VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Elephant versus other browsers’ long-term influences on savanna woodland dynamics

A crucial question in the debate about reintroducing elephant culling is whether the long-term effects of elephants and mesobrowsers on woodlands are similar. Sufficiently high biomass-densities of mesobrowsers may, following reduction or removal of elephants, continue to heavily impact earlier life-history stages of a similar suite of woody plants that elephant impacted, preventing these species from maturing. Thus a similar end-point for woodland structure and composition is achieved. No study exists in the literature where woody plant and habitat utilisation of the savanna browser guild has been determined in the same locality over the same period.
A review of 49 years of literature implied that the two groups impact the same core woody-species in the same habitats. Dietary and habitat utilisation of guild members was determined in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, South Africa. A small suite (n = 8) of woody species formed the core diet of all guild members. Herbivores’ densities were determined using a novel GIS approach; all members of the guild showed extensive overlap in habitat use. GPS collars and a GIS were then used to detect zones of different density of impala in the landscape, thus defining, for the first time, a natural fine-grain browsing gradient. Densities of woody seedlings were significantly less (average 48% reduction) in areas of high versus low impala density. A simple browse-browser model, incorporating, in a novel approach, functional groups of plant species, was parameterised from these results and an extensive review of the literature. Outputs suggest that over the long-term (100 years), impala will have a similar impact on woodland structure as elephant. An apparently strong synergistic effect between impala and elephant impact, suggests that reduction or removal of either impala or elephant will radically reduce long-term destruction of woodlands.
In smaller or medium sized reserves, where control of mesobrowser populations is practical, profitable and more acceptable than elephant culling, these findings imply a re-direction of management efforts. Management should consider the biomass-density of both groups, rather than just focus on the system’s perceived ‘keystone’ species. Such principles may also apply to temperate and other systems.

Keywords: savanna ecology
zoology
ungulates
ecosystems
competition
African elephants
ecology
Advisor: Macdonald, D
A Comparison Between Goal Reaching and Yaari's Models

In this project we build on the work done by He and Zhou in their paper Portfolio Choice via Quantiles[3]. We first explain in brief their portfolio choice model for the complete markets and the solution to the Goal Reaching problem and Yaari's model. We study the effect of Sharpe ratio on the two and are able to analytically prove that for the Goal Reaching Model an increase in Sharpe ratio increases the probability of achieving the target. We study in depth a concrete example of a particular distortion function - the power function in the Yaari's model. We calibrate the Goal Reaching problem and the Yaari's model with power function as probability distortion to the Dow Jones Industrial Average and show the probabilities of achieving targets under the two models. We also compare the results from the two models when given the same targets, in the same time horizon. Finally we show that the Goal Reaching problem can be embedded within the Yaari's model for a particular class of probability distortion functions and under this framework the Goal Reaching problem is risk averse.
Dynamic planning and real-time control for a mobile robot

A mobile robot becomes more intelligent as its control system is given more capabilities to respond to its environment autonomously. This thesis develops a distributed real-time control system for a mobile robot which is intended to operate autonomously in an industrial environment. It is a unified approach to real-time sensing, planning, and control based on a parallel processing architecture.
To be fully autonomous, a mobile robot must be able to sense its environment, build or update maps, plan and execute actions, and adapt its behaviour to environmental changes. The ability of a control system to support these complex tasks in real time is significantly affected by the organisation of information pathways within the architecture. After examining different architectures described in the literature, a transputer-based architecture is developed to maximise the parallel information flow from sensing to action to provide minimal delay in responding to a dynamically changing environment.
Taking account of uncertainty, planning an optimal path is difficult since the internal world model quickly becomes invalid. To find a solution, dynamic changes in the environment are classified as different types of obstacles that are assumed to appear randomly. Bayes' theorem is applied to build statistical models to estimate the mean number unexpected obstacles encountered. This provides a feasible way for the global path planner to update its internal world model dynamically based on available sensor information. A dynamic programming algorithm is used to plan an optimal path.
An array of sonar sensors is used to detect dynamic changes in the environment. To reduce uncertainty in noisy data, a probabilistic sensor model and rule-based heuristics are built. The collision avoidance problem is formulated using decision theory to achieve both collision-free and optimal solution. An optimal decision rule to avoid unexpected obstacles is calculated to minimise the Bayes risk in trading between a careful maneuver and an alternative path.
To control the motion of the robot to follow the planned path, a new guidance system is proposed to provide dynamic trajectory planning and optimal tracking capability to a mobile robot that is subject to nonholonomic kinematic constraints.
The success of this approach is demonstrated by the Turtle mobile robot which is able to interact intelligently with a dynamically changing environment.

Advisor: Brady, M
'Flippant dolls' and 'serious artists': professional female singers in Britain, c.1760-1850

Existing accounts of the music profession argue that between 1750 and 1850 musicians acquired a new identity as professional ‘artists’ and experienced a concomitant rise in their social and cultural status. In the absence of sustained investigation, it has often been implied that these changes affected male and female musicians in similar ways. As this thesis contends, this was by no means the case. Arguments in support of female musical professionalism, artistry, and their function in public life were made in this period. Based on the gender-specific nature of the female voice, they were an important defence of women’s public engagement that has been overlooked by gender historians, something which this thesis sets out to correct. However, the public role and professionalism of female musicians were in opposition to the prevailing valorisation of female domesticity and privacy. Furthermore, the notion of women as creative artists was highly unstable in an era which tended to label artistry, ‘genius’ and creativity as male attributes. For these reasons, the idea of female musicians as professional artists was always in tension with contemporary conceptions of gender, making women’s experience of the ‘rise of the artist’ much more contested and uncertain compared to that of men. Those advocating the female singer as professional artist were a minority in the British musical world. Their views co-existed alongside very different and much more prevalent approaches to the female singer which had little to do with the idea of the professional artist. Through examining debates about female singers in printed sources, particularly newspapers and periodicals, alongside case studies based on the surviving documents of specific singers, this thesis builds a picture of increasing diversity in the experiences and representations of female musicians in this period and underlines the controlling influence of gender in shaping responses to them.

Keywords: Singers
Professions
Singing
Arts
Professionalism
Theatre
Performance
Gender
Professionalization
Artistry
Women
Music
Advisor: Harris, B
Bird responses to habitat fragmentation at different spatial scales

Despite increasing publicity, habitat loss and fragmentation remain a serious threat to biodiversity. The main objectives of this research were (i) to study the effects of forest fragmentation on the distribution and abundance of resident birds in the fragmented littoral forests of southeastern Madagascar and temperate woodlands of southeastern Australia at three spatial scales (patch, landscape and regional) and (ii) to place the results of these case studies within the realms of the equilibrium theory of island biogeography and its descendent theories, to ascertain whether it is appropriate to use these theories to derive conservation scenarios within these threatened regions.
Deforestation of Madagascar's remaining forests is considered a global concern due to both its current high intensity and the small amount of forest claimed to be remaining on the island. Surprisingly, very few studies have considered the impacts of forest fragmentation on bird diversity in Madagascar. A multi-scale study on the effects of littoral forest fragmentation and degradation on birds is therefore a major step forward for bird conservation on the island. Furthermore, prior to this study no known work has been conducted on the avifauna within the threatened littoral forests of eastern Madagascar. My results indicated that (i) the littoral forests contained bird species assemblages that were unique when compared to neighbouring forest habitats, (ii) many forest-dependent bird species were significantly affected by habitat structure and especially proximity to forest edge and (iii) many forest-dependent species were affected by landscape factors such as remnant shape and remnant size. No relationship was found between measures of landscape composition, remnant 'isolation' and bird distribution within littoral forest remnants.
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Advisor: Whittaker, R
A search for the Standard Model Higgs boson via its decay to tau leptons and W bosons at the ATLAS detector

Understanding the origin or Electroweak symmetry breaking within the Standard Model was a key motivation for the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN. This thesis presents a search for evidence of Higgs boson production in the 4.7 fb−1 of collision data recorded at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV at the ATLAS detector during 2011.
This search is focused on signal events in which a Higgs boson is produced in the mass range 100 < mH < 180 GeV/c2 and subsequently decays to a pair of W bosons or a pair of tau leptons to final states with one hadronically decaying tau lepton and one light lepton. After an event selection criteria has been applied, the number of events in this data sample is consistent with the total background estimate and an upper limit is placed on the SM Higgs boson production rate at 95% confidence level. In addition, the prospects for measuring the SM Higgs coupling strength to tau leptons with the associated Higgs production channels and the full LHC dataset are also presented.

Keywords: particle physics higgs tau atlas cern lhc
Advisor: Hays, C
Domain evolution processes in ferroelectric ceramics

The aim of this doctoral research is to understand domain evolution processes in ferroelectrics using piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and Monte Carlo simulation. The results provide improved knowledge of domain evolution processes, and systematic experimental methods for research on domain evolution.
There has been extensive previous research on domain evolution in ferroelectrics, but the research was mainly constrained to simple domain patterns. However, ferroelectric domains tend to form complex patterns that generate low-energy domain configurations. In this research, several methods such as statistical analysis of PFM data, ex situ/in situ PFM observation under electrical/mechanical loading and combining PFM with electron backscatter diffraction are employed to study domain evolution processes in complex domain patterns. The results show that domain switching almost always takes place by the evolution of pre-existing domain patterns, rather than direct flipping of polarization. Also the net effect of domain evolution processes follows a primary principle that positive work is done by external loads. But this principle is not always followed for microscopic switching processes. Multiple types of domain switching occur simultaneously, and occasionally an overwriting process involves unfavourable as well as favourable domain switching. Domain switching is significantly constrained by the pre-existing domain patterns. Meanwhile, angle-resolved PFM is developed for the systematic interpretation of PFM signal. Using lateral PFM images taken from multiple sample orientations, angle-resolved PFM maps are generated based on the angle of phase reversal in the PFM signal. The resulting maps reliably show complex domain patterns which may not appear in vertical and lateral PFM images.
A model of domain evolution is developed using Monte Carlo simulation. Polarization switching by electric field and mechanical stress in the model is shown to take place via the motion of domain walls between pre-existing domains. Typical domain broadening processes are reproduced through this simulation.

Keywords: domain structure
piezoresponse force microscopy
ferroelectrics
Monte Carlo simulation
Advisor: Huber, J
Comprehension of grammar: normal and abnormal development

This thesis is in two parts. Part 1 reviews work on comprehension of grammatical structure in children and describes the development of a new Test for the Reception of Grammar (TRCG). TROG assesses understanding of a variety of grammatical contrasts using a format where the child is required to select from an array a picture to correspond to a phrase or sentence spoken by the tester. Results from 280 normal children aged from 3—6 to 13-2 are presented. It is shown that several grammatical structures are not completely mastered by age 13. and in some instances it appears that the accepted rule that comprehension precedes production is contravened. Data on reliability and validity of TROG are also presented.
Part 2 is Concerned with the application of TROG to 73 children with receptive and expressive developmental language disorders. It is shown that the majority of these children perform below age level both on TROG and on a test of receptive vocabulary. Further. there is a strong relationship between performance on TROG and grammatical complexity of expressive speech. Structures involving decoding of .word order appear to give these children particular difficulty, over and above their general comprehension deficits. Results are discussed in relation to psychological theories of developmental language disorders, and implications for the classification of these disorders are considered.

Keywords: child development
grammar
language comprehension
Advisor: Freda, N
Quasi-standard c*-algebras and norms of inner derivations

In the first half of the thesis a necessary and sufficient condition is given for a separable C*-algebra to be *-isomorphic to a maximal full algebra of cross-sections over a base-space such that the fibre algebras are primitive throughout a dense subset. The condition is that the relation of inseparability for pairs of points in the primitive ideal space should be an open equivalence relation.
In the second half of the thesis a characterisation is given of those C*- algebras A for which each self-adjoint inner derivation D(𝒂, A) satisfies
∥D(𝒂, A)∥ = 2 inf {∥𝒂 - z∥ : z ∈Z(A), the centre of A}.
This time the characterisation is that A should be quasicentral and the relation of inseparability for pairs of points in the primitive ideal space should be an equivalence relation. Those C*-algebras for which every inner derivation satisfies the equation are characterised in a similar way.

Advisor: Batty, C
Manipulating single atoms with optical tweezers

Single atoms are promising candidates for physically implementing quantum bits, the fundamental unit of quantum information. We have built an apparatus for cooling, trapping and imaging single rubidium atoms in microscopic optical tweezers. The traps are formed from a tightly focused off-resonant laser beam, which traps atoms using the optical dipole force. The traps have a diameter of ~1 μm and a depth of ~1 mK.
The novelty of our approach is the use a digital mirror device (DMD) to generate multiple independently movable tweezers from a single laser beam. The DMD consists of an array of micro-mirrors that can be switched on and off, thus acting as a binary amplitude modulator. We use the DMD to imprint a computer-generated hologram on the laser beam, which is converted in to the desired arrangement of traps in the focal plane of a lens. We have developed fast algorithms for calculating binary holograms suitable for the DMD. In addition, we use this method to measure and correct for errors in the phase of the wavefront caused by optical aberrations, which is necessary for producing diffraction-limited focal spots.
Using this apparatus, we have trapped arrays of up to 20 atoms with arbitrary geometrical arrangements. We exploit light-assisted collisions between atoms to ensure there is at most one atom per trapping site. We measure the temperature of the atoms in the traps to be 12 μK, and their lifetime to be 1.4 s. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to select individual atoms from an array and transport them over a distance of 14μm with laser cooling, and 5 μm without.

Keywords: dipole trap
optical tweezers
single atom
laser cooling
quantum information
quantum computing
Advisor: Kuhn, A
The organization and institutions of female asceticism in fourth century Cappadocia and Egypt

In discussing the organization and institutions of fourth century female asceticism I attempt to apply methods used in the study of history to a topic generally regarded as theological, and therefore almost neglected by scholars of Ancient History. I concentrate on monasticism neither as generic phenomenon, nor on its spiritual aspects. Rather, I try to identify the social, economic and legal basis of a specific form (female asceticism) in a specific environment (fourth century Cappadocia and Egypt). By reconstructing the process of organization and the developing institutions of female asceticism one discerns a great variety of models, starting with those most akin to the model of the family, and ending with models which call for a complete rupture with society, while based on scrupulous observance of the Scripture. Out of a constant interaction of these two extreme forms models of integration eventually developed, which were specifically created to suit ascetic needs. The survival of these synthesized organizational models depended on their practicality, and on the personality and doctrinal affiliation of charismatic leaders associated with them. The process of the organization of female asceticism is not isolated; it is important to the general development of early Christianity. It illustrates a problem central to Church History: the conflict between institutions and sectarian enthusiasm. The study of this process highlights the methods employed by the hierarchy in solving the paradoxical task of restraining extremes which grow from the teachings of the very Gospel the hierarchy propagates.
LYVE-1 and hyaluronan - a molecular velcro

The lymphatic system comprises a network of vessels whose primary functions are the maintenance of extracellular fluid balance and the transport of antigen-presenting cells from the periphery to the lymph nodes, thus facilitating immunological surveillance of the tissues and activation of adaptive immunity. In malignant disease, the lymphatics are both a route for dissemination and a reservoir for metastatic cancers such as cutaneous melanoma and breast carcinoma, where lymph node involvement is an early indicator of prognosis. Yet, despite such obvious importance in disease, the fundamental biology of the lymphatics is poorly understood and critical mechanisms such as those underlying trafficking of dendritic and tumour cells have been largely overlooked.
The focus of this thesis is lymphatic vessel endothelial hyaluronan receptor LYVE-1, and the regulation of its binding to the extracellular matrix glycosaminoglycan, hyaluronan (HA). Found selectively on the surface of lymphatic vessels, but sharing many of the features of the leukocyte homing receptor CD44, LYVE-1 appears a likely candidate for regulation of lymphatic trafficking during the stage at which cells migrate into the vessel. However, the precise function of LYVE-1 in recent years has remained enigmatic, not least because the native receptor is subject to post-translational modification with sialic acid, with the effect that HA binding is inhibited in lymphatic endothelium. The results of this thesis demonstrate that sialylation of LYVE-1 is not a short term regulatory modification, but rather a longer term mechanism that imposes a requirement for higher order receptor complex formation or HA crosslinking to achieve stable binding. This implies that native LYVE-1 is an active HA binding protein even when sialylated, with implications for our understanding of the role played by the receptor in HA uptake and metabolism, and transmigration of lymphatic endothelium by migratory leukocytes. Like CD44, HA binding to LYVE-1 is dependent on multivalent interactions between receptor and ligand, and may be enhanced by processes that increase the avidity of the interaction. Here for the first time it is shown that the native LYVE-1 molecule on lymphatic endothelium may be activated to bind HA following clustering of the receptor, or presentation of HA in a cross-linked form, such as that resulting from incubation with the HA binding protein TSG-6.

Keywords: LYVE-1
Hyaluronan
Lymphatics
Advisor: Jackson, D