VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Bushmeat hunting, retaliatory killing, habitat degradation and exotic species as threats to Fosa (Cryptoprocta ferox) conservation

Large carnivores are in global decline, chiefly resultant of anthropogenic persecution, habitat reduction and disturbance. Fosas represent Madagascar’s largest carnivore, occupying much of the island's forest. This thesis examines the threats of bushmeat hunting, retaliatory killing, habitat alteration and exotic species using sociological and remote-sensing methodologies.
Habitat degradation was not associated with reduced fosa occupancy, indicating some resilience within large, contiguous forests. However, competition with exotic species (cats, dogs) was associated with reduced fosa occupancy and potential temporal shifts towards greater nocturnality.
Poor households were more likely to consume protected species. Conversely, wealthier households consumed more fish and eel. This pattern is reflected in Malagasy reported taste preference to consume domesticated animals and certain legally hunted wild species. Protected areas were not associated with reduced protected species consumption.
Fosas' predation was a major cause of rural poultry mortality. Predation was more likely to occur in deciduous forests, in the dry season, during the evening. Fosa predation, and lower education was associated with negative Malagasy attitudes. Wealthy households, and those that had experienced fosa predation were most likely to retaliatory kill a fosa.
Strategies to safeguard fosas' long-term persistence should seek to improve domestic husbandry, build robust coops with the use of watchdogs, promote education, and reduce exotic species abundance.

Keywords: Fossa
Deforestation
Madagascar
Invasive species
Human-wildlife conflict
Hunting
Eupleridae
Poaching
Advisor: Macdonald, D
Dollar, L
Revisiting the origins of Islamic glazed pottery: a technological examination of 8th-10th century AD ceramics from Islamic lands

The beginnings of Islamic ceramics have long been attributed to the opaque white glazed wares made in Iraq in the 9th century in response to the imported Chinese porcelain and stoneware. These Islamic glazes were known to have been opacified by tin-oxide and much work has been undertaken to characterise their development and spread. However, little has been done to explain the origins of this technology and its invention in Iraq.
This thesis takes a new approach to investigating the beginnings of Islamic glazed pottery. It examines the technical aspects of early Islamic glazed wares from the 7th to 10th century AD from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia. A significant number of sherds from Fustat, Aqaba, Al-Mina, Raqqa, Samarra, Basra, Kish, Susa, Nishapur, Merv and Samarqand were sampled and analysed using a scanning electron microscope equipped with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS). Particular focus was placed on the opaque yellow glazes from the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia (7th-9th century) and the opaque white glazes from Mesopotamia and Central Asia (9th -10th century). The analyses showed that the opaque yellow glazes and the opaque white glazes were respectively the result of lead-tin-oxide particles in high lead glazes, and tin-oxide particles in lead-alkali and alkali-lead glazes. Using experimental replication, it was found that at temperatures around 900°C, and in the presence of alkalis and alkaline earths, lead-tin-oxide particles convert to tin-oxide and that the colour of the glaze changes from yellow to white. It was therefore argued that the opaque yellow glazed wares of the 7th/8th-century Eastern Mediterranean represent a precursor to the opaque white glazed wares that flourished in Iraq in the 9th century. The results have helped change the way the beginnings of Islamic ceramics are viewed: origins in the 7th/8th century AD rather than the 9th century AD, first developed in Egypt or the Levant rather than Iraq, and indigenous rather than Chinese-inspired. The eastward spread of Islamic glazed wares to Iraq in the 9th century follows the move of the Islamic capital from Damascus, Syria, to Baghdad, Iraq, and the further spread of this technology east and west can now be traced.

Advisor: Watson, O
Tite, M
Pollard, M
Mediators of transdiagnostic psychological treatments for eating disorders

Cognitive behaviour therapy and interpersonal psychotherapy are the leading treatments for eating disorders. Little is understood regarding their mechanisms of action. The research described in this thesis investigated the purported mechanisms of action of two transdiagnostic versions of these treatments; enhanced cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT-E) and interpersonal psychotherapy for eating disorders (IPT-ED). A series of mediation studies were embedded within a randomised controlled trial comparing CBT-E and IPT-ED in a transdiagnostic sample of patients with eating disorders. An analytic strategy using multilevel and structural equation modelling was used to assess for statistical mediation. Three of the key purported mediators of action of CBT-E (regularity of eating, frequency of weighing, and frequency of shape checking) and the key purported mediator of IPT-ED (interpersonal problem severity) were studied. Only regularity of eating demonstrated a strong case for being a mediator of the effect of CBT-E (on frequency of binge eating). The findings were inconclusive regarding other putative mediators of the effect of CBT-E, and for interpersonal problem severity being a mediator of the effect of IPT-ED. Limitations of the research included the non-optimal choice of measures and non-optimal timing of measurements for establishing temporal precedence. Future research should investigate the mediating role of both cognitive (e.g. interpretation of weight) and behavioural processes (e.g. frequency of weighing) in CBT-E, and the role of interpersonal functioning in CBT-E and IPT-ED. Research should use daily, or session by session measurement to better assess the temporal relationship between the purported mediator/s and the outcome/s. Experimental designs comparing dismantled versions of treatment would also help determine the relative effects that different treatment procedures have on treatment outcome/s.

Keywords: treatment personalisation
structural equation modelling
interpersonal psychotherapy
statistical mediation
treatment personalization
cognitive behavior therapy
multilevel modelling
eating disorder
cognitive behaviour therapy
Advisor: Fairburn, C
Allen, E
Semantic refactorings

Refactorings are structured changes to existing software that leave its externally observable behaviour unchanged. The intent is to improve readability, performance or other non-behavioural properties of a program. Agile software engineering processes stress the importance of refactoring to keep program code extensible and maintainable. Despite their apparent beneﬁts, manual refactorings are time-consuming and prone to introducing unintended side eﬀects. Research eﬀorts seek to support and automate refactoring tasks to overcome these limitations.
Current research in automatic refactoring, as well as state-of-the-art automated refactoring tools, frequently rely on syntax-driven approaches. They focus on transformations which can be safely performed using only syntactic information about a program or act overly conservative when knowledge about program semantics is required. In this thesis we explore semantics-driven refactoring, which enables much more sophisticated refactoring schemata. Our semantics-driven refactorings rely on formal veriﬁcation algorithms to reason over a program’s behaviour, and we conjecture they are more precise and can handle more complex code scenarios than syntax-driven ones.
For this purpose, we present and implement a program synthesis algorithm based on the CEGIS paradigm and demonstrate that it can be applied to a diverse set of applications. Our synthesiser relies on the bounded model checker CBMC as an oracle and is based on an earlier research prototype called Kalashnikov. We further deﬁne our Java Stream Theory (JST) which allows us to reason over a set of interesting semantic refactorings. Both solutions are combined into an automated semantic refactoring decision procedure, reasoning over program behaviours, and searching the space of possible refactorings using program synthesis. We provide experimental evidence to support our conjecture that semanticsdriven refactorings exceed syntax-driven approaches in precision and scope.

Keywords: refactoring
software verification
software synthesis
Advisor: Kroening, D
David, C
Philologia versus philosophia

The aim of this thesis is to provide a revaluation of the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns at the turn of the eighteenth century, with particular reference to Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic. The Quarrel split the European Republic of Letters into two camps: those who thought the achievements of the classical world had been surpassed in the seventeenth century and the study of Latin and Greek had become pointless, and those who thought the classical inheritance remained invaluable. In this thesis, the Quarrel will be examined from the point of view of those who believed in the continued significance of the classical inheritance but who were divided among themselves over how it was best protected: should its study be turned into a purely scholarly pursuit, knowledge for its own sake, or should its study be promoted as a source of wisdom and moral example? This opposition between two approaches to the classical inheritance is then used to analyse and explain a number of key developments in the period under review. These include the reception of Renaissance humanism at the turn of the eighteenth century, the professionalisation of scholarship, the rise of the distinction between form and content in aesthetic thought, and the popularisation of classical culture.
Although the debate between these two approaches primarily focused on the issue of the classical inheritance, it will also help us to gain a better understanding of the Republic of Letters tout court, its membership, prejudices and interests in the era of the so-called Crise de conscience européenne. The United Provinces is the ideal starting-point for such a study, since it has recently been argued at length by Jonathan Israel in his Radical Enlightenment (2001) that Holland at the turn of the eighteenth century gave birth to the radical, atheistic Enlightenment. This thesis will test the plausibility of Israel’s grandiose claims and bring the Dutch pre-Enlightenment back to earth. At the same time this thesis will help us to better understand the United Provinces intellectual connections with England and France and show the important role played by the Querelle in the early Enlightenment. It was not on the periphery, as we have always thought, but at its heart.

Advisor: Brockliss, L
Why be reasonable? Political liberalism, moral pluralism, and deep disagreement

Political liberalism contains a commitment to public justification. The exercise of coercion on the basis of political principles is only thought to be proper if these principles are acceptable to each and every reasonable person. The fact that political liberalism restricts the constituency of public justification, i.e., the constituency of those who are owed justifications, to reasonable people is significant. I argue that, as it stands, this restriction is problematic. Specifically, political liberalism's core commitment to respect for persons as ends in themselves is in conflict with its refusal to justify their exclusion to some individuals who will be coerced. Furthermore, attempts to dispense with the need to provide justifications to the unreasonable seem to resolve that tension, but only at the cost of introducing a second defect: an impoverished and ultimately illiberal conception of the person which refuses to regard individual persons as morally autonomous.
I conclude that political liberalism must justify the very criterion of individuals' exclusion from the constituency of public justification -- reasonableness -- to those who fail to live up to that standard. The justifications it offers must not loose sight of the liberal commitment to respecting individuals' moral autonomy. To that end, I argue, such justifications must be rooted in the set of reasons and beliefs which individuals can be said to be committed to. Two different kinds of unreasonableness warrant different kinds of justifications: there are those who are fundamentally unreasonable because they reject the core liberal commitment to persons as free and equal, while others merely fail to be fully reasonable when encountering deep moral disagreement in political debates, falling short of the requirement to engage with others in public reason on the basis of shared values. With respect to the former, it can be argued that a commitment to regarding their fellow citizens as free and equal is implicit in their attitude and conduct towards them. The latter individuals can be offered justifications for restraint which are rooted in the character of the very moral convictions they are tempted to draw on in public reason.

Advisor: Elford, G
Trade-offs between focused and distributed temporal attention

Humans and other animals are faced with a continuous trade-off between exploiting the current task goal and continuing to explore or monitor their environment to identify new opportunities or threats. The exploitation-exploration dilemma has been investigated in a broad range of fields from animal foraging to machine learning to human decision- making. Often, trade-offs in human behaviour occur on a moment-by-moment basis, between focusing one's attention and distributing one's attention. Although it has been traditionally believed that attention is 'good' when selective and focused, it is increasingly becoming acknowledged that this is not always the case and that there are occasions when distributed attention is optimal instead.
This thesis develops the Attentional Blink – Illusory Conjunctions paradigm as a new experimental context to study distributed and focused attention in time comparatively in visually identical tasks. The thesis sets out to investigate trade-­‐offs between focused and distributed temporal attention using the novel paradigm in a series of 9 experiments. To test how attention states trade off, manipulations known to either enhance attentional focus or to broaden attention are used. Furthermore, the dissociable association between mind wandering and focused vs. distributed temporal attention is analysed in a series of experiments. The neural correlates of the focused-distributed attention trade-off are also investigated using electroencephalogram (EEG) methods.
A key strand of work in this thesis investigates how attention trades off in terms of individual differences. The hypothesis that some people have a more focused attentional style and others have a more distributed attentional style is tested both in the blocked version of the Attentional Blink - Illusory Conjunctions paradigm used throughout the thesis, as well as in a non-blocked version introduced in the final experiment. The non- blocked paradigm variation that concludes the thesis provides a context to analyse how attentional states fluctuate, and furthermore exemplifies the potential of the Attentional Blink – Illusory Conjunctions paradigm as an experimental context that can be flexibly adapted to test a wide range of hypotheses regarding trade-offs in temporal attention.

Advisor: Yeung, N
Aristocracy, politics and power in Byzantium, 1025-1081

The purpose of this thesis is to further our understanding of the period between the death of Basil II in 1025 and the accession of Alexios I Komnenos in 1081. Modern scholarship has often portrayed these 56 years as an important, transformative period, viewing the empire as standing at the height of its power at its beginning, only to be brought to the brink of collapse by civil wars and foreign invasions following the battle of Manzikert in 1071. Based on three unique and underexploited sources of evidence, namely the letters of Michael Psellos, the judicial handbook commonly known as the Peira and the so-called Consilia et Narrationes of Kekaumenos, it argues that the Byzantine state to a large extent relied on private networks to carry out public administration throughout the empire. Public and private power were thus intimately intertwined and by conveying information, orders and requests, but also by reproducing and enforcing norms of acceptable political behaviour, these networks served to compensate to some extent for the institutional shortcomings of the premodern state. It also challenges the idea that the political dynamic of the eleventh century was centred around the power struggles of ‘great families’ or clans that effectively functioned as political parties, as well as the idea that the emperors and their officials were apathetic about governing the provinces beyond what was necessary to pacify and extract resources from them. Taken together, the evidence examined consequently appears to suggest that, by the standards of the pre-modern world, the Byzantine empire had a reasonably well-functioning state and a fairly coherent society during the period in question, suggesting that the focus of the scholarly debate on the eleventh-century Byzantine collapse should, to some extent, be shifted from internal to external factors.

Keywords: Peira
Middle Byzantine Empire
Kekaumenos
Consilia et Narrationes
Michael Psellos
Networks
Aristocracy
Political History
Byzantine History
Advisor: Holmes, C
Exploitation, vulnerability, and the body: a philosophical examination of commercial surrogacy

Since its inception, surrogacy has generated substantial debate in the philosophical literature. India has been host to a lucrative transnational surrogacy industry, where Indian women of low socioeconomic status serve as surrogates for predominantly wealthy foreigners. This thesis examines whether Indian commercial surrogacy is typically exploitative, and what, if anything, follows from this. I develop and defend a working account of exploitation focused on the unfair use of vulnerability: A exploits B when A takes unfair advantage of B’s vulnerability. I define vulnerability according to a conception of justice, endorsing the capabilities approach as a working definition, due to the way in which it is able to reflect the plurality of disadvantage, and coheres particularly well with the experience of Indian surrogates. I bring this definition of exploitation to bear on the Indian surrogacy industry, suggesting that the situation therein constitutes wrongful exploitation. I argue that Indian surrogacy is typically ex ante harmfully exploitative according to Alan Wertheimer’s influential definition, and therefore merits intervention by his own lights. Following this, I consider what remains wrongful about mutually advantageous exploitation, if the element of harm were to be removed. I give three arguments for intervening in wrongful exploitation in the absence of such harm. First, I make a consequentialist argument, suggesting that in light of exploitation’s suboptimal nature as a mode of exchange, arguments for permitting mutually advantageous exploitation actually turn out to fall short in their welfarist aims, and intervention into exploitation plausibly produces better long term consequences. Following this, I make a non-consequentialist argument focusing on use of vulnerability, and the unfair advantage this generates. The use of vulnerability in this way is wrongful insofar as it trades on an objectionable and rectifiable injustice, and inflicts a status harm on the vulnerable, rendering exploitation inimical to ideals of relational equality. My third and final argument for intervention into mutually advantageous exploitation employs Clare Chambers' social constructivist approach, suggesting that when a "free choice" is influenced by prior injustice, and results in further disadvantage, there are reasons to intervene. Lastly, I suggest that the embodiment aspect of the nature of the labour in transactions such as surrogacy make them of special concern, and the exploitation of this type of labour particularly pernicious.

Advisor: Douglas, T
Savulescu, J
Negotiating Norms

This thesis examines the practice of normative contestation in the African Union (AU) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Dissatisfied with existing liberal, realist, and rationalist accounts of normative change, the thesis develops a new theoretical approach involving competing 'norm circles,' actors committed to endorsing or enforcing a norm, whose perceived utility of a norm determines their stance. The model suggests that under conditions of contestation involving at least two norm circles, actors compete according to the terms of their domain, the regional organization. The differences involve actors' competencies in controlling the initiative, their mastery of other shared norms, and their ability to seek other opportunities of influence, termed 'metis.'
Empirically, the thesis examines six case studies, three each from the AU and ASEAN, in which significant new norms testing member state sovereignty were proposed, after which the norms were either accepted, rejected, or qualified, according to how the contest unfolded. Each case reviews the historical origins of the norm and the proposal, followed by analysing how each norm circle used the factors mentioned above to seek approval for their proposals. It then assesses the relative importance of the factors, alternative explanations, and future implications for the norms in each case. In the AU, the three cases were the proposals for the United States of Africa, the Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa, and the Pan-African Parliament. In ASEAN, the thesis examines the question of human rights in the ASEAN Charter, the attempt to formalize the 'ASEAN minus X' principle, also during the charter drafting, and the contestation over the creation of a regional human rights mechanism, which eventually became the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights.

Keywords: Norm contestation
Advisor: Khong, Y