VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The opera fantasias and transcriptions of Franz Liszt

The traditional division between "original" and "arrangement" is impossible to sustain for most of Liszt's oeuvre. By virtue of the amount of original creative thinking displayed in his finest operatic fantasies and transcriptions they deserve as detailed a study as any other group of works. Our knowledge is deficient even with regard to identification and dating; the Fantasia on Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Juan is unknown in its original form, while the Fantasia on Il Giuramento has remained unidentified.
All of Liszt's works share the same improvisatory approach to composition. Both original and operatic themes are found in his sketchbooks, although sketches of larger sections of the fantasias are rare. Many operatic pieces originated hi concert-improvisations before being committed to paper. Thereafter they were subjected to a process of revision that frequently continued after publication. The operatic fantasias of the 1830's and 40's illustrate Liszt's episodic treatment of musical form, with an indulgence in short-range harmonic effects and little concern for overall tonal planning. Some techniques of thematic metamorphosis and transition anticipate features of Liszt's Weimar compositions, and the roots of his fondness for concluding apotheoses can be clearly seen, particularly in the Fantasia on Der Freischütz.
The fantasias and transcriptions vividly illustrate the course of Liszt's compositional and pianistic development, from early precocity through mature mastery to late austerity. The influence of Thalberg can be detected as the motivation for Liszt's return to the operatic fantasia after a hiatus of several years, although he did not adopt aspects of Thalberg's piano style until 1839. His finest fantasias from the years 1839-43 are characterised by bold virtuosity, compositional ingenuity and a striking attempt to encapsulate the dramatic course of an opera within the confines of a fantasia. As operatic pieces formed a large part of Liszt's concert repertoire until 1848 they were almost invariably based on operas of proven popularity. A more innovative and altruistic choice of material is evident only from the beginning of the Weimar period.
Essays on forecast evaluation and financial econometrics

Abstract: This thesis consists of three papers that makes independent contributions to the fields of forecast evaluation and financial econometrics. As such, the papers, chapter 1-3, can be read independently of each other.
In Chapter 1, “Inferring an agent’s loss function based on a term structure of forecasts”, we provide conditions for identification, estimation and inference of an agent’s loss function based on an observed term structure of point forecasts. The loss function specification is flexible as we allow the preferences to be both asymmetric and to vary non-linearly across the forecast horizon. In addition, we introduce a novel forecast rationality test based on the estimated loss function. We employ the approach to analyse the U.S. Government’s preferences over budget surplus forecast errors. Interestingly, we find that it is relatively more costly for the government to underestimate the budget surplus and that this asymmetry is stronger at long forecast horizons.
In Chapter 2, “Monitoring Systemic Risk”, we define systemic risk as the conditional probability of a systemic banking crisis. This conditional probability is modelled in a fixed effect binary response panel-model framework that allows for cross-sectional dependence (e.g. due to contagion effects). In the empirical application we identify several risk factors and it is shown that the level of systemic risk contains a predictable component which varies through time. Furthermore, we illustrate how the forecasts of systemic risk map into dynamic policy thresholds in this framework. Finally, by conducting a pseudo out-of-sample exercise we find that the systemic risk estimates provided reliable early-warning signals ahead of the recent financial crisis for several economies.
Finally, in Chapter 3, “Equity Premium Predictability”, we reassess the evidence of out-of- sample equity premium predictability. The empirical finance literature has identified several financial variables that appear to predict the equity premium in-sample. However, Welch & Goyal (2008) find that none of these variables have any predictive power out-of-sample. We show that the equity premium is predictable out-of-sample once you impose certain shrinkage restrictions on the model parameters. The approach is motivated by the observation that many of the proposed financial variables can be characterised as ’weak predictors’ and this suggest that a James-Stein type estimator will provide a substantial risk reduction. The out-of-sample explanatory power is small, but we show that it is, in fact, economically meaningful to an investor with time-invariant risk aversion. Using a shrinkage decomposition we also show that standard combination forecast techniques tends to ’overshrink’ the model parameters leading to suboptimal model forecasts.

Keywords: Binary Response Panel Model; Equity Premium
Loss Function
Forecast Evaluation
Macroprudential Policy
James-Stein Estimator
Forecast Rationality
Term Structure of Forecasts; Systemic Risk
Advisor: Sheppard, K
Shephard, N
Excluded-volume effects in stochastic models of diffusion

Stochastic models describing how interacting individuals give rise to collective behaviour have become a widely used tool across disciplines—ranging from biology to physics to social sciences. Continuum population-level models based on partial differential equations for the population density can be a very useful tool (when, for large systems, particle-based models become computationally intractable), but the challenge is to predict the correct macroscopic description of the key attributes at the particle level (such as interactions between individuals and evolution rules).
In this thesis we consider the simple class of models consisting of diffusive particles with short-range interactions. It is relevant to many applications, such as colloidal systems and granular gases, and also for more complex systems such as diffusion through ion channels, biological cell populations and animal swarms. To derive the macroscopic model of such systems, previous studies have used ad hoc closure approximations, often generating errors. Instead, we provide a new systematic method based on matched asymptotic expansions to establish the link between the individual- and the population-level models.
We begin by deriving the population-level model of a system of identical Brownian hard spheres. The result is a nonlinear diffusion equation for the one-particle density function with excluded-volume effects enhancing the overall collective diffusion rate. We then expand this core problem in several directions. First, for a system with two types of particles (two species) we obtain a nonlinear cross-diffusion model. This model captures both alternative notions of diffusion, the collective diffusion and the self-diffusion, and can be used to study diffusion through obstacles. Second, we study the diffusion of finite-size particles through confined domains such as a narrow channel or a Hele–Shaw cell. In this case the macroscopic model depends on a confinement parameter and interpolates between severe confinement (e.g., a single- file diffusion in the narrow channel case) and an unconfined situation. Finally, the analysis for diffusive soft spheres, particles with soft-core repulsive potentials, yields an interaction-dependent non-linear term in the diffusion equation.

Keywords: Fokker-Planck equation
self- and collective diffusion coefficients
Brownian motion
interacting particle systems
Advisor: Chapman, S
Rome in ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England

This thesis explores the impact of Rome upon Anglo-Saxon politics, religion, and culture in the ninth century. From the Gregorian mission onwards, Rome helped shape the ecclesiastical and devotional contexts of Anglo-Saxon Christianity and occupied a central place in the imaginations of early English writers. Yet the extent to which these links continued into and throughout the ninth century remains obscure, with scholarship about religion and culture often treating the period as a hiatus. In political narratives, the ninth century is treated as a crucial period, and Roman involvement is most visible in this sphere. By redressing the imbalance between religion and politics, this thesis achieves a thorough appreciation of the part played by Rome in these various fields of experience, as well as showing how Anglo-Saxon writers located themselves and their pasts in relation to the city. It does so over the course of five thematic chapters, which progress from an analysis of the most fundamental issues to more imaginative ones. Chapter one examines contact and communication between England and Rome, arguing that the two areas were closely and constantly connected across the century. The second and third chapters explore the impact of Rome on religion and kingship respectively, finding that while Roman influence on the church was most pronounced in the first half of the century, in political terms the city played a significant and changing role throughout the period. Chapters four and five consider the position of Rome in Anglo-Saxon historical thought and geographical understanding, examining how writers continued to define their position in a wider Christian world with reference to the city and its past. This thesis argues that, in the ninth century, Rome continued to play an important role in English life, while also influencing Anglo-Saxon thought and experience in new and dynamic ways.

Keywords: ninth century
papacy
kingship
King Alfred
religion
Anglo-Saxon history
early medieval Europe
travel
early medieval history
geography
Rome
Anglo-Saxon England
Advisor: Foot, S
Conversion as a narrative, visual, and stylistic mode in William Blake's works

This study suggests that Blake’s works can be understood as ‘conversion works,’ which seek to facilitate a broadly defined perceptual, spiritual, and intellectual conversion in the reader/viewer. This conversion is manifested in various ways in the texts, images, narrative structures, and style of Blake’s works. Part I discusses the genesis of the narrative of Blake’s own conversion and introduces critical discussions of the conversion narrative as a genre, showing how the predominant interpretative paradigm of the conversion narrative (as an autobiographical reportage describing a one-off experience) is challenged by the shapes that conversion narratives have taken throughout history, suggesting a broader definition of conversion literature. In Part II, I analyze Blake’s depictions of Christ in his illustrations to Night Thoughts in relation to eighteenth-century Moravian art, and the way in which they are later used in The Four Zoas. I discuss how Milton can be understood as a multilayered conversion narrative, how the manifestation of conversion in Jakob Boehme’s works might have influenced it, and how a related conversion is manifested in Jerusalem (1804-20). Finally, I show how Blake represents conversion in his illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress and the Book of Job, emphasizing the importance of vision and the inclusion of protagonist and viewer in the divine body. Together, these analyses show conversion as a gradually developing presence in Blake’s works, exploring the conversion moment as a way into the shared salvific space of the body of Christ for fictive characters, author, and reader or viewer together.

Keywords: Jakob Boehme
William Blake
Moravians
conversion
Advisor: Rowland, C
Wilson loops and their gravity duals in AdS4/CFT3

In the first part of this thesis, we study the duality of Wilson loops and M2-branes in AdS4/CFT3. We focus on supersymmetric M-theory solutions on AdS4xY7 that have a superconformal dual description on S3 &equals; ∂AdS4. We will find that the Hamiltonian function hM for the M-theory circle plays an important role in the duality. We show that an M2-brane wrapping the M-theory circle is supersymmetric precisely at the critical points of hM, and moreover the value of this function at those points determines the M2-brane actions. Such a configuration determines the holographic dual of a Wilson loop for a Hopf circle in S3. We find agreement in large classes of examples between the Wilson loop and its dual M2-brane and also that the image hM(Y7) determines the range of support of the eigenvalues in the dual large N matrix model, with the critical points of hM mapping to points where the derivative of the eigenvalue density is discontinuous. We will then move away from the three-sphere and construct gravity duals to a broad class of N&equals;2 supersymmetric gauge theories defined on a general class of three-manifold geometries. The gravity backgrounds are based on Euclidean self-dual solutions to four-dimensional gauged supergravity. As well as constructing new examples, we prove in general that for solutions defined on the four-ball the gravitational free energy depends only on the supersymmetric Killing vector. Our result agrees with the large N limit of the free energy of the dual gauge theory, computed using localisation. This constitutes an exact check of the gauge/gravity correspondence for a very broad class of gauge theories defined on a general class of background three-manifold geometries. To further verify that our gravitational backgrounds are indeed dual to field theories on their boundaries, we compute Wilson loops and their M2-brane duals in this general setting. We find that the Wilson loop is given by a simple closed formula which depends on the background geometry only through the supersymmetric Killing vector field. The supergravity dual M2-brane precisely reproduces this large N field theory result. This constitutes a further check of AdS4/CFT3 for a very broad class of examples.

Keywords: M2-branes
gravity duals
Wilson loops
gauge/gravity duality
Advisor: Sparks, J
Toying with the book: children’s literature, novelty formats, and the material book, 1810–1914

This thesis examines the book in the nineteenth century by way of an unusual corpus: movable and novelty books for children, drawn from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. It argues that these items, which have been either ignored or actively dismissed by scholars of children’s literature, are of two-fold significance for the history of the book: they encourage a sense of the book as a constitutively (rather than an incidentally) material object, and they demand an understanding of reading as not just a mental activity, but a physical one as well.
Each of the first five chapters of the thesis centres on a different format. The opening chapter discusses the Regency-era paper doll books produced by Samuel and Joseph Fuller, exposing the tension between form and content in these works. The second chapter looks at Victorian panorama books for children, showing how the panorama format affects space, time, and the structure of any text accompanying the image. The third chapter reads the pop-up book’s key tension—the tension between surface and depth in the pursuit of an illusion of three dimensions—in terms of flat, theatrical, and stereoscopic picture-making, three other nineteenth-century pictorial modes in which an illusion of three-dimensionality is important. The fourth chapter traces self-reflexive accounts of printing, publishing, and the material book in dissolving-view books produced by the German publisher and printer Ernest Nister at the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth chapter positions the late nineteenth-century mechanical books designed and illustrated by Lothar Meggendorfer in terms of two material analogies, the puppet and the mechanical toy or automaton. The final chapter synthesizes evidence as to how the movable book could and should be read from across formats, foregrounding in particular the ways in which the movable embodies reading.

Keywords: toy and movable books
book design
illustration
children's literature
Advisor: Evangelista, S
Purkiss, D
The nuclear elastic scattering of fast protons

Proton-proton elastic scattering has been studied in counter experiments using the 130 MeV. 48 percent polarized proton beam from The Harwell 110-inch synchrocyclotron.
The polarisation in p-p scattering has been measured at various energies between about 27 MeV. and 100 MeV. The beam energy was reduced to the required values in a suitable absorbser, and the energy of each measurement was defined by an anti-coincidence arrangement in conjunction with telescope absorbers. A liquid hydrogen target was employed and solenoids were used to rotate the polarisation of the beam through ± 180° in order to eliminate geometrical false asymmetrics.
The Wolfenstein depolarization parameter in p-p scattering at 143 MeV. has been measured using similar techniques.

Advisor: Rose, B
Taylor, A
Global retrievals of upper-tropospheric phosphine from the Cassini/CIRS Jupiter encounter

On December 30th 2000, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reached the perijove milestone in its continuing journey to the Saturnian system. During an extended six-month encounter, the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) returned spectra of the Jovian atmosphere, rings and satellites from 10 to 1400 cm^-1 (1000 to 7 µm) at a programmable spectral resolution of 0.5 to 15 cm^-1. The improved spectral resolution of CIRS over previous infrared instrument-missions to Jupiter, the extended spectral range and higher signal-to-noise performance provide significant advantages over previous data-sets. Both optimal-estimation retrieval and radiance-differencing are used to investigate the global variation of upper-tropospheric temperature, ammonia, phosphine and cloud opacity between ± 60˚ latitude. The analysis methods are shown to successfully reproduce Jovian conditions with results consistent with previous investigations. The composition results in particular are well characterised and suggest an important role played by mixing and transport within the upper-troposphere. Interpretation and validation of the retrieved results is conducted via the construction of a simple dynamic model incorporating transport, diffusion and (photo)chemistry.

Keywords: outer planet atmospheres
infrared observations
atmospheric dynamics
Cassini-Huygens
phosphine
atmospheric structure
Jupiter
atmospheric chemistry
CIRS
Advisor: Irwin, P
A fructose-intolerant yeast strain to select for sucrose fructosyl-transferase activity

A selection system for yeast cells expressing mutated invertase (EC 3.2.1.26, SUC2) with altered fructotransferase activity was developed based on the survival of a fructose-intolerant strain in the presence of suitable acceptor substrates and sucrose. Cells of such a strain expressing a wild-type hydrolase activity will not grow due to the release of free fructose from sucrose. Cells expressing an inactive invertase mutant will not grow since they cannot cleave the sucrose, the sole carbon source. Only cells expressing sucrose fructosyl-transferase activity will thrive, growing on the released glucose, the fructosyl moiety not being released.
A strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae was engineered to be intolerant of the presence of fructose in its growth media. This was achieved by inducing a condition in yeast similar to liver cells of humans suffering from hereditary fructose intolerance (MIM 22960). This disorder results from a deficiency of aldolase B (EC 4.1.2.13), and phosphorylation of fructose by ketohexokinase (EC 2.7.1.3) results in an accumulation of fructose 1-phosphate, with a consequent depletion of cytoplasmic phosphate and ATP. Thus, cells in which ketohexokinase phosphorylates fructose, but which lack aldolase B, are intolerant of fructose. Yeast possess neither of these enzymes, and so expression of ketohexokinase in yeast would result in fructose-intolerance. A strain of yeast, for ketohexokinase expression, was initially bred to be unable to metabolize sucrose or fructose, yet remain capable of utilizing glucose, as well as lacking non-specific phosphatases, to prevent remobilization of sequestered fructose 1-phosphate.
Rat liver ketohexokinase was purified to heterogeneity, and the partial amino acid sequence subsequently generated exploited to amplify a region of the ketohexokinase cDNA by PCR. This was used to probe a cDNA library, yielding clones encoding the entire ketohexokinase coding region. This was cloned into pMA91, and subsequent expression in yeast resulted in a strain intolerant of fructose in its growth medium, although still capable of growing on glucose. In order to produce a stable fructose-intolerant selection strain, a vector (pIADl) was constructed that allowed multiple integration of an expression cassette containing ketohexokinase cDNA into the rDNA locus of yeast chromosome XII.
Expression of wild type invertase from the episomal plasmid pIAD3 in this strain resulted in sucrose-intolerance. A preliminary programme of mutagenesis of the SUC2 gene yielded eight libraries of about one hundred clones each. None of these contained any mutants showing solely sucrose fructosyl-transferase activity, although this system would clearly provide an ideal selection for such mutants from a much larger library.

Advisor: Donaldson, I
Comparative analysis of polysomnographic signals for classifying obstructive sleep apnoea

Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is a common disorder involving repeated cessations of breathing due to airway collapse, causing disruption of sleep cycles. The condition is under-diagnosed and the side effects are many and varied. Currently, the ‘gold standard’ diagnostic tool for OSA is a polysomnogram (PSG) which is carried out overnight in a hospital using multiple sensors. A PSG is expensive to set-up, run and analyse, and some subjects experience different sleep patterns due to the artificial conditions of the sleep laboratory.
The aim of this thesis was to find a parsimonious and easy-to-collect set of signals (from the superset of signals recorded in sleep clinics) and other related information (such as demographics), and a set of automated methods that reliably determine which subjects are suitable for standard treatments, i.e. classify subjects requiring treatment (moderate OSA, severe OSA) from those not requiring treatment (normal, snorer, mild OSA), using a smartphone. Data were collected from 1354 subjects in the home using the Grey Flash polysomnographic recording device (Stowood Scientific Instruments, Oxford, UK). Analysis of the audio signal was initially performed using standard speech processing methods, where individual events were annotated and classified. The results achieved (accuracy (Ac) = 69.6%) using this approach were lower than those required for clinical acceptance. In all subsequent work in the thesis, subjects were classified from entire recordings rather than events. Multiscale entropy (MSE) was used to identify non-linear correlations in the audio data and quantify the irregularity of the data over many time scales. The inter-snore interval (ISI) was developed, motivated by clinical intuition. MSE and ISI were then applied to both actigraphy and photoplethysomgraphy (PPG) data, and different combinations of features were analysed. The features which displayed the highest predictive accuracy were derived from the PPG signal (Ac = 89.2%). This work demonstrated that, although audio- and actigraphy-based OSA screening is possible, to achieve clinically acceptable performance PPG remains an important key factor in diagnosis.

Keywords: app
audio
OSA
actigraphy
machine learning
PPG
Advisor: Clifford, G