VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Ambiguous Development: Design Thinking and the Perpetuation of High Modernism
Keywords:  Program of Science
development
design thinking
high modernism
technology transfer
cross-cultural design
science and technology studies
India
Thesis

This thesis uses a postcolonial lens to interpret development in India and disentangle the contemporary relationship between development and design thinking. Recently, design thinking, originally a product of design research, has moved beyond the business and academic bubbles and is increasingly applied to development projects. Building on theories of postcolonialism and technology transfer as well as James Scott’s concept of high modernism, I explore the intricacies of power dynamics within development as well as the recent addition of design thinking, asking: What forms has development in independent India taken? How has development been influenced by its colonial past, technology, and modernism? How is the practice of design thinking perceived and adapted as it is transferred? What role is there for design thinking in the future, particularly in international development? These questions identify conceptualizations of international development and problematize design thinking’s rapid adoption. To do this, I look at development in India at two different periods. The first is the state-led infrastructure projects of dam building during Jawaharlal Nehru’s administration immediately after independence. The second is the modern practice of design thinking in development projects today. Using historical and academic texts, I establish that Nehru continued to use many of the British colonial regime’s practices, particularly around the idealization of technology and other high modernist principles to form India as a modern nation-state. I conducted interviews with designers and development practitioners in both India and the United States and code for terminology, principles, and content. I find that design thinking diverges and loses nuance as it is transferred both from the United States to India as well as from design to development. Ultimately, I recommend that design thinking be rethought as a terminology and practice. At the project level, design thinking is rarely useful or fully understood; these problems should be left to designers. Design thinking should continue to be taught, but specifically as a vehicle to help reimagine the purpose and role of organizations.
The American college in the age of reform [electronic resource]
Keywords: Education.

Despite a longstanding narrative celebrating the inexorable success of American colleges and universities, at certain pivotal times very powerful elites have found the higher education sector to be pitiful, broken, and in urgent need of reform. This is the story of the first iteration of that discontent. This dissertation is an account of American higher education during the period that Richard Hofstadter dubbed the "Age of Reform, " especially the years between 1890 and 1920. During these decades, a cadre of powerful and well-funded reformers clamored for sweeping changes in American colleges and universities. I name these individuals "the academic engineers." Borrowing the language and ethos of engineering, they sought to corral an unruly collection of autonomous institutions into a centralized system; to consolidate control of that system in their own hands; to create a tiered, pyramidal hierarchy of institutions; and to eliminate inefficiencies and distractions on campus. Again and again, I show how the academic engineers' efforts fell short despite their considerable wealth and power. Still, amidst their failures, we can see many key features of the modern higher education sector taking shape. Part of this dissertation's significance is its assurance that although actions always have consequences, top-down design is not destiny. The reform agenda has existed for more than a century, and it will surely continue to exist. Those of us in the rank-and-file of higher education may be best served by seeing it not as an existential threat, but as a fact of life to be assimilated, diverted, or subverted on an ongoing basis.
An Analysis of Human and Monkey Task Learning Dynamics
Keywords: category matching
rule learning
rhesus macaque
learning dynamics
rescorla wagner
transfer learning
jump learning
Symbolic Systems
Stanford University
Thesis

A large part of neuroscience research is devoted to investigating how humans learn - particularly with regard to rules for category matching tasks. Though there are many non-invasive methods to gather electrophysiological data during rule-learning experiments, including fMRI, invasive methods present the opportunity to gather data at the level of individual neurons. Because running invasive procedures, such as inserting electrodes into regions of the sub-cortical brain, is both expensive and dangerous to carry out on humans, rhesus macaque monkeys are often used instead. However, is assumption that monkeys are thinking about the experiment task in the same way as humans flawed? This thesis sets out to investigate if the dynamic of task learning is a factor that needs to be more seriously considered when conducting electrophysiological studies on monkeys. To do this, behavioral data was studied to understand the learning dynamics of monkeys and humans. By comparing this behavioral data to simulations of different learning dynamics, this thesis shows that previous task learning experience has a huge impact on the dynamic of learning on monkeys. It also shows that increased data transparency and availability is needed in order to better understand the intricacies of task learning in humans and monkeys. Lastly, it shows that finding different learning dynamics should be a concern for researchers making the claim that the neural representations of tasks in monkeys and humans are similar.
An evaluation of Symbiodinium shifting within coral colonies in American Samoa as a response to thermal fluctuations and climate change
Keywords:  Department of Biology
Acropora hyacinthus
Acropora gemmifera
biology
bleaching
climate change
marine biology
resilience
Symbiodinium
thermal stress
Thesis

Anthropogenic climate change is causing coral reefs around the world to rapidly deteriorate and disappear, in large part due to thermal stress from increased ocean temperatures. Recent evidence suggests that certain coral species may be better at adapting and acclimatizing to thermal changes than others. Corals form mutualistic relationships with diverse clades of dinoflagellate algal symbionts, in the genus Symbiodinium (spp.). Symbiotic plasticity within this relationship allows the corals to adapt to changes in their environment – there have been many well-documented cases of symbiont clade switching within coral colonies in response to thermal heat stress. The majority of coral reef research, especially as it pertains to symbiont switching, is short-term and therefore, doesn’t provide much insight as to the large-scale global changes that are likely to occur in the wake of climate change. By evaluating symbiont switching in coral colonies around the island of Ofu in American Samoa this study aimed to (i) determine the frequency with which symbiont clades shift within coral colonies, (ii) better understand the influence of climatic factors in promoting the switching of symbiont clades specifically with respect to mass bleaching events, and (iii) provide some of the first temporally significant evidence for symbiont switching in situ. By using DNA extraction and amplification techniques, samples taken from the same coral colonies over the span of several years were assessed for hosted symbiont type and analyzed with respect to species, location, and season; there were also genetically identical replicates that were transplanted to different locations. It was found that corals exposed to greater fluctuations in daily temperature are more likely to host heat resistant symbionts. Additionally, some coral colonies appear to be able to switch their symbiont composition over short time periods (~ 2 months) effectively undergoing rapid adaptation to environmental changes. These findings align with what is a growing consensus that two simultaneous factors, heat resistant symbionts and the ability to rapidly acclimatize to changes in the environment, are necessary for corals to resist heat stress. Understanding the mechanisms that confer differences in resistance responses between corals to environmental stress may allow us to better protect coral reef ecosystems as climate change intensifies.
The analysis of cellular states [electronic resource]
Keywords: Structural Biology.

Cellular state is an old concept. However, scientists have only recently begun the systematic manipulation of cells to characterize and understand the functions of myriad states. As biotechnology advances enable innovative and large-scale measurements on cellular components, new biostatistical tools are required to make sense of the increased data size and complexity, which in turn augment our knowledge of cellular states. In this dissertation, I discuss my contributions to the study of cellular states from the theory and computation angles: 1) modeling and inference of regulatory gene networks with systems of nonlinear deterministic and stochastic differential equations; 2) partition-assisted clustering analysis of high-dimensional single-cell mass cytometry data; and 3) the alignment of subpopulations of cells across cytometry samples by similarity in the associated network structures. These contributions cement a platform that furthers the discussion of cellular states by framing it in both mechanistic and quantitative terms. This platform adds layers of biostatistical knowledge to Biosciences and enhances the discovery of cellular state properties.
Analysis of Electron Hole Propagation in Low-Temperature <111>-aligned Silicon Crystals
Keywords:  Department of Physics
Stanford University Department of Physics
CDMS
DKK Model
Anisotropy
Thesis

We implement the Dresselhaus-Kip-Kittel (DKK) Model to evaluate and simulate signals obtained from electron holes propagating through a low-temperature silicon crystal in a uniform electric field. The DKK model, first formulated in the 1950s, categorizes the valence energy levels in Silicon into two warped, degenerate bands (denoted “heavy” and “light” respectively) and a spherical spin-orbit band, deriving the approximate energy functions of each band. It has remained a popular model for decades due to its simplicity and relative accuracy, despite some disagreements with recent first-principles calculations. Here we attempt to fit the DKK model to the signals generated by electron-hole pair creating interactions in a millimeter-scale crystalline silicon substrate, where the model’s <100> energy preference results in tri-lobed anisotropic patterns. The model can provide some basic explanations of particular features found in the signals, such as signal profile shapes, but has trouble connecting to an overall quantifiable anisotropy. Proper modeling of the transport of electron holes in crystalline silicon will help make these substrates useful direct detection media, especially for distinguishing the patterns of potential WIMPs.
Analysis of microseismic multiplets in a hydraulic fracturing operation [electronic resource]
Keywords: Geophysics.

Development of shale gas and tight oil reservoirs is shaping the global energy outlook. The U.S. Energy Information Administration anticipates continued strong growth of these unconventional hydrocarbon sources both in absolute terms and relative to conventional sources. Given the tremendous scale of development over the coming decades, improving the tools available to optimize resource recovery is a high priority. This is particularly pronounced given low reported recovery factors, typically 3-7% for shale oil and 20-30% for shale gas. Developing an accurate physical model of the reservoir response to hydraulic fracturing is crucial for achieving improved recovery factors, but few tools are available to monitor the response of the reservoir to stimulation. Microseismic monitoring provides one of the few sources of spatiotemporal data during stimulation. This thesis begins with documentation of a methodology to identify groups of multiplets, seismic events that occur in essentially the same place with similar source characteristics, in microseismic data. Multiplets are useful in providing an improved understanding of microseismicity associated with the stimulation, as well as direct evidence of change in the reservoir. The workflow is presented for general application, then applied to a case study. This case study demonstrates the value of multiplets both for independently quantifying uncertainty and for directly observing changes in the reservoir. In this case, the uncertainty is much larger than estimated by the contractor who initially located the events, and changes in reservoir properties are significant. A discrete fracture network is inferred from the microseismicity associated with the hydraulic fracturing operation, and the resulting network's impact on production is analyzed. The inferred network is compared to the fracture network intersected by the wellbore, finding that many pre-existing fractures are not associated with detected microseismicity. In collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a massively parallel hydraulic simulator is used to model hydraulic fracture propagation and the impact of stress shadows on parallel fractures. Finally, ambient seismic noise is used to extract noise correlation functions on an an unprecedentedly small spatial scale in in situ earth at the El Tatio Geyser. Apparent arrivals of multiple phases are identified in the raw noise correlation functions, an observation that has been made only after advanced processing in previous studies.
Analysis of performance tradeoffs for embedded HOG feature extraction [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Recent mobile vision applications demand energy-efficient real-time object detection. Specialized hardware design is needed to push the limits of both performance and energy-efficiency. While such hardware has been demonstrated for backend detection, current imager frontends consume a significant fraction of total system energy. Therefore, additional system-level energy savings may be achieved by reducing the energy requirements of frontend image capture. At the same time, it is crucial that the energy saving techniques used do not significantly degrade object-detection performance. This dissertation studies the effects of frontend imager parameters on object detection performance and energy consumption. A simulation framework, including a largescale RAW image database for object detection, is developed. And simulation results quantifying the tradeoff between pixel bitdepth and HOG-based object detection performance are presented. A custom version of HOG features based on 2-bit pixel ratios is introduced, and shown to achieve superior object detection performance for the same estimated energy compared to conventional HOG features. A frontend hardware implementation capable of extracting these features at multiple scales is proposed, and a system-level energy analysis is performed. This energy analysis suggests a potential 19X reduction in I/O energy and 3.3X reduction in backend detection energy compared to conventional object detection pipelines.
Analyzing British Public Opinion Towards Integrative Policy: An Empirical Test of Two Theories
Keywords: center on democracy development and the rule of law
cddrl
european union
brexit
voter motivation
eu referendum
Thesis

The British public’s decision to separate from the European Union (EU) in June of 2016 shocked scholars around the world. 52 percent of citizens voted Leave in the European Union Membership Referendum in the United Kingdom (UK), shattering the predictions of major polls. Scholars became even more confused when examining the traits of citizens who voted Leave, like individuals who greatly benefit from EU cash transfers. This thesis explores how different personal values are prioritized when voting and discovers which are specifically influencing voter preferences toward integrative policies through examining the personal values of UK voters and how these affected their votes in the EU referendum. To do so, I test two prominent individual-level theories of public support for European integration. The first is based on the belief that voters prioritize material values, like economic and physical security, when making their decisions while the second is based on the belief that voters prioritize non-material values, like intellectual fulfillment, self-actualization, and belonging, when making their decisions. Through analyzing survey responses from the British Election Study, I find that a voter’s perception of integration is most influenced by non-material issues. Specifically, the prioritization of non-material values made an individual more likely to vote Leave in the EU referendum. I combine these findings on the impact of non-material values on voter preferences with information about the changes that have occurred to the modern political climate and the rhetorical strategies chosen by each referendum campaign to explain how the Leave vote was able to secure victory. I conclude my thesis with recommendations for what the EU can do to increase and sustain its support in other member states.
aniani: Family History in the Making
Keywords: family history
identity
stereotype threat
intersectionality
Learning Design and Technology
Education
Thesis

Everyone has a story that's influenced by a history. This constant need to understand who we are becomes even more complicated when we consider the intersection of our many identities. aniani is a mobile platform that aims to ignite a new kind of conversation for families to have about their own histories that prioritizes the complexity of human relationship. Translating to both window and mirror, aniani allows families to define the influence of those from whom they come as either a reflection or separation of who they are. Families create profiles for people important to their story and engage with investigative activities that allow them to develop far more interesting and vital connections to their ancestors than lines on a paper.
Anode prelithiation for lithium-ion batteries [electronic resource]
Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.

Rapid progress has been made in realizing battery electrode materials with high capacity and long-term cyclability in the past decade. However, low first-cycle Coulombic efficiency as a result of the formation of a solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) and lithium trapping at the anodes, remains unresolved. Here, I develop nanoscale lithium alloys (LixSi, LixGe, LixSn, LixAl etc.) as excellent prelithiation reagents with high specific capacity to compensate the first-cycle capacity loss for both graphite and alloy-type anode materials. However, because of the high chemical reactivity and low anode potential, lithium alloys are not stable in humid air and react vigorously with the standard slurry solvent N-methyl-2-pyrrolidinone (NMP), indicating they are not compatible with the real battery fabrication process. In this thesis, I report different coatings (Li2O, artificial SEI, LiF, graphene etc.) and different structures (core-shell nanostructure and nanocomposite), and improve the stability of lithium alloys. With the protection of crystalline and dense LiF coating, LixSi nanoparticles can be processed in anhydrous NMP with a high capacity of 2504 mAh/g. With low solubility of LiF in water, this protection layer also allows LixSi to be stable in humid air (∼40% relative humidity (RH)). Traditional lithium-ion batteries based on lithium free anodes and lithium metal oxide cathodes are rapidly falling behind the high-energy storage demands of portable electronics and electric vehicles. Significant increase in energy density of batteries must be achieved by exploring new materials and cell configurations. Alloy anodes with much higher capacity have been recognized as promising alternatives to graphite. Without pre-stored lithium in anodes, the energy density is limited by the low capacity of lithium metal oxide cathodes. Recently, lithium metal has received renewed interest as a high-capacity anode, but faces many challenges resulting from its high reactivity and uncontrolled dendrite growth. Here I develop a series of lithium alloys based anodes as alternatives to lithium metal, inheriting the desirable properties of alloy anodes and pure metal anodes. The large-scale freestanding LixM/graphene foil (M = Si, Sn, Al etc.) consists of fine nanostructures of densely-packed LixM nanoparticles encapsulated by large graphene sheets. LixM/graphene foils are stable in air, owing to their unique structure as well as the hydrophobicity and gas impermeability of graphene sheets. With fully-expanded LixM confined in the highly-conductive and chemically-stable graphene matrix, this foil maintains a stable structure and cyclability in half cells. The LixSi/graphene foil is successfully paired with high-capacity lithium free cathodes, such as V2O5 and sulfur, to achieve stable full-cell cycling. Stabilized lithium alloys serve as prelithiation reagents or excellent anode materials by themselves, which bring huge benefit to both the existing lithium-ion batteries and next-generation lithium metal batteries.
Approaching the limits of contact resistance and scaling in molybdenum disulfide transistors [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

For half a century, decreasing transistor dimensions (following Moore's Law) have increased the performance and lowered the cost of computer electronics. Today's transistors have nanoscale features, but the ultimate limit is the atomic scale with sub-nanometer thin channels, which are not feasible with conventional semiconductors such as silicon. Monolayer semiconductors like MoS2 are intrinsically only three atoms thick, and thus have exciting potential for use in future atomic-scale electronics. This work explores the fundamental performance limits of MoS2 transistors in the context of transistor scaling. First, I discuss the contact resistance, which is a key factor limiting the performance of short channel devices. A systematic study of contacts to MoS2 with varying metals and fabrication conditions reveals that gold deposited in ultra-high vacuum yields three times lower contact resistance (~740 Ω⋅μm) than under normal conditions. Using this technique, MoS2 transistors with contact lengths down to 20 nm are demonstrated. Modeling provides key insights on how to further improve the contacts to approach fundamental limits. Next, using a novel self-aligned fabrication technique, I demonstrate transistor gate lengths down to 10 nm. At this length scale, I provide the first analysis of ballistic transport in monolayer MoS2, which is the ultimate performance limit for these transistors. Quasi-ballistic behavior with transmission coefficient up to 0.25 at 175 K, and up to 0.15 at room temperature is demonstrated. I also project the intrinsic performance of MoS2 transistors, demonstrating the potential for applications in low-power electronics. With the same technique, I also fabricate double gate transistors to examine the scaling limits of monolayer MoS2. These devices reach high saturation current > 500 μA/μm and transconductance > 200 μS/μm, a record for any sub-nanometer thin semiconductor, and comparable to modern silicon-on-insulator technology. Simulations examine how such devices can be further scaled down, finding that thinning the gate oxide is crucial once the channel has reached few-atom thickness. In the last chapter I use mm-wide devices to measure monolayer MoS2 transistor leakage currents down to 60 aA/μm and current on/off ratios greater than 10^11, both records for this material. Overall, these results demonstrate that MoS2 can bring transistor technology to the ultimate atomic-scale limit.