VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Beyond cognitive failure: examining consumers’ inaction in debt management

This thesis examines consumers’ inaction in debt management. It departs from the observation that the vast majority of consumers with problem debt in the UK, but also elsewhere, does not resolve their situation and lives with such debts on a prolonged basis. This empirical social problem has been left unaddressed by the existing literature. Also policy has thus far failed to effectively address a central fact: unpaid debt continues to grow.

This thesis aims to fill a “theory gap” in consumer behavior research. The typical approach in this field to consumers’ financial decision making relies on a single core assumption: that the problem of over-indebtedness is the result of individual cognitive failure, leading to the idea that consumers fail to pay their debts because they do not know enough or do not think rationally enough to manage their money.

In “history of science” terms, anomalies to this prevailing theory have built to the point that a paradigm shift is in order. I posit that the blinders typical of what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science” have kept consumer behavior research from asking obvious questions about the problem under study. Little consideration has been given to individual conditions and problematic relationships between debtors and their creditors that together form a crippling system in which inaction in debt management occurs.

Using mixed methods, I offer a grounded-theory approach that helps to better grasp the structural elements in inaction in debt management. This is followed by hypothesis testing using binary logistic regression analysis. On this empirical basis, I build an argument that identifies outstanding accounts with systems that consumers interact with by necessity (and the inefficiencies therein) as a major component of inaction. I label this “system debt”, a term that is illustrative of the structural elements that limit the type of consumer choices that are generally assumed under CB’s cognitive paradigm. In-depth interviews with debtors further illustrate how these presumed choices are not realistic given consumers’ circumstances. The findings illustrate the importance of research being grounded in consumers’ lived experiences.

Advisor: Scott, L
Tufano, P
On the origin, progression, and evolution of ovarian cancer

High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is amongst the deadliest of cancers. Despite decades of research on this disease, the exact mechanisms through which this carcinoma initiates, spreads, and relapses remain unclear. I believe the main reason behind this discrepancy between importance and available knowledge roots in the fact that currently available genomics methods are not sensitive enough for accurate study of limited amount of clinical materials.
To address this issue, I optimised a novel library preparation protocol called DigiPico to generate reliable next generation sequencing data from picogram quantities of DNA that can be obtained from 10-20 human cells. Moreover, I implemented DigiTitan and MutLX analysis algorithms to identify clone-specific copy number alterations and small nucleotide variations from DigiPico data. Validating MutLX algorithm using experimental and simulated data I demonstrated that DigiPico/MutLX is a uniquely sensitive, accurate, and reliable method for analysis of micro-heterogeneity in solid tumours.
Next, using DigiPico, I conducted the first accurate case study of genetic micro-heterogeneity on a collection of pre-chemotherapy tumour islets and post-chemotherapy microscopic residual disease (MRD) samples from one HGSOC patient. Analysing the results using DigiTitan and MutLX, firstly, I introduced tumour heterogeneity and genetic diversity as a hallmark of HGSOC. Secondly, based on new observations from this study, I challenged a pre-existing notion that mutations in TP53 gene are responsible for the initiation of HGSOC. I proposed that mutations in the regulatory regions that adversely affect the DNA repair machinery which can lead to subsequent large-scale genomic alterations precede the loss of TP53 function in the tumorigenesis pathway of HGSOC. Thirdly, comparing the somatic mutation load of pre-chemotherapy, MRD and recurrent tumours, I demonstrated that MRD harbours the least number of somatic mutations. Thereby, I hypothesized that MRD is likely to be composed of stem cell-like tumour cells that have survived the chemotherapy therefore suggesting that MRD is likely be the recurrence precursor. Lastly, I propose experimental approaches that are required to effectively validate or nullify these hypotheses.

Keywords: Chemotherapy resistance
Tumour Evolution
Microscopic residual disease
Genetic Micro-heterogeneity
Ovarian Cancer
Advisor: Ahmed, A
Improving the prevention and outcomes of severe complications of pregnancy through international collaborative and comparative studies

Background: International collaborations have been set up to complete combined and comparative studies to improve the evidence to support the prevention and management of severe and rare complications of pregnancy. The utility of such collaborative studies has yet to be tested. This DPhil aims to explore the utility of multinational studies of severe and rare complications of pregnancy.
Methods: Secondary analysis and primary data collection through an international collaboration (INOSS) were used to address four clinical research areas; extreme maternal obesity, massive transfusion in major obstetric haemorrhage, abnormally invasive placenta and anaphylaxis in pregnancy.
Results: A pooled analysis of two national studies of extreme maternal obesity enabled the examination of a rare exposure group (BMI ≥60 kg/m2). Nevertheless, the combination of two national studies did not allow the examination of the most uncommon outcomes, such as perinatal death or stillbirth. A comparison of five population-based studies of massive transfusion in obstetric haemorrhage showed that haemostatic features varied according to aetiology. It also demonstrated the large variation in blood products used between countries. A binational study on abnormally invasive placenta enabled the examination of the association between outcomes and an uncommon management in a rare complication of pregnancy. A prospective international study of a very rare complication of pregnancy, anaphylaxis, overcame the limitations of comparability and provided a more precise estimate of the causal agents and outcomes associated with this complication.
Discussion: Multinational studies are feasible and can be used to address a multitude of clinical questions. They provide the comparison of management across nations, which empowers countries to benchmark their clinical care against that of other countries. The pooling of data creates a unique examination of uncommon modalities of management and a rare exposure group. Prospective studies overcome comparability issues and provide a more robust pooled analysis.

Keywords: maternal obesity
abnormally invasive placenta
international comparison
postpartum haemorrhage
anaphylaxis
Advisor: Kurinczuk, J
Knight, M
The role of institutional investors in financing sustainable energy

In the COP 21 Paris Agreement, Parties agreed to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C and to make finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development. The scale of investment needed in sustainable energy for this transformation is so large that it will, inevitably, have to rely in large part on mobilising private capital. A key potential source is the capital controlled by institutional investors. This thesis focuses on examining and improving the understanding of the role of institutional investors in financing sustainable energy, the barriers to investment, and how they may be surmounted.
One of the central contributions is the articulation of an original methodology and framework to understand and monitor what policy settings, financing instruments, risk mitigants and transaction enablers might be most effective and appropriate with regards to scaling up institutional allocations through a variety of principal investment channels. The thesis also examines the role of the debt capital markets, including the emergence of the ‘green bond’ market. I argue that if there is concerted attention by policy makers and market participants, the bond markets can be relied on as a critical foundation for mobilising institutional investors and raising part of the debt financing that will be needed for the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Underpinning the analysis is an empirical base of 110 examples of institutional investment in sustainable energy projects. It is hoped that this framework, along with the analysis, conclusions and policy recommendations, can assist in creating the fundamental settings needed to study how to scale up and mobilise greatly needed flows of this type of investment.

Keywords: Sustainable energy
Institutional investors
Advisor: Clark, G
Diagram and dimension: visualising time in the drawings of Opicinus de Canistris (1296-c. 1352)

This thesis focuses on the representation of time within the diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris, a cleric working in the scriptorium of the Avignon Papacy from 1329, who created a collection of fifty-two large, highly complex, unbound drawings (BAV, MS Pal. Lat. 1993). The intimidating volume and variety of information which each image displays, amalgamating amongst other elements maps, calendars, astrological tables and theological hierarchies, led their twentieth-century interpreters to conclude that Opicinus was insane. This has been to the detriment of a properly historicised interpretation of his drawings. The dissertation shows that the calendrical and cartographic features of these pictures are neither ornamental nor vague allegories of temporality and geography, but methodically constructed and meticulously measured instruments. By focusing on the calendars of the Palatinus, it demonstrates how Opicinus incorporated and creatively configured new sources, temporal and theological, derived principally from the Avignon papal court, into representations of time in order to create unique cosmologies which sought to visualise, and so better to comprehend, the metaphysical themes of time, space and God.
In addition to elucidating a selection of Opicinus’s neglected drawings, they are contextualised here in order to illustrate their value to the study of medieval visual culture. Their comparison to other sources made in Avignon shows how a particular type of diagram, which used technological renderings of time and space for an essentially theological purpose, was characteristic of the Avignon court. This indicates that Opicinus’s drawings, in their form and content, were made in response to a discussion at the court concerning the shape of the cosmos and the place of the Church within it. Their interpretation also contributes to larger questions concerning the changing perception of time and function of diagrams in the fourteenth century, whilst demonstrating how the history of technology can inform the study of visual culture.

Keywords: historical horology
Avignon papacy
medieval diagrams
Opicinus de Canistris
calendars
medieval visual culture
Advisor: Rosser, G
Landscape, imperialism, and individualism in post-war American poetry: opposition and 'the greater romantic lyric'

This thesis discusses how a genre of poem I am calling the ‘greater Romantic lyric’, after the critic M.H. Abrams—a descriptive, meditative poem centring on the poet’s interaction with the landscape—becomes associated with ideas central to American politics. Freedom, individualism, and indeed, the landscape itself, terms which are important to the genre’s history, are also central to an American identity that becomes troubling in the period following World War Two. I argue that this closeness between national and generic identity demanded a response from poets who opposed the political direction of their nation.
My thesis reveals the intersections of the critique of an American ideology of individualism—which critics often locate in classic works of American literature—with the post-war landscape poem. What is attempted is not a discussion of the rights or wrongs of claims about the ideological character of certain works of American literature. Rather, the thesis considers the different forms in which poets apprehended the political complicities of their literary inheritance. In the post-war period, as U.S. power became increasingly hegemonic and yet arguably justified its power with a rhetoric of individual freedom, it became essential for poets to reckon with the contradictions in this rhetoric; this task changed many poets’ self-understanding, and their approach to their own influences. The thesis claims that poets have prefigured, responded to, and even challenged criticisms of poetic subjectivity, and shows how they have employed the resources of the greater Romantic lyric for these purposes.
After an introduction which lays out the framework of my thesis, each subsequent chapter focuses on the works of one significant poet of the period, examining their writings in relation to debates about individualism, and about poetic representations of the self and the landscape. The poets discussed are Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham. I read one major poem in each chapter as being in the tradition of the greater Romantic lyric, demonstrating how it modifies that tradition in the light of contemporary ideas about politics, the self, and the United States. With reference to points of stress in American history, especially overseas military ventures, the chapters thus explore how poets work against simple understandings of the landscape poem, seeking resources that might distinguish the poetic subject from the object of critique.

Advisor: Whitworth, M
Pratt, L
Wonder and the marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic world

This thesis is the first serious examination of the significance of wonder and the marvellous as a category of experience in the Greek world from Homer to the early Hellenistic period. I argue that wonder and wonders, far from being a tangential concern of the Greek literary tradition, constitute a constant and central theme in Greek culture. Over the course of the thesis I examine texts from a range of literary genres (for example, early Greek hexameter poetry, tragedy, comedy, historiography, philosophy, oratory, Hellenistic paradoxographical collections) to present a diachronic view of the place of wonder and the marvellous in relation to several key Greek cultural themes. I show that wonder is an important term of aesthetic response in the Greek world; that it occupies a central position in concepts of what philosophy and literature are and do; that it becomes a means of expressing the manner in which the realms of the human and divine interrelate with one another; and that it is central to the articulation of the ways in which the relationships between self and other, near and far, and familiar and unfamiliar were conceived. Moreover, this thesis is the first attempt to analyse the sources and literary models that helped to underpin, thematically, structurally and ideologically, the ancient literary mode of paradoxography (‘marvel-writing’) which emerged fully in the Hellenistic period. It provides a much needed starting point for the production of re-assessments of the impact of wonder as a literary critical and cultural concept in later periods and contexts.

Advisor: Budelmann, F
Identification of inhibitors for a family of human oxoglutarate-dependent oxygenases

The family of human iron- and 2-oxoglutarate - dependent oxygenases encompasses over 60 members and a subclass of the enzymes, containing Jumonji C (JmjC) domain, is directly involved in epigenetic control of gene transcription, through demethylation of methyl marks present on histone tails. Recently, JmjC-type enzymes, namely MINA53, NO66 and OGFOD, were identified as ribosomal protein hydroxylases (ROXs), broadening the known substrate set and indicating a function in the control of mRNA translation. Oxygenases are frequently implicated as key regulatory factors in various types of cancers and targeted inhibition of this class of enzymes can lead to suppressed cancer cell proliferation, opening an epigenetic avenue for therapeutic intervention by small molecules.
In order to identify novel chemical starting points for JmjC- type oxygenases we have profiled representative members of the family with two libraries of fragments by activity assays and used X-ray crystallography to explore the binding mode of identified inhibitors. The obtained X-ray crystal structure complexes with JARID1B demethylase represent 7 novel chemotypes exploring different regions of the catalytic binding site as well as a previously unidentified putative allosteric pocket. We have then focussed on the ribosomal hydroxylases NO66 and MINA53, and identified novel chemical lead compounds through a mass spectrometry based enzymatic activity assay and obtained X-ray crystal structure complexes with JARID1B demethylase of two active inhibitors of MINA53 and JARID1B (IC50 of 0.9-5 µM). The most active hydroxamic acid series has an IC50 of 900 nM towards JARID1B with a favourable selectivity profile and shows anti-proliferative effects in human myeloma cell lines.
We anticipate that our comprehensive set of fragment library activity data together with X-ray crystal structure complexes identified in this thesis can be used as starting points for further structure-based inhibitor development programs for JmjC- type oxygenases.

Keywords: ribosomal hydroxylase
lysine demethylases
KDM
epigenetics
oxygenases
Advisor: Oppermann, U
Johansson, C
Tumber, A
Owen, D
A commentary on Pindar's Emmenid odes: O.2, O.3, P.6, I.2

The thesis is a commentary on four Pindaric odes for the Emmenid dynasty of Acragas: Olympian 2, Olympian 3, Pythian 6, Isthmian 2. The main introduction sets out the Emmenid odes' historical context, and the commentary's approach to them in relation to Pindaric scholarship. There follows a synopsis of the textual readings adopted, indicating divergences from Snell-Maehler. The four main chapters are arranged in chronological order, with each one treating a single ode: lemmatized commentary follows an introductory section that contains a translation, metrical scheme, notes on date and performance/reperformance context, structural analysis, and interpretation. A conclusion draws out the broader patterns that emerge from the study of all four odes, especially the techniques Pindar employs to address the encomiastic needs of his honorands, and to bind the poems together.
The commentaries on individual odes aim both to explore the nuances of particular words and phrases, and to advance critical understanding of the poem as a whole. They address a wide spectrum of linguistic, textual, metrical, and stylistic questions, in combination with socio-political and historical issues, bringing to bear a range of evidence and applying recent scholarly insights to established cruces. The translations do not seek to achieve the most natural English style, but to render as far as possible the Greek's emphasis, and to reflect the interpretative decisions argued for in the lemmata.
The study's larger aim is to explore the manner in which Pindar's odes for the Emmenids developed in light of the family's shifting personal, competitive, and political fortunes, over the course of two decades that saw their acquisition, possession, and loss of tyrannical power. The corpus as a whole is shown to constitute a series of intertextuallyconnected reperformative artifacts that together create a poetic monument to the Emmenids.

Advisor: Davies, M
The effect of composition of dietary sugars on hepatic fatty acid synthesis and partitioning and insulin secretion and sensitivity

Increased consumption of foods containing free sugars, especially fructose, has been associated with the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate the effect of composition of fructose and glucose on hepatic fatty acid (FA) synthesis and partitioning and insulin response and to do this, three studies were undertaken.
A randomised crossover study was conducted, where subjects consumed a low fructose meal and a high fructose meal with [U13C]palmitate incorporated to trace the metabolic fate of dietary fats. The two study visits were four weeks apart. Overall, it was found that consuming a high fructose meal but not a low fructose one had a marked effect on females but not males in postprandial hepatic FA synthesis and not in hepatic FA partitioning.
In the second study, subjects consumed a test meal which contained [U13C]fructose to trace the metabolic fate of dietary fructose. It was demonstrated that though there was fast metabolic conversion of fructose into FAs within 2 hours, less than 1% of the ingested fructose was converted to FAs. A much larger proportion of fructose was oxidised into 13CO2 (30.5%).
The objective of the third study was to investigate the acute and chronic effect of high fructose consumption on insulin secretion, liver fat content and hepatic de novo lipogenesis (DNL) in subjects. In the crossover acute arm of the study, single dose consumption of the high fructose drink resulted in significantly lower static insulin secretion rate (ISR) in females but not males. This difference in static ISR diminished following prolonged high fructose consumption. It was also found that the daily consumption of either the low or high fructose drink did not change the liver fat content or fasting hepatic DNL in the subjects.
Overall, we found notable gender differences in FA metabolism after consumption of low and high fructose meals, the mechanistic details of which can be investigated in future studies.

Advisor: Hodson, L
Tomlinson, J