VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Improving properties of operators by extensions and reductions

This thesis presents and develops two tools which can be used to work with lower bounds of operators.
One tool in working with lower bounds is invertible extensions. They allow one to turn a lower bound of an operator into the norm of an inverse operator. Some results giving extensions are known for single operators and certain other semigroup representations. Chapter 3 includes some positive new results for operators on Hilbert space and also certain unbounded operators. An example shows that a uniform lower bound for the powers of an operator does not give an extension with power bounded inverse. Variations are given for generators of C0-semigroups, and for operators on Hilbert space. A result by Read, which gives an extension with minimal spectrum raises the question how the lower bounds of the original operator are related to the resolvent bounds of the extension.
Another tool which is developed in this thesis is a reduction using semi- norms. A seminorm can place a different emphasis on elements and even neglect some. In this way, we can shape a Banach space to attain properties that we impose. This idea is used to define maximal parts in Chapter 4. They are identified in the context of contractivity and expansiveness of a bounded operator, and in the context of dissipativity and accretivity for certain unbounded operators. Applications are an improvement of a theorem by Batty and Tomilov which characterises embeddings into hyperbolic C0-semigroups, and a generalisation of a theorem by Goldberg and Smith leading to a characterisation of generators of C0-semigroups which have an extending group with bounded inverses.

Advisor: Batty, C
Molecular archaeoparasitology as a novel tool for the study of trading and migration networks through history

This project represents the first comprehensive study applying molecular and genetic methods to study historical contexts such as migration and trade based on human parasites. Using specially developed techniques, the study focused on parasites with minor symptoms which allowed the infected person to go about their daily business. The combination of state of the art techniques in archaeology, molecular methods and phylogenetic analysis enabled us to develop a novel powerful tool to study historic events. Diseases have a considerable impact on societies. Various publications indicate that human intestinal parasites are commonly found in a variety of archaeological contexts, including latrines, graves and mummies. These parasites can be detected by microscopy which focuses the work on samples which do close association to humans; widespread prevalence and the possibility for reliable microscopic diagnostics suggest that these parasites are an attractive study system for human activities. Infectious diseases have a much short generation time which offers greater opportunity to track historical events at higher resolution. Looking at a range of human parasites, their different life-cycles allowed insight into various aspects of human culture, comparing different origins of the samples allows an estimation of the epidemiological burden of ancient populations. Application of a parallel sequencing approach (MiSeq) enabled building a comprehensive database of sequences from various archaeological sites dating as far back as 3630 BCE. Indepth phylogenetic analysis reveals patterns in the genetic signatures of both coding and non-coding genetic regions, taking various levels of selective pressure into account. This project has produced the oldest pathogen sequence and the most comprehensive database of ancient pathogen sequences.

Advisor: Pollard, A
Smith, A
The protesting youths of Hong Kong: post-80s reimaginings of politics through self, body, and space

This thesis examines the political activism of Hong Kong youths known as the Post-80s. In contrast to dominant discourse in Hong Kong claiming that these youths are driven by economic concerns, based on 18 months of fieldwork, I suggest that the Post-80s are instead striving to reimagine what politics means as a part of life in the postcolonial city. It is emphasised that youths are 'protesting' as an act of rejecting mainstream politics, and as a means to realise their desire for a different form of politics to emerge in the city. By bringing youth voices to the forefront, this thesis addresses two broad themes—why and how the Post-80s protest. The thesis first provides an overview of Hong Kong politics, arguing that youths express a deep sense of dissatisfaction towards the political culture in society dictated by financial interests, and towards the hierarchical structures within the political domains that stifle the public voice. The thesis then reviews how the Post-80s challenge these conditions by positing a form of alternative politics predicated on individualistic self-representation manifesting through the self, body, and space. I look at youth claims that becoming political is an 'individual choice', and the ways in which their strong sense of individuality interacts with/counteracts the limitations on their political participation imposed by familial ties and gender roles. I then explore Post-80s attempts to dispel bodily passivity in protests through the incorporation of performance art into their political actions to empower the individual activist, and analyse youth attempts to reconfigure urban space into political sites of individualistic experimentation. The conclusion reviews the impact Post-80s activism has had on the realpolitik of the city, noting the inherent contradictions within the political efforts of the Post-80s and their limited ability to inflict widespread structural changes in Hong Kong politics.

Keywords: Youth Protest
Hong Kong
Politics
Advisor: Xiang, B
Ottoman-Arab transatlantic migrations in the age of mass migrations (1870-1914)

This thesis sketches out the history of Ottoman-Arab emigration from Greater Syria to the United States and to Argentina from the late nineteenth century up to the end of World War I, relying primarily (but not solely) on the related documents preserved in the Ottoman Archives. It depicts a wide range of this emigration history, including the scale and the number of immigrants, the causes behind emigration, the ways that emigrants managed to reach the Americas, the attitudes of Ottoman governments toward them, and the ways that emigrants adapted to their host societies. The thesis analyses the Ottoman-Arab emigration phenomenon from social and economic perspectives and in the larger context comprising other European population movements to the New World during this period, which has been called 'the Age of Mass Migrations.'

Keywords: immigration
USA
Argentina
Syrian
Ottoman Empire
Lebanese
Advisor: O'Rourke, K
The role of compartmentalised cyclic nucleotides in pulmonary endothelial barrier function

The barrier function of the endothelium has been found to decrease in response to cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) elevations in the cellular cytosol, while it seems to be rescued by increasing cAMP concentrations at the membrane. This suggests that cAMP compartmentalisation may be a regulatory mechanism of barrier function.
Barrier dysfunction has been implicated in disease, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and oedema. It remains unknown whether cAMP compartmentalisation plays a role in barrier dysfunction. Therefore, it is of interest to investigate whether cAMP is compartmentalised in human pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells (hPMEC) and how this affects barrier maintenance.
Here we describe the optimisation of methods to investigate the potential cAMP compartmentalisation in hPMEC. Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) microscopy allows for high resolution live monitoring of spatiotemporal changes of cyclic nucleotides. FRET membrane targeted and cytosolic sensors, respectively, were developed to compare cAMP regulation in different subcellular locations in space and time. FRET imaging studies in hPMEC have not been undertaken before, therefore cell culture conditions were optimized for this specific purpose. In addition, a chamber that combines FRET imaging with transendothelial resistance (TER) measurements was designed and constructed to determine cAMP compartmentalisation in hPMEC and its contribution to cellular barrier function.
Fluorescence imaging confirmed localization of FRET reporters at the membrane and in the cytosol, respectively. Addition of 28 mM HEPES and omission of serum were judged to be appropriate in conducting future FRET experiments in hPMEC. Initial FRET-TER chamber experiments were conducted, confirming that both FRET and TER could be measured with this approach. Preliminary data, employing different stimuli and FRET reporters, are in line with the notion of cAMP is compartmentalised in hPMEC.
By further optimisation and development of the methods described here, insight will be gained into the localisation and regulation of cAMP at the subcellular level and its effect on endothelial barrier function. This will help clarify whether local manipulation of cAMP signals may offer alternative approaches to the treatment of barrier function-related pathologies.

Advisor: Zaccolo, M
Perfusion imaging and tissue biomarkers for colorectal cancer

Background: Systemic chemotherapy and radiotherapy play an important role in the treatment of colorectal cancer. Tumour perfusion and oxygenation is known to influence radiosensitivity and chemosensitivity. In this thesis, I propose that the evaluation of changes in tumour perfusion using perfusion CT (pCT) and dynamic contrast-enhanced (Dce) MRI can guide the rational sequencing of drugs and radiation.
Methods: Dce-MRI and pCT scans were incorporated into a clinical trial of hypofractionated pelvic radiotherapy and nelfinavir in 10 patients with rectal cancer. Toxicity and tissue biomarkers (tumour cell density, microvessel density, CAIX, HIF1-alpha, phospho-Akt and phospho-PRAS40) were evaluated. pCT liver scans were incorporated into an imaging study in patients with colorectal liver metastases randomised to receive either oxaliplatin/ 5FU chemotherapy or oxaliplatin/ 5FU chemotherapy plus selective internal radiotherapy.
Results: After 7 days of nelfinavir concurrent with hypo-fractionated pelvic radiotherapy, there was a mean 42% increase in median Ktrans (P=0.03, paired t test) on Dce-MRI and a median 30% increase in mean blood flow on pCT (P=0.028, Wilcoxon Rank Sum), although no statistically significant changes in perfusion parameters were demonstrated after 7 days of nelfinavir prior to radiotherapy. The feasibility of evaluating tumour cell density in rectal biopsies before and after radiotherapy and a radiosensitising drug as an early endpoint of response was demonstrated. In patients with colorectal liver metastases who received oxaliplatin and modified de Gramont chemotherapy alone, after 4 cycles of chemotherapy, a 28% decrease in the mean hepatic arterial fraction was observed (P=0.018, paired t test). Between pCT scans 2 days before SIRT and 39-47 days following SIRT and continued 2-weekly chemotherapy, there was a mean 62% (P=0.009) reduction in Blood Flow and 61% (P=0.006) reduction in Blood Volume (paired t test).
Conclusions
This research does not support the hypothesis that nelfinavir before radiotherapy improves blood flow to human rectal cancer. Increases in rectal tumour perfusion during radiotherapy and concurrent nelfinavir are likely to be primarily explained by the acute biological effects of radiation. Four or more cycles of oxaliplatin and modified de Gramont chemotherapy may result in changes in tumour perfusion of colorectal liver metastases which would be detrimental to subsequent radiotherapy. Selective internal radiotherapy resulted in substantial reductions in tumour perfusion 39-47 days after the treatment. Perfusion imaging can be used to detect changes in tumour perfusion in response to radiotherapy and systemic therapy which have implications for the sequencing of therapies.

Keywords: Chemotherapy
Selective Internal Radiotherapy
Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI
Radiosensitisation
Perfusion CT
Radiotherapy
Nelfinavir
Advisor: Sharma, R
Partridge, M
Education, work and family events in women's lives: Long-term developemnts and recent trends in East and West Germany

This thesis investigates how educational expansion, the trend towards the service society and the German unification affect East and West German women's life courses and family lives. It focuses on educational enrolment, educational attainment level, labour force participation, career resources, social origin, the educational match among partners as well as historical periods and examines their consequences on women's entry into first motherhood as well as partnership formation and dissolution processes. Using longitudinal data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we have applied multivariate methods such as event history analysis. The findings suggest that women's entry into motherhood during full-time education is highly dependent on women's age, social origin and the policy measures in a country. Furthermore, women's education has mainly an effect on the time structure of entry into first motherhood over the life course of differently qualified women but not on their final decision to enter into motherhood. Only if higher educated women can turn their educational investments into career resources, there is an effect on childlessness. This thesis also looked into women's partnership formation and dissolution processes. East and West German women do only differ slightly with regard to these transitions; nevertheless, the results showed that it is mainly West German women that transform their partnerships if they experience a pregnancy. Furthermore, the transmission of norms within a family seems to play an important role in women's partnership formation and dissolution processes. Based on a new theoretical model on educational assortative mating and divorce, this thesis is able to show that there are not only benefits from division of work but also benefits from communication within married couples. The empirical results show that the combined gains and losses of division of work and communication are different for educationally married up, homogamous or down women. Women's upward marriages are the most stable ones, with homogamous marriages ranking second, followed by married down marriages being the least stable ones.

Keywords: Marriage
Advisor: Mills, C
Essays on fertility and family size

In these papers I discuss the causal estimation of the effects of fertility and fertility planning developments on mother and child outcomes. A number of concerns are raised with existing identification techniques, and alternative methodologies to consistently estimate the effect of interest are proposed. These concerns and new techniques are illustrated using microdata on slightly more than 43,000,000 births ocurring between 1972 and 2013.
In the first substantive chapter (written with Sonia Bhalotra), we discuss the validity of the use of twin births in fertility research. We demonstrate that twin births are not random. Successfully taking twins to term depends upon positive maternal health behaviours and investments in the periods preceding birth. We show that this is of considerable concern for estimation techniques which rely on twin births being (conditionally) randomly assigned to identify causal effects. To illustrate, we consider the estimation of the child quantity–quality (QQ) trade-off, and show that existing instrumental variable estimates are inconsistent in the contexts examined. Upon partially correcting for the fact that twin births are not random, a statistically significant QQ trade-off begins to emerge. We close by examining a number of partial identification techniques to bound the true effect of fertility on child outcomes.
In the second substantive chapter, I examine the effect of fertility control policies on the fertility decisions and outcomes of women. I consider the case of the emergency contraceptive pill in Chile. The staggered arrival of this technology to Chile over the last decade has resulted in the availability of the first safe and legal post-coital birth control policies. In a context of high teenage pregnancy rates, difference-in-difference (DD) style estimates suggest that this policy has accounted for reductions in short-term teen childbearing by as much as 7%, an effect similar to the arrival of abortion in the USA. This policy is also shown to reduce fetal deaths reported in early gestation with no similar reduction in late gestation: suggestive evidence that an alternative fertility control policy may reduce costly and dangerous illegal abortions.
Finally, I turn to the use of DD estimators as a policy-analysis tool. I discuss how such estimators perform in the case of reforms which may not be sharply demarcated to treatment and control clusters, but rather subject to local spillovers or externalities. I propose an extension of the typical DD estimator: a spillover-robust DD estimator. This methodology is applied to estimate the effect of two localised fertility control reforms in Mexico and Chile, where women close to treatment clusters who were not themselves subject to the reform may nonetheless travel to access treatment.

Keywords: fertility control
causal inference
fertility
Advisor: Stevens, M
Treading the path of salvation: The religious devotion of Shaqiq al-Balkhi, al-Harith al-Muhasibi, and Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz

In the early ninth century Muslim renunciants developed the metaphor of devotion to God is a path to teach their disciples how to cultivate virtues that would enable them to escape attachment to the world. Alongside these virtues were ascetic practices, sometimes extreme, that demonstrated their commitment to God. The earliest example of this renunciant path is the ascetic manual &Amacr;d&amacr;b al-'ib&amacr;d&amacr;t attributed to Shaq&imacr;q al-Balkh&imacr; (d. 198/809–10). Al-Ḥ&amacr;rith al-Muḥ&amacr;sib&imacr; (d. 243/857–8) took exception to exaggerated practices of Shaq&imacr;q's path and insisted that religious devotion must adhere to the commands God gave in the Quran and in the Sunna. Unique in the ninth century, Muḥ&amacr;sib&imacr; also insisted that God's commands were not limited to exterior actions, but included specific expectations of the interior dimension of religious devotion. Ab&umacr; Sa'&imacr;d al-Kharr&amacr;z (d. 277/890–91 or 286/899) expanded the renunciant path of Saq&imacr;q's followers, but also responded to Muḥ&amacr;sib&imacr;'s censure and softened the more extreme practices of the renunciant path. He was firmly committed to the interior dimension of religious devotion, but gave no indication that he accepted Muḥ&amacr;sib&imacr;'s insistence that these virtues were incumbent. Rather, he argues that the noblest expression of these virtues exists only among God's friends, whose religious devotion has its origin in the excellence of their primordial condition.
This thesis will introduce a conceptual hierarchy of religious devotion that facilitates the analysis and comparison of each of these authors. Current discussions of ninth-century Islamic piety are limited by inadequate definitions of asceticism and mysticism. A holistic approach to their religious devotion will provide tangible indicators of the ascetic or mystical orientation of their piety. This provides better parameters for discussing the relationship between asceticism and mysticism in the ninth century.

Keywords: Religious Devotion
Islamic Spirituality
Advisor: Melchert, C
Social learning of a foraging task in great tits: Population patterns and underlying mechanisms

Certain bottlenose dolphin pods forage using sponges, while a subset of Japanese macaque troops wash sweet potatoes. These are just some examples of group-level patterns of behaviour that could have arisen by social learning. Understanding the scale at which social learning acts to result in such traditions can be informative of underlying mechanisms. In addition, studying how social learning can influence the occurrence and distribution of behaviour over space and time enables a better understanding of how selection acts on populations. Thus, in this thesis, I investigate the role of social learning on spatiotemporal foraging patterns and the underlying mechanisms in wild great tits (Parus major). To do this, I employed both field and captive experiments to examine learning at experimentally introduced foraging tasks. I found individual and spatial variation in coarse and fine-scale techniques used to solve a bidirectional control procedure task. Social learning of fine-scale solving behaviours was focused on location rather than actions, suggesting fine-scale local enhancement. I also found that social learning influences temporal behavioural patterns, with learning individuals benefiting from the improving skill levels of demonstrators. This however, was masked at a local scale by competition. Temporal changes in behaviour were influenced by potential 'habit forming', with individuals acting to increase their foraging efficiency of preferred techniques rather than adopting more efficient techniques. Finally, results from a captive open diffusion experiment using a two-action task, though inconclusive, supported fine-scale local enhancement in great tits when foraging. This thesis highlights the importance of examining the impact of social learning on behavioural patterns at different scales. It also emphasises the need to examine not only how social learning influences novel skill acquisition and the distribution of behaviour in populations, but also how it influences temporal changes in behaviours already within the repertoire of individuals.

Keywords: Social learning
Great tit
Advisor: Sheldon, B
Aplin, L
Apologies and damages: the moral demands of tort law as a reparative mechanism

This thesis seeks to justify on moral grounds the existence of tort systems. The argument is that corrective justice is necessary but not sufficient to succeed at this task. Corrective justice is necessary because it is the only principle that can adequately justify the bilateral structure of tort litigation between claimants and defendants, and full compensatory damages as the default remedy in most tort systems. However, it is argued that the critiques to corrective justice lead us to the important lesson that tort law is more than just corrective justice. Three gaps of corrective justice are identified: the equivalence between gains and losses, the definition of what counts as a tort, and the diversity of remedies.
The thesis offers a solution to these problems based on the values of restorative and distributive justice. It is argued that restorative justice plays an important role in tort law, providing an apologetic framework for material compensation (the message that money awards communicate), but especially for symbolic remedies, such as apologies, nominal damages, non-pecuniary damages, punitive damages, and gain-based damages, solving the diversity of remedies problem. This restorative framework of tort remedies is compatible with corrective justice. Distributive justice also plays an important role in tort law. Even though corrective and distributive justice are conceptually separate concepts, in the context of tort law they cannot be separated. It is argued that the definition of what counts as a tort involves a distributive task. Following this argument, the thesis argues that there is a distributive uneasiness in tort law, because tort law protects some interests regardless of how they were acquired, and regardless of whether their distribution amounts to an unfair distribution of resources. It is suggested that the distributive mechanism of insurance can solve, or at least ameliorate, this uneasiness.

Keywords: Restorative Justice
Apologies
Distributive Justice
Corrective Justice
Tort Law
Advisor: Gardner, J