VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Application of room temperature ionic liquids as electrochemical solvents

This thesis is concerned with investigating the suitability of room temperature ionic liquids as solvents in which to perform voltammetry, and in characterising electrochemical processes within these media. After providing a general introduction and a background to the ionic liquid field, the results of six original studies are presented, dealing in turn with the following subjects:
• The oxidation of N,N,N',N'-tetraalkyl-para-phenylenediamine (TAPD) in five ionic liquids each incorporating the bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide anion.
• The reduction of oxygen in four ionic liquids based on quaternary alkyl -onium cations and heavily fluorinated anions in which the central ion is either nitrogen or phosphorous.
• The simulation of double potential step chronoamperometry at a disk electrode for the case of unequal diffusion coefficients and its experimental validation using a variety of aqueous, traditional nonaqueous and ionic liquid solutions.
• The rate of diffusion of N,N,N',N'-tetramethyl-para-phenylenediamme (TMPD), its radical cation and dication as a function of temperature and ionic liquid viscosity and four such solvents.
• The temperature dependence of the viscosity of five ionic liquids along with the translational and rotational diffusion coefficients of dissolved 2,2,6,6- tetramethylpiperidine-N-oxyl (TEMPO).
• The kinetics of the reaction between N,N-dimethyl-para-toluidine (DMT) and its electrogenerated radical cation in an ionic liquid solvent.
The experimental strategy common to each report involves the application of cyclic voltammetry and chronoamperometry at disk electrodes immersed in uL-samples of ionic liquid solution. The data so measured is then analysed via the appropriate theoretical equations or, as is commonly necessary, by comparison with simulated voltammetry. Combined, these chosen redox systems provide access to information on various aspects of electrochemistry within ionic liquids, specifically (a) mass transport (b) the nature of the electron transfer process and (c) the rate of follow-up homogeneous reactions. It is the overall finding herein that while both diffusion and heterogeneous electron transfer are significantly slowed relative to the same processes in a conventional organic solvent, the rate of subsequent homogeneous chemistry remains largely unchanged.

Advisor: Compton, R
Cymru am byth?

This thesis is an attempt to document and explain the manifest changes that have been taking place in Welsh identity since 1979, and the political consequences thereof.
It is presupposed that before any autonomist outbursts and other, related political changes take place in a sub-national region such as Wales, some sort of identive change has to occur. This 'identive change' is posited to take place in two stages - identity transformation followed by identity mobilisation. Central chapters deal with this process in two, non-exclusive, dimensions - institutions and individual agents. Alongside institution-building, certain policy areas are deemed to be of crucial importance in relation to the maintenance and dissemination of Welsh identity, namely education and broadcasting.
In addition, the relationship between endogenous and exogenous forces affecting Welsh identity is considered in the context of civil society, political praxis, the economy and the European Union.
These events are charted and analysed by means of primarily qualitative techniques which emphasise the importance of the positional and strategic confluence of individual 'gatekeepers', who are able to influence policy and, perhaps more importantly, affect the perception and reception of new ideologies and institutional exigencies.
Causal inference with instruments and other supplementary variables.

Instrumental variables have been used for a long time in the econometrics literature for the identification of the causal effect of one random variable, B, on another, C, in the presence of unobserved confounders. In the classical continuous linear model, the causal effect can be point identified by studying the regression of C on A and B on A, where A is the instrument. An instrument is an instance of a supplementary variable which is not of interest in itself but aids identification of causal effects. The method of instrumental variables is extended here to generalised linear models, for which only bounds on the causal effect can be computed. For the discrete instrumental variable model, bounds have been derived in the literature for the causal effect of B on C in terms of the joint distribution of (A,B,C). Using an approach based on convex polytopes, bounds are computed here in terms of the pairwise (A,B) and (A,C) distributions, in direct analogy to the classic use but without the linearity assumption. The bounding technique is also adapted to instrumental models with stronger and weaker assumptions. The computation produces constraints which can be used to invalidate the model. In the literature, constraints of this type are usually tested by checking whether the relative frequencies satisfy them. This is unsatisfactory from a statistical point of view as it ignores the sampling uncertainty of the data. Given the constraints for a model, a proper likelihood analysis is conducted to develop a significance test for the validity of the instrumental model and a bootstrap algorithm for computing confidence intervals for the causal effect. Applications are presented to illustrate the methods and the advantage of a rigorous statistical approach. The use of covariates and intermediate variables for improving the efficiency of causal estimators is also discussed.
The emotional voter: the impact of electoral campaigns and emotions on electoral behaviour in Britain

This thesis examines the role of emotions in mediating the effects electoral campaigns have on political behavior in Britain. I contend that electoral campaigns, aside from direct effects, can also have indirect effects, manifested through the impact of the emotions they induce. I theorize that, through manipulating the tone, framing and targeting of their messages, electoral campaigns induce specific emotions. Emotions are argued to have a direct effect on turnout (intentions) and a moderating effect on the impact partisanship, policy preference and leader evaluations have on vote choice.
Extending the Theory of Affective Intelligence, I hypothesize that individuals who are enthusiastic about their preferred party, or experience anxiety or anger in relation to an out-party, are more likely to turn out, and to cast their vote based on their partisanship. Contrarily, anxiety and anger experienced towards the preferred party are expected to decrease the importance of partisanship and increase the relevance of policy preferences and leader evaluations when voting. While anger experienced towards this party is also hypothesized to also decrease turnout, anxiety is not thought to affect it.
To test these propositions, I rely on a multi-methodological approach that uses both panel and experimental data. The panel data was collected in two waves prior to the 2010 British General Election. The laboratory experiment, designed to specifically test the emotion-induction capacity of campaigns, was conducted on British participants in the aftermath of the same elections. The results corroborate the theory. First, the analyses confirm that campaigns, not only can, but actually do induce emotions. Second, it is shown that emotions do influence political behavior as expected. Third, it is established that the effect of the campaign on turnout intentions is partly channeled through emotions. Finally, it is shown that campaign exposure indirectly affects vote choice by increasing the magnitude of the impact emotions have on the effect of partisanship on vote choice.
Aside from the literature on campaign effects in Britain, the thesis also contributes to the emerging literature pertaining to the role of emotions in politics. Moreover, it contributes to the field of voting behaviour by extending our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of vote choice.

Keywords: voting behaviour
emotions
turnout
electoral campigns
Advisor: Duch, R
Hobolt, S
Pricing in multiproduct firms

This thesis is a theoretical analysis of optimal pricing by firms when consumer demands are uncertain. The purpose is to extend the familiar literature on single-product nonlinear pricing in two directions: to cases where the firm is regulated and to the case where the firm produces several products. Chapter 1 embeds these problems into the general setting of models of asymmetric information and, as well as covering existing work on the pricing decisions of firms facing adverse selection, discusses other areas including repeated contracts, auctions, signalling and the uses of what is known as the 'first-order approach'.
Chapter 2 analyzes nonlinear pricing by a regulated single-product firm. As an alternative to requiring the firm to offer a given linear tariff two different types of regulation which allow nonlinear pricing are considered, namely, average revenue regulation and optional tariff regulation.
Chapter 3 introduces the topic of multiproduct pricing when consumers have differing tastes for the various goods. The important simplifying assumption is that consumers wish to buy either one unit of a good or none at all. There are three main results: if consumers' taste parameters are continuously distributed then the firm will not offer all goods to all consumers; in the symmetric two-good case it is shown that (subject to a kind of 'hazard rate' condition) the firm will offer the bundle of two goods at a discount compared with the charge for the two goods separately; and the pricing strategy when the number of goods becomes large is solved approximately.
Chapter 4 relaxes the assumption of unit demands and uses differential methods to analyze the multiproduct nonlinear pricing problem. In the symmetric case when taste parameters are continuously distributed the firm will choose to exclude some low-demand consumers from the market. It is shown that when parameters are independently distributed the firm will wish to introduce a degree of cross-dependence into its tariff. Sufficient conditions for a tariff to be optimal are derived and any tariff which satisfies these conditions necessarily will induce 'pure bundling', so that once a consumer decides to participate in the market at all she will choose to buy all goods. A class of cases is solved explicitly using these sufficient conditions. Since other solutions may be hard to solve analytically, a procedure for numerically generating solutions for the two-good case is described and two more solutions are described.
Law, government and authority in mid-Tudor England 1540-1570

This thesis investigates legal and political authority in mid-Tudor England, using the operation of the legal system in Oxfordshire and Berkshire in the period from 1540 to 1570 as a case study through which to give context and content to more abstract forms of contemporary political thought. It seeks to address the broad question: how did people experience the civil—as opposed to the criminal—legal system, and what does this tell us about their understanding of authority? In so doing, it aims to shed light on mid-Tudor attitudes towards legality, limited government and the rule of law.
The argument of the thesis is built up piece by piece. First, people in the Thames Valley engaged in a remarkable, and increasing, amount of litigation over the period in question, much of which was based on antecedent commercial transactions. Encountering the law, whether in its litigious or transactional forms, was thus a very common social experience. Second, despite their frequent interaction with the legal system, ordinary people perhaps knew less about the technical law than some historians have suggested. Third, even if technical legal knowledge was not widespread among the population, the complicated map of overlapping jurisdictions and rival legal institutions meant that ordinary people nonetheless cultivated a detailed mental map of their legal world. Boundaries mattered because jurisdiction and legal authority mattered. Fourth, partly because of their own lack of detailed technical knowledge, and partly because of the complicated legal landscape which they had to navigate, people sought out legal advice from professional advisers. Fifth, even if people frequently sought out professional legal advice, many people’s experience of the law (and of lawyers) was far more negative than their desire to seek out such advice might suggest. Seen in this light, the social utility of legal institutions was quite separate from their ability to provide an idealised standard of abstract justice.

Keywords: Sixteenth Century England
Law
Goverment
Authority
Advisor: Gunn, S
King, cities, and elites in Macedonia c. 360-168 BC

This thesis investigates the nature of the relationship between cities and king in the late Classical and Hellenistic Macedonian kingdom. It will consider the cities from two main perspectives: the city as a community, and the city as a settlement. Section 1 re-examines the evidence most commonly used to argue for the Macedonian cities gaining substantial autonomy in this period. It will be argued that this evidence has less to tell us about the political autonomy of the Macedonian cities than their 'social relations' with other Greek communities: Macedonian cities engaged in international exchanges which did not represent any challenge to the authority of the monarch, but which could also be used to represent the relationship between king and city as cooperative. Such latitude was balanced, however, by forceful expressions of royal dominance in other arenas. Section 2 considers the position of the cities within the royal economy, and examines how, as a result of the king's monopolisation of Macedonia's resources, and the fact that the Macedonian elite was more interested in advancing their position at court than acting as civic benefactors, the cities were left economically subordinated to the king. Section 3 uses the increasingly abundant archaeological evidence to consider how royal building programmes served to project royal ideology into the localities. Royal palaces, large-scale urban development, and fortifications created an experience of urban space in Macedonia which emphasised the roles of the monarch as guardian, benefactor, and unifying figure. The picture that emerges is of a kingdom of civic communities which were engaged in meaningful exchanges with their peers outside Macedonia, but which were living in large and impressive urban settlements which stood as monuments to the extent and ubiquity of royal authority. Late-Classical and Hellenistic Macedonia was a kingdom of poleis, but that kingdom was first and foremost a royal space.

Keywords: Greek history
king
ancient history
Macedonia
settlement
Advisor: Thonemann, P
Dissecting tunicamycin biosynthesis: a potent carbohydrate processing enzyme inhibitor

Tunicamycin nucleoside antibiotics were the first known to target the formation of peptidoglycan precursor lipid I in bacterial cell wall biosynthesis. They have also been used extensively as inhibitors of protein N-glycosylation in eukaryotes, blocking the biogenesis of early intermediate dolichyl-pyrophosphoryl-N-acetylglucosamine. Despite their unusual structures and useful biological properties, little is known about their biosynthesis. Elucidating the metabolic pathway of tunicamycins and gaining an understanding of the enzymes involved in key bond forming processes would not only be of great academic value in itself, it would also unlock a comprehensive toolbox of biosynthetic machinery for the production of tunicamycin analogues which have the potential to act as novel therapeutic antibiotics or as specific inhibitors of medicinally important NDP-dependent glycosyltransferases.
I – Cloning the tunicamycin biosynthetic gene cluster. We report identification of the tunicamycin biosynthetic genes in Streptomyces chartreusis following genome sequencing and a chemically-guided strategy for in silico genome mining that allowed rapid identification and unification of an operon fractured across contigs. Heterologous expression established a likely minimal gene set necessary for antibiotic production, from which a detailed metabolic pathway for tunicamycin biosynthesis is proposed.
II – Natural product isolation and degradation. We have developed efficient methods for the isolation of tunicamycins from liquid culture in preparative quantities. A subsequent relay synthesis furnished advanced biosynthetic intermediates for use as precursors in the production of tunicamycin analogues and as substrates for the in vitro characterisation of individual Tun enzymes.
III – Functional characterisation of tun gene products. Individual tun gene products were over-expressed and purified from recombinant E. coli hosts, allowing in vitro functional studies to take place. An NMR assay of biosynthetic enzyme TunF showed it acted as a UDP-GlcNAc-4-epimerase. Putative glycosyltransferase TunD showed hydrolytic activity towards substrate UDP-GlcNAc but failed to accept to the expected natural acceptor substrate, providing unexpected insights into the ordering of biosynthetic events in the tunicamycin pathway. Initial studies into the over-expression of the putative sugar N-deacetylase TunE were also described.
IV – Towards synthesis of tunicamycin fragments. Investigations into a novel synthesis of D-galactosamine – a structural motif within tunicamycin – led to the unexpected observation of inverted regioselectivity upon RhII-catalysed C-H insertion of a D-mannose-derived sulfamate. This was the first example of N-insertion at the beta- rather than gamma-C-H based on conformation alone and warranted further investigation. The X-ray structure of a key sulfamate precursor offered valuable insights as to the source of this unique selectivity.

Keywords: glycosyltransferase
epimerase
Streptomyces
biosynthesis
Tunicamycin
antibiotic
natural product
Advisor: Davis, B
The origin and development of the Pleistocene LSA in Northwest Africa: A case study from Grotte des Pigeons (Taforalt), Morocco

This thesis examines variation within the microlith industries of the Later Stone Age (LSA) of Northwest Africa, around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) until the onset of the Holocene, between &Tilde;25 - 11.5 ka. The traditionally held view is that whilst there is variation amongst the lithic assemblages, this can all be accommodated by a single definable industry, known as the Iberomaurusian. This thesis indicates an alternative scenario.
Based on the typo-technological analysis of 16,689 lithic artefacts recovered from recent excavations at the site of Grotte des Pigeons (Taforalt, Morocco) and the re-analysis of published data using the multivariate statistical approach of correspondence analysis (CA), this thesis shows that there was much greater variation than previously proposed within the Pleistocene LSA.
This thesis indicates that the LSA industries can be sub-divided into four chronologically distinct variants, an Initial LSA time-coincident with the first appearance of microlithic technology from &Tilde;25 ka and lasting up until Heinrich event 2, a succeeding Early LSA at &Tilde;22 ka that continued until Heinrich event 1, a Middle LSA marking a shift in technologies around this event at &Tilde;16 ka, and an Upper LSA occurring with the climatic amelioration of the Bølling-Allørod at &Tilde;14.5 ka.
The proposed chronological model provides a new framework for categorising variation within the LSA, which is a necessary pre-requisite for potential future research addressing wider anthropological and archaeological issues, such as reasons for shifts in subsistence and settlement.

Keywords: Later Stone Age
Maghreb
Middle East
Iberomaurusian
North Africa
Epipalaeolithic
Advisor: Barton, N
Double object constructions and 'bill' verbs in English

This thesis empirically tests the two predominant views concerning which object in a DOC is the ‘true’ one by applying Hudson’s (1992) eleven objecthood diagnostics to verbs that pattern like ‘bill’ in a corpus search and a grammatical acceptability survey. Only two tests showed statistically significant results: passivization and extraction. Passivization indicated that the first positional object (O1) behaves most like the monotransitive object (O0). Extraction indicated that, by a small margin, the second positional object (O2) behaves more like O0. For most of Hudson’s objecthood tests, however, there was no clear patterning of O0 with either the first or second object for ‘bill’ verbs. This calls into question whether it is possible to determine which of the objects in a DOC is the ‘true’ object by employing such diagnostics, and has significant implications for notions of objecthood, especially within Lexical Functional Grammar. The study indicates that a substantial rethink is needed with regards to traditional views about objecthood.

Keywords: mainstream generative syntax
double object constructions
objecthood
lexical functional grammar
objects
syntax
Advisor: Dalrymple, M
The nouveau roman in Britain, 1957-73

This thesis considers the early dissemination and critical/cultural/literary reception of the nouveau roman in Britain, roughly between the years 1957–73. The nouveau roman is considered in its capacity as an avant-garde grouping of writers and texts coming from France, and as articulated at the interface of the novel and its theoretical metalanguage; the main nouveaux romanciers considered are Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the nouveau roman's status as nouveau was presented in Britain in the period in question. One of the major arguments of the thesis is thus: that the question of the nouveauté of the nouveau roman became a nodal point for negotiations over the legacy of modernism, and over the meaning of the 'contemporary' in literature in the postwar period.
Part I charts the emergence of the nouveau roman in Britain. It looks first at the origins and the methods of the nouveau roman's initial dissemination, drawing on a range of previously undocumented archival sources. The main focus here is Calder & Boyars – the nouveau roman's main British publisher – and in particular the notions of publics that framed its activities involving the nouveau roman. Subsequently, the nouveau roman's British reception is considered with reference to an extensive survey of periodicals and books.
Part II looks at the literary impact of the nouveau roman. First, a range of novels is considered as bridging the critical and the literary response in Britain to the nouveau roman. The authors considered are: Pamela Hansford Johnson, J. I. M. Stewart, Muriel Spark, John Fowles, J. B. Priestley, William Cooper, Rayner Heppenstall, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Then, other novels are considered more directly within the domain of the nouveau roman, seen against the background of Robbe-Grillet's approach to objects and materiality, and with reference to notions of 'project-work' in Butor's novels. Novels are considered by: Brian W. Aldiss, Muriel Spark, Denis Williams, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, and Alan Sheridan. Finally, the nouveau roman is looked at in relation to an emergent avant-garde in the British novel. Here, the nouveau roman is seen as providing terms with which British writing from the period in question was able to present itself as avant-garde beyond the manifestations of individual works. The conclusion briefly surveys more peripheral and non-novelistic British responses to the nouveau roman, considering the way in which they inscribe the nouveau roman as 'contemporary'. The thesis turns finally to the legacy of the nouveau roman for the British novel of the present day.

Keywords: nouveau roman
postwar British literature
Advisor: Marcus, L