VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Chinese muslims and the conversion of the Nusantara to Islam

This thesis is a comprehensive re-examination of Maritime Southeast Asia's (or the Nusantara's) Islamic conversion history between the late thirteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Traditionally, academia has attributed this event to Muslim traders and/or Sufis from either India and/or the Middle East. During the late twentieth century, however, a number of scholars began to consider the possibility of Chinese Muslim involvement. The resulting discussions focused on a re-evaluation of Javanese history in the context of attempts to re-conceptualise pre-modern Nusantara trade (considered the catalyst for Islamisation) as fundamentally orientated towards Southern China, where Muslims played a significant commercial role from the seventh through to the early fifteenth centuries. Despite the intrinsic merits of these efforts, however, they have all been limited by an overwhelming focus on Java and a tendency to examine the relevant issues over only a very narrow time span. This thesis seeks to rectify these problems. First, it will evaluate the validity of the new commercial framework over a much longer period – from the rise of &Sacute;r&imacr;vijaya in the seventh century CE to the establishment of the early seventeenth-century European trade monopolies. This longue dureé view will provide a much stronger basis for both conclusively re-orientating pre-modern Nusantaran trade towards China and also positing it as the catalyst for conversion, with Chinese Muslims at its heart. Second, the thesis will look beyond Java to examine the conversion histories of several other important Nusantara locations (Samudera-Pasai, Melaka and Brunei), as accessed through early written texts (indigenous, European and Chinese) and archaeology. The thesis then, and thirdly, couples this examination with a consideration of the Islamic influences which came to bear on the Nusantara’s early intellectual and architectural expressions of Islam. Ultimately, by taking this broad chronological, geographical and cultural approach, the thesis aims to more reliably assess the possibility that Chinese Muslims influenced the Nusantara’s initial Islamisation process.

Keywords: conversion
China
Islamisation
Southeast Asia
Advisor: al-Akiti, A
Fogg, K
Development and usage of information architecture

Despite its emergence more than a decade ago, information architecture remains a problematic concept. A study of relevant literature suggests significant advocacy with inadequate supporting evidence on its existence, application or value. The available limited research evidence generally presents unsatisfactory information architecture experience. Notwithstanding the unresolved issues and reported unsatisfactory experience, information architecture continues to be referenced as an important information management issue. Hence this doctoral study sought to investigate it.
In the first stage, the study set out to clarify the position of information architecture via a large scale postal survey of 294 organisations. The survey found that information architecture is being used in association with IS planning, particularly in organisations which position IT as a strategic resource, but perceptions on its two conventional key components vary. While application architecture is viewed as being useful for IS planning, corporate data model is seen as being more relevant to data management and project implementation. Both models are regarded as tools facilitating integrated information systems development.
In the second stage of research, case studies on 6 large organisations were conducted to gain an in-depth understanding of successful information architecture practice. The investigation reaffirmed application architecture's position as an IS planning tool and cast further doubt on corporate data model's role not only in IS planning but also in IS practice as a whole. Business area/project data model was identified as the pragmatic high-level data model for both application/database development and data management. A major finding of the case studies was on business system architecture, a pictorial model depicting IT in its business setting. It is seen as being of value for integrating IS planning with strategy development and business planning - a tool for fusing IT with the business. The case studies concluded that the value and effectiveness of information architecture is dependent on the targeting of its components - business system architecture, application architecture and business area/project data model - in terms of tasks and recipients.
The case for a holistic approach to business/IS planning and implementation is currently being argued by a number of leading management and IS scholars. This thesis embraces the holistic approach and positions the (redefined) information architecture as a valuable tool in its implementation.
Enhancing the synthetic utility of silicon: an investigation into organosilicon chemistry

The aims of this work were two-fold - to enhance the 'latent functionality' of a silicon centre by expanding the range of functionalisation reactions available to such compounds, and to develop novel silicon-tethered transformations in order to increase the utility of this attractive synthetic strategy.
1. Aryle Silane Oxidation
Building upon the earlier work of Tamao and co-workers, we have developed a mild, functional group-tolerant oxidation of arylsilanes, allowing a wide range of phenols to be readily accessed. One key insight uncovered during this work was the observation that this oxidation could be acheived with sub-stoichiometric quantities of a fluoride promoter, thus allowing several TBS-protected substrates to be oxidised without any concomitant loss of the protecting group.
2. Silicon-Tethering Methodology
In order to utilise our recently acquired expertise in the field of alkoxy arylsilane synthesis, we sought to develop a novel silicon-tethered iron-catalysed biaryl coupling. Unfortunately, despite our considerable efforts, this methodology was found to suffer from reproducibility issues, and thus our attentions subsequently turned to silicon-tethered palladium- and platinum-catalysed processes. These investigations proved to be more fruitful, with the palladium-catalysed methodology affording a small range of silicon-tethered products. Finally, a novel platinum-catalysed hydro-silylation / electrocyclisation cascade was also developed, allowing a substituted arene to be accessed from a dienyne precursor.

Keywords: Organosilicon
oxidation
silicon tethering
Advisor: Anderson, E
Chemical, electronic and electrochemical properties of diamond thin films

Diamond is of interest as an advanced functional material, since the extreme physical properties of diamond, suggests it is ideally suited to a range of new demanding applications. In this context, the thesis explores basic surface chemical properties of diamond thin films, along with electrochemical, electronic and electron emission processes involving this material.
New experiments are reported concerning the nature of surface conductivity on diamond. Measurements clearly show that the conductivity only arises if a hydrogenated diamond surface is exposed to water vapour, in the presence of chemical species capable of acting as electron acceptors. The conduction properties of surface conductive diamond in aqueous solution are also studied, and the first detailed electrochemical investigations of this material are described.
Comparative electrochemical studies of nanocrystalline and boron-doped diamond have been performed. Investigations of electrode stability, and the accessible "potential window" are described, as well as the behaviour of a range of 'redox' systems, including transition metal complexes, metal deposition/stripping, and bio-related organic species. Significant differences between the behaviour of nanodiamond and microcrystalline boron-doped material are observed.
A range of surface chemical and threshold photoemission studies of diamond thin films are reported. The results indicate that quantum photoyields (QPYs) are insensitive to the diamond "quality", although the wavelength selectivity is dependent on it. The adsorption of oxygen strongly reduces the QPY, although this only occurs slowly in the presence of O2 because of a low reactive sticking probability. Much more rapid uptake of oxygen and consequent reduction of photoyield is observed in the presence of atomic O or electronically excited dioxygen O2*. The presence of alkali metals on the diamond surface increases the QPY, and reduces the sensitivity of the QPY to surface oxygen. Significant differences between the surface chemical properties of Li, and other adsorbed akali metals (K and Cs) are observed.

Advisor: Foord, J
Maltreatment-related processes of emotion regulation and social understanding: A study of adolescents in care in New South Wales

Child abuse and neglect is a significant social issue with long term consequences for affected children and young people, including increased risk of emotional and social difficulties. Models of the impacts of maltreatment outline a developmental process in which maltreating parent-child relationships affect the development of neural networks, which in turn undermine developing cognitive processes, including emotion regulation and social understanding, thereby increasing risk of emotional and social difficulties. This study explores a subset of these cognitive processes in a sample of adolescents in long-term out-of-home care as a result of maltreatment, relative to a sample of non-maltreated peers, including situation selection (conditioned avoidance and risk-taking), attentional deployment (attention biases and attention control) and cognitive change (interpretation bias), as well as aspects of social understanding (mentalising, emotion understanding and prosocial responding). Further, the relative effects of maltreatment factors, and the relationship between emotion regulation and social understanding with adolescent adjustment was also explored. Results demonstrated maltreatment-related effects in conditioned avoidance, risk-taking, attention processes and social understanding, and explored the relative effect of exposure to physical abuse on the development of these processes, differences in such processes did not appear to significantly predict poor or normative adjustment of maltreated adolescents. These results are discussed with respect to models of maltreatment, emotion regulation and social understanding, with implications for the development and implementation of interventions.

Keywords: social cognition
emotion regulation
developmental psychopathology
Child maltreatment
Advisor: Lau, J
Scerif, G
Leabhar gabhála, Yeats, and Joyce

In Galicia, translation slowly emerged as part of a cultural program during the 1920s, primarily through the activities of the Xeración Nós and the Irmandades da Fala, two intellectual and political groups seeking to recuperate and defend Galician language and culture through two magazines, A Nosa Terra and Nós. This aspect of nationalism is deserving of study because few scholars have addressed how the appropriation of literary texts, via translations, impacts nationalists' agendas.
Nineteenth-century Galician scholars had claimed to establish ethnic and cultural links in early history between Galicia and Ireland and other alleged Celtic nations. The Xeración Nós and the Irmandades da Fala continued this legacy by researching Celtic and Irish history as well as introducing Irish writers, discussing their contributions to literature, and translating their works in journals. Their main intention was to demonstrate the Galicians' distinctiveness from Spain and to establish a common link with a nation struggling for its national rights. Therefore, for both journals, the subject of Ireland and the Irish was an obligatory and ideologically imperative reference.
This thesis examines the role of translation in Nos and A Nosa Terra and its impact on Galician cultural nationalism. Working within the parameters of translation theory, nationalism, and post-colonialism, I consider why literary works by authors such as W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), James Joyce (1882-1941), and Terence MacSwiney (1879-1920), and the Irish epic, Leabhar Gabhála (The Book of the Conquests of Ireland), are discussed and later translated into Galician and what these translations seek to achieve within the re-emerging culture. On this basis, my objective is to show that as translated literature assumes a new role by providing invigorating models in the target culture, it regenerates national culture, language, and literature.

Advisor: Dr John Rutherford, D
Creating dynamic capabilities

This research examines how companies adapt to more unpredictable environments by developing dynamic capabilities that help sustain innovation and change. The key explanatory construct is modular architecture - the intentional decomposition of systems (products or processes) into relatively independent sub-units with standard interfaces.
The dissertation is structured as three semi-independent papers plus an introduction and a literature review. The literature review describes current theories of modular systems and discusses the similarities and differences to related concepts such as nearly decomposable systems, loose coupling, and vertical decomposition. The literature review identifies three gaps in the current literature. First, there has been a limited degree of theorising on the concept outside the field of technology management. Second, the current literature is based largely on anecdotal case studies and there is little quantitative evidence of the strategic value of modularity. Finally, there is a lack of understanding concerning the implementation of modular architectures.
The first paper generalises from product to organisation design and derives five principles for modular organisational architectures. A hypothetical example is developed to illustrate how a large home appliances company might apply these principles to create a process platform consisting of reconfigurable building blocks. The chapter also proposes some extensions of current theory to more realistically adopt modularity concepts in organisation design.
The second paper is based on a study that explores the current product and process architectures at three leading manufacturers of vacuum cleaners. It identifies some of the key barriers to increased flexibility among companies in mature industries. It also considers the relative value of modularity for established companies pursuing incremental innovation versus entrepreneurial companies introducing more radical innovations. The third paper presents the results from a survey questionnaire study of companies in the home appliances industry in the UK. and US. The relationship between market context, product and process architecture, strategic flexibility and firm performance is examined by means of structural equations modelling. The results show a positive relationship between modular product architectures and performance, with product model variety as a mediating variable.
The thesis makes the following contributions to the existing literature: It complements extant theorising by generalising modular principles to organisation design. It contributes to methodology by developing a questionnaire for assessing modularity in product and process design. Finally, it provides one of the first empirical studies of the effects of modularity on strategic flexibility and firm performance.

Advisor: Moore, K
The safe lambda calculus

We consider a syntactic restriction for higher-order grammars called safety that constrains occurrences of variables in the production rules according to their type-theoretic order. We transpose and generalize this restriction to the setting of the simply-typed lambda calculus, giving rise to what we call the safe lambda calculus. We analyze its expressivity and obtain a result in the same vein as Schwichtenberg's 1976 characterization of the simply-typed lambda calculus: the numeric functions representable in the safe lambda calculus are exactly the multivariate polynomials; thus conditional is not definable. We also give a similar characterization for representable word functions. We then examine the complexity of deciding beta-eta equality of two safe simply-typed terms and show that this problem is PSPACE-hard. The safety restriction is then extended to other applied lambda calculi featuring recursion and references such as PCF and Idealized Algol (IA for short). The next contribution concerns game semantics. We introduce a new concrete presentation of this semantics using the theory of traversals. It is shown that the revealed game denotation of a term can be computed by traversing some souped-up version of the term's abstract syntax tree using adequately defined traversal rules. Based on this presentation and via syntactic reasoning we obtain a game-semantic interpretation of safety: the strategy denotations of safe lambda-terms satisfy a property called P-incremental justification which says that the player's moves are always justified by the last pending opponent's move of greater order occurring in the player's view. Next we look at models of the safe lambda calculus. We show that these are precisely captured by Incremental Closed Categories. A game model is constructed and is shown to be fully abstract for safe IA. Further, it is effectively presentable: two terms are equivalent just if they have the same set of complete O-incrementally justified plays---where O-incremental justification is defined as the dual of P-incremental justification. Finally we study safety from the point of view of algorithmic game semantics. We observe that in the third-order fragment of IA, the addition of unsafe contexts is conservative for observational equivalence. This implies that all the upper complexity bounds known for the lower-order fragments of IA also hold for the safe fragment; we show that the lower-bounds remain the same as well. At order 4, observational equivalence is known to be undecidable for IA. We conjecture that for the order-4 safe fragment of IA, the problem is reducible to the DPDA-equivalence problem and is thus decidable.

Keywords: lambda calculus
game semantics
safety restriction
Advisor: Ong, C
Socio-economic aspects of the Byzantine mosaic pavements of Phoenicia and northern Palestine

The present thesis analyzes the Byzantine mosaic pavements of Phoenicia and Northern Palcatine from a socio-economic perspective, primarily by examining the laying of pavements including technical aspects and bedding, the quality of decoration, the distribution of pavements in time and space, as well as inscriptions which provide names of donors and artists as well as dates. The approach adopted represents a novel alternative and complement to typical interpretations of mosaic floor decoration which overwhelmingly focus on the development and diffusion of style, or provide an exegesis of figurative iconography. Key aspects discussed include the extent to which chronological patterns of mosaic floor laying may be used to gauge economic conditions; the factors which determined the quality and distribution of technique and decoration in different building types; as well as the social mechanisms of patronage.
Close scrutiny of the regional mosaic Corpus (which includes the total number of pavements) suggests that mosaic pavements provide a reasonable indication of economic conditions, especially in association with other media (coins, pottery, inscriptions). Together these media paint a historical picture of the economy of the period.
Having graded according to four Levels of Complexity all the geometric designs in the Corpus after their codification following the rules devised by the Association Internationale pour l'Etude de la Mosaïque Antique (AIEMA), and with the support of the written ancient sources, it is demonstrated that quality and distribution of technique and style were governed by a combination of factors, notably function, financial expenditure, social use and various socio-economic categories of patrons, liturgy and liturgical level of participation.
By building on the methodologies followed and the conclusions reached by other mosaic scholars, this innovative approach has attempted to reintroduce the human element into a discipline focused since the late 1960s on codification and descriptive precision. Revealing the hidden costs underlying the laying of mosaic pavements has presented a new insight into mosaic pavements as tri-dimensional products of team work. Likewise, stripping the literary language of dedicatory formulas down to essential information has challenged the misinterpreting of epigraphic evidence regarding donations and donors. In-depth analysis of Christian mosaic inscriptions has strengthened the pattern of changes plotted by historians of the Early Byzantine period and suggested that Christian patronage of mosaic art is to be equated with the local initiatives of the Church, ecclesiatics and wealthy laymen (or women) as private donors, and more rarely entire village communities. By contrast, scrutiny of the Jewish and Samaritan mosaic inscriptions has highlighted the fact that benefaction emanated from rich and poor alike, and was far more family and community oriented.

Advisor: Dr Claudine Dauphin, J
Functional laminar architecture of the rat primary auditory cortex

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the functional role of the cortical column architecture within some of the existing brain coding theories. Here I focus on the hierarchical models of predictive coding and the 'phase of firing' coding hypothesis.
Using an oddball paradigm consisting of a sequence of identical sounds interspersed with rare, unexpected sounds, one can observe a difference between the scalp potentials evoked by oddball and common sounds. This difference has been linked to predictive coding and novelty detection, and Stimulus Specific Adaptation (SSA) has been suggested as a likely substrate at the single neuron level. In order to simultaneously constrain hierarchical models of predictive coding, and so as to investigate the contributions that neural processing within the different cytoarchitectonic layers of the primary auditory cortex (A1) may make to SSA, I simultaneously recorded multi-unit activity and current source density (CSD) profiles across all layers in A1 of the rat in response to standard and oddball tones. Our results suggest that SSA arises at the level of the thalamocortical synapse and is further enhanced in the supragranular layers.
The phase of low-frequency Local Field Potentials (LFPs) in primary sensory cortices carries stimulus related information and disambiguates the information about different stimuli evoking similar spike rates. However, it is yet unclear how these informative LFP phase values arise within the laminar organization of cortical columns. To address this issue, I performed CSD recordings in the area A1 of anaesthetized rats during the presentation of complex naturalistic sounds. Information theoretic analysis revealed that most LFP phase information originates from discrete CSD events consisting of strong granular-superficial-layer dipoles, likely triggered by bursts of thalamocortical activation. These events, which occur at rates of 2-4 Hz, reliably reset LFP phases at times of strong network excitation. They therefore provide a useful reference frame to measure neural activity with respect to salient times of stimulus history. CSD events display a diverse, stimulus-dependent morphology: these reflect the outcomes of cortical computations which result in varying extents of activation of infragranular output layers.

Keywords: spikes
cortical column
LFP
auditory cortex
microcircuit
stimulus specific adaptation
phase coding
information theory
local field potential
Advisor: Schnupp, J