VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Human trafficking, modern slavery and discursive institutionalism: entertainers, foreign trainees and interns in contemporary Japan, 1990-2017

This thesis offers insights into the institutional and policy changes associated with anti- trafficking and anti-slavery paradigms by drawing attention to discursive institutionalism. These insights derive from the constructed dominant discourses on human trafficking and modern slavery in Japan from 1990 to 2017. Two strands of discourse have become dominant there as a consequence of political activism since the early 1990s: Filipina entertainers as ‘sex trafficked victims’ and interns and trainees in the Technical Intern Training Programme (TITP) as ‘modern slaves’. Taking a critical view of these discourses, this thesis answers the questions of how and why institutional arrangements associated with trafficking and modern slavery have changed in Japan. It argues that, in the context of a discursive shift regarding how to treat these workers, institutions and policies gradually changed to provide remedies to foreign interns and trainees under the purview of TITP by 2017, whilst entertainers largely remained subjects of criminalisation and deportation. By looking at the empirical transformation by 2017, this thesis argues that the discourse about trafficking and modern slavery was significant in making known the needs to protect unskilled migrants. While not officially admitting that labour trafficking and modern slavery exist in Japan (due to its zero-immigration principle), the government in 2017 revealed its intention to establish an action plan to fight trafficking and modern slavery, following the initiatives of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8.7. Through the lens of human trafficking and modern slavery and the related changes in policies and institutional arrangements since the early 1990s, this thesis examines the role of the state in solving problems related to unskilled migrants. In this sense, the study empirically illuminates the trajectory of the government’s current shift towards officially accepting unskilled labourers in response to Japan’s dwindling workforce.

Keywords: Immigration
Discursive Institutionalism
Japan
Human Trafficking
Modern Slavery
Advisor: Neary, I
Improved neutron detection using zinc sulfide with boron

Phosphor screens designed to detect neutrons by producing light are used in many applications to detect thermal neutrons including the SoLid antineutrino detection experiment. These screens are formed by binding powders of zinc sulfide and lithium-6 fluoride with an epoxy. Due to poor transparency, these screens have limited neutron detection efficiency. The current study proposes an alternate material with the potential for higher neutron detection efficiency based on sintering zinc sulfide and boron compounds to form a polycrystalline composite ceramic. A model was developed to predict neutron detection efficiency of ceramics and screens based on modifying parameters such as composition and grain size. By varying these design parameters, an optimal ceramic design was found that increased the neutron capture rate by 45% (using enriched boron) and increased the signal per neutron by 18% compared to a model of the phosphor screen used in the SoLid experiment. These design parameters were then used to fabricate ceramics by sintering commercial powders of unenriched BN and ZnS(Ag) using the FAST sintering technique. The ceramics retained the luminescent properties of ZnS(Ag) and demonstrated improved translucency. Drawbacks of this methodology include apparent carbon migration into the ceramic and difficulty reproducing the ceramics. The ceramics and a phosphor screen used in the SoLid experiment were exposed to neutrons in a custom test apparatus that collected light from either side. The results of these experiments were used to compare the neutron detection efficiency of the ceramics and the screen and compare the experimental results to the model predictions. The rate of neutrons detected and the signal produced per neutron by the ceramics were respectively 10% and 40% that of the rate and signal of the phosphor screens (the model predicted a rate roughly 35% of the phosphor screen using unenriched boron). While the experimental results did not confirm the model predictions, the effort demonstrated the feasibility of the concept and showed promise of success with further development.

Advisor: Vacheret, A
Watt, A
Learning (to learn) from few examples

The availability of large labelled datasets has played a crucial role in the recent success of deep neural networks. However, there are many situations in which training data is scarce. For instance, in the case of object tracking, such a limitation arises directly from the definition of the problem, which requires an estimate of the position of an object of interest in every frame of a video with the sole supervision of a bounding box in the first frame. Another scenario which can be doomed by data scarcity is classification. For example, one might want to identify the species of a rare insect with a single reference image, or train a tumour classification system from a few labelled MRI scans. For both tracking and classification, we propose techniques that sidestep per-task data scarcity by leveraging a large number of small episodes, each characterised by a limited training set. This strategy is particularly novel for tracking, for which for many years the standard approach has been to train a discriminative model exclusively online, while the video is streaming. Moreover, we examine how this general approach can be framed as "learning to learn", in the sense that the knowledge distilled within a training task is accrued and used across tasks. We show how such a framework allows one to devise systems that can be trained with a small amount of per-task data while also being dynamically tailored to the problem at hand. From a practical point of view, the proposed methods have a common focus on simplicity, efficiency and speed, achieved by exploiting the shape or redundancies of the data.
All the code produced in this thesis is open source and available at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~luca

Keywords: deep learning
few-shot learning
ridge regression
meta-learning
metric learning
Correlation filter
Siamese network
similarity learning
machine learning
computer vision
visual object tracking
artificial intelligence
Advisor: Torr, P
"Comment les femmes ordinairement appetent choses defendues": writing women into the history of Rabelais' reception (1628-1785)

This thesis makes three key contributions to early modern French studies; it reintroduces forgotten perspectives into the history of Rabelais’ reception, offers new, less phallocentric, ways of reading the major episodes in Rabelais’ work that feature questions of women and femininity, and reconsiders early modern processes of authorial construction and posterity more generally. Women readers and audiences have thus far been excluded from the history of Rabelais’ afterlives. This study addresses this gap in scholarship by exploring a diverse range of thus far neglected seventeenth and eighteenth-century re-appropriations of Rabelais’ work. These sources take the form of literary genres associated with feminine culture in the early modern world: ballets, anecdotes, letters, journals and illustrations. I consider the ways in which these moments not only complicate the critical narrative of Rabelais’ literary afterlives but also help us to reread those episodes of Rabelais’ work that have proved to be the most problematic when it comes to the issue of women in Rabelais’ world.
Through detailed analysis of these instances of re-appropriation in conjunction with close readings of Rabelais’ primary text, I make the case for a feminist reading of Rabelais’ work whereby the woman reader may take linguistic pleasure in the text. I debunk the current critical characterisation of Rabelais’ text as masculinist by demonstrating the extent to which the misogyny of the text is a fabrication of posterity related to the narratives surrounding Rabelais’ life, rather than an aspect inherent to the work itself. Despite the important contributions to Rabelais studies made by queer criticism in recent years, this work has thus far been predominantly phallocentric in nature. My thesis readdresses this imbalance, offering a more balanced approach to reading gender in Rabelais’ text. I suggest that the figure of ‘Dame mouche’ provides a useful model for thinking about what it means to read Rabelais’ work as a woman. By underlining the ways in which re-appropriations of texts and constructions of authorial personas serve to both include and exclude, this thesis reveals the gendered and class-based power structures that shape a writer’s posterity. By taking more seriously the lessons of reception history, this study distinguishes Rabelais’ work from the mythmaking surrounding the author’s life, and offers a fresh perspective on reading Rabelais’ women.

Keywords: Early Modern France
Advisor: Tunstall, K
Williams, W
Identity and society within ‘landscapes of memory’: Iron Age cult at Bronze Age ruins (1000-700 BC)

In the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age ‘Collapse’ many Mycenaean and Minoan sites were left destroyed, abandoned, or diminished. In the Early Iron Age the vestiges of the Bronze Age at these sites formed ‘landscapes of memory’ in which communities engaged with the past through practices such as ‘tomb’ and ‘hero’ cult. An additional practice, to which previous scholarship has dedicated less attention, was cult practised at or amongst Bronze Age ruins.
This thesis is a study of such cults in Crete, the Argolid, and Attica. In each case we explore the site’s development in the Bronze Age, through the ‘Collapse’, and during the Early Iron Age in order to recreate its ‘landscape of memory’ when cult activity was initiated. In turn we examine the finds, features, and practices of the cult itself.
Thirteen instances of Iron Age cult at Bronze Age ruins are included. In Crete: Knossos, Amnisos, Phaistos, Agia Triada, Palaikastro, and Kommos. In the Argolid: Mycenae, Tiryns, Asine, Argos, and the Argive Heraion. In Attica: Athens and Eleusis.
From this study it is argued that a cultic engagement with the Bronze Age past was an attractive prospect to Iron Age communities in Greece. The thesis uses the assembled evidence to make four particular claims: that Bronze Age ruins inspired a cultural memory of a glorious past represented in Homer and other oral tradition; that the commemoration of cultural memories fostered a common sense of identity; that in some communities cultural memories were a useful tool in the acquisition and consolidation of power; and that cultural memory was malleable, and ‘invented’ memories could be powerful in early Greece.

Advisor: Lemos, I
Microwave magnonics at millikelvin temperatures

This thesis reports on three recent experimental studies of microwave magnons in yttrium iron garnet (YIG) systems at millikelvin temperatures.
We begin with an introduction to the emerging field of quantum magnonics and its underpinning motivations. Basic theory of dipolar spin-wave or magnon dynamics in various sample geometries is presented. This introduction is followed by a brief description of the specificities of our experimental setup and properties of YIG --- the magnetic material used in our studies.
The first experiment involves a hybrid system combining a YIG sphere and a niobium-based superconducting planar resonator. The device is measured at millikelvin temperatures and signals of strong magnon-photon coupling are observed when the excitation energy is at the level of single photons. The superconducting resonator is shown to maintain a good quality factor even under sizeable in-plane magnetic field that is required to support the excitation of magnons in YIG.
The second experiment demonstrates the operation of a magnonic crystal based on an etched YIG film at millikelvin temperatures. A magnonic bandgap is successfully observed both under continuous- and pulsed- microwave excitation. High magnon damping is observed in the device at low temperature.
The third experiment involves the measurement of magnon damping in YIG films. Comparisons between results from different samples and at different temperatures provide insight into the role of the substrate and two-level fluctuators at low temperature. A brief review of the known damping processes in bulk YIG from room temperature down to millikelvin temperature is also presented.
The final chapter summarises results in this thesis and suggests possible future research directions.

Keywords: magnon damping
niobium
two level fluctuators
strong coupling
superconducting resonator
transfer matrix method
millikelvin temperatures
gadolinium gallium garnet
yttrium iron garnet
microwave magnon
magnonic crystal
Advisor: Karenowska, A
“At that time, I was intoxicated”: Buddhist emotion and the cultivation of Bodhicitta in the first four chapters of the Bodhicaryāvatāra

Although the Bodhicaryāvatāra is one of the most influential works of Sanskrit Buddhist literature, central to Tibetan Buddhist thought and widely translated into modern languages, analysis of it has been largely limited to philosophical approaches. The methods of religious studies, particularly current scholarly concerns with religious emotion and the interpretation of text, illuminate not only the Bodhicaryāvatāra's particular project but also wider issues in Mahayana Buddhism. By focusing on the early chapters, I demonstrate that bodhicitta, the central motivation and defining feature of a bodhisattva, is built up through a series of emotional and imaginative turns prompted and performed by the text.

Advisor: Zacchetti, S
Aristotle's account of sense-perception in De Anima II.5, II.12, and III.2

The idea that Aristotle portrays perception as a kind of conceptual activity is supported by this thesis. This support is the result of a detailed consideration of Aristotle's formal characterizations of perception in De Anima II.5, II.12, and III.2.
The first chapter considers Aristotle's doctrine that actual sense and sense-object are 'the same, but different in being' (DA III.2). This doctrine may amount to the dispositional view that sense-qualities as sensed exist only when sensed, or to the trivial view that sensed sense-qualities so exist. Aristotle's treatment of his non-Democritean predecessors, and his positive account of the sense-qualities in DA and DS, cannot decide between these interpretations. His rejection of the Democritean dispositional theory on the basis of features shared by all dispositional theories, however, would seem to confirm the trivial interpretation of the unity-of-actuality doctrine.
The second chapter turns to Aristotle‘s doctrine that perception is a special kind of assimilation of the senser to the object of sense (DA 11.5). A change in the senser's sense-organs is unlikely~fo be a case of the special kind of assimilation, whose distinctive feature is its status as an energeia. The senser's cognitive assimilation to the oBgect of sense, on the other hand, might well be. The view that Aristotle's assimilation doctrine identifies such an assimilation, however, requires support from Aristotle‘s form-without-matter doctrine.
The doctrine that sense receives the sensible forms without the matter (DA 11.12) is thus the subject of the third chapter. Physicalist and unity-of-actuality interpretations of this doctrine, antecedently implausible, are in fact unsatisfactory. An acceptable non-physicalist interpretation, however, may be based on the view that a form-without-matter is a universal. On this interpretation, Aristotle's form-without-matter doctrine (supplemented by his assimilation doctrine) states that perception is the reception of a particular sensible as a sensible. If this interpretation is right, Aristotle would indeed see perception as a kind of conceptual activity.

Keywords: sense-perception
mind
Anima
philosophy
perception
Aristotle
Modernism, empathy, and the contemporary novel

This thesis reveals previously unrecognised relations between modernism, empathy, and the contemporary novel. It argues that Ian McEwan, Ciaran Carson, and Zadie Smith in particular reclaim a rich history of empathy that defines their approach and reason to rework modernist texts. Drawing on philosophical, psychological, sociological, neuroscientific, and aesthetic theories of empathy, my chapters offer close readings of contemporary and modernist novelists’ representations of empathic experience to ultimately demonstrate how McEwan’s, Carson’s, and Smith’s reclaiming of modernist empathies is at the same time formally, creatively, ethically, and attentively enabling.
McEwan pays particular attention to Woolf’s representation of self–other and subject–object relations, dramatizing, through his highly engineered narrative patterns, aesthetic and intersubjective empathies. Carson miniaturizes Joyce’s attentional associative patterns, staging an empathic way of reading that involves an attention to and a distraction from the text. Zadie Smith dramatizes Forsterian tension between narrative symmetry and a comedy of arbitrariness, using Forster’s ideas about musical and visual empathy and distinction between rhythm and pattern to map urban relations onto networks of a more relaxed coexistence.
Through their close attention to modernism’s representations of empathic experience, these novelists sidestep the simpler notions of empathy that their non-fictional statements suggest, expanding empathic attention in their novels to include attunement with art, objects, and others. Their reason to do so has various consequences. Firstly, they test the creative expansiveness of modernism, probing how closely they can attend to Woolf’s, Joyce’s, and Forster’s novels without creating a simple pastiche. Secondly, they problematize new ethical, reconstructive tendencies of post-postmodern humanist realisms. Thirdly, through their minute attention to modernist empathies, these novelists also advocate an empathic, inclusive, patient way of reading to accommodate and expand twenty-first-century attentional demands.

Advisor: MacKay, M
An epigenetic analysis of planarian stem cells

Planarian flatworms possess somatic pluripotent stem cells, called neoblasts (NBs), which are able to differentiate into all cell types that constitute the adult body plan. Consequently, planarians possess remarkable regenerative capacities, and have become an invertebrate model system to study stem cell responses during regeneration. Transcriptomic studies have revealed the genes needed to both maintain NB pluripotency and ensure correct lineage specification during differentiation. However, these studies have not elucidated how this regulation of expression is controlled at the epigenetic level, and in particular by diverse histone modifications. In this thesis, we present a case for elevating planarians as a model system for studying the epigenetic regulation of stem cell pluripotency and differentiation.
Firstly, we describe an expression-based annotation of the asexual Schmidtea mediterranea genome. For each annotated locus, we allocate proportional values for a gene’s expression in either S/G2/M NBs (X1), G1 NBs + post-mitotic progeny (X2), or differentiated cells (Xins) – the three broadly-defined cellular compartments that can be isolated from planarians using Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS). The production of a well-annotated genome incorporating transcriptomic information serves as the basis for correlating the presence of particular histone modifications with underlying gene expression. We have developed an optimized ChIP-seq protocol for planarian NBs and show that the active histone marks H3K4me3 and H3K36me3 and suppressive H3K4me1 and H3K27me3 marks correlate with the transcriptional output of genes. We also show that genes with little transcriptional activity in NBs, but which switch on in post-mitotic progeny during differentiation are bivalent, being marked by both H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 at the promoter-proximal region. Bivalent histone modifications in mammalian embryonic and germline stem cells enable transcriptional poising of genes, and consistent with this we find that bivalent genes in planarian NBs are marked by paused RNA Pol II at the promoter-proximal region.
In addition to histone modifications, enhancers and their associated transcription factors can also directly influence gene expression. Consequently, we elucidate the potential TF repertoire of planarians, and identify those enriched in NBs. We also present preliminary evidence to suggest that ATAC-seq on planarian cells can identify both transcriptionally permissive gene promoters, at least in differentiated cells, as well as putative enhancers that correlate with expression of neighbouring genes. In the future, we hope to be able to build gene regulatory networks by identifying TF-binding sites in open chromatin regions and elucidating enhancer targets in a range of planarian cell types.

Advisor: Aboobaker, A
Precision frequency metrology with optical lattice clocks

Strontium optical lattice clocks are proven to be excellent timekeepers. Their exceptional performance makes them a leading candidate for possible redefinition of the SI second and a valuable tool for searching for new physics beyond the standard model. This thesis reports on the development of strontium (Sr) optical lattice clocks at National Physical Laboratory (NPL).

Advisor: Baird, P
Gill, P
Foot, C