VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Income and asthma-related outcomes in children: a longitudinal study in the United Kingdom

There is evidence that children from socially disadvantaged families tend to have poorer health outcomes than their richer counterparts. However, evidence on the association between family income and specific outcomes, such as asthma and wheezing, is limited. This thesis therefore applies different methodological approaches to investigate the relationship between family income and asthma-related outcomes in children, in the United Kingdom.
Chapter 1 presents the motivation and background to the thesis, and Chapter 2 describes the data and gives an overview of the methods used. Three asthma-related outcomes were used, as derived from the Millennium Cohort Study. These were: ever asthma, wheezing in the last 12 months and asthma medication use. Chapter 3 examines cross-sectionally, the association between family income and asthma-related outcomes. The results showed that income is a statistically significant driver of asthma-related outcomes, after taking into account potential confounding factors. Furthermore, for outcomes ever asthma and asthma medication use, there was some evidence that the child health-income gradient strengthened with age, novel findings in the United Kingdom.
Chapter 4 considers heterogeneity in asthma-related outcomes in children, and constructed four phenotypes based on the duration and onset of wheezing. Multinomial regression models were fitted to analyse the association between income and wheezing phenotype. Results showed statistically significant associations between income and the late-onset and persistent wheezing phenotypes, which are both likely to persist into adult life.
In Chapter 5, empirical methods are used to exploit the longitudinal nature of the data. Two approaches were used: firstly, panel data methods, where fixed and random effects models were fitted to the data. Income effects were statistically weak across all asthma-related outcomes. Secondly, a single regression model was fitted on the combined data across all age groups for each outcome, including an interaction term between income and survey age. Results showed that higher income decreased the probability of asthma-related outcomes.
Chapter 6 examines income-related inequity of asthma-related outcomes. The first part of the analysis used Erreygers’ Indices to estimate income-related inequality. Negative indices indicated income-related inequality for all ages and outcomes. Income-related inequality was then decomposed into contributing factors, and showed that income itself is the main driver.
Overall, the findings show that children from low-income families are at higher risk of adverse asthma-related outcomes, and that the burden of asthma-related disease is more concentrated in low-income children. In light of this, policies should therefore focus on reducing the degree of income-related inequality in asthma outcomes in children, by tackling the key drivers of inequality.

Keywords: child health
income-gradient
wheezing
longitudinal
health-related income inequality
asthma
Advisor: Quigley, M
Violato, M
A polymath from Amdo: the many hats of Sumpa Khenpo Yeshe Paljor (1704–1788)

The eighteenth century is a key period for Amdo, a region which sits at the crossroads between Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese cultural and political spheres of influence. Due to the shifting geo-political landscape of this period, studies have frequently focused on the many historic events, overlooking more localised and personal accounts. This thesis will add to the growing trend of studying personal histories by focusing on the experiences and perspectives of one individual; Sumpa Khenpo Yeshe Paljor (Sum pa mkhan po Ye shes dpal 'byor; 1704–1788). An influential and respected incarnate lama, research on this figure in the West has shown him to be an important diplomat in these tripartite relations and he is often labelled as an interlocutor between the Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese cultural spheres.
The main text investigated in this thesis is the autobiography of Sumpa Khenpo titled 'A Description of the Activities of the Khenpo Known as Erdeni Paṇḍita, [which is like] Nectar for the Ear' (mKhan po erte ni Paṇḍi tar grags pa'i spyod tshul brjod pa sgra 'dzin bcud len). As a starting point for my investigation, I translated and analysed the work in its historical, religious and political context. During the research, it became clear that Sumpa Khenpo’s role as diplomat was only one of the many roles he assumed. The most interesting facet of his writings, and a key contribution of this thesis, is how he blends all these many roles – or, as the title of this thesis suggests, wears his many hats – and can switch between them as required across the networks he develops.
This thesis will highlight three important roles that feature prominently in Sumpa Khenpo’s autobiography. The first aspect studied in this thesis is his influence as a pilgrim; while the main aims of his travels were religious, these journeys also opened and developed networks to further religious, institutional and economic goals as it was expected of the head of monastic institutions. The second aspect is his use of rhetoric to further his roles as a peacekeeper, teacher, and abbot, and to encourage virtue and build his own reputation. The final aspect is more practical in nature, focusing on the use of medicine in his role as healer, teacher, and writer of medical literature, which is still in use today.
Sumpa Khenpo’s autobiography bears witness to the fact that he was a true polymath; a frontier cosmopolitan scholar whose many skills, knowledge, and prominence allowed him to comfortably navigate across cultural boundaries and build a reputation to spread the dharma across the region and across time, through his autobiography.

Keywords: Tibetan social history
life writing
Tibetan and Himalayan studies
Qing
Advisor: Roesler, U
The challenges of developing diagnostic assessments in countries rooted in rote learning – a case study around assessment in India

This thesis explores the challenges of developing diagnostic assessments to measure skills and competencies in an education system where assessments are rooted in a rote-learning culture. The research in this thesis applied the work of Marsh and Hau’s 2007 research that issued a challenge to researchers that their methodology should be adopted in the analysis of substantive data. This challenge was applied to a ‘real’ (substantive) data set from a newly created diagnostic assessment in India, a country rooted in rote learning. The methodology describes a multi-stage process for exploratory factor analysis alongside practical cautions around limited use of rules-of-thumb, and considerations of missing data and interpretation of causality. The Marsh and Hau (2007) assertion is that the “polarization of substantive and methodological approaches to research and research training” must be reduced. The assessment at the centre of the research in this thesis was conceived, designed, developed and marketed by bringing together assessment implementors – experts, assessment developers, teachers, school leaders and examination board reviewers. This thesis concludes that the Marsh and Hau (2007) methodology is useful in a substantive research setting but argues that there is further polarisation to consider – that between researchers (methodological or substantive) and implementors of educational assessments.

Keywords: MEA
MEA 2020
Online intergroup conflict: How the dynamics of online communication drive extremism and violence between groups

In the early days of the Internet, the social web was suggested to hold the power to reduce conflict, prejudice, and discrimination, by promoting connection between those with diverse backgrounds and experiences. However, this optimistic view has not materialised. Instead, evidence shows that Western societies are increasingly polarised and divided, and social media has been particularly implicated with the promotion of violent extremism and the spread of hate speech. The exact role social media plays in driving these processes remains poorly understood. This thesis investigates the mechanisms through which social media may foster and exacerbate intergroup conflict both online and offline, and explores different intergroup and intragroup dynamics which may drive this trend. This work firstly investigates the prevalence and impact of online communication between opposing groups on offline intergroup relations, demonstrating how intergroup communication does frequently occur online, but can be confrontational, hostile, and fails to improve intergroup relations, instead predicting future offline violence. Following this, we then develop a novel approach to detect online hate speech by leveraging datasets from multiple social media platforms in order to train natural language machine learning classifiers. We use these classifiers to explore the influence of extreme outgroup denigration in ingroup discussions on fringe social media platforms popular with the far-right. We demonstrate how exposure to online hate plays a role in shaping individual radicalisation trajectories, increasing the likelihood of offline hate crimes, and driving mutual radicalisation with opposing groups. Finally, we explore the effect of hostile manipulation from state actors on the dynamics of online conversations, presenting novel techniques to reveal how manipulation of these discussions increases the polarisation of online conversations from genuine users. Together these findings shed light on the mechanisms by which the Internet promotes intergroup conflict, extremism, and violence, providing new insight into initial steps that could be used to counter these effects.

Keywords: Social Media
Social Psychology
Internet
Extremism
Polarisation
Intergroup Conflict
Advisor: Heerdink, M
Bright, J
Wright, J
Russia's escalating opposition to popular revolutions in the Post-Soviet region and Middle East: A quest for domestic legitimacy

This thesis attempts to explain the sources of Russia’s opposition to popular uprisings in the post-Soviet region and Middle East since the colour revolutions in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004). Although Russia has experienced few major episodes of unrest in recent years, Moscow’s opposition to popular uprisings has escalated from rhetorical criticisms of the colour revolutions to its military interventions in Ukraine and Syria. This thesis argues that existing neoclassical realist, English School and constructivist arguments incompletely explain this phenomenon, and instead advances a novel theoretical approach called “instrumental constructivism.” This theory contends that Russia’s counter-revolutionary policy is an integral component of its foreign policy identity that crystallised in an incremental fashion. Soviet and transition-era framings of popular unrest conditioned the Russian public to associate mass protests with rampant disorder, and Western interference and expansionism.
As Vladimir Putin’s presidency progressed, the Russian public also linked successful challenges to the Western-dominated liberal order to domestic perceptions of great power status. In order to align Russian foreign policy more closely with public opinion, Russian officials constructed a counter-revolutionary foreign policy identity, which exploited popular insecurities about mass protests and appealed to domestic status aspirations. To provide empirical evidence for instrumental constructivism’s key contentions, this thesis explores Russia’s responses to the colour revolutions and Arab Spring and uses Ukraine after the Euro-Maidan revolution and the Syrian civil war as its two primary case studies. The thesis concludes by assessing instrumental constructivism’s potential transferability to the foreign policy conduct of other authoritarian states, and to related dimensions of Russia’s global offensive against liberal democracy.

Keywords: Syria
Russia
Vladimir Putin
Popular Protests
Constructivism
Ukraine
Color Revolutions
Advisor: Allison, R
Fawcett, L
Structural disorder in two-dimensional network-forming materials

Investigations into two-dimensional network-forming materials have renewed importance due to the experimental synthesis of ultra-thin films of carbon, silica and aluminosilicate glasses. Microscopy on the disordered phases of these materials reveals a percolating ring structure, identifying them as candidates for a range of technologically useful materials, with applications including catalysis and gas separation. The ability to characterise, understand and control the structure of the pore landscape in such materials is therefore central to their further development.
The overall aim of this thesis is to improve the simulation and characterisation of two-dimensional disordered materials. The key is to accurately quantify and reproduce the ring structure, described by the ring size distribution and ring-ring correlations. This will be achieved by relating previous empirical laws (namely Lemaître’s law and the Aboav-Weaire law), to well-defined metrics in network science, and developing a variety of Monte Carlo methods to generate networks with controllable ring structures and topologies.
The first of these methods will be a sequential growth algorithm to construct triangle rafts (a proxy for silica bilayers), which will be shown to produce configurations commensurate with those from experiment. Following from this, a modified bond switching algorithm will be used to investigate more generic systems, spanning a variety of atomic coordination environments, potential models and topologies. Fundamental relationships between these measures and the ring structure will be demonstrated by systematically varying the system parameters. In addition, hard particle Monte Carlo techniques will be used to generate Voronoi diagrams, making contact with experimental studies on quasi-two-dimensional colloidal systems.
Treating these diverse physical systems as complex networks allows a gener- alised network theory to be developed. Traditional ring measures will be related to well-defined metrics from network theory, namely the node degree distribution and the assortativity. This will enable seemingly disparate physical systems to be compared and ties them into the wider field of network science.
Further applications of this work to real systems will be illustrated with analyses on a range of experimental (or experimentally motivated) data. The appropriateness of weighted and unweighted Voronoi constructions will be eval- uated for colloidal monolayers. The ring structure of procrystalline lattices will be demonstrated to be related to the underlying parent lattice and atomic coordination environments. Finally, a tool from topological data analysis, termed persistent homology, will be investigated and shown to be a potential complement to more traditional measures of structural disorder.

Keywords: Bilayer Materials
Persistent Homology
Complex Networks
Disordered Materials
Monte Carlo Methods
2D Materials
Voronoi Diagrams
Advisor: Wilson, M
The function and evolutionary ecology of intra-sexual aggression in drosophila melanogaster

Across the animal kingdom, competition for reproductive resources often results in intra-sexual aggressive contests. The extent to which individuals engage in aggression varies in response to ecological conditions. However, as individuals live and compete in highly complex environments, understanding how aspects of an individual’s ecological surroundings shape aggression is a constantly advancing field with many unresolved questions. Furthermore, while much previous research has focused on male aggression, it is now acknowledged that females fight too, but whether female aggression reflects male aggression in its response to the environment is largely unknown. In this thesis, I use the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to investigate how the prevailing environment drives short term responses and long term evolutionary change in aggression in both sexes.
Sexual selection plays a key role in shaping traits involved in reproductive competition, such as aggression, and I begin by investigating how the sex ratio influences the operation of sexual selection in males, and whether these patterns are reflected in females. Traditional sexual selection theory predicts that as the sex ratio becomes more biased, the abundant sex should experience stronger sexual selection. I find support for this prediction in males, but, in females, I find sexual selection arising from mating competition to be weak and insensitive to the sex ratio, illustrating differences in intra-sexual competition in the two sexes. I then investigate how aggression evolves in response to the population sex ratio, and find that a male-biased sex ratio increases the propensity for males to focus aggression around food patches but does not influence male aggressive intensity, while a female-biased environment increases the magnitude by which mating elevates female aggression.
Furthermore, kin selection has the potential to shape aggressive interactions, and high population relatedness can reduce harmful aggressive behaviours. I find some evidence that high relatedness can reduce harmful behaviours in D. melanogaster, but find this response to be highly sensitive, with no evidence that it is driven solely by olfactory-based discrimination. Finally, I show that nutrition can determine aggressive ability and motivation, with aggression decreasing in response to food deprivation during development but increasing in response to adult food deprivation.

Keywords: drosophila
aggression
Advisor: Perry, J
Wigby, S
Pizzari, T
Sustainability reconsidered: an ethnography of natural dyeing in contemporary Japan

Based on twelve months of fieldwork with dyeing craftspeople on the biodiverse island of Amami Ōshima in southern Japan, this thesis explores the complex, often contradictory, intertwining of preservation practices, resource extraction, and access to land that define local relationships with the natural environment. It thereby aims to question widespread discourses about sustainability that assume that small scale ʻtraditionalʼ craft is low impact and therefore more environmentally sustainable. Using apprenticeship methodologies, I reveal that Amamian craft producers are subject to social, economic and bureaucratic pressures, precarities and hierarchies that have equivalences to those widespread in industrial settings. Against a backdrop of uncertainty and instability, my research participants navigate geographically specific practices of ecological care, foraging, cultivating, processing and dyeing and temporally specific experiences of labour migration and lifestyle aspiration. By focusing on their dynamic relationship with local ecologies in order to produce (global) commodities, I was able to study sustaining processes in practice. This in turn forced me to rethink the ideology of sustainability and argue instead for a broader understanding of the extraction, life and value of materials. Value, in this formulation, is not only concentrated on the economic but distributed in ways that benefit the health of a wider conception of community, ecology and sustainability.

Keywords: Japan
material culture
sustainability
visual anthropology
natural dyeing
Oshima Tsumugi
textiles
Advisor: Daniels, I
Etruscans in Latin poetry: political, cultural and personal implications in the age of Augustus

The intention of this thesis is to attempt for the first time to explore the presence of Etruscan themes in the Augustan poets in all their facets and shades, in their political as well as cultural context, while also being mindful of the unique ways in which each individual poet engages with traditional tropes. The thesis examines the presence of Etruscan themes as they surface in Augustan poetry, by exploring the particular ways in which each subject takes shape and the different forms they assume, re-contextualising and re-appraising overly well-known material by framing narratives according to more unorthodox intra- and inter-textual connections. The investigation will be supplemented by ample recourse to material evidence, in an attempt to reconstruct each subject in its many ramifications and expressions. The intent is not to read the text as truthful substantiation of the archaeological evidence, of course, but as one of many pieces of a puzzle, all equally required to reveal the overall picture in its most complete form. Such an outlook will enable the reader to better discern the framework in which the emergence of Etruscan themes can be investigated and understood. Emphasis on the need to incorporate Etruria and the rest of Italy into the new Augustan political programme coexists with a resurgence in the cultural milieu of the late republic of a vigorous interest in Etruscan antiquities, amongst others. To these stimuli, poets respond either by forcefully seeking to legitimise the Etruscans’ role in Rome’s past or by maintaining a more traditional stance and offering conventional portrayals of Etruscan self-indulgence and treacherousness. The ambition of this work overall is thus to provide a comprehensive account of the ways in which Augustan poetry engages with Etruria and the Etruscan people at the twilight of their civilisation.

Advisor: Morgan, L
Virtually nilpotent mod-𝑝 Iwasawa algebras are catenary

Fix a prime 𝑝 > 2. Let G be a nilpotent-by-finite compact 𝑝-adic analytic group, and k a finite field of characteristic 𝑝. We prove that kG is a catenary ring.

Keywords: completed group rings
Iwasawa algebras
ring theory
noncommutative algebra
compact p-adic analytic groups
catenary rings
Advisor: Ardakov, K
Regulation and role of TBX2 and TBX3 in tumour progression

TBX2 and TBX3 belong to the T-box family of transcription factors and are im- portant in embryonic development and tumourigenesis. Overexpression of TBX2/3 has been observed in several types of cancer, promoting tumour proliferation, senescence bypass and invasiveness.
Given their important contribution to tumour progression, it might be of therapeutic benefit to pharmacologically inhibit their expression for cancer treatment. To identify novel regulators of TBX2/3, we carried out a high throughput screen for FDA-approved drugs that could affect TBX2/3 expression and/or subcellular localisation using melanoma cells ectopically expressing TBX2/3. We identified hit drugs from the initial imaging-base screen and confirmed the results of selected compounds targeting calcineurin.
In addition to the regulation of TBX2/3 protein, to further understand their role in tumour progression, we undertook genome-wide ChIP-seq and RNA-seq experiments to identify potential target genes and explore functional implications. As there is a lack of ChIP-grade TBX2/3 antibodies, we tagged the endogenous proteins with 3xHA using the CRISPR/Cas9 system. The generated cell lines produced high-quality ChIP-seq datasets of TBX2 and TBX3 and revealed the repertoire of binding sites genome-wide. Surprisingly, TBX2 binds to not only T-elements as expected, but also to a subset of E-box sequences bound by USF2. Integrative analysis of ChIP-seq and RNA-seq datasets identified E2F1 as a novel target gene of TBX2 that promotes cell growth.
Last, but not least, we also identified novel cofactors of TBX2, with preliminary data suggesting that TBX2 represses gene expression by interacting with polycomb repressive complex 1, and may be converted to a transactivator when interacting with basis helix-loop-helix transcription factor USF2.

Keywords: Cancer
Tbx3
Melanoma
Tbx2
Advisor: Goding, C