VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Exploring the testing 'effect' to enable knowledge retention and deployment in the Key Stage 3 History classroom

This project aims to explore two interrelated issues. First, it seeks to probe recent interest in with research from experimental cognitive psychology regarding the use of low-stakes tests as a learning and memory tool rather than a summative assessment instrument. The idea that frequent testing of key dates, names and information as a way to improve student learning, produce superior performance in examinations and overcome social and economic deprivation has been seen as an exciting opportunity within the history and wider education community in England. By transplanting the basic methodology and placing it into the real world context of a school classroom rather than the tightly controlled laboratory space, it seeks to analyse the performance of students over a term in comparison with a class not subjected to frequent low-stakes testing. Qualitative data in the form of written work and semi-structured interviews are used to probe student conceptions of tests as learning tools.
The second related aspect the project aims to explore is the interest in the teaching of 'knowledge' and increasing the capacity of student memory which has fuelled the desire to explore cognitive psychology as a vehicle to liberate students from limited historical understanding and poor academic performance which leads to poor life chances.

Keywords: MLT
MLT2016
Key Stage 3
History
Promoting collaboration to enhance learning in modern foreign languages

This paper details school-based research conducted to gather pupil views on group work and promote collaboration to enhance learning in French lessons at a British junior school. A dual-phase intervention centred on a sample of 74 pupils in Year 5 and saw the collaborative design, implementation and evaluation, by four teachers, of tasks drawing on the cooperative learning principles of positive interdependence, individual accountability, social skills, group processing and promotive interaction. Questionnaires were employed to gather views at different stages of the enquiry, allowing for quantitative analysis; data was also gathered via qualitative techniques such as lesson observations and semi-structured interviews. A majority of pupils claimed to enjoy working together, learning from others and helping one another, with many citing teamwork as a key facilitator to effective collaboration and warning of the negative implications of arguing, bossiness and disruption. The role of the teacher was considered key to the efficacy of group work, with proficient task design and efficient classroom management seen as especially important. Overall, cooperative learning strategies were deemed effective in enhancing the quality of group work in French lessons, this judgment being based primarily on the observations and experiences of the pupils and teachers involved. The key findings from this study have been collated to form a set of guidelines, intended as a point of reference in the future planning and execution of group work in this setting.

Keywords: MLT
MLT2016
Modern Foreign Languages
The purpose of perichōrēsis in the polemical works of John of Damascus

John of Damascus was an early eighth century theologian in the Jerusalem Patriarchate. His family supplied financial administrators in Syro-Palestine for most of the seventh century, who were involved in surrendering Damascus to the Arabs if not also to the Persians. They thrived in the sectarian environment under the Umayyads. Numerous Greek Lives paint John in legendary terms; however, these are late and unreliable. I deconstruct the Lives decoupling his timeline from Byzantine Iconoclasm, arguing that there is no evidence and good reason to think that he did not leave the Arab administration because of vexed piety, persecution or administrative language change. Rather, focusing on the chronicler's treatment of John's family, I argue that John left office for his own reasons. I propose that John was instrumental in a quid pro quo: cathedral for patriarchate negotiation. Consequently, the Arabs built the Damascus Mosque on the site of the cathedral church of St John the Baptist, and the (dyothelite) Chalcedonian party moved to Jerusalem, where they reestablished the Jerusalem Patriarchate. Thus, I argue the context of John’s polemical works is Jerusalem and patriarchal policy. Further, I argue that John was commissioned to produce something like 'proto-school' texts in the context of debate in the Anastasis with internal Maronite and external West and East Syrian interlocutors. Then I look at one example of John’s theological creativity to show how this context impinged on his theological program. John appropriates Maximus the Confessor's term perichōrēsis and reduces its scope to the Incarnation while moving it into the doctrine of God for the first time. I show that he does this for polemical reasons in order to contravene each of his interlocutors with a simple biblical rhetorical model providing Chalcedonian monks in debate with a simple formula against better educated foes. This thesis demonstrates that reading John out of context fails to appreciate his creative response to these local exigencies.

Keywords: Interdisciplinary
Damascus
Byzantine Theology
Christological Controversy
Jerusalem
Sectarian
Umayyad
Advisor: Edwards, M
Coordination in crisis: the practice of medical humanitarian emergency

This thesis in anthropology investigates how emergency is socially constituted as a named and actionable entity. Specifically, it asks how human values and techno-scientific practices contribute to the constitution of emergency in the context of medical humanitarian intervention. The study considers emergency from an ethnographic perspective, as a group of international medical humanitarian practitioners from the aid group Médecins San Frontières (MSF) come to understand and respond to the 2013 outbreak of armed conflict in South Sudan and the potential for mass starvation among certain groups within that country. Through the method of participant observation, it examines how emergency is understood or constituted at three different conceptual levels: at the level of the individual clinical encounter, the level of population statistics, and the level of political representations of crisis. By extension, it inquires as to how professional formation and moral categories determine appropriate response. The study reveals how values, ethics and conceptions of "the good" are embodied in—yet imperfectly translated through—numerical measures and institutional structures. This reveals a key paradox of medical humanitarianism: that rational, technocratic institutions simultaneously enable and debilitate the goals and means of humanitarian action. This study is based on 11 months of fieldwork (Oct 2013-Sept 2014) with the Amsterdam operational section of MSF. The fieldwork was multi-sited; it included participant observation of MSF activities in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Juba, Leer and Bentiu (South Sudan).

Keywords: famine
Médecins Sans Frontières
humanitarianism
medical anthropology
nutrititional
emergency
epistemology of
South Sudan
Advisor: Ulijaszek, S
Privacy-preserving statistical and machine learning methods under fully homomorphic encryption

Advances in technology have now made it possible to monitor heart rate, body temperature and sleep patterns; continuously track movement; record brain activity; and sequence DNA in the jungle --- all using devices that fit in the palm of a hand. These and other recent developments have sparked interest in privacy-preserving methods: computational approaches which are able to utilise the data without leaking subjects' personal information.
Classical encryption techniques have been used very successfully to protect data in transit and in storage. However, the process of encrypting data also renders it unusable in computation. Recently developed fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) techniques improve on this substantially. Unlike classical methods, which require the data to be decrypted prior to computation, homomorphic methods allow data to be simultaneously stored or transfered securely, and used in computation. However, FHE imposes serious constraints on computation, both arithmetic (e.g., no divisions can be performed) and computational (e.g., multiplications become much slower), rendering traditional statistical algorithms inadequate.
In this thesis we develop statistical and machine learning methods for outsourced, privacy-preserving analysis of sensitive information under FHE. Specifically, we tackle two problems: (i) classification, using a semiparametric approach based on the naive Bayes assumption and modeling the class decision boundary directly using an approximation to univariate logistic regression; (ii) regression, using two approaches; an accelerated method for least squares estimation based on gradient descent, and a cooperative framework for Bayesian regression based on recursive Bayesian updating in a multi-party setting. Taking into account the constraints imposed by FHE, we analyse the potential of different algorithmic approaches to provide tractable solutions to these problems and give details on several computational costs and performance trade-offs.

Advisor: Holmes, C
Bonsall, M
Comparative study of archaeological contexts of silver hoards c. 800-1050 in Northern and Central Europe

The dissertation deals with the archaeological context of Baltic-zone silver hoards deposited in the Viking Age. Its main objective is to investigate the hoards and the context of their deposition to determine how hundreds of thousands of silver artefacts, mainly Oriental dirhams, arrived in Northern Europe, why they were put in the ground and never retrieved.
The review of the published sources on hoards was undertaken in three case studies: Gotland, Pomerania and Svealand. The data on hoards, archaeological sites, geology and topography was collected in geodatabases, and analysed in detail by applying descriptive and advanced statistical methods: regression modelling and GIS-based spatial analysis. The results were presented in the historical context depicted in contemporary literary sources.
Hoard deposition was most pronounced near sites which afforded conditions suitable for mercantile exchange and facilitated the flow of silver: the network of emporia, regional trade hubs, local power centres, and harbours, generally situated near major communication routes and within populated areas. However, exchange networks needn’t have been strictly hierarchical, and emporium-scale sites were not indispensable for a fair share of silver influx, and trade, to occur. Chronological changes in hoard distributions, their composition and fragmentation of objects indicate how these networks operated and meshed with economic and political conditions in c. 900 and c. 980.
A method, which uses the information about the presence/absence of a container, crossreferenced with the weight of silver, was devised to provide an indication as to whether particular hoards were deposited with the aim of retrieval – as savings accessed periodically, or for protection in the face of danger – or whether they were meant to be permanent ritual or symbolic offerings. Ritual behaviour took a variety of forms, but the most widespread were the depositions in recently occupied land in marginal soils, where they were aimed at forging a personal bond between the land and the owner.

Keywords: trade
silver
Pomerania
Baltic Zone
archaeology
Gotland
emporia
hoards
hoarding
Svealand
Viking Age
dirhams
Advisor: Shepard, J
Treadwell, L
French imports: English translations of Molière, 1663-1732

This thesis explores the first English translations of Molière's works published between 1663 and 1732 by writers that include John Dryden, Edward Ravenscroft, Aphra Behn, and Henry Fielding. It challenges the idea that the translators straightforwardly plagiarized the French plays and instead argues that their work demonstrates engagement with the dramatic impact and satirical drive of the source texts. It asks how far the process of anglicization required careful examination of the plays' initial French national context.

The first part of the thesis presents three fundamental angles of interrogation addressing how the translators dealt with the form of the dramatic works according to theoretical and practical principles. It considers translators' responses to conventions of plot formation, translation methods, and prosody. The chapters are underpinned by comparative assessments of contextual theoretical writings in French and English in order to examine the plays in the light of the evolving theatrical tastes and literary practices occasioned by cross-Channel communication.

The second part takes an alternative approach to assessing the earliest translations of Molière. Its four chapters are based on close analysis of culturally significant lexical terms which evoke comically contentious social themes. This enquiry charts the changes in translation-choices over the decades covered by the thesis corpus. The themes addressed, however, were relevant throughout the period in both France and England: marital discord caused by anxieties surrounding cuckoldry and gallantry, the problems of zealous religious ostentation, the dubious professional standing of medical practitioners, and bourgeois social pretension. This part assesses how the key terms in translation were chosen to resonate within the new semantic fields in English, a target language which was coming into close contact with new French terms.

Keywords: Molière
Translation
Advisor: Hawcroft, M
Stern, T
Heterotic string compactification and quiver gauge theory on toric geometry

This thesis is composed of papers in two areas: heterotic string model building on Calabi-Yau manifolds, and bipartite field theory with applications to brane tilings. However, the two streams share a common topic - string model building on toric geometry. Toric variety appears as both the ambient space for constructing Calabi- Yau hyper-surface, and the moduli space of D-brane configurations.
We study heterotic model building on 16 specific Calabi-Yau (CY) manifolds as hypersurfaces in toric four-folds. These 16 manifolds are the only ones among the more than half a billion manifolds in the Kreuzer-Skarke (KS) list with a non-trivial fundamental group. We classify the line bundle models on these manifolds, both for SU(5) and SO(10) Grand Unified Theories (GUT), which lead to consistent supersymmetric string vacua and they have three chiral families. In order to apply the model building to the whole KS list, we then systematically classify the freely-acting symmetries. For this purpose we develop a method of classifying all freely acting discrete groups of CY on toric spaces, and generate its weighted projective representations. A few new discrete symmetries are found and presented. This is the first step towards heterotic string model building on CYs constructed by re exive polytopes of KS list.
The second part of this thesis emphasises the applications of quiver gauge theory and dimer models. We generalise the results for quiver theories with low block numbers, revealing an new intriguing algebraic structure underlying a class of possible superconformal fixed points. After explicitly computing the Diophantine equation of five block cases, we use this structure to re-organize the result in a form that can be applied to arbitrary block numbers. We argue that these theories can be thought of as vectors in the root system of the corresponding quiver. In addition to exploring the block quiver theory, we also compute the large area toric models and their associated dimer models. We compute the Kasteleyn matrix of the conifolds and its orbifolds, then turn on the vacuum expectation value (vev.) for massless fields. New dimer models with large triangulation areas are classified and presented.

Advisor: Lukas, A
The aesthetics of sugar: concepts of sweetness in the nineteenth century

My thesis examines the concept of sweetness as an aesthetic category in nineteenth-century British culture. My contention is that a link exists between the idea of sweetness as it appears in literary works and sugar as an everyday commodity with a complex history attached. Sugar had changed from being considered as a luxury in 1750 to a mass-market staple by the 1850s, a major cultural transition which altered the concept of sweetness as a taste. In the thesis I map the consequences of this shift as they are manifest in a range of texts from the period, alongside parallel changes in the aesthetic category of sweetness. I also assess the relationship between the material history of sweetness and the separate but related concept of aesthetic sweetness. In focussing on the relationship between sugar and sweetness in the Victorian period this thesis examines an area of nineteenth-century life that has previously never been subject to detailed study. Although several critics have explored the connection between sugar and concepts of sweetness as they relate to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus differs in that I assert that other material histories of sugar played as significant a role in developing discourses of sweetness. Throughout this study, which spans the period 1780-1870, I draw on a range of sources across a variety of genres, including abolitionist pamphlets, medical textbooks, the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins, the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I conclude that literary cultures in the nineteenth century increasingly use discourses of sugar to relate to the mass market and explore the commercialisation of literature, at a time when a growing commodity culture was seen as a threat to literary integrity.

Keywords: Sensation Fiction
Sweetness
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Walter Pater
Matthew Arnold
Commodity Culture
Charlotte Bronte
Sugar
Abolitionism
Aesthetics
Material Culture
Advisor: Evangelista, S
McDonagh, J
Mobile health for cardiovascular disease risk prediction and management in resource-constrained environments

It is well established that the leading global cause of mortality and morbidity, cardiovascular disease (CVD), is more severe in resource-constrained environments such as rural India (RI). This thesis explores how best to manage CVD risk in RI by using a mobile-based, point-of- care (POC) Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS), SMARThealth, that is designed to assist Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) or minimally trained health workers. The four major focus areas are:
(a) Design, development, and large-scale data collection using SMARThealth - an agile development process and user-centred design approach were followed to pilot test the CDSS with 292 participants. Evaluation metrics included system efficiency, end-user variability, usability, and sub-group analysis to identify better or poorly performing ASHAs. An improved version of SMARThealth was used for baseline data collection across 54 villages (62,194 participants) in Andhra Pradesh, India. 9864 (15.8%) of the participants were at high CVD risk.
(b) Improvement of the sole CVD risk prediction algorithm for RI, the WHO/ISH CVD risk prediction charts (WHO-ISHc) - the choice of the low information (LI) model or high information (HI) model of WHO-ISHc was statistically significant for CVD risk prediction in RI (p=0.008;χ2=7.03) with 155 subjects (or 14.5% of 1066 patients) having different CVD risk scores according to the LI and HI WHO-ISHc. A parsimonious POC test was developed to identify patients for whom risk prediction by the HI and LI WHO/ISHc differ (that is, for whom the assessment of total cholesterol would be beneficial). The POC test showed good discrimination (out-of-sample AUC 0.85 with Random Forests).
(c) Assessment of best prediction algorithm for RI - eight highly predictive features of CVD risk were identified based on labelled data, and the resulting model (Model 1) had higher or equal AUCs and log-likelihood scores, and lower Brier scores when compared to a benchmark algorithm. The contribution of age and gender alone offered good discrimination and recalibration of Model 1 for RI was introduced. The lack of recorded end outcomes in RI prompted the use of an unsupervised approach to identify high-risk patients. Clusters of low and high CVD risks were found when ˆK =2, but also clusters with intermediate risk when ˆK =4 offering an alternative approach to identifying groups of high-risk patients.
(d) Analysis from a randomised controlled trial evaluation of SMARThealth - preliminary data analysis of 131 high-risk patients during the first year of the randomised controlled trial showed a statistically significant reduction in median blood pressure between the 1st and 5th assessment (p=0.0097). The proportion of patients under treatment for high blood pressure continued to increase throughout.

Keywords: mobile health
cardiovascular disease risk
machine learning
WHO
India
epidemiology
Late-Stage Trifluoromethylation

This thesis is concerned with the development of methodology for late-stage trifluoromethylation of complex molecules.
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of late-stage trifluoromethylations and details the effect that substitution of a CF3 group can have on the properties of organic molecules. Methods for generating reactive trifluoromethylating intermediates for use in allylic and aliphatic trifluoromethylation are also discussed.
Chapter 2 examines the photoredox catalysis as a mechanistic manifold for the trifluoromethylation of allylsilanes for the synthesis of branched allylic trifluoromethylated compounds. The stereogenic trifluoromethylation of enantio-enriched allylsilanes through chirality transfer is explored, and mechanistic experiments are performed to investigate the formation of the CF3 radical intermediate.
Chapter 3 details the development of hydrotrifluoromethylation of terminal alkenes for the synthesis of aliphatic trifluoromethylated compounds under mild conditions using photoredox catalysis. This methodology tolerates a wide range of functional groups and is applicable to the late-stage trifluoromethylation of complex organic compounds.
Chapter 4 explores the synthesis and isolation of 18F-labelled aryl -SCF3, -OCF3 and - OCF2H compounds from high specific activity [18F]fluoride, using Ag(I) mediated halogen exchange as a mode of activation. This methodology can be used for the synthesis and isolation of 18F labelled radiotracers containing new functional groups that have interesting biological and pharmacological properties.
Chapter 5 contains full experimental procedures and characterisation data for compounds synthesised in chapters 2, 3 and 4.

Advisor: Gouverneur, V