VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Court-executive relations in unstable democracies: strategic judicial behaviour in post-authoritarian Argentina (1983-2005)

This dissertation deals with court-executive relations in post-authoritarian Argentina (1983-2006). Specifically, I analyse Supreme Court behaviour in highly sensitive cases to determine whether the tribunal has cooperated with or obstructed the government’s policy preferences in three key policy areas: human rights, economic emergency and pensions. This innovative type of approach – i.e., focusing on a small number of highly sensitive decisions – allows me to concentrate on cases that are genuinely important for the government or, more precisely, for the country’s political administration. There are cases that are significant for the State apparatus but irrelevant for the president (thinking of politicians as self-interested actors).
My research uses a rational choice approach to courts, underscoring the strategic nature of judicial behaviour. This vision of judges provides a more accurate account of judicial-executive relations by bringing politics into the study of courts. By focusing exclusively on attitudes and apolitical jurisprudence, other visions take for granted the institutional context. Political stability, for example, cannot be assumed in many developing democracies.
My findings indicate that the Argentine Supreme Court has consistently avoided obstructing the president’s policy preferences. Such behaviour is motivated by strategic considerations: judges are risk-averse actors that avoid clashing with the executive. For most of the time, the Supreme Court has operated under unified government, which increases the chances of being punished for anti-government decisions. Two other factors also account for the court’s risk-averse behaviour. First, procedural rules grant the Supreme Court wide discretion over its docket. The tribunal has used such discretion to strategically select the timing of its decisions. Second, recurrent democratic breakdowns have repeatedly led to attacks against the court, such as impeachment, irregular dismissals, and/or enlargements. Third, politicians exert broad control of judicial promotions, allowing them to block the careers of independent, courageous judges that act as a check on political power.

Keywords: Court-Executive relations
judicial activism
democracy
judicial independence
Executive branch
breakdowns
Argentina
Supreme Court
rational choice
Advisor: Angell, A
The child, language and literature

This thesis aims not only to set Proust's treatment of childhood in the context of his work as a whole, but also to set that work in the context of contemporary writing about childhood.
Chapter 1 reveals the existence of a fashion in Proust's time for literature devoted to childhood. This genre has a tendency towards technical innovation, despite repetition of the same subject matter, or 'myths'. One particularly important myth, that of the 'child-artist', is seen to be influential - not only on Proust's work but also on contemporary scientific attitudes to childhood.
Chapter 2 traces the origins of the genre to the earlier literary form of the Pastoral. It examines residual elements of the Pastoral, or the myth of the pastoral childhood, in later works which may have influenced Proust. Combray, it is concluded, both affirms and questions this myth. Chapter 3 examines the mythology of play. Although play generally has a significant role in the genre, it is peculiarly absent from Combray. In Proust's novel, the usual functions of play are fulfilled by reading, while apparent examples of play that remain are in reality strategies for obtaining sexual gratification. Chapter 4 shows how Proust's use of metaphor represents a partial return to the syncretism characteristic of childhood impressions and the essentialism of the child's beliefs about proper names.
The final chapter verifies the impressions of earlier chapters that Proust's work simultaneously affirms and denies the child-artist myth, and that his hero can only become a narrator when a process of fusion between child and adult is complete. This process permits a reinterpretation of A la recherche, its structure, and themes (such as society and love) in terms of childhood. Thus, the importance of childhood and its associated genre to Proust's work as a whole is confirmed.
Crisis and form in Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose: an aesthetic examination of the poetic drafts of the 1960s

This thesis demonstrates the aesthetic impact of crisis on Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose. It examines poetic drafts written during a period of personal breakdown in the 1960s, which have largely been received as documents of personal suffering, and identifies these texts as a radical stage of writing that was to prove formally significant for Bachmann's development of the prose "Todesarten"-Projekt. This thesis draws on the new material made available with the publication of these poetic drafts to chart the genesis of Bachmann's acclaimed late oeuvre. By selecting and grouping lyric fragments, the thesis defines recurrent features in this verse and accounts for the texts as a body of writing that forms a radical, yet undocumented, part of this oeuvre. In terms of both their form and of their content, the fragmentary drafts are shown to reflect new engagement with aspects of experience conventionally excluded from High Art. In light of Bachmann's growing preoccupation with the need for aesthetic engagement in the post-war era, close readings reveal how she set about taking her subjective suffering as a basis for a critique of the social order. The thesis outlines how, during the 1960s, Bachmann pioneered a symptomatic expressive mode that - in the disrupted form of the writing - found an indirect means of manifesting the wider origins of subjective disturbance. The ambiguous aesthetic status of these poetic drafts, which were never finished by Bachmann, is related to an inability to establish structural distance from crisis in lyric form. Building on its readings of the poetic drafts, the thesis traces Bachmann's prose experimentation with the same motifs. It identifies how, ultimately, the prose medium enabled the author to resolve problems of aesthetic form raised in the verse. Parallels with the work of other writers and thinkers illuminate the development of a reflexive mode where sophisticated aesthetic strategies enable the oblique expression of cultural critique.

Keywords: 1960s
prose
Todesarten
poetry
Ingeborg Bachmann
women's writing
crisis
post-1945 literature
experimental writing
German literature
Advisor: Paul, G
Louth, C
The political economy of "local foods" in Eastern Kansas

Alternative agriculture and counter-cuisine movements have grown to a strong cultural current in Western European and North American societies. In recent years,these movements have begun to converge and coalesce around the concept of localizing agri-food relations and commodity chains as a way of redressing the deleterious environmental, social, and economic consequences of what are seen as dominant globalized food relations. This dissertation reports on a regional study in Eastern Kansas of the political economy of local food relations that has arisen through this producer and consumer response. It is an effort to recognize the regional interplay of disparate forces in constructing local food systems in the interest of framing more contextualized and nuanced questions about the environmental, social, and economic outcomes of alternative agri-food development. Network, conventions, and spatial analysis theories and methods were customized and put into practice in the service of these aims, using triangulation among them to mitigate each of their individual weaknesses in representing the variable embeddedness, politics, and spaces of local food in Eastern Kansas. It was found that local food generally represents a marketing niche in urban consumerism that is served primarily by regional rural producers. The distances, agricultural and food ecologies, forms of organization, and values underpinning local food linkages were all found to vary quite considerably throughout the region, creating a diverse combination of development agendas and impacts from local food networks and making food localization a highly contested concept. Local food development in its current form is thus highly dependent on urban/rural dialectics and projects of urbanization that lack open, transparent, and reflexive governance. Critical acknowledgement of these development interdependencies is important as a step toward encouraging social, economic, and environmental justice through local food development.
Protein loop structure prediction

This dissertation concerns the study and prediction of loops in protein structures.
Proteins perform crucial functions in living organisms. Despite their importance, we are currently unable to predict their three dimensional structure accurately.
Loops are segments that connect regular secondary structures of proteins. They tend to be located on the surface of proteins and often interact with other biological agents. As loops are generally subject to more frequent mutations than the rest of the protein, their sequences and structural conformations can vary significantly even within the same protein family. Although homology modelling is the most accurate computational method for protein structure prediction, difficulties still arise in predicting protein loops. Protein loop structure prediction is therefore a bottleneck in solving the protein structure prediction problem.
Reflecting on the success of homology modelling, I implement an improved version of a database search method, FREAD. I show how sequence similarity as quantified by environment specific substitution scores can be used to significantly improve loop prediction.
FREAD performs appreciably better for an identifiable subset of loops (two thirds of shorter loops and half of the longer loops tested) than ab initio methods; FREAD's predictive ability is length independent. In general, it produces results within 2Å root mean square deviation (RMSD) from the native conformations, compared to an average of over 10Å for loop length 20 for any of the other tested ab initio methods.
I then examine FREAD’s predictive ability on a specific type of loops called complementarity determining regions (CDRs) in antibodies. CDRs consist of six hypervariable loops and form the majority of the antigen binding site. I examine CDR loop structure prediction as a general case of loop structure prediction problem. FREAD achieves accuracy similar to specific CDR predictors. However, it fails to accurately predict CDR-H3, which is known to be the most challenging CDR. Various FREAD versions including FREAD with contact information (ConFREAD) are examined. The FREAD variants improve predictions for CDR-H3 on homology models and docked structures.
Lastly, I focus on the local properties of protein loops and demonstrate that the protein loop structure prediction problem is a local protein folding problem. The end-to-end distance of loops (loop span) follows a distinctive frequency distribution, regardless of secondary structure elements connected or the number of residues in the loop. I show that the loop span distribution follows a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
Based on my research, I propose future directions in protein loop structure prediction including estimating experimentally undetermined local structures using FREAD, multiple loop structure prediction using contact information and a novel ab initio method which makes use of loop stretch.

Keywords: protein loop
protein
computational biology
protein structure prediction
bioinformatics
protein loop structure prediction
Advisor: Deane, C
Game semantics based equivalence checking of higher-order programs

This thesis examines the use of game semantics for the automatic equivalence checking of higher-order programs. Game semantics has proved to be a powerful method for constructing fully abstract models of logics and programming languages. Furthermore, the concrete nature of the semantics lends itself to algorithmic analysis. The game-semantic model can be used to identify fragments of languages which have a decidable observational equivalence problem. We investigate decidability results for different languages as well as the efficiency of these algorithms in practice.
First we consider the call-by-value higher-order language with state, RML. This can be viewed as a canonical restriction of Standard ML to ground-type references. The O-strict fragment of RML is the largest set of type sequents for which, in the game-semantic denotation, justification pointers from O-moves are always uniquely reconstructible from the underlying move sequence. The O-strict fragment is surprisingly expressive, including higher-order types and difficult examples from the literature. By representing strategies as Visibly Pushdown Automata (VPA) we show that observational equivalence of O-strict terms is decidable (and in fact is ExpTime-complete). We then consider extensions of the O-strict fragment. Adding general recursion or using most non-O-strict types leads to undecidability. However, a limited form of recursion can be added while still preserving decidability (although the full power of DPDA is required).
Next we examine languages with non-local control. This involves adding call/cc to our language and is known to correspond to dropping the game-semantic bracketing condition. In the call-by-name game-semantic model of Idealized Algol (IA), in which answers cannot justify questions, the visibility condition still implies a form of weak bracketing. By making bracketing violations explicit we show that we can still model the entire third-order fragment using VPA.
We have also implemented tools based on these algorithms. Our model checkers Homer and Hector perform equivalence checking for third-order IA and O-strict RML respectively. Homer uses a naive explicit state method whereas Hector takes advantage of on-the-fly model checking. Our tools perform well on small yet challenging examples. On negative instances, the on-the-fly approach allows Hector to outperform Homer. To improve their performance, we also consider using ideas from symbolic execution. We propose a representation for finite automata using transitions labelled with formulas and guards which aims to take advantage of the symmetries of the game-semantic model so that strategies can be represented compactly. We refer to this representation as Symbolically Executed Automata (SEA). Using SEA allows much larger data types to be handled but is not as effective on larger examples with small data types.

Keywords: verification
Higher-order programs
Game semantics
equivalence checking
Advisor: Ong, C
Murawski, A
Neuronal mechanisms underlying the perception of slant and binocular orientation

When a line is slanted away from a binocular observer, the image of that line has different orientations on the two retinae. This difference has been called an orientation disparity. A mechanism that exploits the orientation disparities in the visual image could form an efficient method of signalling surface slant. Three different experimental techniques are employed here to investigate whether such a mechanism is exploited in the human, and non-human primate visual systems.
Modelling
The responses of early visual neurons were simulated using a two dimensional version of the disparity selective complex cell model of Ohzawa et al. (1990). This model had no specific mechanism for detecting orientation differences, and had poor sensitivity to slant. Despite this, the model was able to account for all previous physiological data (Blakemore et al., 1972; Nelson et al., 1977; Wieniawa-Narkiewicz et al., 1992). The model was used to generate predictions to enable new physiological recordings to determine whether or not there is a specialised neuronal mechanism that detects orientation differences.
Single unit recording
Significant differences in preferred monocular orientation were found in around 30% of the orientation selective neurons recorded from V1 in the two awake, behaving monkeys used for this study. When stimulated binocularly, about one third of the orientation selective V1 neurons appeared to respond consistently to the same interocular orientation difference as the monocular orientations were changed. However, rather than forming a population of neurons specifically selective for orientation differences, it is likely that this response was an artefact of not centering the stimulus on the receptive field of neurons tuned for positional disparity.
Psychophysics
The results of experiments presented here, combined with a critical review of previous psychophysical studies provide no evidence for an independent orientation disparity mechanism.
None of the data presented here, using any of the above approaches, support a significant role for interocular orientation differences in the perception of slant.

Advisor: Parker, A
Words and artworks in the twelfth century and beyond. The thirteenth-century manuscript Marcianus gr. 524 and the twelfth-century dedicatory epigrams on works of art

The thesis is divided into three sections. The first section discusses the manuscript Marcianus graecus 524, the second looks at the Greek text of the dedicatory epigrams on works of art from the same manuscript, and the third puts these texts in their context. In the first part, the compilation of the manuscript is analysed. I suggest that the manuscript was copied mainly by one individual scribe living in Constantinople at the end of the thirteenth century. He copied the quires individually, but at some point he put all these quires together, added new quires, and compiled an anthology of poetry. The scribe’s connection to the Planudean School and the Petra monastery in Constantinople is discussed. Although their relationship remains inconclusive, the manuscript provides evidence regarding the literary interests of late-thirteenth-century intellectuals. The second part contains thirty-five unpublished dedicatory epigrams on works of art. New readings are offered for the text of previously published epigrams. The third section analyses the dedicatory epigrams on works of art in their context. The first chapter of this section discusses the epigrams as Gebrauchstexte, i.e. texts with a practical use. The difference between epigrams intended to be inscribed and epigrams intended to be performed is highlighted. In the next chapter of this part, La poésie de l’objet, the composition of the dedicatory epigrams is discussed. The conventional character of the epigrams suggests that the poetics express the ritual aspect of the epigram. The last chapter considers the texts from a more pragmatic angle. After a short discussion of the objects on which the epigrams were written, the mechanisms of the twelfth-century art market are presented based on evidence taken mainly from the epigrams. At the end of this part, conclusions are drawn on the understanding of these texts in the twelfth century.

Keywords: 12th century Byzantium
epigrams on works of art
Manuel Komnenos
marc. gr. 524
word and image
Constantinople
Advisor: Lauxtermann, M
Community, women and selfhood in the writings of Michel Leiris and Carlo Emilio Gadda

This study sets out to uncover the thus far unexplored affinities between the works of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Michel Leiris, two key figures of twentieth-century literature whose place within the broader European literary panorama has been largely overlooked. Through an inquiry into three interconnected areas – the question of 'community'; the relationship between male self and female other; and writing as a space in which a fractured experience of subjectivity is both played out and exposed – I argue that their works are underpinned by a parallel tension, between a nostalgia for a lost experience of unity and a recognition of its impossibility within a fractured modernity.
Chapter One examines the relationship between the individual and the communal. With a focus on Gadda's Giornale di guerra e di prigionia, and Leiris's involvement in a series of key intellectual, literary and political societies of the 1930s and 1940s, it argues that while both authors were drawn to a form of communal integration, both were ultimately thwarted in their attempts to reinstate it. Chapter Two continues this inquiry into the relationship between self and other through an examination of the dysfunctional relationship between individual (male) self and (female) other. With a focus on Leiris's L'Age d'homme and Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, it questions the extent to which any authentic relationship between male self and female other is ruled out, and examines the association between sexuality and fear that underpins their approach to the sphere of the female at large. The final chapter examines the implications of the authors' shared loss of faith in the notion of a unified, authentic experience of selfhood for their approach to the literary act itself.
Through a study of these three key areas, this study thus sets out to respond to the need for further contextualisation of these two key figures of the twentieth-century European literary panorama, in the conviction that a comparative examination will shed new light both on their individual works and on their shared affinity with a number of key tenets of twentieth-century European thought.

Keywords: Self
Carlo Emilio Gadda
Community
Identity
Women
Michel Leiris
Advisor: Jefferson, A
Stellardi, G
Tax incentives, R&amp;D; and productivity

This thesis explores the causal relationships between tax incentives, research and development (R&D;) and productivity. Using R&D; survey data from the United Kingdom (UK) Office for National Statistics and administrative data on corporation tax returns from HM Revenue and Customs, I first conduct empirical analyses of tax incentive policies for R&D;, and then estimate the elasticity of output with respect to firms' own R&D; efforts as well as external R&D; performed by neighboring firms in technology and product space. In the first two chapters which focus on tax incentive policies and their evaluation, I am able to identify the policy effect of interest by exploiting two significant reforms in the UK in 2002 and 2008. I find that tax incentives had a positive and significant stimulating effect on businesses' R&D; spending. I argue that the availability of a quasi-experimental set up helps in better identifying the policy impact. The production function estimation exercise in the third chapter shows that double counting of R&D; human resources and materials in the production function causes the elasticity of output with respect to the firms' own R&D; to be substantially underestimated. I also find that the R&D; done in multi-unit enterprise groups is productive for the production facilities which themselves do not perform R&D.; The Jaffe (1986) and Bloom et al. (2013) measures of external R&D;, which account for closeness of firms in technology and product space can be constructed and included in the production function in the spirit of Griliches (1979). I find that the point estimate for the elasticity of output with respect to firms' own R&D; is around 3 percent and statistically significant. Evidence is mixed regarding the productivity effects of R&D; carried out by competitors in the product market or neighboring firms in technology space. The detailed data sets used in this study offer valuable resources for empirical work on R&D; and productivity.

Keywords: R&amp;D
productivity
tax
policy evaluation
applied microeconomics
Advisor: Bond, S