementioned matrices remain bounded independent of problem size provided p/mn, s/p, and r(m+n-r)/p remain fixed. Additionally, we show that semidefinite programming and two hard threshold gradient descent algorithms, NIHT and NAHT, converge to the measured matrix provided the measurement operator's RICs are sufficiently small. The convex relaxation and NAHT also provably solve Robust PCA with the optimal order of the number of corruptions s = 𝒪(mn/(μ2 r2)). Numerical experiments illustrating these results are shown for synthetic problems, dynamic-foreground/static-background separation, and multispectral imaging.

Keywords: PCA
Robust PCA
low-rank approximation
low-rank plus sparse
numerical analysis
Advisor: Tanner, J
Counting partial objects

In this thesis, I develop a theory of counting. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and explains why it is important to give a theory of counting whole and partial objects. Chapter 2 shows that giving a theory of counting is surprisingly difficult because counting has five special features: counting is kind sensitive, source sensitive, context dependent, graded in felicity, and underspecified. Based on the observation that counting is tightly connected with the notion of mentally merging objects, I develop a theory of counting in Chapter 3 that accounts for all these features. Roughly speaking, we can count objects with respect to a predicate P iff we can merge them such that they form objects that are sufficiently similar to whole Ps and at most one partial P. Chapter 4 argues that this theory of counting performs better than its competitors. Chapter 5 refines the proposed theory in three ways, while Chapter 6 replies to six objections against the theory. Chapter 7 concludes these discussions by exploring potential future research questions.

Keywords: Philosophy of language
Semantics
Counting
Formal semantics
Advisor: Mandelkern, M
Molecular carbon allotropes: cyclo[n]carbons

This thesis details the first structural characterisation of a cyclo[n]carbon. Carbon allotropes built from rings of two-coordinate atoms, known as cyclo[n]carbons, have fascinated chemists for many years, but until now they could not be isolated or structurally characterised, due to their high reactivity. This thesis describes two different routes to cyclo[18]carbon by atomic manipulation of a cyclocarbon oxide C24O6 and a bromocyclocarbon C18Br6 precursor on bilayer NaCl on Cu(111) at 5 K. It then discusses initial attempts towards the on-surface synthesis of antiaromatic cyclo[n]carbons.
Chapter 1 reviews the history of synthetic carbon allotropes, in particular the cyclo[n]carbons, including all theoretical and experimental investigations into these molecular carbon allotropes. An introduction to the field of scanning probe microscopy is then detailed.
Chapter 2 discusses the on-surface generation of cyclo[18]carbon by elimination of carbon monoxide from a cyclocarbon oxide molecule, C24O6. Characterisation of cyclo[18]carbon by high-resolution atomic force microscopy reveals a polyynic structure with defined positions of alternating triple and single bonds. The high reactivity of cyclocarbon and the cyclocarbon oxides allows covalent coupling by atom manipulation, which has significant promise for the synthesis of other carbon allotropes and carbon-rich materials from the coalescence of cyclocarbon molecules.
Chapter 3 details the synthesis of cyclo[18]carbon by dehalogenation of a bromocyclocarbon precursor, C18Br6, in 64% yield. This method generates cyclo[18]carbon in a higher yield than from the cyclocarbon oxide, C24O6. The experimental images of C18 are compared with simulated images for four theoretical model geometries, including possible bond-angle alternation: D18h cumulene, D9h polyyne, D9h cumulene and C9h polyyne. Cumulenic structures with (D9h) and without (D18h) bond-angle alternation can be excluded. Polyynic structures with (C9h) and without (D9h) bond-angle alternation both show a good agreement with the experiment and are challenging to differentiate.
Chapter 4 explores the synthesis and properties of a series of cyclocarbon oxides as precursors to antiaromatic cyclo[n]carbons. The synthesis of cyclocarbon oxide precursors to cyclo[24]carbon (C32O8) and cyclo[20]carbon (C28O8) is discussed however the on-surface sublimation of both molecules proves unsuccessful. Initial investigations into the synthesis of a cyclo[16]carbon precursor, C22O6, are also detailed. Finally, a number of possible future avenues for this project are described.

Keywords: polyyne
cyclo[n]carbons
carbon allotropes
aromatic
Advisor: Anderson, H
Dissecting the contribution of dipeptide repeats to the toxicity in C9orf72 iPSC-derived neurons from ALS/FTD patients

A large (GGGGCC) repeat expansion in C9ORF72 gene is the commonest genetic cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It causes both loss- and gain-of-function, but the relative contribution of the different mechanisms to the development of ALS remains uncertain. One of the pathomechanisms is the production of dipeptide repeat proteins (PR, PA, GR, GP and GA) via repeat-associated non-ATG translation (DPRs). Animal and cellular models have suggested that the arginine-rich DPRs are toxic, but staining in fixed brains of C9orf72 patients show that the same DPRs are not very abundant compared to GA, GP and PA. Moreover, the DPR-related phenotypes exhibited in in vitro models are not always verified in C9orf72 patients. For these reasons I developed a doxycycline-inducible lentiviral system to regulate DPR expression in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived motor neuron (MN) cultures. The effects of GA and PR expression in CRISPR/Cas9 corrected C9orf72 iPSC-derived MNs were compared to the phenotypes of C9orf72 mutant lines. Both DPRs were partially accountable for altered ER and mitochondrial calcium homeostasis, and stress granule formation. Moreover, PR expression may reduce maximal mitochondrial respiration, while GA induced lysosomal activation. The activation of chaperone-mediated autophagy cleared CRISPR/Cas9 corrected iPSC-derived MNs from GA and PR, but it did not rescue C9orf72 mutant lines. Moreover, I studied the effects of a peptide designed to reduce RNA foci, and I showed that it may improve mitochondrial respiration in C9orf72 mutant iPSC-derived MNs.

Keywords: Neuroscience
Doxycycline inducible system
Lentivirus
Neurodegeneration
Calcium physiology
Cellular stress
Motor neurone disease
Cloning
Induced pluripotent stem cells
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
C9ORF72
Advisor: Talbot, K
Dafinca, R
On the modeling of mobile ad hoc networks

This thesis examines the effects of node mobility and signal fading on the performance of mobile ad hoc networks.
Chapter 3 presents novel expressions for the statistical properties of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the separation distance in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A full mathematical description of the squared distance process is provided, including its distribution and autocorrelation function. Next, the stochastic differential equation of the link SNR is derived. Closed-form expressions for the distribution and bivariate distribution of the link SNR are given in the absence and presence of signal fading. Finally, the connectivity probability is calculated for both scenarios.
Chapter 4 develops an entropy-based metric that quantifies link uncertainty and evaluates its stability by taking full advantage of the correlation between the link's current and future state. This formulation is based on a stationary Markov chain representation of link connectivity whose source of randomness is the separation distance between the nodes or the variations in the propagation channel. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed metric thoroughly captures the link dynamics and accurately reflects changes in the state of a wireless connection.
Chapter 5 combines the theoretical modeling of the communication link developed in Chapter 3 with the topological uncertainty analysis carried out in Chapter 4 to conclude that the primary source of uncertainty on the link state is random mobility. It then proposes a new routing decision strategy for MANETs based on the entropy-based metric presented in Chapter 4. The key idea of this strategy is to identify and select the route with the longest lifetime between a source and a destination in an environment where different paths are available. Identifying the set of most stable paths, i.e., those that are expected to be active for a longer time, can potentially reduce the number of route discoveries and overhead throughout the network. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach is performed via simulation and analysis.

Advisor: Coon, JP
Structural studies on receptor binding and antibody neutralization mechanisms of EV71

Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is an infectious disease that mainly infects infants and children and has caused epidemics widely in the Asia-Pacific region in the last 20 years. Enterovirus 71 (EV71) is one of the most common causes of HFMD. HFMD caused by EV71 is sometimes quite harmful because EV71 can induce severe cardiac or central nervous system (CNS) complications.
Although EV71 vaccines have been approved in China, there are no other effective means to treat EV71 infection. Our collaborators have identified and characterized 13 human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that can neutralize EV71. Blocking EV71 entry with therapeutic antibodies could be a new useful strategy.
Human scavenger receptor class B, member 2 (SCARB2) is a cellular receptor for EV71 and can induce attachment and uncoating. SCARB2 is a key factor in the entry process of EV71, however a structure of EV71-SCARB2 complex has not been available to clarify EV71-SCARB2 interaction.
We have determined the cryo-EM structure of the EV71-SCARB2 complex. SCARB2 was found to bind outside the canyon region, different from the binding patterns of many IgG-like picornavirus receptors. The VP1 GH and VP2 EF loops of the EV71 capsid, together with helices α5 and α7 of SCARB2, are involved in virus-receptor interactions.
With anti-EV71 antibodies from our collaborators, we also solved Fab structures as well as cryo-EM structures of EV71-Fab complexes. In these structures, the binding sites of antibodies can be classified into three groups: canyon, 2-fold-axis area and 3- fold-axis area. Antibodies that bind near the canyon region share some common binding residues or have overlapped volume with SCARB2 when binding with EV71, so may use a receptor-blocking neutralization mechanism. Antibodies binding near the 2-fold axis may block genome release of EV71, since it is thought EV71 releases its genome from the channel at the 2-fold axis. Antibodies binding near the 3-fold axis slightly increase the stability of EV71 virions, which may also contribute to the neutralization of EV71 by these antibodies.
Our studies on EV71-receptor interaction and neutralization mechanisms of antibodies may contribute to the development of structure-based anti-EV71 drugs and antibody- based therapy for HFMD.

Advisor: Stuart, D