VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Sunset clauses: a historical, positive and normative analysis

Sunset clauses are a commonly used statutory provision related to the temporary duration of various laws. Such clauses are scattered throughout the statute books. This thesis aims to shed light on the constitutional value of such clauses, in order to value them from the perspective of the separation of powers and the rule of law.
We have an extant amount of literature on sunset clauses, especially regarding their utility in the United States. In the United Kingdom, we have a limited analysis with respect to specific fields, including emergency legislation. However, we lack a comprehensive analysis with regard to their constitutional value.
This thesis’s analysis is conducted in three parts, separated into the historical, the positive, and the normative. All three parts of this thesis are interdependent, and the analysis of each subsequent part builds on the conclusion of its antecedent. The first part investigates the historical development of sunset clauses since the first Parliament in England. The positive analysis examines the contemporary utility of sunset clauses. Finally, the normative evaluation examines their interaction with several models of separation of powers as it values their impact on the rule of law.
Depending on the separation of power model, such clauses play a role in the system of checks and balances. On the one hand, they impact the institutional relationship between the executive and legislative branches. On the other hand, they influence the interaction between the legislature and the courts. Although I acknowledge that their legislative use in limiting human rights diminishes the rule of law, they might have the exact opposite effect: on several occasions in the past, they were used to advance the rule of law, including the adoption of innovative legislation and the annulment of the death penalty. Indeed, this thesis attests to the constitutional value of sunset clauses.

Keywords: rule of law
separation of powers
sunset clauses
Advisor: Craig, P
Negotiating a living: working children in Kolkata

The majority of children, involved in both waged and unwaged work exist beyond the control and comprehension of national and international regulation, within the informal economy. Research has shown that the informal economy, contrary to general perception, is not a sphere of unregulated activity, but rather, operates through alternative structures and techniques of power. Children's work within the informal economy, and therefore outside the regulative reach of the state, is subject to extra-legal modes of regulation that are pursued through elaborate systems of discipline and power exercised by non-state actors, groups, and social institutions and networks.
Through a case study on children in Kolkata, India, who are engaged in specific forms of informal work in three distinct urban spaces – domestic servitude in the private realm of the home, small-scale manufacturing and service work in factories and shops, and ragpicking, scavenging and begging on the streets – this thesis aims to explore the way children's lives are constructed through work and space, to uncover the social processes and relations of power that working children navigate in order to build and sustain their livelihoods. I examine the way that children's spaces of work are imbued with social relations of gender, caste, religion, ethnicity and power that are enacted through the construction of hierarchies, divisions of labour, and work regimes. I also explore the politics of these spaces, revealing the primary economic partnerships and obstacles that children contend with in constructing their working lives. Overall, I aim to uncover the ways in which children engage with and negotiate the extra-legal systems of regulation by categorically analysing children's work in the home, shop and factory, and street.

Keywords: South Asia
India
Kolkata
childhoods
geography
labour
Advisor: McDowell, L
Jeffrey, C
The AdS/CFT correspondence and generalized geometry

The most general AdS5imesY solutions of type IIB string theory that are AdS/CFT dual to superconformal field theories in four dimensions can be fruitfully described in the language of generalized geometry, a powerful hybrid of complex and symplectic geometry. We show that the cone over the compact five-manifold Y is generalized Calabi-Yau and carries a generalized holomorphic Killing vector field xi, dual to the R-symmetry. Remarkably, this cone always admits a symplectic structure, which descends to a contact structure on Y, with xi as Reeb vector field. Moreover, the contact volumes of Y, which can be computed by localization, encode essential properties of the dual CFT, such as the central charge and the conformal dimensions of BPS operators corresponding to wrapped D3-branes. We then define a notion of generalized Sasakian geometry'', which can be characterized by a simple differential system of three symplectic forms on a four-dimensional transverse space. The correct Reeb vector field for an AdS5 solution within a given family of generalized Sasakian manifolds can be determined---without the need of the explicit metric---by a variational procedure. The relevant functional to minimize is the type IIB supergravity action restricted to the space of generalized Sasakian manifolds, which turns out to be just the contact volume. We conjecture that this contact volume is equal to the inverse of the trial central charge whose maximization determines the R-symmetry of the dual superconformal field theory. The power of this volume minimization is illustrated by the calculation of the contact volumes for a new infinite family of solutions, in perfect agreement with the results of a-maximization in the dual mass-deformed generalized conifold theories.

Keywords: AdS/CFT correspondence
generalized complex geometry
string theory
Advisor: Sparks, J
He, Y
Post-war French writings on Black Africa

Edward Said stresses the politically and ideologically skewed nature of western imperial responses to colonised or formerly colonised cultures and peoples, articulated in a variety of media, including scholarly and imaginative writings, which are inflected by the various kinds of power (political, intellectual, cultural and moral) that the West has wielded and continues to wield over non-Western regions of the world. While recognising the pathbreaking import of Said's work, critics have pointed out his blindness to the possibilities of resistance to and subversion of the discourse of Empire within the western-authored texts that he discusses. Even where he does consider the issue of resistance and opposition to Empire by western intellectuals, he still stresses the complicity of their texts with the processes of Empire. If one were to pursue the logic of such criticisms to its limit and apply it to the intellectual resistance generated from the centre in the context of the post-War dismantling of European overseas empires and its aftermath, one might be tempted to conclude that such resistance constitutes an unqualified disruption of colonial modes of apprehending difference. Against the backdrop of such readings of Said, this thesis examines the issue of cross-cultural representation in a selection of mainstream metropolitan French writings relating to black Africa produced between 1945 and the present. It brings together scholars and writers like Gide, Sartre and Griaule, some of whose works relating to black Africa belong to the first decade of the post-War period marked by France's continued colonial presence in the continent. It also considers other scholars and writers like Dumont, Conchon, Verchave and Le Clézio, whose books appeared in the second and succeeding decades of the period. The overall aim is to identify the ways in which these writers respond individually and collectively to black Africa often construed as a paradigm of cultural difference, and to consider whether such cross-cultural responses, given their historical context, can be described as being invariably a function of the changing relations between France and black Africa. What forms do the cross-cultural responses take? What cultural assumptions and ideological motivations shape those responses? Are the responses entirely disruptive of colonial modes of relating to difference? If not, what are their aporias, their ambiguities and paradoxes? My conclusion is that while Sartre and others relate to black Africa with unmistakeable empathy, their positive cross-cultural disposition does not necessarily enable them to attain a relationship with the peoples and cultures of Africa which is an equipollent relationship between equals.

Advisor: Garfitt, T
The electrochemistry of hydrogen sulfide in room temperature ionic liquids

The work presented in this thesis involves the use of room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) as solvents in electrochemical experiments for the detection of hydrogen sulfide. The fundamentals of electrochemistry are presented, followed by an overview of RTILs in terms of their properties, applications and their behaviour as electrochemical solvents compared to conventional solvents. This is followed by an outline of electrochemical detection of various gases in aqueous, organic and ionic solvents. The results of 8 original studies are then presented as follows:
The study of the electrochemical window of twelve different room temperature ionic liquids using cyclic voltammetry vs. an internal redox couple for two defined current densities, and observation of water uptake of different ionic liquids under different conditions using a Karl Fischer titrator.
The reduction of hydrogen sulfide in various room temperature ionic liquids at a platinum electrode, measured using cyclic voltammetry. Also, solubilities and diffusion coefficients of hydrogen sulfide determined by potential step chronoamperometry.
The oxidation of hydrogen sulfide in various room temperature ionic liquids at a platinum electrode measured using cyclic voltammetry and the simulation of the electrochemical signal using experimentally defined parameters.
The disproportionation of N,N-dimethyl-p-phenylenediamine (DMPD) in room temperature ionic liquids using cyclic voltammetry, and computational simulation of the voltammetry of DMPD using experimentally defined parameters to elucidate kinetic and thermodynamic data. DMPD was examined as a mediating species for hydrogen sulfide detection.
The oxidation of catechol and dopamine in ionic liquids using cyclic voltammetry and observing adsorption effects when varying solvent anion. Catechol was examined as a mediating species for hydrogen sulfide detection.
The electrochemical oxidation of NADH in ionic liquids using cyclic voltammetry and observing the ”switching on or off” of the electrochemical signal when varying the solvent anion. NADH was examined as a mediating species for hydrogen sulfide detection.
The mediated detection of hydrogen sulfide utilizing various mediating species in several ionic liquids using cyclic voltammetry, and the elucidation of the mediating mechanism of hydrogen sulfide in 3,5-tert-butyl-o-benzoquinone.
The observation of the diffusion of ferrocene in an ionic liquid at ring-recessed disc microelectrode arrays in generator-collector mode using potential step chronoamperometry.
The results presented show that room temperature ionic liquids perform well as solvents in gas sensors, and could be viable alternatives to traditional organic solvents. Ionic liquids have also been observed to be tuneable in their reactions with analytes depending on the constituent cations and, in particular, anions. This tuneability is advantageous as specific combinations of cations and anions can be chosen to suit particular experiments.

Keywords: room temperature ionic liquids
gas detection
voltammetry
electrochemistry
Advisor: Compton, R
Nuclear magnetic resonance studies of modified eukaryotic cytochromes C

The central theme of this thesis is a study of the structural changes accompanying chemical modification and denaturation of eukaryotic cytochrome c as characterised by 1II nuclear magnetic resonance (n.m.r.) spectroscopy. First, however, it was necessary to obtain and confirm assignments for individual resonances; this was achieved by a novel method of cross assignment between ferricytochrome c and ferrocytochrome c and by double resonance techniques. A variety of perturbations were caused to native cytochromes c, which ranged in degree from the elevation of temperature for ferrocytochrome c to the complete denaturation of the protein with urea or methanol. Modification at single sites both on the surface (e.g. Met 65, Tyr 74) and in the core ( e.g. Tyr 67) of the molecule were found to cause only small local effects to the structure, although the dynamic features of the molecules were altered. One single site modification, the breaking of the iron - sulphur cross linking bond, caused considerable disruption to one side of the molecule, although hydrophobic domains in the other side were preserved; this state of the molecule is analogous to the penultimate state in the refolding pathway. Modification of all the charged lysine residues caused small changes to the surface structure of the molecule, though the complete reversal of the charges in maleyl cytochrome c produced a species which unfolded reversibly from a native configuration with the increase of temperature. The unfolding of the protein is virtually identical with both methanol and urea, but the pathways are shown to differ for the oxidised and reduced proteins.

Advisor: Williams, R
Model-based ultrasonic temperature estimation for monitoring HIFU therapy

High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is a new cancer thermal therapy method which has achieved encouraging results in clinics recently. However, the lack of a temperature monitoring makes it hard to apply widely, safely and efficiently. Conventional ultrasonic temperature estimation based on echo strain suffers from artifacts caused by signal distortion over time, leading to poor estimation and visualization of the 2D temperature map. This thesis presents a novel model-based stochastic framework for ultrasonic temperature estimation, which combines the temperature information from the ultrasound images and a theoretical model of the heat diffusion. Consequently the temperature estimation is more consistent over time and its visualisation is improved.
There are 3 main contributions of this thesis related to: improving the conventional echo strain method to estimate temperature, developing and applying approximate heat models to model temperature, and finally combining the estimation and the models. First in the echo strain based temperature estimation, a robust displacement estimator is first introduced to remove displacement outliers caused by the signal distortion over time due to the thermo-acoustic lens effect. To transfer the echo strain to temperature more accurately, an experimental method is designed to model their relationship using polynomials. Experimental results on a gelatine phantom show that the accuracy of the temperature estimation is of the order of 0.1 ◦C. This is better than results reported previously of 0.5 ◦C in a rubber phantom.
Second in the temperature modelling, heat models are derived approximately as Gaussian functions which are mathematically simple. Simulated results demonstrate that the approximate heat models are reasonable. The simulated temperature result is analytical and hence computed in much less than 1 second, while the conventional simulation of using finite element methods requires about 25 minutes under the same conditions.
Finally, combining the estimation and the heat models is the main contribution of this thesis. A 2D spatial adaptive Kalman filter with the predictive step defined by the shape model from the heat models is applied to the temperature map estimated from ultrasound images. It is shown that use of the temperature shape model enables more reliable temperature estimation in the presence of distorted or blurred strain measurements which are typically found in practice. The experimental results on in-vitro bovine liver show that the visualisation on the temperature map over time is more consistent and the iso-temperature contours are clearly visualised.

Keywords: Temperature estimation
HIFU
Temperature model
Kalman filtering
Ultrasound
Echo strain
Advisor: Smith, PP
Noble, A
Sequestering of Kähler moduli in type IIB string theory

In this thesis we employ string perturbation theory in toroidal orbifold models to study aspects of supersymmetry breaking in type IIB string theory.
First, we determine the dependence of physical Yukawa couplings on blow-up moduli in models with D3-branes at orbifold singularities. Blow-up moduli are scalar fields describing the size of small blow-up cycles in the compactification geometry. In models implementing moduli stabilisation these fields can acquire F-terms and break supersymmetry. We examine the moduli-dependence of physical Yukawa couplings at string tree-level by computing disk correlation functions involving a Yukawa interaction of visible sector fields and an arbitrary number of blow-up moduli. We perform the calculation for one blow-up insertion explicitly and find that the correlation function vanishes if the blow-up modulus is associated with a small cycle distant to the visible sector. For more than one blow-up insertion we show that all such correlation functions are exponentially suppressed by the compactification volume. We explain how these results are relevant to suppressing soft terms to scales parametrically below the gravitino mass.
Further, we determine corrections to holomorphic Yukawa couplings on D3-branes at an orbifold singularity due to non-perturbative effects such as gaugino condensation on a stack of D7-branes. This can be done by calculating a one-loop threshold correction to the gauge coupling on the D7-branes. We show that, if present, the new contributions to Yukawa couplings are not aligned with the tree-level couplings. As the new Yukawa couplings contribute to soft A-terms they are sources of flavour-changing neutral currents.
Last we discuss an effect unrelated to supersymmetry breaking. We show that orbifold models with D3-branes at orbifold singularities can exhibit kinetic mixing of different massless Abelian factors. For this to be possible, the relevant U(1) factors have to be associated with more than one orbifold singularity.

Keywords: string theory
strings and branes phenomenology
intersecting branes models
supersymmetry breaking
conformal field models in string theory
compactification and string models
particle physics
Advisor: Conlon, JP
The study of hyperphagia in dementia

About 750 000 people suffer from dementia in the United Kingdom. This number is rising as the proportion of those over 65 years old increases. Excessive eating (hyperphagia) occurs at some stage in about 25 % of people suffering from dementia. This can lead to consumption of unsuitable substances and a significant gain in weight, which may make care at home impossible. Until now, reports of hyperphagia have been purely anecdotal. The aims of this thesis were to develop objective methods for the definition and measurement of hyperphagia and to use these as a basis for examining the phenomenon of hyperphagia in detail.
Two standardised and reliable methods for quantifying hyperphagia were developed and compared. Results showed that people with hyperphagia ate, on average, more than three times the quantity of food eaten by matched controls during test meals. The hyperphagic group were compared, in a series of experiments, with two control groups - subjects with dementia who were not hyperphagic and normal elderly. The food choice of the hyperphagic group differed significantly from normal elderly: they chose less protein and low-energy foods and ate more sweet food. The changes in food choice seem to be a more severe form of the changes which occur during the dementing process. Examining the microstructure of eating showed that the mechanisms controlling both the onset and cessation of feeding are abnormal. Satiety was examined by giving subjects and controls two preload drinks of different energy content and examining the effect on subsequent food intake. Compensation for the preload was found to be weaker in normal elderly controls and both dementia groups when compared with young controls.
Although people with hyperphagia show significantly more patterns of stereotyped behaviour than matched demented controls the prolonged period of eating does not seem to be due to a stereotypy but to a delay in the satiation mechanism. Hyperphagia typically occurs in the middle stages of the dementing illness and lasts for a mean of about three years. These studies demonstrated that subjects with dementia who are hyperphagic have a major disturbance in the mechanisms controlling satiation, hunger, food choice and satiety.

Advisor: Hope, A
Hope, T
Studies into the technical feasibility of the Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine

The Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine (THAWT) has been proposed as a tidal device which can be easily scaled and requires fewer foundations, bearings seals and generators than a more conventional axial-flow device. The THAWT device is a horizontally deployed variant of the Darrieus cross-flow turbine, in which the blades can be oriented into a truss configuration to produce long, stiff multi-bay rotors.
This thesis establishes and combines a set of numerical models, which predict the hydrodynamic and structural performance of the THAWT device, with sufficient confidence to assess the feasibility of such a device at a full scale installation and to optimise its performance.
Tests of 1/20th scale experimental models of the THAWT device have demonstrated that the truss configured device is capable of producing power with an efficiency close to that of the parallel configured turbine. In addition, variations in the configuration of the scale models have indicated how several design parameters affect the hydrodynamic performance of the device.
A two-dimensional Navier-Stokes blade element model has been developed, in which the THAWT device is represented using an actuator cylinder. The addition of a hydrostatic free surface deformation correction has resulted in a model which is capable of matching experimental results with sufficient fidelity and accuracy.
Blade loads from the numerical hydrodynamic model have been applied to a beam finite element analysis, to predict the stresses induced in the hydrofoils of the THAWT device.
The numerical and hydrodynamic models are combined with a Linear Channel Momentum model to predict the performance of the THAWT device at a full scale tidal location. The effect that the device has on the channel flow indicates how much energy is available for extraction and how this energy might be most efficiently obtained. When considering material fatigue the analysis suggests that the structural design considerations dominate over the hydrodynamic considerations.

Keywords: Tidal energy
THAWT
Darrieus turbine
Advisor: Houlsby, G
McCulloch, M