VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Colonialism and consent [electronic resource] : rape in South Africa's Eastern Cape, 1847-1902
Keywords: History.

The 19th century Eastern Cape has long been recognized as one of the most violent eras of South African history, the result of a series of bloody frontier wars between the area's Xhosa-speaking inhabitants and British colonial forces. Colonization created political instability in which violence thrived; it also brought new systems for regulating that violence. This dissertation examines the effect of British colonization on African understandings of sexual violence in the Eastern Cape from 1848, when the colonial government began to exert administrative control over the area, through its incorporation into the Union of South Africa in 1902. During this period, the complex interactions between colonial culture and Xhosa sexual morality contributed to a rhetorical instability in Xhosa discussions of sexual consent. The spread of missionary Christianity, creation of a colonial legal system in the Eastern Cape, and the rise of a migrant labor economy all challenged the claims that men made to control the sexuality of their wives and daughters and placed new emphasis on the role of female consent in sexual relationships. The importance of consent, however, also made it more difficult for women to gain recompense from men who sexually assaulted them. Despite the proliferation of venues for prosecuting sexual assault, women in the Eastern Cape entered the twentieth century with substantially diminished protection from sexual violence.
Combinatorial approaches to scalability problems in storage, networking, and communications [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering

As computing systems have grown larger and more interconnected, every single layer in the underlying technologies has had to scale correspondingly in order to continue to support these systems. In this dissertation, we take a critical look at the scaling challenges in the storage, networking, and communications layers, by considering the combinatorial aspects of existing approaches. By recognizing the need for understanding the combinatorics of these problems, we are then able to provide efficient solutions that perform well even as problem domains get significantly larger. In the first part of this dissertation, we present a systematic method for designing storage systems where node repair is efficient even as the system scales to large numbers of nodes. In this scheme, data chunk replication is used to guarantee storage reliability. By distributing data chunks and their replicas through the storage system according to a Steiner system design, node repair can be heavily parallelized, thus resulting in higher data availability. We show that the design of such storage systems can be extended to scenarios where node sizes are much larger than replication degrees. Via these constructions, which are based on bipartite cage graphs and mutually orthogonal Latin squares, the resulting designs are guaranteed to require the fewest number of storage nodes for the given parameters. Furthermore, the scheme is scalable, since these storage systems can be easily expanded without need for frequent reconfiguration. In the second part of this dissertation, we focus on the class of network coding problems known as the non-uniform demand problem, and show how network codes for these problems can be efficiently constructed even as the networks become larger. The non-uniform demand network coding problem is a single-source, multiple-sink network transmission problem where the sinks may have heterogeneous demands, and is generally an NP-complete problem. In this work, we present non-uniform network demand scenarios under which network coding solutions can be found in polynomial time. This is accomplished by relating the demand problem with the graph coloring problem and then applying results from the strong perfect graph theorem. In the third part of this dissertation, we consider an interference alignment scheme in an ergodic setting. Here, interference alignment is achieved by pairing complementary channel realizations in order to amplify signals and cancel interference. Unfortunately, such a scheme is prone to large delays in decoding message symbols when there are many users. Thus in this work we take an in-depth look at the causes of such delays and propose better schemes that mitigate these issues. We show that delay can be mitigated by using outputs from potentially more than two channel realizations, at the possible cost of reduced data rate. We further demonstrate the tradeoff between rate and delay via a timesharing strategy.
Combinatorially generated oligodeoxyfluorosides as metal cation sensors [electronic resource]
Keywords: Chemistry

Despite numerous advances in metal ion sensor design, it is still difficult, slow and laborious to rationally design, synthesize and optimize selective sensors for each individual metal ion for a wide variety of metal cations. In order to develop an approach to rapidly generate sensors for many different metal cations, a new molecular sensor design strategy based on DNA-like oligomers (oligodeoxyfluorosides or ODFs) was investigated. The ODF-based design incorporates fluorophores and metal ligands onto the DNA backbone, allowing the binding and reporting moieties to interact intimately by bringing them into direct contact by pi-pi stacking, analogous to the stacking of DNA bases. The highly modular molecular design allows for water solubility and enables rapid synthesis and discovery of sensors from combinatorial libraries. Using the ODF-based sensor design and a combinatorial library approach, a wide variety of metal ion sensors were discovered for many different metal cations. A selective ODF sensor for silver ions that functions similarly to the more classical type of metal ion sensors was discovered employing this approach. In addition, ODF sensors that have diverse responses (such as fluorescence enhancement, quenching, and blue- and red-shifts) for a number of different metal cations were also discovered utilizing this sensor design strategy. Five water-soluble ODF sensors were identified to exhibit responses beyond simple fluorescence quenching to eight typically quenching metal cations. The diversity of sensor responses enable as few as two ODF sensors to be utilized to successfully differentiate all eight metal cations based on the response pattern of the sensors. The modular nature of this sensor design strategy suggests a broadly applicable approach to finding sensors for many different cations, simply by varying the sequence and composition of ligands and fluorophores using a DNA synthesizer.
Coming of age in a global Egypt [electronic resource] : the politics of transnational humanitarianism, childhood, and youth
Keywords: Anthropology

This ethnography investigates the social effects of transnational humanitarianism in the lives of vulnerable children and youth in Egypt. It argues that new relations between the Egyptian state and transnational NGOs are emerging over the governance of child and youth life and the ethical management of young and poor populations. Based on over 27 months of fieldwork conducted in Egypt (2007-2009, 2010) and three months of follow-up ethnography in France (2010), the research demonstrates how international discourses of children's rights, based on the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, inform local understandings of embodiment, personhood, and the family in Egypt. By examining the everyday practices of humanitarian workers (lawyers, child rights activists and administrators) and medical experts (physicians, psychiatrists and nurses) in relation to street children and village girls, this study reveals how philanthropic care produces social distinction such as class, race, gender and generation. Anthropologists have engaged with questions of childhood and adolescence, or how persons come to be certain kinds of political and cultural subjects, since the publication of Margaret Mead's now classic Coming of Age in Samoa. Coming of Age in a Global Egypt extends this scholarly trajectory into the context of the contemporary Arab world, tracing how new forms of child and adolescent humanity are being constructed in Egypt at the critical nexus of global biomedicine, children's rights, and humanitarian ethics and practice.
Common randomness, efficiency, and actions [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering

The source coding theorem and channel coding theorem, first established by Shannon in 1948, are the two pillars of information theory. The insight obtained from Shannon's work greatly changed the way modern communication systems were thought and built. As the original ideas of Shannon were absorbed by researchers, the mathematical tools in information theory were put to great use in statistics, portfolio theory, complexity theory, and probability theory. In this work, we explore the area of common randomness generation, where remote nodes use nature's correlated random resource and communication to generate a random variable in common. In particular, we investigate the initial efficiency of common randomness generation as the communication rate goes down to zero, and the saturation efficiency as the communication exhausts nature's randomness. We also consider the setting where some of the nodes can generate action sequences to influence part of nature's randomness. At last, we consider actions in the framework of source coding. The tools from channel coding and distributed source coding are combined to establish the fundamental limit of compression with actions.
The "common sense" of slavery [electronic resource] : race, performance, and a "peculiar" America, 1817-1861
Keywords: Drama

The economic, socio-political, and cognitive gains attendant to the institution of slavery benefited more people in the antebellum period than ever before, profiting slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike. As such, multiple constituencies turned to the theatre and other sites of cultural performance to defend the institution and its underlying racial logics. Rather than the more-studied philosophical apologies for slavery, the dramatic, theatrical, and performance texts and practices I consider in this interdisciplinary dissertation evince the practical consciousness of proslavery thought and culture. From the conservative pastorals of slave owners to the sentimentalist melodramas of abolitionists, from the ribald minstrel acts of working class publics to the romantic racialists dramas of perfectionist reformers: I explore the personal and collective benefits that imagining and embodying black captivity afforded antebellum publics across categories of ideological, sociological, and geographical difference. These proslavery representations were not unitary but varied and frequently contradictory, constituting a chaotic "common sense" of slavery, to use Gramsci's phrase. The forms and figures of these "common sense" understandings reflect the ways in which proslavery ideology and culture overdetermined racial meanings and representations in the post-Emancipation United States and, in significant ways, continues to inform our contemporary moment.
Communication through elections [electronic resource] : three studies exploring the determinants of citizen behavior
Keywords: Communication

Elections are an occasion for citizens to communicate their desires to government in a democracy. Although we typically think of the electoral communication environment as flowing from citizens to their government, the decisions of those citizens are not made in a vacuum. More than simply processors of political information, citizens make choices about whether and how to vote based on a wide range of inputs. This dissertation explores how citizens are influenced by three of these factors: knowledge of candidate issue positions, attitudes about individuals of different races, and the ordering of candidates' names on the ballot. Analysis of each of these influences reveals that candidate issue positions appear to have less of an impact on the decision to participate than many had hypothesized and that both citizens' racial attitudes and the ordering of candidates names had a significant influence on electoral choices -- changing the messages citizens sent to their government. Together, these studies present a portrait of electoral behavior as more diversely impacted than might otherwise be apparent.
Community dynamics and variation of the murine intestinal microbiota in health and disease [electronic resource]
Keywords: Microbiology and Immunology

The importance of the intestinal microbiota to the health of an organism is well recognized. Alterations in the composition of the microbiota are associated with a number of diseases. However, the extent to which the microbiota varies across healthy individuals and time and the causes of this variation are still not fully understood. In order to distinguish between microbial community states of health and disease, the range of healthy microbial communities must be determined. In addition, the effect of perturbations on the microbiota is an area of active research. Recent studies indicate that intestinal infections can have a significant impact on the composition of intestinal microbiota. However, the extent and duration of these changes during different infections have not been fully characterized. My aims were to characterize the range of healthy microbiota in an inbred mouse population over time and to determine the dynamics of alterations in the microbiota during disease. I also wanted to determine if certain characteristics of the microbiota make animals more or less susceptible to infection. In this work, 46 individual healthy mice were sampled over time to assess the range of microbial communities in health. A mouse model of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium infection was used to assess the impact of infection on the microbiota. Mice were sampled prior to infection and over the course of infection. This work finds that the microbiota of healthy mice varies significantly over time and among individuals. However, there are stable differences among individual mice, which may be established at the point of weaning when adult microbial communities develop. In addition, this work finds significant changes in the microbiota during infection that differ with the level of infection. This data also shows that there are some taxa whose abundance prior to infection correlates with outcome of infection. This work provides insights into the dynamics of the microbiota in health and disease and its impact on the health of the host.
The comparison study of future on-chip interconnects for high performance VLSI applications [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering

Moore's law has driven the scaling of digital electronic devices' dimensions and performances over the last 40 years. As a result, logic components in a microprocessor have shown dramatic performance improvement. On the other hand, an on-chip interconnect which was considered only as a parasitic load before 1990s became the real performance bottleneck due to its extremely reduced cross section dimension. Now, on-chip global interconnect with conventional Cu/low-k and delay optimized repeater scheme faces great challenges in the nanometer regime, imposing problems of slower delay, higher power dissipation and limited bandwidth. Carbon based materials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons, and optical interconnect have been proposed for the alternate solution for the future nodes due to their special physical characteristics. This dissertation investigates the basic physical properties of novel materials for future interconnect, and describes the analytical and numerical models of local and global wire system based on new materials and novel signaling paradigms. This work also compares their basic performance metrics and circuit architectures to cope with the interconnect performance bottlenecks. We quantify the performance of these novel interconnects and compare them with Cu/low-k wires for future high-performance ICs.
Competing particle systems and their applications [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mathematics

The following dissertation studies several classes of competing particle systems, which are of importance in statistical physics and mathematical finance. Two main examples are systems which go by the names rank-based market models and volatility-stabilized market models in stochastic portfolio theory. Motivated by the applications, we analyze the behavior of the ordered particles, the shape of the invariant distributions for the processes of spacings between consecutive particles, the global behavior of the particle systems as the number of particles becomes large, as well as the corresponding systems of infinitely many particles.
Composite inelastic dark matter [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics

In this thesis, we propose the Composite Inelastic Dark Matter(CiDM) model as a possibility to reconcile null results of numerous experiments with the DAMA/LIBRA experiment results. We also do a thorough study of the cosmological thermal history of CiDM. To the end we study the consequences of a nearly Supersymmetric dark sector on the CiDM.
Composition and temperature effects on aluminoborosilicate glasses structure and properties [electronic resource]
Keywords: Geological and Environmental Sciences.

This works studies the effects of compositional and temperature variations on the structure and properties of aluminoborosilicate glasses. Two groups of aluminoborosilicate glasses, one that has lower boron content and another that has higher boron content, have been studied. The structural changes were mainly observed with high-field B-11, Al-27 and Na-23 magic angle spinning (MAS) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. In these glasses, boron is either three-coordinate (BO3) or four-coordinate (BO4); aluminum exists predominately as four-coordinate species, but there is a small amount of five-coordinate aluminum ([5]Al). The compositional study focused on the effect of the cation field strength of the network modifiers on the glass structure by varying the ratio of the two network modifiers, CaO and Na2O. Increasing the ratio of CaO to Na2O dramatically lowers the fraction of four-coordinated boron (N4), increases [5]Al, and increases the fraction of non-bridging oxygens (NBO), which was calculated based on the boron and aluminum structural information. However, variations in these fractions are not linear with respect to the average cation field strength. Na-23 spectra reveal that the ratio of bridging to non-bridging oxygens in the coordination shell of Na+ increases with an increasing ratio of CaO to Na2O in Ca-rich glasses. These changes can be understood by the tendency of higher field strength modifier cations to facilitate the concentration of negative charges on NBO in their local coordination environment, systematically converting BO4 to BO3. The effect of temperature on the structure was studied by two ways: cooling the glass-forming melts at different rates to sample the glass structure at different fictive temperature, and using high-temperature in situ NMR. The abundances of BO3 and NBO increase with increasing fictive temperature, suggesting that the reaction BO4 [logical equivalence] BO3 + NBO shifts to the right with increasing temperature. The observed temperature dependence of the abundance of BO4 species allows us to estimate the enthalpy of reaction, [Delta]H, which is closely related to the amount of NBO in the glass. In situ high-T B-11 MAS NMR was used to observe chemical exchange between BO3 and BO4 species over the timescale of microseconds to seconds. The timescale of BO3/BO4 exchange from NMR data, [lowercase Tau](NMR), appears to be "decoupled" from that of the macroscopic shear relaxation process, [lowercase Tau](s), derived from the viscosity data; however, at higher temperatures, [lowercase Tau](s) approaches [lowercase Tau](NMR). The "decoupling" at lower temperature may be related to intermediate-range compositional heterogeneities, and /or fast modifier cation diffusivities, which trigger "unsuccessful" network exchange events.
Compulsory Licensing and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from the Trading with the Enemy Act after World War II
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Alien Property Custodian
patent law
innovation
invention
learning-by-doing
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)
Thesis

Compulsory licensing allows countries to produce patented foreign innovations without the consent of the foreign patent holders. During World War I and World War II, the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) allowed the United States to vest all enemy-owned patents. The Alien Property Custodian systematically licensed the vested patents to U.S. firms. Moser and Voena (2010) found that compulsory licensing under the World War I TWEA increased U.S. domestic innovation by a minimum of 20 percent. My paper extends their analysis by examining how compulsory licensing under the World War II TWEA affected U.S. domestic innovation. During World War II, patents originally owned by Germany, Japan, and Italy were licensed to U.S firms. Did U.S. inventors face less economic incentive to produce domestic innovation because they could cheaply use foreign innovation after paying a low licensing fee? Or did compulsory licensing encourage domestic innovation (Moser and Voena, 2010)? For example, experience with producing foreign innovations could have encouraged the learning-by-doing of the compulsory licensees (Moser and Voena, 2010). To the extent that technologies were differently affected by the World War II TWEA, I use a difference-in-differences strategy to examine the effects of compulsory licensing on domestic innovation. My analysis provides evidence that compulsory licensing under the World War II TWEA had positive effects on domestic innovation activities.