The ubiquity of the ‘Nazi’ – the fictional Doppelgänger of the historical Nazi – in the various media of popular culture is both disturbing and fascinating. There is an important relationship between the ‘Nazi’ and its audience; related to but separate from the historical Nazi, the creation and reception of the ‘Nazi’ both enables and exemplifies the continual processing of the past. Using a purpose-built framework (concept and terminology) for the study of the ‘Nazi’ as a phenomenon in and of itself, in combination with Freud’s concept of the uncanny, this thesis examines the dynamics of the relationship between the ‘Nazi’ and its audience in four examples: television episodes “Deaths-Head Revisited,” “He’s Alive” (The Twilight Zone), and “Patterns of Force” (Star Trek); and Serdar Somuncu’s performances/readings of Mein Kampf. The temporal and geographical context of the episodes (1960s America) seem far removed from Somuncu’s performances (1990s/2000s Germany), but analysing the production and effects of the uncanny moments generated in each case reveals a provocative raison d’être that spans across the geographical and temporal divide. / Graduate / 0311 / 0900

At present, the most accurate approach to predicting protein structure, comparative modelling, builds a model of a target sequence using known protein structures as templates. Comparative modelling becomes markedly less accurate in the ‘twilight zone’, where the target protein shares little sequence identity with all known templates. There are two main causes of this inaccuracy: first, it becomes difficult to identify good structural templates; second, it becomes difficult to determine which amino acids in the template are structurally equivalent to those in the target. These are problems of fold recognition and target-template alignment respectively. In this thesis, new approaches are developed to address both these problems. The alignment problem is investigated in the special case of membrane proteins. These are key modelling targets as they resist structure determination and are pharmaceutically important. The approach taken here is to use ‘environment specific substitution tables’ (ESSTs)– that is, to alter the alignment scoring system for each local environment of the template structure. We show how ESSTs can be made for membrane proteins, tested for robustness of construction, and used to infer the most important evolutionary pressures acting on protein structure. The incorporation of ESSTs into a multiple sequence alignment method leads to more accurate alignments of membrane proteins, and so to more accurate models. Recently, algorithms have been developed that predict contacts in protein structures from a multiple sequence alignment of homologous sequences. We explore the potential of these predictions for fold recognition by developing an algorithm that makes no use of amino acid identity, and so should be agnostic to the existence of a ‘twilight zone’. We show that whilst this is not the case, our method is complementary to state-of-the-art approaches.

The starting point of this thesis is the assertion that the interaction between individuals and public authorities sometimes produces claims which cannot easily be categorized as public or private law claims – “claims in the twilight zone”. The aims of the thesis are to examine to what extent such claims can be determined by a court of law and to establish to which kind of court such a claim is properly to be submitted. Moreover, assuming that there is a division of competence between the general courts and the administrative courts that purport to “cut through” claims in the twilight zone, the thesis examines three specific interests: 1) the interest of effective adjudication of claims in the twilight zone; 2) the interest of upholding the division of competence between the general courts and the administrative courts; and 3) the interest of avoiding parallel decisions on the same subject matter.      There is much to support the conclusion that claims in the twilight zone have hitherto, with a couple of important exceptions, been adjudicated in the general courts. However, certain ambiguities relating to the proper role of the administrative courts make it uncertain whether this can still be said to be the case. It may perhaps be that the Supreme Court and the Supreme Administrative Court have divergent conceptions of the meaning and effect of a decision made by an administrative court. The present uncertainty makes it difficult to establish to which kind of court a claim in the twilight zone is properly to be submitted, and there is a certain risk that such a claim will not be possible to pursue through a judicial process at all. There is also a certain risk that new boundary lines between public law and private law will be created as a result of procedural ambiguities and not as a result of clear standpoints in matters of substantial law. It is suggested that the situation should be remedied by clarifying the proper role of the administrative courts – or by an amalgamation of the general courts and the administrative courts to one single court system.

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