VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Wir sind gekommen, doch wir sind gar nicht da : authenticity and identity on contemporary German stages
Keywords: German Studies.

What does it mean to be authentic, and how might the concept of authenticity become politically and artistically solvent in the theater? My dissertation, entitled 'Wir sind gekommen, doch wir sind gar nicht da: Authenticity and Identity on the Contemporary German Stage, ' examines potential answers to these questions, particularly as posed by theaters that have responded to the demands and modes of US- style identity politics. It explores ways in which a particular understanding of authenticity has been held up as a "solution" to certain perceived shortcomings (particularly as related to issues of race and representation) in mainstage theaters across the country; how authenticity has been positioned as being politically, aesthetically, institutionally, and/or formally innovative; how a pragmatic authentic praxis in performance interacts with its theoretical problematization in German academia; and what potentially ambiguous implications authenticity may have for the work of the actor. My dissertation highlights both the potentialities and ambiguities of productions that have defined themselves as authentic, examining their ability to provide a platform for underrepresented voices while, perhaps, reproducing the very structures and dynamics they seek to counteract. At the same time, it fills a gap in scholarly literature lacking in historical studies of the past decade in German theater: it spans discussions on representation and voice in the early Beyond Belonging festivals in Berlin (2007-8); the heated debates on blackface during the 2012-13 season; the rise of so-called "postmigrant theater" at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße and Maxim Gorki theaters; and recent meta-theatrical works at the Maxim Gorki (2017) and Deutsches Theater (2020) that have cast authenticity on stage into an ethically ambiguous light. My work is both descriptive and analytical, centering as much on the analysis of theatrical performance and texts as on the politico-cultural discourse that surrounds them, in the dialogues and communicative slippages between critics, activists, academics, and theatermakers
Womanist Worldmaking: Black Women’s Pleasure as a Framework for Expansive Cinematic Gazes
Keywords: Womansim
African American women
Motion pictures
Feature films
Queer theory
Pleasure in art
Families, Black > History
Text
Thesis

The messaging within cinema holds immense social power. The ability to immerse oneself within a world created by a director’s gaze provides opportunities for connection and understanding internally and externally. Historically, these gazes have instilled imagery based in notions of racism and sexism that have positioned Black women outside of pleasurable experiences across the realms of audiences, performers, and creators themselves. The intersectional experiences of multiple identities are rarely depicted in mainstream media, and for that reason Black women’s interactions with cinema are often limited and laborious. Working to subvert these oppressive gazes, activists and creatives orient around pleasure- based frameworks of personal and creative liberation. In this thesis, we work to connect these frameworks and their extensions to Womanist praxis to that of cinematic gaze development, in order to further develop modes of looking that center authentic experiences for Black women.
World Health Organization Alcohol Policy Prescriptions Under Scrutiny: Assessing Impact in Ukraine and Russia
Keywords: Drinking of alcoholic beverages > Government policy
Drinking of alcoholic beverages
Ukraine
Russia
Soviet Union > Former Soviet republics
Text
Thesis

Russia and Ukraine have both experienced large reductions in alcohol consumption since the turn of the century. Although both have enacted alcohol control policies since the late 1990s, there are striking differences between them. Russia, like most other former Soviet Union countries, has a written national plan and monitoring system, whereas Ukraine does not. This paper addresses the question of how to explain the similar decrease in total alcohol per capita consumption in Russia and Ukraine in the 21st century considering these differences. I argue the similar trends in APC reduction are not primarily explained by a similar adherence to World Health Organization alcohol policy prescriptions, specifically WHO 'best buys,' which are policies deemed to be the most cost effective. I find policy implementation in 'best buy' categories in both countries, but I argue that these are only complementary to the primary determinants of APC trends, which take the form of wider economic developments throughout the period.
Writing and the origins of Greek intellectual influence
Keywords: Classics.

Why is ancient Greek civilization considered the cradle of Western thought and intellectual practice? Although it is undeniably the Greeks who have shaped European and Western practice in science, mathematics, philosophy, historiography, and many other disciplines, the ancient Greeks themselves might have been surprised to find themselves occupying the role of "founders of the Western tradition" in lieu of their Near Eastern neighbors, to whom they credited the invention of many practices they pursued themselves, and with whom they had much fruitful intellectual exchange. Whereas it has traditionally been assumed that Greek thought became canonical in the West because of its inherent rationality, my dissertation argues that the outsize "genetic success" enjoyed in the West by Greek intellectual culture was the result of the emergence in Greece of an unusual literary culture, whose textual products proved uniquely capable of transmitting knowledge and practices across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Far from happening inevitably as the result of (e.g.) an alphabetic culture enabling rising literacy, this dissertation argues that this event required a series of extraordinary accidents to come about: namely, the return of writing technology to Greece from abroad, as opposed to its re-invention within Greece, after a lengthy period of illiteracy and low state development; and the emergence in the fifth century BCE of a political landscape which transformed various forms of knowledge and expertise into marketable commodities
Youthful Exuberance of FU Ori Accretion Disks
Keywords:  Department of Physics
Star Formation
Astrophysics
FU Ori
Accretion Disks
Young Stellar Objects
Observational Astronomy
Text
Thesis

FU Ori objects are a class of young stellar object (YSO) currently seen in an outburst state. It is generally accepted that the outbursts are caused by the onset of rapid accretion at rates three to four orders of magnitude larger than those of quiescent-state young T Tauri stars. During the ensuing decades- to century-long outbursts, the accretion disks outshine their central stars by factors of 100-1000, leading to models of the outburst radiation as being purely due to a rotating disk. About half of the known FU Ori objects were detected during this sudden transition from quiescence to outburst via optical/infrared brightness increases on the order of four to five magnitudes. We present new optical and near-infrared observations of the newest confirmed FU Ori objects, HBC 722 and Gaia 17bpi, and discuss the successes and limitations of the conventional model. This model is a thin Keplerian disk featuring a modified Shakura-Sunyaev temperature profile, with each annulus radiating as an area-weighted spectrum given by a NextGen atmosphere at the appropriate temperature. We consider the overall spectral energy distribution (SED) as well as medium-resolution spectra in evaluating best-fit models to the data. Both sources have lower luminosity than previously studied FU Ori-type outbursts, and correspondingly are fit by lower accretion rate disks.
2018: An Important Year for the Politics of Russian Rap
Keywords: CREEES
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies
Russia
rap
politics
Thesis

2018 was a pivotal year with regards to the politics of Russian rap. Late in the year, many artists, especially rappers, had their shows cancelled throughout Russia, receiving accusations from government officials ranging from spreading drug propaganda to using obscene language. This move by Russian authorities to repress the rap scene forced a confrontation with rappers that culminated in the arrest of rapper Husky in Krasnodar. His detention spurred many rappers into action against the Russian government, as they organized a benefit concert for him that Aleksei Navalny attended. This intense negative reaction caused the Russian government to change its strategy, as it tried to adjust Russian rap to fit its narratives about mainstream Russian culture and reject the subversive elements of the art form like drug-related and political language. This paper seeks to understand the political side of Russian rap from the perspective of both rappers and the government. To accomplish this, the paper contains two analytical sections. The first section analyzes the policies and motivations of the Russian government by using primary source material from different actors including Vladimir Putin and other officials. It argues that the concert cancellations were not a part of the Kremlin’s strategy and that Putin’s personal intervention signaled the extent to which the government was worried about distancing itself from the policy of cancellation. The second section will gauge the political trends in the Russian rap community of the time, using textual analysis of rap lyrics to paint a picture of the political messaging of influential pro- and anti-Kremlin rappers surrounding the crackdown on rap. This section will serve as a counterpart to the first, using the artistic expression of rappers to illustrate their political philosophies, including their views on the nature of the Russian state, their opinions of the behavior and polemics of powerful figures in Russian politics, and their takes on controversial social problems about which the Russian government is concerned. This second section argues that political rappers employ a rich fabric of references and allusions to powerful political actors in order to praise or criticize them and that Russian rappers often oppose the government, sometimes as a direct result of the 2018 crackdown.
3D human liver tissue engineering for hepatic diseases study and cell replacement therapies
Keywords: Bioengineering.

Engineering of 3D human liver tissue is important to model authentic human liver for drug testing, disease modeling, and transplantable construct development that can be an alternative solution for human liver transplantation which is the only reliable option for end-stage liver diseases but suffers from a human donor shortage. Recently, hydrogel inverted colloidal crystal (ICC) scaffold-based liver systems were introduced as mature functional liver constructs with human fetal liver cells and human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS)-derived hepatocytes. However, primary human adult hepatocytes (hHeps), the gold standard cell type for human liver tissue engineering, has not yet been introduced to the ICC system, thus limiting multiple applications requiring highly preserved liver-specific functions and highly authentic liver modeling such as phase II metabolism, hepatitis B and D infection, fatty liver modeling and IL-6 release modeling for finding new drug targets, novel candidate drug screening and novel strategies for transplanting engineered human liver tissues. In this thesis, I developed hHep-based authentic human liver systems using several types of advanced ICC scaffolds and characterized authentic human liver functions that were not explored in other ICC systems before. Using the developed systems, human liver diseases were modeled, and we explored a new drug target for combatting hepatitis B infection and screened novel drug candidates for fatty liver disease, hepatitis D infection, and cytokine storms, which can be promising future therapeutics. Also, the system was applied to transplantation studies, and it showed proof-of-concept potential to be a bridge or an alternative to current human liver transplantation
A Global Analysis of Non-Trophic Impact of Herbivores on Seedling Models Under Contrasting Levels of Defaunation
Keywords:  Earth Systems
School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
Earth Systems
Thesis

Anthropogenic changes are altering large and medium sized mammal densities in forest ecosystems across the world, causing significant declines in their abundance and impacting their many contributions to the functioning of ecosystems and their services to humanity. Although animal-forest trophic interactions (i.e., when animals consume plants or plant parts, as in pollination or seed dispersal) are well understood within the scientific community, non- trophic animal impacts (e.g., trampling on the vegetation) are under-studied. Yet, the few studies available are beginning to show that non-trophic (not consumptive) interactions could significantly impact the current and future functional integrity of forest ecosystems.
In order to contribute to close that knowledge gap, I conducted a global analysis to determine the influence of non-trophic damage on forest ecosystems by collecting studies conducted at a global scale and investigating the extent of non-trophic damage under differing levels of mammalian defaunation. The hypothesis of this research was that, if non-trophic damage is an important and consistent occurrence in forest ecosystems, areas in which large and medium- sized animals are present should have higher non-trophic damage than areas that have been defaunated. To test the hypothesis, I compiled studies in which artificial seedlings were used to quantify animal non-trophic damage on plants of the understory. In my literature search, for each study I compared animal impact data (i.e., mortality of artificial seedlings) from two conditions (treatments): i) a defaunated treatment that represented areas that had an absence or low numbers of large and medium sized animals, and ii) a control group that represented areas with intact faunal communities. The difference in percentage damage to artificial seedlings per site was statistically evaluated using a linear mixed effects model. The results show that out of 16 sampled sites, 14 showed higher mortality of seedlings in control treatments which, overall, experienced a 7-times higher non-trophic damage compared to defaunated treatments. These results suggest that the structure of understory plant communities will be affected by the negative anthropogenic impact on animal populations. I posit that the functional integrity of forest ecosystems may be at risk if these animals are lost. Therefore, their protection is imperative.
Accelerated proliferation and aging driven by the prion state of an RNA-modifying enzyme
Keywords: Chemical and Systems Biology.

The term 'prion' is loaded with fear and negative connotation. The reason for this is because the first prions to be described, those of PrP in various species, were agents of death and disease unlike any known to mankind up to that point. The PrP prions captured the attention and fear of the general public and shaped our understanding of what prions are or could be for decades after. But prions can be more than just agents of disease, they can drive paradigm-shifting biology. If we go back to the original definition as coined by Stanley Prusiner himself, the only requirements to be a prion is to be proteinaceous and infectious. There are no thresholds of Q/N enrichments that need to be met or β- amyloid fibers formed in order to be considered a prion. Prions are highly stable protein conformations that can drive new biological phenotypes endowed with certain characteristics unique to prions. These phenotypes are usually dominant, disobey Mendel's law on inheritance, rely on protein chaperones for the faithful propagation across generations, and are encoded not in nucleic acid, but in the protein conformation itself. In fluctuating environments, switching between different growth strategies, such as those affecting cell size and proliferation, can be advantageous to an organism. Trade-offs arise, however. Mechanisms that aberrantly increase cell size or proliferation— such as mutations or chemicals that interfere with growth regulatory pathways—can also shorten lifespan. We report a natural example of how the interplay between growth and lifespan can be epigenetically controlled. We find that a highly conserved RNA-modifying enzyme, the pseudouridine synthase Pus4/TruB, can act as a prion, endowing yeast with greater proliferation rates at the cost of a shortened lifespan. Cells harboring the prion grow larger and exhibit altered protein synthesis. This epigenetic state, [BIG+] (better in growth), allows cells to heritably yet reversibly alter their translational program, leading to the differential synthesis of dozens of proteins, including many that regulate proliferation and aging. Our data reveal a new role for prion-based control of an RNA-modifying enzyme in driving heritable epigenetic states that transform cell growth and survival
Accelerating pediatric magnetic resonance imaging using deep learning-based image reconstruction
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful diagnostic tool for visualizing soft tissue anatomy, but physical limits on data acquisition speed result in uncomfortably long MRI exams. This is problematic for many patient populations, but especially for pediatric patients, who often require general anesthesia (GA) to reduce anxiety and body motion. Many attempts at accelerating data acquisition have been made to reduce or eliminate use of GA for pediatric MRI. For example, compressed sensing (CS) methods have been used to iteratively reconstruct rapidly acquired measurements into high-quality images by leveraging sparse priors. More recently, deep learning (DL) methods have been used to train deep neural network models to map the rapidly acquired measurements into even higher-quality images. While DL reconstruction approaches may potentially accelerate data acquisition beyond CS, these approaches have several issues which impede their clinical adoption. First, DL reconstructions require large quantities of high-quality ground truth data for supervised training, which can be costly and time-consuming to acquire. Second, memory requirements during network training limit the applicability of DL reconstruction to low-dimensional MRI data, such as static or dynamic 2-D imaging with limited spatiotemporal resolution. In this thesis, a series of projects demonstrating robust DL reconstruction techniques for acceleration of high-dimensional pediatric MRI will be presented. First, physics-based models are incorporated into deep CNN architectures to enforce consistency between intermediate network outputs and the rapidly acquired measurements in a novel method called DL-ESPIRiT. Physics-based modeling allows DL-ESPIRiT to be trained end-to-end in a supervised fashion with relatively little training data compared to non-physics-driven DL reconstruction. DL-ESPIRiT is applied and validated on 12X prospectively accelerated dynamic 2-D MRI scans acquired at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Finally, DL-ESPIRiT is extended to leverage subspace methods within the network to address GPU memory limitations during training. This method, known as deep learning-based subspace reconstruction (DL-Subspace), reconstructs a compressed representation of the MRI data instead of the data directly, thereby reducing the memory footprint during training and accelerating DL inference times. DL-Subspace is demonstrated to reconstruct 2-D dynamic MRI data with 4X higher memory efficiency and inference speed
Accessible platforms for anomalous cell detection beyond laboratory boundaries
Keywords: Bioengineering.

Resource limitations and socioeconomic challenges pose obstacles to equitable healthcare access worldwide. Accurate diagnosis is an important early step in which technical innovation can help to bridge some gaps. Towards this goal, I worked on developing anomalous cell detection tools to enable broader access to health information for resource-constrained clinical settings. In this thesis, I explore portable tools for detecting malaria in blood samples and screening forensic swab samples. Quantifying the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum relies on isolating the ring-stage infected red blood cells, which are challenging to differentiate from the majority of uninfected cells. I used magnetic levitation to perform label-free biophysical separation and detection of malaria-infected cells, by cumulatively leveraging density and magnetic susceptibility differences in the cells. Next, I built an accessible platform to process, image, and analyse whole blood patient samples in field settings, in a malaria-endemic region of Uganda. I combined cell lysis, suspension, and machine learning on cellphone images to develop an automated morphology-based classifier for blood samples. I also explored a different application for portable image-based screening, to address a sample processing backlog in sequencing forensic samples in the sexual assault justice workflow. I developed an automated algorithm for differentiating sperm from epithelial cells in sexual assault swab samples, using morphology features captured in cellphone imaging of microchips. Overall, this work demonstrates examples of anomalous cell detection technology built specifically for under-resourced settings. Such interdisciplinary techniques could help to overcome existing gaps in access to biological data, with the aims of supporting accurate diagnosis and surveillance of malaria, or screening of backlogged sexual assault samples
Accumulation and heritability of mutations in reef-building corals
Keywords: Biology.

Mutations are the fundamental source of variation among organisms, and they can have deleterious, neutral, or beneficial effects on the overall fitness of an organism. Whether a mutation affects the organism it arises in, the offspring of that organism, or both depends on what type of cell it arises in. In many animals, mutations in germ cells are inherited by the offspring, whereas somatic cells are generally thought not to be inherited. Somatic mutations can cause cancer, aging, and general genome instability. However, plants and many basal animal taxa may lack embryonic germ-soma distinction. Colonial reef-building corals can grow to be meters across, live for hundreds to thousands of years while maintaining fertility, and almost never develop recognizable tumors. Whether they have embryonic germline segregation is controversial. All of this makes them a pivotal group in which to understand genome maintenance. Corals also create critical ecosystems that are threatened by many stressors, including ocean warming. Mutation research in corals thus has far-reaching implications for the study of genome integrity and cell lineage development, as well as for the capacity of these animals to adapt when faced with selective pressures. In this dissertation I characterize the rates and patterns of somatic, germ, and stem cell mutations in corals. I show that 26% of the post-embryonic mutations found in the parent soma are inherited by their sperm. I also compare the rates of different types of mutations in corals living under normal conditions to those living in former nuclear test sites. The results yield insight into genome maintenance dynamics and somatic mutation inheritance in a colonial organism with a position in the tree of life that suits it to be key in understanding the evolution of germline-soma distinction. It also points to how population diversity arises in these animals, key information when considering how they may adapt in the coming years