VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Natural classification and the reality of higher taxa

Many generations of taxonomists have struggled with the self-appointed task of constructing a 'natural' classification of biological organisms. Advocates of the cladistic school of classificatory methodology have in recent years made insistent claims that the cladistic method of phylogenetic reconstruction provides the sought-for, unique, natural classification. Especially, they have claimed that the taxa delineated by cladistic methodology are of radically different status from other kinds of taxon. Adopting and extending a philosophical innovation which categorizes biological species as individuals rather than classes/ they assert that cladistic taxa are 'real entities', and other kinds of taxon merely 'subjective' or 'convenience' classes whose existence should not be recognized in formal classifications.
Having outlined the present situation as regards rival taxonomic philosophies, and some of its historical background, the thesis examines this attempt to recategorize taxa as individual-like entities, and finds it wanting. The properties of species which render them regardable as individuals do not readily extend to more inclusive levels, or, if they do, are not readily restricted solely to cladistic taxa. Cladistic systematization, in moving away from the notion of a taxon as a class of similar entities, may cease to convey the information expected of a classification system. The practice of biology requires a more flexible and more stable taxonomy than can be provided by strict adherence to cladistic rules, and taxa are-better regarded as 'historical classes', delineated neither by pure unanalysed similarity nor by logical transformation of hypotheses of phylogenetic relationship, but by a considered pragmatic synthesis of the two, employing the notion of convexity as a criterion of acceptability.

Advisor: Kemp, T
Higher-order model checking with traversals

Higher-order recursion schemes are a powerful model of functional computation that grew out of traditional recursive program schemes and generalisations of grammars. It is common to view recursion schemes as generators of possibly-infinite trees, which Ong showed to have a decidable monadic second order theory and opened the door to applications in verification. Kobayashi later presented an intersection type characterisation of the model checking problem, on which most subsequent applied work is based. In recent work, recursion schemes have been considered to play a role similar to Boolean programs in verification of first-order imperative programs: a natural target for abstraction of programs with very large or infinite data domains.
In this thesis we focus on the development of model checking algorithms for variants of recursion schemes. We start our contributions with a model checking algorithm inspired by the fully abstract game semantics of recursion schemes, but specified as a goal-directed approach to intersection type inference, that offers a unification of the views of Ong and Kobayashi. We build on this largely theoretical contribution with two orthogonal extensions and practical implementations.
First, we develop a new extension of recursion schemes: higher-order recursion schemes with cases, which add non-determinism and a case construct operating over a finite data domain. These additions provide us with a more natural and succinct target for abstraction from functional programs: encoding data using functions inevitably results in an increase in the order and arity of the scheme, which have a direct impact on the worst-case complexity of the problem. We characterise the model checking problem using a novel intersection and union type system and give a practical algorithm for type inference in this system. We have carried out an empirical evaluation of the implementation --- the tool TRAVMC --- using a variety of problem instances from the literature and a new suite of problem instances derived via an abstraction-refinement procedure from functional programs.
Second, we extend our approach from safety properties to all properties expressible in monadic second order logic using alternating parity tree automata as our specification language. We again provide an implementation and an empirical evaluation, which shows that despite the challenges accompanying liveness properties our tool scales beyond the current state of the art.

Keywords: software verification
intersection types
model checking
Theory and automated verification
Advisor: Ong, C
Beyond melancholia: Algeria and its spectres

This thesis problematizes the recent transdisciplinary turn to melancholia by grounding the concept within the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. If Freud figured melancholia as a pathological response to loss, much recent scholarship has reconceptualized it as an ethico-political model of remembrance that safeguards the memory of the lost or marginalized other. Yet the recent and ubiquitous depathologization of melancholia is only possible insofar as theorists overlook its more insidious elements. By analyzing how melancholia emerges within the postcolonial novels of Djebar, Khadra, and Sansal, this thesis reveals how melancholia in fact undermines an ethico-politics of remembrance, further displacing those lost others that theorists of melancholia would recuperate. Divided into two sections, the first part of the thesis thus challenges the ethico-political viability of melancholia as a mnemonic model. Through close readings of the texts, the first four chapters reveal postcolonial melancholia in Algeria to be imbricated in amnesia, immobility, repetition, victimhood, apolitical retrospection, and the unethical appropriation of the lost object. Part II investigates how the authors imagine different models of remembrance that move beyond the limits of the mourning and melancholia dyad. If melancholia has been depathologized, it nonetheless remains ensnared within a binary system in which the subject either forgets (mourns) or engages in a putative act of hyper-remembrance (melancholia). Building upon the recent theory of Dominick LaCapra, Mireille Rosello, and Judith Butler, the final two chapters explore the critical potential of ‘working upon’ the past. As an on-going and conscious model of remembrance, ‘working upon’ actively resists the closure inherent to mourning but it also circumvents the melancholic (re)appropriation of the past and its lost others. Ultimately, then, this thesis signals the need for emergent models of memorialization that move beyond the restrictions of the Freudian binary of mourning and melancholia.

Keywords: spectrality
melancholia
postcolonial
haunting
Algerian War
mourning
colonialism
Francophone
Sansal
psychoanalysis
memory
Djebar
Khadra
Algeria
Advisor: Hiddleston, J
Mathematics of crimping

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the mathematics and modelling of the industrial crimper, perhaps one of the least well understood processes that occurs in the manufacture of artificial fibre. We begin by modelling the process by which the fibre is deformed as it is forced into the industrial crimper. This we investigate by presuming the fibre to behave as an ideal elastica confined in a two dimensional channel. We consider how the arrangement of the fibre changes as more fibre is introduced, and the forces that are required to confine it. Later, we apply the same methods to a fibre confined to a three dimensional channel. After the fibre has under gone a preliminary deformation, a second process known as secondary crimp can occur. This involves the `zig-zagged' material folding over. We model this process in two ways. First as a series of rigid rods joined by elastic hinges, and then as an elastic with a highly oscillatory natural configuration compressed by thrusts at each end. We observe that both models can be expressed in a very similar manner, and both predict that a buckle can occur from a nearly straight initial condition to an arched formation. We also compare the results to experiments performed on the crimped fibre. Throughout much of the process, the configuration of the fibre does not alter. This part of the process we call the block, and model the material in this region in two ways: as a series of springs; and as an isotropic elastic material. We discuss the coupling between the different regions and the process that occurs in the block, and consider both the steady state and stability of the system.
Italian postwar experimentalism in the wake of English-language modernism

After World War II in Italy the cultural scene was in need of resuscitation. Artists searched for tools with which to revifify their works. Central to this, for many key figures in the fifties and sixties, was an engagement with English-language Modernism. This phenomenon has been widely recognised, but this thesis is its first sustained analysis.
I draw together the receptions of three English-language Modernist authors – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce – who, as a triad, were instrumental in the radicalisation of the arts in Italy in the fifties and sixties. I show that their works were elevated as models of an experimental approach to language that was revisited by Italian artists – most notably by poets associated with the Neoavantgarde. The specific Modernist linguistic techniques which were adopted by the Italians that we will consider here are the mingling of languages and styles, the use of citations, and the perversion and manipulation of single words and idioms.
The poets considered in most depth to exemplify this phenomenon are Edoardo Sanguineti, who was a major exponent of the Neoavantgarde, and Amelia Rosselli, who was more peripherally and problematically associated with the movement. Both poets desecrated the traditional language of poetry and energised their own poetry with recourse to Modernist techniques which they consciously and deliberately adopted from Eliot, Pound and Joyce.
An unpicking of the mechanics of these techniques in Sanguineti's and Rosselli's poetry reveals that their texts necessitate an active mode of reading. This aligns with the intellectual ideas propounded by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, all of whom grounded their theories on readership in analyses of the linguistic experiments of Modernism. Sanguineti's and Rosselli's poetry fulfil the characteristics of Eco's “open” work, Barthes' “polysemous” work, and bring about Benjamin's “shock-effect” in the reader. These radical linguistic techniques, appropriated from the Modernists, contribute to each poets' overall poetic projects – they enact Edoardo Sanguineti's anarchic and revolutionary impulses, and stage Amelia Rosselli's thematic conflicts.

Keywords: Ezra Pound
Modernism
Neoavantgarde
Edoardo Sanguineti
T.S. Eliot
Amelia Rosselli
James Joyce
neoavanguardia
Advisor: Bush, R
Tandello, E
Weakened by strengths: drugs in solution, medication error and drug safety

The concentrations of some drug solutions are often expressed as ratios or percentages. This system simplified prescription and dispensing when Imperial measures such as grains and minims were used. Ampoules of powerful vasoactive drugs such as catecholamines and potentially toxic local anaesthetics are still labelled as ratios and percentages, seemingly through habit or tradition than for any useful clinical reason. This thesis argues that adherence to this outdated system is confusing, causes drug administration errors, and puts patients at risk. Internet-based questionnaires were used to quantify medical students’ and doctors’ understanding of ratios and percentages. A substantial minority of almost 3000 doctors could not convert between ratios, percentages and mass concentration correctly, made dosing errors of up to three orders of magnitude in written clinical scenarios, and struggled with conversions between metric units. These findings are strong arguments for expressing drug concentrations as mass concentration and providing better drug administration teaching. High fidelity patient simulation was used to examine the influence of clearer ampoule labelling and intensive drug administration teaching. This allowed critical incidents to be reproduced realistically, clinical performances to be assessed, and outcome measures to be accurately recorded. Randomised controlled trials were conducted that demonstrated positive influences of both interventions for doctors and students. The difficulties that nurses encounter when preparing infusions of these drugs on critical care units were also studied and are reported. The findings presented should be sufficient to persuade regulatory authorities to remove ratios and percentages from ampoule labels – a straightforward, cheap, commonsense intervention. The lack of effective clinical error reporting systems and the extreme practical difficulties of conducting clinical trials in this field mean that a firm link between this intervention and patient outcome is unlikely ever to be made, but this should not be an excuse for maintaining the status quo.

Keywords: drug dose calculation
patient safety
drug infusions
medication error
drug error
Advisor: Sear, J
The fragile state: essays on luminosity, normativity and metaphilosophy

This dissertation is a set of three essays connected by the common theme of our epistemic fragility: the way in which our knowledge – of our own minds, of whether we are in violation of the epistemic and ethical norms, and of the philosophical truths themselves – is hostage to forces outside our control. The first essay, “Are We Luminous?”, is a recasting and defence of Timothy Williamson’s argument that there are no non-trivial conditions such that we are in a position to know we are in them whenever we are in them. Crucial to seeing why Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument succeeds, pace various critics, is recognising that the issue is largely an empirical one. It is in part because of the kind of creatures we are – specifically, creatures with coarse-grained doxastic dispositions – that nothing of interest, for us, is luminous. In the second essay, “What’s in a Norm?”, I argue that such an Anti-Cartesian view in turn demands that epistemologists and ethicists accept the ubiquity of normative luck, the phenomenon whereby agents fail to do what they ought because of non-culpable ignorance. Those who find such a view intolerable – many epistemic internalists and ethical subjectivists – have the option of cleaving to the Cartesian orthodoxy by endorsing an anti-realist metanormativity. The third essay, “The Archimedean Urge”, is a critical discussion of genealogical scepticism about philosophical judgment, including evolutionary debunking arguments and experimentally-motivated attacks. Although such genealogical scepticism often purports to stand outside philosophy – in the neutral terrains of science or common sense – it tacitly relies on various first-order epistemic judgments. The upshot is two-fold. First, genealogical scepticism risks self-defeat, impugning commitment to its own premises. Second, philosophers have at their disposal epistemological resources to fend off genealogical scepticism: namely, an epistemology that takes seriously the role that luck plays in the acquisition of philosophical knowledge.

Keywords: luminosity
knowledge
metaphilosophy
Cartesianism
luck
Advisor: Hawthorne, J
Williamson, T
APRA, 1968-1988

Peru has long had to contend with a lack of national and political integration. Yet its APRA party is the oldest mass-based reformist party in the region, and its mission has historically been to integrate the nation. The APRA, since its inception, aroused more political hostility than any other force in Peru, and consequently was repressed, even outlawed, for decades. Years of repression and clandestinity contributed to a lack of doctrinal clarity and undemocratic tendencies within the party, which were to affect its capacity to govern. The nature of the party, and the difficulty of its task, are the subject of this thesis.
Despite the existence of democratic institutions, large sectors of the population exist outside of formal legal, political, and economic systems; there is a gap between state and society. Successful democratic reform would incorporate these marginalized sectors. When the APRA came to power in 1985, it proposed to do so by focusing on the needs of the poorest. Expectations were high for the new government, in part because of its popular young leader, Alan Garcia, and in part because a decade of economic and social crisis had discredited both the military and the right as alternatives, resulting in unprecedented consensus for reform.
Once it attained power, the APRA managed, for the first two years, to maintain support that was unique to reformist efforts in Peru. A sudden shift in strategy to confrontational rhetoric and authoritarian tactics destroyed the fragile consensus necessary for democratic reform. The politics of reform became the politics of polarization: a "winner take all" style debate in which cooperation and compromise were impossible. The outcome was policy stagnation, a surge of reaction from extremes of the left and the right, and severe strain on the political system. The APRA party, rather than playing the role of the strong centre acted as a catalyst to the polarization process. In large part due to decades of sectarian and authoritarian strains that the party's 1980's renovation had not eliminated, it was virtually powerless in the face of increasingly erratic behaviour on the part of its leader.
This thesis examines the evolution of the APRA from the time of the 1968 military "revolution" through the party's first three years in power. It explores the formulation and initial success of the consensus it built, the reasons for its breakdown, and the fate of the poor during that process. The difficult context in which the party had to operate will also be addressed. Finally, it attempts to contribute to the understanding of the challenges faced by reformers in Peru in particular and more generally by developing democracies.
Reading between the lines: Arabic fiction in Israel after 1967

Arabic literature in Israel has evaded critical attention, or has been treated as an uncomplicated part of Palestinian national culture, on a quest for unification and an identity that was devastated in 1948. This dissertation complicates that narrative through close readings of short stories by five Arab citizens of Israel—Imil Habibi, Muhammad ‘Ali Taha, Muhammad Naffa‘, Hanna Ibrahim, and Zaki Darwish—between 1967 and 1983. Focusing on the relationship between geography and fiction, I suggest that literary constructions of “place” and “space” by these authors reveal a range of cultural negotiations that break down entrenched dyads: Palestinian yet Israeli; Palestinian on the one hand, Israeli on the other; spared exile, but suffering occupation. Instead, these writers evoke the hybrid and ambivalent experiences produced in the paradoxical spaces of Israeli-Palestinian life.
I develop an analytical framework that incorporates geographic and literary theory. I use the work of humanists such as Gaston Bachelard, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Edward Casey to suggest that literature mediates geography in a way that communicates belonging, alienation, or personal and collective meaning. The framework is bolstered with the work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, along with historical and political sources, to capture the contextual resonance of the texts.
After laying out these theoretical guidelines, I offer a historical account of Arabic literature in Israel and embark on four analytical chapters. Chapter Two explores Imil Habibi’s portrayals of anxiety around post-1967 Palestinian reunions. Chapter Three focuses on the themes of Muhammad ‘Ali Taha’s Palestinian collective identity in Israel. Chapter Four takes up the theme of “the land” in the works of Muhammad Naffa‘ and Hanna Ibrahim, in the context of 1970s land expropriations. Chapter Five explores a long story by Zaki Darwish and its depiction of the body’s phenomenological relation to the homeland.
Rather than portraying counter-narratives that suggest a binary of “Israeli” and “Palestinian” always at odds, these authors portray the spaces and characters in between. They disclose the anxieties of finding a sense of place in the context of a dispersed Palestinian nation, geopolitical uncertainty, social marginalization within the state, and the subtle geographies of a historic homeland that both is—and is not—one’s own.

Keywords: Palestine - in literature
place and space
Arabic literature
Arabic literature - Palestine - history and criticism
Imil Habibi
geographical perception in literature
Palestinian citizens of Israel
Advisor: Armbrust, W
Omri, M
The role of environmental principles in the decisions of the European Union courts and New South Wales Land and Environment Court

The thesis is a comparative legal analysis of environmental principles in environmental law. Environmental principles are novel concepts in environmental law and they have a high profile in environmental law scholarship. This high profile is promoted by two factors – the high hopes that environmental law scholars have for environmental principles, and the increasing prevalence of environmental principles in legal systems, particularly in case law. This thesis analyses the latter, mapping doctrinal developments involving environmental principles in two jurisdictions and court systems – the courts of the European Union and the New South Wales Land and Environment Court.
This doctrinal mapping has both narrow and broad aims. Narrowly, it identifies the legal roles in fact taken on by environmental principles within legal systems. Broadly, and building on this assessment, it responds to scholarly hopes that environmental principles (can) perform a range of significant roles in environmental law, including solving both environmental problems and legal problems in environmental law scholarship. These hopes are based on assumptions about environmental principles that have methodological weaknesses, including that environmental principles are universal and that they fit pre-existing models of ‘legal principles drawn from other areas of legal scholarship. The thesis exposes these methodological problems and concludes that environmental principles are not panaceas for pressing and perceived problems in environmental law. It does this by showing that the legal roles of environmental principles, which are significant in environmental law and its current evolution, can only be understood by closely analysing the legal cultures in which they feature. This is a conclusion for environmental law scholarship generally – while environmental issues and problems may be urgent and often global, legal analysis of the law that applies to those problems requires close engagement with legal systems and cultures, as they are and as they develop.

Keywords: environmental principles
environmental law methodology
environmental law
Advisor: Fisher, L