VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Explaining the trends in breastfeeding behaviours in Great Britain: Findings from the Infant Feeding Surveys, 1985 to 2010

Available data from the quinquennial Infant Feeding Surveys (IFS) show that breastfeeding rates in Great Britain (GB) rose steadily between 1985 and 2010. However, the rates of breastfeeding continuation and exclusivity remain relatively low, and there is evidence that breastfeeding in public may still be considered unacceptable by many in GB. To date, no study has examined the reasons behind the increase in breastfeeding rates between 1985 and 2010, and the factors which influence women’s practice of breastfeeding in public in GB remain under-researched. Therefore, this DPhil research aimed to investigate whether the increase in breastfeeding rates in the first six weeks after childbirth in GB between 1985 and 2010 were driven by changes in the distribution of population characteristics, or changes in the differences in breastfeeding behaviours between subgroups of women. It also aimed to investigate the factors which influenced the practice of breastfeeding in public in GB in 1995 to 2010.
Data from the IFS surveys in 1985 to 2010 were analysed to, firstly, describe and summarise the distribution of selected explanatory factors among the childbearing population of GB from 1985 to 2010. This was followed by an estimation of the independent effects of these explanatory factors on breastfeeding initiation, breastfeeding continuation at one week and at six weeks, and breastfeeding in public, in each survey year. There was an assessment of the changes over time in the effects of each factor on breastfeeding initiation, and on breastfeeding continuation at one week and at six weeks. This was followed by an examination of the extent to which changes in the distribution of factors among the childbearing population contributed to the increase in breastfeeding rates in the first six weeks in GB between 1985 and 2010.
This DPhil research found no evidence of changes in the effects of factors on breastfeeding in the first six weeks between 1985 and 2010. This suggests that breastfeeding behaviours had not improved over time. At the same time, there were increases in the distribution of those factors which positively influence breastfeeding, suggesting that the increase in breastfeeding rates in the first six weeks between 1985 and 2010 were indeed attributable to population changes rather than improved breastfeeding behaviours. Additionally, breastfeeding in public was seemingly most influenced by women’s perceptions of the normality and acceptability of breastfeeding in GB. There is a clear need for more equitable interventions to target the needs and perceptions of those women in GB who remain characteristically less likely to breastfeed.

Keywords: health inequalities
breastfeeding
health trends
Advisor: Kurinczuk, J
Quigley, M
Carson, C
Biological interactions between cell populations in heterogeneous tumour spheroids

When radiotherapy is prescribed in the clinic, the tumour is assumed to be homogeneous. However, tumours are composed of many distinct cell populations that interact with each other and their environment. It is unclear how this heterogeneity affects tumour growth and response to treatment. Additionally, much of cancer research considers tumour cells in isolation, neglecting the context in which the disease develops. Experimental approaches alone are not suficient to understand the complexity of the interactions occurring in the cancer ecosystem. In this thesis we use a multidisciplinary approach combining in vitro experiments, mathematical modelling and parameter inference methods to explore the impact of cellular heterogeneity on tumour growth and radiation response. Our objectives are: i) to determine if intratumour heterogeneity affects bulk radiation response; ii) to characterise the interactions between co-cultured cell populations; iii) to determine how interactions between different cell populations are affected by radiation.
In the first part of the thesis we design a 3D experimental model in which we co-culture pairs of prostate cancer cell lines with distinct phenotypes and derived from the same tumours. We use the experimental model to study the growth and radiation response of heterogeneous tumours (Chapter 2). We then use nonlinear regression and approximate Bayesian computation algorithm to fit the Verhulst logistic and Lotka-Volterra mathematical models to our data to characterise how the cell populations interact when co-cultured in tumour spheroids before and after exposure to ionising radiation (Chapters 3 and 4). Our third piece of work involves the development of a cellular automaton model of avascular tumour growth to allow for spatial variation within the tumour. The cellular automaton model is simulated for a range of parameter values and fitted to the logistic model to determine the relationship between microscale and macroscale parameters describing tumour growth and to study the dynamics between co-cultured cell populations.
The work presented in this thesis highlights the benefits of multidisciplinary research for understanding cancer heterogeneity. We show that intratumour heterogeneity affects bulk tumour growth and radiation response. We demonstrate how complex biological interactions can be identified and quantified via mathematical modelling and inference. We also show how experimental design studies can streamline biological experiments. Taken together, this work presents a framework for uncovering the effect of cellular heterogeneity on tumour growth with a particular emphasis on interclonal interactions.

Advisor: Byrne, H
Kannan, P
Partridge, M
Investigation of structure and electrical hysteresis in functional materials

This thesis addresses issues regarding structure and electrical hysteresis in two functional materials; the semiconductor CH3NH3PbI3, which is the prototypical material used in lead-halide perovskite solar cells, and the magnetic multiferroic CuFeO2.
Thin film CH3NH3PbI3 is characterised by electrical hysteresis loop measurements which show that the current-voltage hysteresis observed in lead-halide perovskite solar cells cannot be attributed to a ferroelectric nature of the material but instead indicate a conductive hysteretic mechanism. This is further investigated through dielectric spectroscopy of crystals of CH3NH3PbI3 and CH3NH3PbBr3, which reveal dispersive, thermally activated hopping conduction due to ionic vacancy conduction. The low activation energies reveal that ionic vacancy migration is the likely underlying mechanism of current-voltage hysteresis.
The structural details of CH3NH3PbI3 are investigated by X-ray and neutron scattering. X-ray diffraction gives no indication of a polar crystal structure at room temperature and the extent of symmetry twinning is characterised. Quasielastic neutron scattering on crystals of CH3NH3PbI3 is used to study the rotational dynamics of the CH3NH3 molecule, resolved in q-space. This reveals the highly isotropic nature of CH3NH3 molecular reorientation throughout the tetragonal phase.
In the multiferroic material CuFeO2, a ferroelectric polarisation memory effect is characterised through history-dependent pyrocurrent measurements. Uniaxial strain is applied to control the magneto-structural domain population, however the polarisation memory is found to only depend on the magnetic history of the material. Simulations of the magnetic domain wall spin structures by Monte Carlo methods predict the existence of helical domain walls in the magnetic ground state. It is proposed that these helical domain walls can act to store information on the helical state of the ferroelectric phase, thus accounting for the observed memory effects.

Advisor: Radaelli, P
Regulating dissemination: a comparative digital ethnography of licensed and unlicensed spheres of music circulation

This thesis examines the transformations of music circulation and consumption brought about by new media platforms. Specifically, it shows how the social and technical design of online music platforms link the consumption of music immanently to its circulation. The thesis makes contributions to ethnomusicology, media studies, and digital anthropology, as well as to the study of music's technical cultures. It is based on a comparative ethnographic study of music circulation and consumption within two field sites: the commercial streaming service Spotify and the extralegal, unlicensed peer to peer platform 'Jekyll'. Governance comes to the fore in both sites: the study shows how practices of music curation, collection and consumption are regulated by the technical design of these platforms. Surprisingly, music consumption and circulation on Jekyll generates a variety of social relations, including pronounced social hierarchies. This is far less apparent on Spotify, due to the platform's individuated mode of address. The subjectivities of online music consumers are mediated by both their personal histories and by the broader technical genealogies of the platforms they use. The thesis illuminates the mutual interdependencies of the licensed and extralegal spheres, two domains often portrayed as not only separate but antagonistic. It also provides insight into the hybrid modes of exchange that generate digital music platforms. Through examining the entailments of circulatory participation, the study offers new insights into digital polymedia and to labour, exchange and governmentality online, as well as providing nuanced understandings of the ownership and collection of music in digital environments. Moreover, it advances new concepts to identify core aspects of digital music cultures, namely 'circulatory maintenance' and 'circumvention technology'. The thesis shows overall how Spotify and Jekyll are not merely emblematic of emergent consumption practices engendered by new media, but are bound up in the mutual co-creation of culture, engendering novel musical subjectivities, practices, socialities and ideologies. The complex musical, technical and social assemblages formed around music circulation online point to the affective potentials of music itself, producing inalienable attachments to the objects through which music is formatted, experienced, and circulated.

Keywords: Streaming
Digital Ethnography
File-sharing
Advisor: Born, G
New Songdo City, or, the potentiality of Asian urbanism(s)

This thesis explores the nexus between 'urban expressionism' and the potentiality of 'Asian urbanism(s)' by exploring ways that different planning paradigms have been located/dislocated in the case of New Songdo City, South Korea. By investigating four expressions of New Songdo City - as an 'Eco-City', a 'Smart City', an 'International City', and as the 'City of the Future' - this thesis argues that urban expressionism can make important contributions to the aims of Asian urbanism(s). Ultimately, this research demonstrates the ways that urban expressionism can be used to destabilize hegemonic Western-centric urban knowledge and city-building practices, and further point to new geographies of theory from which important contributions to urban research can be made.
Urban expressions are made evident by various entwined urban rhetorics and worlding practices that operationalize multiple mediums of communication. Consequently, New Songdo City is, first and foremost, a city of simultaneity. To investigate this simultaneity, this research utilizes an exploratory case study approach and multiple qualitative methods that include semi-structured interviewing, focus groups, and surveys to gather insights from residents of Songdo, local experts, public and private sector actors, and other key stakeholder groups. Visual analysis is also used to explore mixed-mediums of data, including promotional videos, images, exhibition displays, magazines, and advertisements. The methods used to undertake this thesis provide a glimpse in to the development of New Songdo City and capture different urban expressions that are articulated by the city through various examples of urban rhetoric and worlding practices.
The urban expressions presented in the New Songdo City case are analysed through the lens of Asian urbanism(s) and investigate the ways that hegemonic Western and Euro-centric conceptualizations of ‘the urban’ and ‘the city’ have been deployed, articulated, experienced, challenged, and complicated. By extension, this thesis also contributes to a more nuanced conceptualization of Asian urbanism(s) as well as the relevance of New Songdo City for urban theory in South Korean, Asian, and more generalizable contexts.

Keywords: New Songdo City
City of Tomorrow
Asian Urbanism
Eco City
South Korea
International City
Urban Theory
Smart City
Advisor: McDowell, L
McCormack, D
Computer-aided analysis of fetal cardiac ultrasound videos

This thesis addresses the task of developing automatic algorithms for analysing the two-dimensional ultrasound video footage obtained from fetal heart screening scans. These scans are typically performed in the second trimester of pregnancy to check for congenital heart anomalies and require significant training and anatomical knowledge to perform.
The aim is to develop a tool that runs at high frame rates with no user initialisation and infers the visibility, position, orientation, view classification, and cardiac phase of the heart, and additionally the locations of cardiac structures of interest (such as valves and vessels) in a manner that is robust to the various sources of variation that occur in real-world ultrasound scanning. This is the first work to attempt such a detailed automated analysis of these videos.
The problem is posed as a Bayesian filtering problem, which provides a principled framework for aggregating uncertain measurements across a number of frames whilst exploiting the constraints imposed by anatomical feasibility. The resulting inference problem is solved approximately with a particle filter, whose state space is partitioned to reduce the problems associated with filtering in high-dimensional spaces.
Rotation-invariant features are captured from the videos in an efficient way in order to tackle the problem of unknown orientation. These are used within random forest learning models, including a novel formulation to predict circular-valued variables.
The algorithm is validated on an annotated clinical dataset, and the results are compared to estimates of inter- and intra-observer variation, which are significant in both cases due to the inherent ambiguity in the imagery. The results suggest that the algorithm’s output approaches these benchmarks in several respects, and fall slightly behind in others.
The work presented here is an important first step towards developing automated clinical tools for the detection of congenital heart disease.

Keywords: Video Analysis
Rotation Invariance
Machine Learning
Algorithm
Fetal
Echocardiography
Tracking
Cardiac
Random Forests
Heart
Localization
Ultrasound
Advisor: Noble, A
Tools and resources for molecular simulations of integral membrane proteins

Integral Membrane Proteins (IMPs) are an important and scientifically interesting class of protein which span the lipid bilayer surrounding cells, cell compartments and many viruses. Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation has revealed intimate and often highly specific relationships between membrane lipids and IMPs critical to many metabolic and signalling pathways. Meanwhile, the use of Coarse-Grained (CG) MD techniques has extended capabilities of biomolecular simulation to larger proteins over longer time periods. Several tools and resources for biomolecular simulations of IMPs are presented here, as well as two MD studies of specific IMPs. The previously developed MemProtMD pipeline automates the setup of MD simulations of IMPs; major extensions to this are presented here with the MemProtMD database and web server, automating the analysis of IMP simulations. The results of this can be viewed using the MemProtMD web server, an interactive, searchable online resource containing data from simulations of over 3000 experimentally determined IMP structures in explicit lipid bilayers. Using data from analysis of the entire MemProtMD database, MemProtMetrics has been developed to automate identification and orientation of IMP structures from Protein DataBank (PDB) depositions. This is shown to effectively predict membrane protein orientations seen in MD simulations. A tool for identification and classification of membrane lipids is also described, and used to identify over 500 IMPs structures with resolved lipids.CGMD simulations have also been used to assess dependence on side-chain ionisation state of interactions between lipids and two IMPs observed in mass spectrometry experiments. The simulations reveal similar trends to those seen in experiments. Finally, using multi-scale simulations, and through the development of a novel method for altering membrane composition in MD simulations, lipid-specific scramblase activity was shown for a novel structure of the TMEM16K scramblase IMP.

Advisor: Sansom, M
Stansfeld, P
Ottoman policy-making in an age of reforms: unearthing Ottoman archaeology in the 19th and early 20th centuries

This thesis discusses the Ottoman policies on archaeology in the aftermath of the initiation of the Tanzimat reforms (1839) and until the end of the Ottoman Empire (1923). It explores the activities of the central state, the autonomous Principality of Samos in the Aegean, and the Hellenic Literary Society at Constantinople. Primary and secondary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Katharevousa Greek, Modern Turkish and Modern Greek, English and French inform the analysis. The first chapter looks at the contexts within which an Ottoman interest in archaeology emerged. It discusses the rise of archaeology as a distinct area of scientific and scholarly research in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the encounters of the Ottomans with western archaeologies in that period, and those domestic intellectual dynamics that made them receptive to archaeology. The second chapter focuses on the Ottoman legislation on antiquities, and secondarily looks at related institutional developments. It discusses at length the emergence of an Ottoman voice on archaeology through the crystallisation of increasingly comprehensive and mature sets of rules and procedures on heritage management. By looking at the autonomous Principality of Samos, the third chapter shifts the attention to the western periphery of the empire, and explores how the Greek Orthodox, when outside the direct control of the central state, could develop their own understanding of, processes and structures regarding archaeology. The fourth chapter looks, for the first time in the literature, at the archaeological activities of the Hellenic Literary Society at Constantinople, and discusses the contribution of Ottoman society to the promotion of archaeological research and the protection of monuments. Overall, this thesis provides a critical analysis of the emergence of the concept and practice of archaeological heritage protection in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Keywords: Samos
heritage
archaeology
Ottoman Greeks
Ottoman history
Hellenic Literary Society at Constantinople
Advisor: Mignon, L
Analysis on Stochastic Anisotropic Degenerate Parabolic-Hyperbolic Mixed-Type Equations

This dissertation consists chiefly of three parts, which tell different facets in the development of one topic. The first part is an exploration of continuous dependence estimates of stochastically driven degenerate parabolic equations. The second is an extension of work done by Debussche and Vovelle on first order stochastic conservation laws - we extend their results to degenerate parabolic-hyperbolic conservation laws with additive noise, and derive results on the existence and uniqueness of invariant measures. In the third part we explore the long time behaviour of solutions to stochastic degenerate parabolic-hyperbolic conservation laws with multiplicative noise, depending non-linearly on the solution itself.

Advisor: Chen, G
Copyright and culture: a qualitative theory

Copyright is conventionally justified as an incentive to produce and disseminate works of authorship. We can justify and theorise copyright more richly, not least because empirical evidence does not support the incentive narrative. Rather than focussing on quantitative matters such as the number of works incentivised and produced, we should consider copyright's qualitative influence on culture.
A threshold objection to such an approach is the risk of cultural paternalism. This objection can be overcome. Rather than specifying paternalistic standards of merit for works, we can target the conditions under which their creation and consumption takes place.
I argue, firstly, that we should adopt the following high-level principles: (i) that the conditions of creation and consumption of works should be conducive to democratic deliberation (democracy) and (ii) that they should facilitate the development of human capabilities (autonomy). Secondly, I propose that we pursue three mid-level objectives, which are helpful indicia of democracy and autonomy:
- a fair and wide distribution of communicative and cultural power (inclusiveness);
- diversity in the content and perspectives available to the public (diversity); and
- conditions that permit authors and users of works to engage rigorously with the conventions of the media in which they operate (rigour).
It is often said that copyright obstructs important qualitative objectives, like freedom of expression, and that we could better pursue these goals by weakening copyright and relying on non-proprietary alternatives. My approach produces a more optimistic, but also more complicated, view of copyright. While copyright's qualitative influence is not optimal, reductions in the strength and scope of copyright sometimes produces conditions and incentive structures that are worse for inclusiveness, diversity and rigour than stronger copyright. For example, both attention and wealth are highly concentrated in networked information economies driven by free sharing of content, and this is bad for diversity or inclusiveness. Online business models, based on surveillance of users' consumption of free works, are corrosive of autonomy and democracy. Merely removing copyright-based restrictions on the sharing of works is not a panacea for copyright's ills.
A qualitative theory such as mine equips us to better understand and calibrate more richly the trade-offs involved in copyright policy decisions, and encourages us to treat copyright as part of a broader, qualitatively-oriented information and cultural policy.

Keywords: wealth of networks
diversity
deliberative democracy
markets
winner takes all
autonomy
free speech
creativity
distributive justice
aesthetics
discourse
clickbait
fair use
free culture
copyright
levy
network effects
creative industries
works
democracy
positive liberty
freedom of expression
inclusive
filter bubble
authorship
Advisor: Dinwoodie, G