VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A comparative study of reliance in the unilateral breaking-off of contractual negotiations

This thesis explores the theoretical basis of precontractual liability for the unilateral breaking-off of negotiations, by undertaking a comparative study between three selected jurisdictions (Germany, France and Chile). It defines a 'paradigm case' and focuses on it in order to find the theoretical basis of this liability. Traditionally, precontractual liability for breaking off negotiations has been founded upon or at least linked with the notion of good faith. This thesis, however, argues that in the selected jurisdictions the true basis of this liability is the notion of 'reliance' and distinguishes two dimensions of reliance (referring to them as 'trust-based' and 'expectation-based'). It analyses the relationship between these dimensions arguing that in the selected jurisdictions the trust-dimension merges with the general principle of good faith and that the expectation-dimension emanates from the trust-dimension. This thesis argues that this innovative approach to the theoretical analysis of the foundation of this liability could have important practical consequences in jurisdictions which do not embrace a general principle of good faith. It focuses on English law, as a contrasting jurisdiction to the selected jurisdictions, in that it rejects a general principle of good faith and, especially, the notion of a duty to negotiate in good faith, which is generally considered to lead necessarily to the rejection of a general principle of precontractual liability. This thesis demonstrates that while English law can provide protection for certain cases of precontractual liability, it currently does not protect the paradigm case. It argues that if the analysis is shifted from good faith to the notion of reliance, English law could develop one or more of its particular solutions in order to protect the paradigm case, if it desired to do so, and explores how such a development could be implemented without establishing a general principle of precontractual liability.

Keywords: comparative law
negotiations
reliance
Advisor: Cartwright, J
Electronic delocalisation in linear and cyclic porphyrin oligomers

This thesis presents a combined experimental and computational evaluation of the physical-organic properties of butadiyne-linked porphyrin oligomers. The principal result from the thesis is the synthesis and characterisation of the largest aromatic and antiaromatic systems to date, in the form of an oxidised [6]-porphyrin nanoring, with diameter 2.4 nm. This large electronically coherent system provides insight into the connection between aromatic ring currents and persistent currents in metal and semiconductor mesoscopic rings.
Chapter 1 briefly reviews the concepts used in the remainder of the thesis, with a particular focus on aromaticity.
In Chapter 2, the barrier to inter-porphyrin torsional rotation in a butadiyne-linked porphyrin dimer is determined computationally and experimentally to be 3 kJ mol−1. The barrier height is closely related to the resonance delocalisation energy between the porphyrin subunits.
In Chapter 3 we show that by oxidising a butadiyne-linked [6]-porphyrin nanoring to its 4+ and 6+ oxidation states, the nanoring becomes antiaromatic and aromatic respectively. In contrast, the neutral oxidation state exhibits only local aromaticity for the six porphyrin units. The 12+ cation can also be generated, and exhibits local antiaromaticity for each porphyrin unit. The characterisation of (anti)aromaticity employs NMR and computational techniques.
In Chapter 4, the properties of cation radicals of linear and cyclic porphyrin oligomers are explored. Cations generated by spectroelectrochemistry are measured by optical spectroscopies, and chemically generated radical monocations are examined by cw/pulsed EPR spectroscopies. EPR and optical spectroscopies agree that the dimer monocation radical is fully delocalised, in Robin-Day Class III, whereas the monocations of longer oligomers are localised over 2–3 porphyrin units (Class II).
In Chapter 5, photophysical and computational investigations into excited state aromaticity in porphyrin nanorings are presented. The computational results suggest the presence of aromaticity in the triplet excited states, but experiment fails to convincingly demonstrate the effect.
Computational results in Chapter 6 show that a butadiyne linked [6]-porphyrin nanoring in which one butadiyne (C&#

Keywords: torsion
nanoring
density functional theory
dft
aromaticity
porphyrin
coherence
ring current
butadiyne
physical organic
nmr
quantum interference
antiaromaticity
Advisor: Anderson, H
Complexity in Rhodobacter sphaeroides chemotaxis

Perceiving and responding to the environment is key to survival. Using the prokaryotic equivalent of a nervous system – the chemotaxis system – bacteria sense chemical stimuli and respond by adjusting their movement accordingly.
In chemotactic bacteria, such as the well-studied E. coli, environmental nutrient sensing is achieved through a membrane embedded protein array that specifically clusters at the cell poles. Signalling to the motor is performed by activation of the CheA kinase, which phosphorylates CheY and CheB. CheY–P tunes the activity of the flagellar motor while CheB–P, together with CheR is involved in adaptation to the stimulus. In E. coli, a dedicated phosphatase terminates the signal.
Most bacterial species however, have a much more complex chemotaxis network. Rhodobacter sphaeroides, a model organism for complex chemotaxis systems, has one membrane-embedded chemosensory array and one cytoplasmic chemosensory array, plus several homologs of the E. coli chemotaxis proteins. Signals from both arrays are integrated to control the rotation of a single start-stop flagellar motor.
The phosphorelay network has been studied extensively through in vitro phosphotransfer while in vivo studies have established the components of each array and the requirements for formation. Mathematical modelling has also contributed towards inferring connectivities within the signalling network.
Starting by constructing a two-hybrid-based interaction network focused on the components of the cytoplasmic chemosensory array, this thesis further addresses its associated adaptation network through a series of in vivo techniques.
The swimming behaviour of series of deletion mutants involving the adaptation network of R. sphaeroides is characterised under steady state conditions as well as upon chemotactic stimulation. New connectivities within the R. sphaeroides chemotaxis network are inferred from analysing these data together with results from in vivo photoactivation localisation microscopy of CheB2.
The experimental results are used to propose a new model for chemotaxis in R. sphaeroides.

Keywords: PALM
rhodobacter sphaeroides
bacterial two-hybrid
free swimming
bacterial chemotaxis
complex chemotaxis
BACTH
chemotaxis
tethered cell
Advisor: Armitage, J
Cultural and contextual variations in ideal affect

Most affect research has focused on "actual affect", with relatively limited consideration given to "ideal affect", that is the states that people value and would ideally like to feel (Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006). The present research investigated sources of variation in ideal affect, particularly focusing on cultural and context-dependent factors that shape affective preferences. Studies 1 and 2 focused on cultural variations in ideal affect, whereas Studies 3, 4 and 5 focused on sources of variation in context-dependent ideal affect. In Studies 1 and 2, I investigated affective preferences in Brazil, Greece Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Zambia. Results demonstrated an effect of cultural variables on ideal affect. Specifically, ideal high arousal positive (HAP) states were predicted by independent self-construal and influence goals, consistent with previous research. Extending previous work, results also found that power distance and beliefs about emotional expression independently predicted ideal HAP. Ideal low arousal positive affect (LAP) was predicted by interdependent self-construal in line with prior findings. Uncertainty avoidance was also an independent predictor of ideal LAP. In investigating context-dependent ideal affect, I focused on assessing whether an influence target's characteristics in an interpersonal persuasion context would affect ideal affect. In Study 3, results demonstrated that knowledge of an influence target’s motivational orientation had an effect on preferences for LAP. However, this effect was not replicated in Studies 4 or 5. Overall, these 5 studies found some support for previous factors that have been identified in shaping ideal affect, while identifying additional sources of cultural variation and pointing to the possibility that another person may influence affective preferences in an interpersonal situation.

Advisor: Parkinson, B
Methods for assessing the costs of transfusion management strategies in cardiac surgery

A blood transfusion is one of the most common hospital procedures, yet there is a lack of reliable information on the costs of administering blood. This thesis aims to fill this information gap, and considers the impact on total costs of alternative transfusion management strategies in the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom. A high user of blood transfusion, cardiac surgery, acts as a clinical exemplar.
Comprehensive estimates of the costs of administering blood are first produced. The costs of administering blood add substantially to the costs of the blood products themselves, costs for red blood cells are 40% higher when the costs of administration are added to red blood cell costs.
These cost estimates were used to more accurately cost blood products transfused (compared to the costs of blood products only) in two economic evaluations assessing firstly, the cost-effectiveness of a restrictive versus a liberal red blood cell transfusion threshold after cardiac surgery, and secondly, the cost-effectiveness of introducing bedside tests of haemostatic function in cardiac surgery. Both economic evaluations showed little difference in costs or outcomes between the groups and uncertainty around the cost-effectiveness results. While a restrictive threshold reduces costs associated with transfusion compared to a liberal threshold, there is no evidence based on detailed and comprehensive costings, to suggest that a restrictive threshold saves the NHS money overall.
Reliable resource use data are vital for economic evaluations, and a subgroup of patients in both economic evaluations enabled resource use data collected from alternative sources to be compared. There was strong agreement between primary (clinical trial) data and routine datasets for data available from both sources, however, primary data captured post-operative complications more comprehensively than routine datasets.
This thesis provides hospital managers and health economists with accurate information on the costs of administering blood for budget impact assessments and economic evaluations.

Keywords: Healthcare costs
Cardiac surgery
Economic evaluation
Health economics
Blood transfusion
Advisor: Wordsworth, S
Stanworth, S
Investigation of vibrating-hydrogen based ultrashort molecular phase modulator

This thesis investigates the coherent phase modulation of ultrashort pulses using vibrating hydrogen as a molecular medium.
Self-phase modulation in a gas-filled hollow core capillary allows the generation of highpower few-cycle pulses in the NIR. Such pulses can be used to drive high harmonic generation (HHG) to deliver attosecond duration pulses in the extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray spectral region. While reaching unrivalled pulse durations (down to 67 as), these sources have characteristically low efficiencies. The pump-probe spectroscopy community would greatly benefit from brighter short wavelength sources with sub-5 fs duration.
In this work I apply Amplified RamaN Impulsive Excitation for Molecular Phase Modulation (ARNIEMPM), a multiple pulse scheme, to coherently prepare vibrating hydrogen molecules and exploit them for the phase modulation of ultrashort pulses. The preparation of the molecular motion is performed via impulsive stimulated Raman scattering and transient stimulated Raman scattering. The generated in-phase motion of molecules creates an oscillating optical polarizability in the medium which can be exploited by a probe pulse propagating through it, acting as a 125THz frequency phase modulator, the fastest among molecular media. This technique has the potential to provide bright, isolated subfemtosecond duration ultra-violet (UV) pulses via spectral broadening of broadband pulses. I experimentally investigate the preparation of the molecular motion against multiple experimental parameters. I then demonstrate the molecular phase modulation of ultrashort broadband probes in the near-infrared (NIR) and UV via a degenerate interferometric scheme. I used a waveguide to increase the interaction length of the process and reduce the energy requirements for the medium preparation. This allowed the use of a single laser system to generate all the required pulses, which are largely diverse in terms of wavelength, duration and power.
Additionally, I present a novel technique named Attosecond Resolved Interferometric Electric-field Sampling (ARIES), which is capable of directly measuring the waveform of arbitrary pulses with attosecond resolution. This technique is based on high-harmonic generation (HHG) acting as a temporal gate for an applied secondary field, and tracking its electric field amplitude as a shift in the HHG cut-off frequency. I present experimental demonstration of a pulse waveform measurement by accurately retrieving a know inserted variation in dispersion and carrier-envelope-phase. A theoretical calculation of the technique applicability over a wide spectral range is also presented.

Advisor: Walmsley, I
Wyatt, A
Between politics and preaching: the Tunisian al-Nahda movement in the city of Sousse, 1973-2014

Research on Islamist movements in the Middle East and North Africa has tended to focus on leaders and ideologues to explain transformation over time. This thesis, however, is a political ethnography of the Tunisian al-Nahda movement that focuses on one city to present a fine-grained micro-study of the shifting trajectories of an Islamist organisation. The main original finding is that the relationship between politics and preaching in the practice of Islamism can be conflicting and irreconcilable, rather than cohesive and interdependent. By privileging the experiences of non-elite activists, this thesis also identifies informal networks, an individual reimagining of the Islamist project, and peripheral activism as explaining resilience under repression. It argues that al-Nahda has undergone strategic and intellectual adaptations, which have incurred costs, culminating in a decision in 2016 to separate the political party from social, religious, and cultural work.
This thesis is based on fourteen months of fieldwork among current and former al-Nahda activists in the city of Sousse. It addresses the origins of the movement in Sousse to ask why the movement first emerged in the city and what mechanisms of mobilisation were deployed. It rethinks the politicisation of the movement in the 1980s to challenge previous assumptions that suggested the movement grew away from its preaching origins. The thesis addresses the effect of two decades of repression, excavating the prison experience and the period of social exclusion which followed and which disaggregated the movement into its constituent parts. It explains why the movement fragmented after 2011 even as activists rebuilt and redefined their project. In conclusion, the thesis accounts for the tension between politics and preaching within the movement, interrogates the party-movement separation of 2016, and asks what lessons similar Islamist experiences in the region might offer al-Nahda.

Keywords: Tunisia
Islamism
Al-Nahda
Advisor: Willis, M
Near-field microwave addressing of trapped-ion qubits for scalable quantum computation

This thesis reports high-fidelity near-field spatial microwave addressing of long-lived 43Ca+ "atomic clock" qubits performed in a two-zone single-layer surface-electrode ion trap. Addressing is implemented by using two of the trap's integrated microwave electrodes, one in each zone, to drive single-qubit rotations in the zone we choose to address whilst interferometrically cancelling the microwave field at the neighbour (non-addressed) zone. Using this field-nulling scheme, we measure a Rabi frequency ratio between addressed and non-addressed zones of up to 1400, from which we calculate an addressing error (or a spin-flip probability on the qubit transition) of 1e-6. Off-resonant excitation out of the qubit state is a more significant source of error in this experiment, but we also demonstrate polarisation control of the microwave field at an error level of 2e-5, which, if combined with individual-ion addressing, would be sufficient to suppress off-resonant excitation errors to the 1e-9 level.
Further, this thesis presents preliminary results obtained with a micron-scale coupled-microstrip differential antenna probe that can be scanned over an ion-trap chip to map microwave magnetic near fields. The probe is designed to enable the measurement of fields at tens of microns above electrode surfaces and to act as an effective characterisation tool, speeding up design-fabrication-characterisation cycles in the production of new prototype microwave ion-trap chips.
Finally, a new multi-layer design for an ion-trap chip which displays, in simulations, a 100-fold improvement in addressing performance, is presented. The chip electrode structure is designed to use the cancelling effect of microwave return currents to produce Rabi frequency ratios of order 1000 between trap zones using a single microwave electrode (i.e. without the need for nulling fields). If realised, this chip could be used to drive individually addressed single-qubit operations on arrays of memory qubits in parallel and with high fidelity.

Keywords: trapped-ion quantum computing
microwave-driven quantum logic
Advisor: Steane, A
Technology, labor, and mediation in Egyptian film production

This thesis examines the way in which imponderable problems are mediated in the everyday work of commercial film production in Egypt. By 'imponderable problem', I mean a working problem encountered in an extended production process whereby the individual worker, in the present, cannot account for all courses of action leading onto the process’s expected outcome. I argue that workers in film production can never entirely solve this kind of problem: they 'mediate' it. They rely on various assumptions and material mediators to break this overall imponderability into a series of contingent tasks, thereby modifying the expected outcome. I situate this mediation in the wider context of the contemporary Egyptian film industry, with its interpersonal mode of interaction, its labor hierarchy, its socio-technical process of production, and its technological implements. This thesis analyzes three imponderable problems in particular: how to coordinate a shooting day; how to visualize the film; and how to anticipate the audience's composition and reaction.
The overall argument is situated within media anthropology, where media production tends to be examined as a 'social' phenomenon inscribed on an invisible technological substratum, without exploring the material implications of everyday technological objects in a temporally extended process of production. This literature, moreover, tends to be inattentive to the gap between the way in which the film unfolds and the way in which social agents involved in its making anticipate this unfolding. This thesis, by contrast, considers how Egyptian filmmakers try to anticipate the future of their activity. In addition to being an ethnographic account of the Egyptian film industry, this thesis contributes to the anthropological literature on media production by exploring how workers concretely mediate between the present and the near-/far-future.

Keywords: Labor
Technology
Film industry
Uncertainty
Egypt
Cinema
Advisor: Banks, M
Armbrust, W
Modularity of networks

Modularity is a quality function on partitions of a network which may be used to identify highly clustered components. It is commonly used to analyse large real networks, for example in social networks and protein discovery to find communities and related proteins respectively. Given a graph G, the modularity of a partition of the vertex set measures the extent to which edge density is higher within parts than between parts, and the maximum modularity q&ast;(G) of G (where 0 ≤ q&ast;(G) &LT; 1) is the maximum modularity of a partition of V(G). In essence, modularity allows us to feed in large sets of data, and output a vertex partition with an associated score.
Knowledge of the maximum modularity of random graphs is important to determine the statistical significance of the maximum modularity found on a real network. This thesis establishes numerical bounds on the likely maximum modularity for random regular graphs. The modularity of a random cubic network is shown to be whp in the interval (0.66, 0.81). This result has practical applications. It establishes that a large cubic network with modularity greater than 0.81 has a statistically significant clustering structure.
The evolution of the maximum modularity of Erdös-Rényi random graphs as the edge probability increases is investigated. Three different phases of the likely maximum modularity are found. For np=1+o(1) the maximum modularity is 1 + o(1) whp and for np → ∞ the maximum modularity is o(1) whp. For np = c with c &GT; 1 a constant, functions are constructed with 0 &LT; a(c) &LT; b(c) &LT; 1 and b(c) → 0 as c → ∞ such that whp the maximum modularity is bounded between these functions. Concentration of the maximum modularity about its expectation and structural properties of any optimal partition are also established.
Finding the maximum modularity of graph classes helps us understand the behaviour of the modularity function. We study trees, lattices and related graphs. The maximum modularity of a large k-ary tree was shown to be near 1 by Bagrow 2012. This was extended to trees with maximal degree o(n1/5) in Montgolfier et al. 2011. This thesis further extends the result to any tree with maximal degree o(n). Indeed it is shown that the maximum modularity will tend to 1 for any graph where the product of the treewidth and the maximal degree is much less than the number of edges. This shows random planar graphs typically have modularity 1 + o(1).
Lower bounds were given in Guimerà et al. 2004 for the maximum modularity of complete sections of the integer lattice and for lattices with extra axis aligned edges included. The maximum modularity of any subgraph of this lattice is shown to be at least the same order of magnitude in the number of edges. This generalises to any graph which can be embedded in Euclidean space such that no edge is too long and no two vertices fall too close together.

Advisor: McDiarmid, C