VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Avian malaria associations with British mosquitoes

Avian malaria (Plasmodium spp.) is a popular model system to study the ecology and evolution of parasite-host-vector interactions in the wild. These studies have historically focused mostly on the avian hosts and the malaria parasites. Knowledge regarding the role of vectors is essential to our understanding of these wild systems, but has only very recently started to accumulate.
This thesis aimed to contribute to this field by assessing mosquito-malaria-host associations for British mosquitoes and the role of mosquito ecology in shaping these parasite systems in a British woodland study site, using molecular, field ecology and statistical modelling methodologies. From the 12 mosquito species or species groups found, I showed that the Cx.pipiens/torrentium mosquito group is likely to have a major role in avian malaria transmission in Great Britain, while Cs. annulata may be transmitting P. circumflexum. I also demonstrated a positive spatial association between mosquito density per host and avian malaria prevalence, in accordance with theoretical expectations for malaria transmission. Findings here provide evidence that avian malaria transmission in British woodlands is limited mainly to June-August, being preceded by relapse of previous infections or, alternatively, by maintenance of chronic blood parasitaemia through the colder months; this agrees with theoretical expectations and findings elsewhere for temperate climates.
This thesis also described local-scale spatial heterogeneity and seasonal variation in adult mosquito abundance within a British woodland where avian malaria is endemic, with differing patterns found between species or species groups. Spatially, variation in adult mosquito abundance was associated with microclimatic and landscape variables such as distances to mosquito breeding sites, microclimate and canopy height; seasonally, variation in mosquito abundance was associated with temperature and rainfall, alongside calendar date. The heterogeneity in mosquito parameters and associations with environmental variables found at a site where avian malaria is endemic highlights the need to anticipate such complexity when trying to understand Plasmodium transmission. By doing so, we further extend the potential of these parasite systems to improve our knowledge regarding the ecology and evolution of parasite-host-vector associations.

Keywords: local-scale
mosquito
landscape ecology
seasonal heterogeneity
spatial heterogeneity
Parus major
Avian malaria
host-parasite-vector associations
Cyanistes caeruleus
wild populations
British woodland
Plasmodium
great tit
environmental predictors
mosquito density per host
blue tit
Advisor: Sheldon, B
Wood, M
Politics of change:  energy efficiency policy in Britain and Germany

Britain and Germany are two countries that are internationally recognised for their energy efficiency policies in the area of domestic buildings. Although pursuing similar objectives, the two countries have quite different flagship policies: Germany put in place a large loan and grant scheme to finance residential energy efficiency measures in 2001, the CO2-Building Rehabilitation Programme. The UK was the first country in Europe that introduced Energy savings obligations in 1994. Since then the policy instruments in both countries experienced significant change. This thesis explores the politics of the changes that occurred, and investigates the policy processes that led to the modifications. Mainstream theories of policy change emphasise short-term crisis-like events when it comes to explaining why policies change significantly. However, more recent theoretical approaches suggest that gradual mechanisms, including accumulating external pressures and slowly developing consequences of the policies themselves, play an important role as well. In order to approach the two cases theoretically, this thesis draws on the concept of friction developed in Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and the policy feedback literature. This thesis investigates how long-term pressures, for example the perceived impact of climate change and rising energy prices, affected the evolution of the key home energy efficiency policies in Britain and Germany. Combined with assessing the impact of institutional changes and policy feedback, a comprehensive analysis of long-term policy change is carried out. A set of different methods is employed to undertake the investigation including qualitative and quantitative research methods such as semi-structured interviews with more than 25 experts followed by qualitative content analysis, complementary document analysis, and the review of data sets. The analysis provides a detailed historical case study of the key home energy efficiency policy instruments in Germany and the UK with a focus on the causal mechanisms of gradual pressures. Wider conclusions are drawn for the theories of policy change and how gradual pressures might be accounted for in those theories in a more meaningful way.

Keywords: energy efficiency
energy policy
policy change
Advisor: Eyre, N
Schreurs, M
Tracking homing pigeons by GPS

The present thesis utilises recently developed miniature GPS loggers to track homing pigeons (Columba livia) navigating within their familiar area. This technology allows tracks of extremely high spatial and temporal resolution to be recorded providing a unique opportunity for novel data analysis.
The thesis focuses on the development of pigeons' tracks as they become increasingly experienced with a homing task. Birds' routes became increasingly stereotyped over time, were individually distinctive, and remained substantially longer than the beeline. This was demonstrated at short distances (~5 km) and at 25 km from home. Pigeons seem to use a similar strategy when homing from the longer distance site as at shorter distances, although the distance beyond which this strategy may become inefficient remains to be elucidated.
It seems likely that the cues involved in performing detailed stereotyped routes are familiar visual landmarks, as birds' routes remain stable over varying wind conditions and are resistant to a magnetic disruption treatment. Furthermore, birds released at novel sites perpendicularly displaced along their homeward routes are attracted back to and rejoin their established routes. This demonstrates that the route cues used can be detected and accurately assessed from distances of several kilometres, again suggesting that these route cues are visual.
Birds released at sites they had flown over as part of their stereotyped routes appear unable to recognise their routes until airborne which, along with previous experiments, suggests that certain limitations apply to visual recognition, which could have profound effects on the way visual landmarks are remembered and subsequently recognised. This, in addition to the similarity between the stereotyped routes performed by pigeons and the foraging routes performed by some insects (ants, bees and wasps) allows novel parallels to be drawn between pigeon and insect navigation.
The ability of birds to detect and accurately assess route cues from distances of several kilometres suggests that pigeons may be able to perform detailed stereotyped routes via visual attraction between successive landmarks without reference to a compass system. This hypothesis is tested in the final experimental chapter which incorporates artificial manipulation of the birds' sense of compass direction through a clock-shift treatment. The results show that while some birds are able to perform their stereotyped routes without the aid of the sun compass, in others the sun-compass may have a role to play even after they have become extremely familiar with a local homing task.
The combined results demonstrate an extremely important role for visual landmarks in familiar area navigation, and provide evidence as to how familiar visual landmarks are remembered, recognised, and encoded by homing pigeons.
Process control applications of long-range prediction

The recent Generalised Predictive Control algorithm (Clarke et al, 1984,87) is a self-tuning/ adaptive control algorithm that is based upon long-range prediction, and is thus claimed to be particularly suitable for process control application.
The complicated nature of GPC prevents the application of standard analytical techniques. Therefore an alternative technique is developed where an equivalent closed loop expression is repeatedly calculated for various control scenarios. The properties of GPC are investigated and, in particular, it is shown that 'default' values for GPC's design parameters give a mean-level type of control law that can reasonably be expected to provide robust control for a wide variety of processes.
Two successful industrial applications of GPC are then reported. The first series of trials involve the SISO control of soap moisture for a full-scale drying process. After a brief period of PRBS assisted self-tuning default GPC control performance is shown to be significantly better than the existing manual control, despite the presence of a large time-delay, poor measurements and severe production restrictions.
The second application concerns the MIMO inner loop control of a spray drying tower using two types of GPC controller: full multivariable MGPC, and multi-loop DGPC. Again after only a brief period of PRBS assisted self-tuning both provide dramatically superior control compared to the existing multi-loop gain-scheduled PID control scheme. In particular the use of MGPC successfully avoids any requirement for a priori knowledge of the process time-delay structure or input-output pairing. The decoupling performance of MGPC is improved by scaling and that of DGPC by the use of feed-forward. The practical effectiveness of GPC's design parameters (e.g. P, T and λ) is also demonstrated.
On the estimation side of adaptive control the current state-of-the-art algorithms are reviewed and shown to suffer from problems such as 'blowup', parameter drift and sensitivity to unmeasurable load disturbances. To overcome these problems two novel estimation algorithms (CLS and DLS) are developed that extend the RLS cost-function to include weighting of estimated parameters. The exploitation of the 'fault detection' properties of CLS is proposed as a more realistic estimation philosophy for adaptive control than the 'continuous retention of adaptivity'.

Advisor: Clarke, D
The theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800: a genealogy of the tragic

The thesis focuses on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800, and has two primary aims: to demonstrate the importance of idealist thought for contemporary approaches to tragedy and the tragic; and to revise the intellectual historiography of the classic phase in German letters. It traces reflection on Greek tragedy from the Querelle des anciens et des modernes in France around 1700 through the aesthetic systems formulated in Germany around 1800. Two intellectual developments are emphasized: the historicist consciousness that develops throughout the eighteenth century and places Greek tragedy more radically in its cultural context than ever before; and the idealist philosophy of art, which seeks to restore a measure of universality to the ancient genre, seeing it as the manifestation of a timeless quality of ‘the tragic.’ These two impulses, historicizing and universalizing, it is argued, are fundamental to modern understanding of Greek tragedy. The genealogical method seeks to establish a greater continuity with earlier eighteenth-century thought than is generally recognized, and to refute the teleologies that dominate accounts of idealist thought. A reconstruction of the central texts of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin reveals that the theory of tragedy around 1800 is in large part a reflection on history, an effort to understand how ancient literature can be meaningful in modernity. Greek tragedy becomes the ground for an engagement with the pastness of antiquity and its possible presence. Idealist theories, far from dissolving particularity in abstraction, seek a mediation between philological historicism and philosophical universalism in considering Greek tragedy. A genealogy of the tragic suggests that such mediation remains a vital task for scholars of the Classics.

Keywords: The Tragic
German Idealism
Greek tragedy
Advisor: Macintosh, F
Taplin, O
Investigations of the role of d-amino acid oxidase and serine racemase in schizophrenia

D-serine metabolism is implicated in schizophrenia pathophysiology. This is based on reduced D-serine levels in the disorder, its ameliorative effects therapeutically and the potential genetic contributions of its metabolic enzymes, D-amino acid oxidase (DAO) and serine racemase (SRR). D-serine is a gliotransmitter and the N-methyl D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) co-agonist. Thus, altered D-serine metabolism may contribute to NMDAR hypofunction in schizophrenia. The research in this thesis was designed to investigate D-serine metabolic enzymes further through studying their distribution, their expression in schizophrenia and their effect on NMDARs.
The regional and cellular distribution of DAO and SRR in rodent and human brain were investigated using immunohistochemistry. Both enzymes were found within frontal cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum. In rodent frontal cortex, SRR expression was neuronal suggesting D-serine is not always glia-derived. In the human this was not the case, highlighting possible species differences. DAO in the rodent and human cortex was robustly detected, challenging previous views. In rodent cerebellum, both enzymes were neuronal and glial and in human, predominantly glial. In schizophrenia, DAO and SRR expression were investigated using western blotting and real-time PCR. DAO expression was elevated in the cerebellum in the disorder, without an accompanying change in SRR. In the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (DPFC), DAO and SRR mRNAs were unchanged in schizophrenia but SRR protein was significantly increased. The elevation in DPFC SRR protein was not replicated however in a second study. To investigate the effects of D-serine metabolic enzymes on NMDARs, an in vitro model of altered SRR expression was developed, but its use hindered through technical complications.
The data detailed demonstrate new findings of DAO and SRR’s distributions in the brain and highlight novel potential roles for these enzymes. In addition, the data provide some paradoxical findings including DAO’s cortical expression. The investigations in schizophrenia lend to robust demonstrations of DAO’s elevated cerebellar expression in the disorder. However, its roles therein and that of DAO and SRR on NMDAR function remain unclear.

Keywords: schizophrenia
serine racemase
d-serine
d-amino acid oxidase
Advisor: Burnet, P
Wood, M
The mechanism of the enzymatic ring expansion of penicillin N to deacetoxycephalosporin C

The order of events in the Deacetoxycephalosporin C/Deacetylcephalosporrn C Synthetase (DAOC/DAC Synthetase) catalysed ring expansion of penicillin N to deacetoxycephalosporin C has been investigated by the use of labelled/unlabelled penicillin N mixed competitive kinetic isotope effect experiments, in which the labelled penicillin N substrates were either labelled in the pro R- and pro S-methyl groups or at C-3. In addition, to assisting in the determination of the position of the first irreversible event in this reaction, deuteration at C-3 gave rise to a bifurcation of the natural biosynthetic pathway which led to enhanced production of the shunt metabolite, (2R,3S,6R,7R)-l-aza-3- methyl-3-hydroxy-7-[(5R)-5-amino-5-carboxy-pentanamido]-8-oxo-5-thiabicyclo[4.2.0]octane-2-carboxylate.
The biosynthetic precursor to the 3S-hydroxycepham shunt metabolite has been investigated and the origin of the 3S-hydroxyl oxygen atom has been determined by the use of labelling studies with 18O2 and shown to be derived from molecular oxygen.
13C-labelling studies are described which indicate that the ring expansion process is stereospecific to within the limits of the detection system employed. These experiments confirm earlier investigations but, in addition to improving upon the assessment of the degree of stereospecificity, have shown that the 3S- hydroxycepham shunt metabolite is produced with the same stereospecificity as that observed for the usual biosynthetic products, DAOC and DAC.
Chapter 5 describes an investigation of the anomalous C-2 deuterium exchange detected in DAOC produced by incubation of di-(2H3-methyl)-penicillin N with DAOC/DAC synthetase. The preliminary results from this study indicate that initially exchange occurs stereospecifically with the pro R C-2 deuterium atom being replaced by a hydrogen atom.
The origins of the unusual tripeptides L-α-aminoadipyl-L-serinyl-D-valine (L,L,D-ASV), α-aminoadipyl-serinyl-isodehydrovaline (ASdV) and α-aminoadipyl-cysteinyl- β-hydroxyvaline (AC-[β-OH]-V) isolated from Penicillium chrysogenum and Cephalosporium acremonium, have been examined by the use of variously 13C-labelled L,L,D-α-aminoadipyl-cysteinyl-valine (L,L,D-ACV) and D,L,D-α-aminoadipyl- cysteinyl-valine (D,L,D-ACV) tripeptide isotopomers. The initial results obtained from this investigation may be considered as circumstantial evidence that ASdV is formed by the action of IPNS upon L,L,D-ACV.
Finally, various substrate analogues have been prepared and evaluated as substrates for the ring expansion and hydroxylation activities of the bifunctional DAOC/DAC synthetase enzyme.

Advisor: Baldwin, J
Comparing direct and indirect forms of intergroup contact in Cyprus

This thesis examines and compares the effectiveness of direct and indirect types of contact in leading to short- or longer-term prejudice-reducing outcomes in Cyprus. Chapter 1 provides a background to the relations between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and Chapter 2 provides a theoretical introduction to the intergroup contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954) and to extended friendships (Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, & Ropp, 1997), vicarious contact (Mazziotta, Mummendey, & Wright, 2011), and imagined contact (Crisp & Turner, 2009) which have been suggested to be alternatives and a stepping stone to direct contact when the latter is absent. Chapter 3 consists of three experiments assessing the relative effects of direct and vicarious contact (Experiments 1 and 2) and imagined contact (Experiment 3). The results show that direct, and to a weaker extent, vicarious contact lead to more positive outgroup attitudes, but that a week after contact this effect is lost. All types of contact yield less anxiety, an effect that endures in time, and direct and imagined contact yield more positive action tendencies, an effect that remains significant in time only for direct contact. Chapter 4 consists of two experiments further exploring the capacity of imagined contact to yield positive intergroup outcomes. Experiment 4 tests whether the induction of interpersonal and intergroup similarities and/or differences into a positive imagined contact scenario affects participants evaluation of the outgroup. The results show, in line with the Optimal Distinctiveness Theory (Brewer, 1971), that ‘balanced similarity’ which incorporates both similarities and differences yields more positive outgroup attitudes than the conditions focusing only on similarities or only on differences. Experiment 5 compares ‘balanced similarity’ with positive imagined contact and finds that only the former affects variables related to preparing individuals for future contact. Chapter 5 consists of a three-wave longitudinal study examining the temporal effects of direct and extended friendships on outgroup attitudes and their mediation. Both types of friendships yield a significant indirect effect on attitudes which is stronger for direct friendships and is mediated by intergroup anxiety for both types of friendships and also by ingroup norms for direct friendships. Chapter 6 presents and discusses the key findings, outlines the limitations of these studies, and suggests avenues for future research.

Keywords: attitudes
imagined contact
intergroup contact
direct contact
vicarious contact
Advisor: Hewstone, M
Al Ramiah, A
High contrast limitations of slicer based integral field spectrographs

The viability of using a slicer based integral field spectrograph (IFS) for high contrast observations has been under scrutiny due to the belief that the one dimensional coherence that persists along the slice to the point of sampling at the detector will cause the creation of secondary speckles that will not have the same characteristics as normal speckles, thus stopping us from calibrating them out. It has also been previously assumed that a suitably low differential wavefront error when moving slice to slice was not guaranteed by design. It was for these reasons that slicer based IFSs were not selected for the current generation of planet finding instruments. As part of the EPICS (Exo Planet Imaging Camera and Spectrograph for the E-ELT) design study it was decided that slicers should be re-investigated due to results from on sky observations suggesting these limitations did not exist.
The purpose of this thesis was to determine whether there was validity to the concerns mentioned above and therefore to answer the question; Would implementing a slicer based integral field spectrograph limit the achievable contrast of an instrument designed for the direct detection of exoplanets? Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction into the field of exoplanet research. Charpter 2 describes the noise limiting direct detection of exoplanets and the ways to get around it. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the two types of IFS under investigation by the EPICS consortium. Chapter 4 looks into details of the EPICS instrument and the IFS design study that came about. Chapter 5 shows simulations performed for the aim of achieving better contrasts via post processing methods and accurate data reduction as well as simulations of slicer based integral field spectrographs. Experimental tests using a slicer and a preoptics setup designed to simulate the limiting noise are described in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 looks at using SINFONI for high contrast observations and Chapter 8 details the conclusions drawn from the work presented in this thesis, as well as possible extensions to it.
The work performed in this thesis dispels the concerns about the continued one dimensional coherence up to the detecter and suggests that slicer based integral field spectrographs do not inherently limit the contrast achievable; Results from experiments fit well with the requirements for EPICS to achieve its goals. Simulations also supported the idea that secondary speckle noise should not be an issue for the slicer based IFS. This means that a slicer based IFS is a viable option for the EPICS instrument.

Keywords: High Contrast
Integral Field Spectrograph
Direct Detection
Slicer IFS
Speckle Noise
Spectral Deconvolution
Exoplanet
Advisor: Thatte, N