VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Portable GMR biosensor platform with smartphone interface [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Magnetic nanotechnologies have shown tremendous potential in the areas of medical imaging, therapeutics, and early diagnostics. In particular, giant magnetoresistive (GMR) spin-valve sensors, commonly used as hard disk read heads, have demonstrated significant promise as biosensors. However, access to such technologies has been limited to laboratories in developed countries. In this work, we present two custom designed portable magnetic immunoassay platforms using integrated GMR biosensors and controlled entirely via smartphone. Then, we explored if GMR sensors can detect glucose molecules. First of all we introduce Eigen Diagnosis Platform (EDP) Generation 1 (G1) that can quantitatively detect analytes of interest within 15 minutes. The platform performs biological reactions on an 8x8 array of GMR biosensors. The signals from the GMR biosensors are transferred to a smartphone connected to the platform by micro USB. A smartphone app processes the raw data and translates them into concentrations of the analytes in the sample. We have developed and implemented a unique one-step assay to complement this platform and simplify point-of-care diagnostics. As demonstrations, we detected human IgG and IgM antibodies and the hepatitis B antibody. The IgG and IgM antibodies could be detected down to 0.07 and 0.33 nanomolar (nM) concentrations, respectively, using the platform's multiplexing capability. Secondly, we further reduced the size of the station, EDP G2, to fit in half the palm of a hand, enhancing its portability. Bluetooth was added in the station to allow wireless communication between the station and a smartphone. To minimize the size and power consumption of the station, we custom designed a toroid magnetic core inductor for operating the GMR biosensors. As proof of concept, we detected THC, the principal constituent of marijuana, to enable roadside screening of impaired drivers. Because the size of THC molecule is small, a competitive assay was designed to detect THC in saliva. Using EDP G2, we quantitatively detected THC down to 15.9 nM concentrations. Thirdly, we explored if we can detect glucose using GMR biosensor. Currently, there is no antibody that can specifically bind to glucose. So, we studied transduction mechanisms for sensing glucose molecules.
Positive, normative and methodological questions in the economics of education [electronic resource]
Keywords: Education.

The Economics of Education is a field that deals with an education system that is funded and administered at different levels. For example, states provide funds for public universities, schools get funding from local taxes, and experimental designs deal with different administrative levels (e.g. school, district, state). The existence of different levels in the educational systems raises interesting questions. Therefore, this thesis studies positive, normative and methodological questions that arise from the level design of education systems. First, an interesting question is how different education systems interact with each other. Regarding this positive question, the first thesis chapter looks at the interaction of public universities at the state level. In particular, it estimates the effect on in-state tuition rates of interstate Tuition Reciprocity Agreements (TRAs) that allow students from out-of-state to get in-state tuition rates. The results suggest that TRAs increase tuition rates and education quality. Therefore, market integration and quality competition would explain a part of the "always increasing tuition" phenomenon in higher education. The second chapter of the thesis studies the normative question of optimal taxation on opportunity inputs. In particular, the chapter uses tools from the Optimal Taxation literature and introduces a Social Welfare Function with equal opportunity concerns. The theoretical results suggest that equal opportunity concerns imply taxation on opportunity inputs. The optimal linear scheme includes an important transfer of resources to school districts. However, the transfer of resources is taxed away when private/local funding of education increases. Therefore, the results support the normative principle of redistribution of local school district revenue, when society has equal opportunity concerns. Finally, the third chapter addresses some issues of experimental research. In the education literature, experiments usually take place at the school or district level, which counteracts the preference of researchers for covariates balance. That preference has resulted in researchers using different re-randomization schemes (constraints on the treatment allocations allowed). The re-randomization schemes improve the efficiency, but researchers have struggled to understand the implications of re-randomization. As such, the paper clarifies the implications of re-randomization and suggests a re-randomization scheme that preserves asymptotic normality -a key property for statistical testing.
The postal west [electronic resource] : spatial integration and the American west, 1865-1902
Keywords: History.

The Postal West is a spatial history of one of the defining transformations of the late nineteenth-century United States. When the American Civil War drew to a close in 1865, much of the West remained a sparsely settled and violently contested periphery with only tenuous connections to the rest of the country. Over the next three decades, the West incorporated six new states and millions of new inhabitants into an increasingly interconnected regional system. How did this integrative project unfold so quickly across such a massive area? The answer comes from an unlikely source. More so than the any other institution, the U.S. Post was the midwife of western integration. Its sprawling network of post offices and mail routes connected local communities to larger systems of capital and commerce, law and governance, politics and culture. This dissertation maps where, when, and how that process unfolded in the western states and territories. The spatial infrastructure of the U.S. Post explains the speed and course of the region's integration into the larger nation.
Postwar in no man's land [electronic resource] : Germans, Poles, and Soviets in the rural communities of Poland's new territories, 1945-1948
Keywords: History.

This dissertation examines what happened to the vast landed estates of Prussia's nobility in the former German territories assigned to Poland after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945. I follow these estates and their villages from their occupation by the Red Army, to the expulsion of their German inhabitants, through the subsequent resettlement of the land by Poles. The transformation of these estates into Polish farms involved the forced resettlement of millions of Poles and Germans and an attempt by Polish authorities to convert large capitalist agricultural enterprises into smaller holdings or state farms expected to operate in the new country's socialist economy. While previous works have studied the transformation of western Poland's urban spaces, this study shows how rural communities and the land they depended on changed as a result of war, forced migration, and regime change. The forced migrations accompanying the end of World War II in Central Europe resulted from the Allies' decisions establishing the new postwar European order. During three separate conferences, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union decided to shift Poland's borders westwards by several hundred kilometers. This would allow the Soviet Union to keep former Polish lands in the east, which Stalin had first invaded in 1939, and would compensate Poland for that loss with German territory in the west. While the western Allies acceded to Soviet and Polish demands that the German population from these territories had to be transferred, they left the final decision on the exact run of the new Polish-German border to a future peace conference which never took place. While Polish authorities began to expel Germans from the lands provisionally placed under their administration, Polish settlers arriving in this territory from the center and former east of the country remained uncertain that their settlement would be permanent. The movement of millions of people in the aftermath of a destructive war did not happen overnight. Long after the fighting had ended hundreds of thousands of Germans continued to live and work on the large estates of Poland's sparsely populated northwestern countryside. As a result German citizens, Polish settlers, and Red Army soldiers lived alongside one another for at least four years following the war. Their everyday life in this contested space is the subject of this dissertation.
Power to the People: How to Engage Disadvantaged Communities and Drive Urban Policy Change
Keywords:  Urban Studies
Community Organizing
Voter Mobilization
Civic Engagement
Social Movements
Political Empowerment
Urban Politics
Mixed Methods
Program on Urban Studies
Stanford University
Thesis

This project investigates how urban social justice campaigns can engage disadvantaged communities to enact progressive public policy. Working-class neighborhoods and communities of color are typically underrepresented in the political process: compared to more affluent citizens, they are less likely to vote, donate to causes, volunteer for campaigns, or attend public meetings or rallies. As a result, they have little power to influence policy decisions, which overwhelming favor wealthy and advantaged constituencies. Moreover, mainstream political strategies – focused on persuading citizens who are already engaged – often ignore disadvantaged communities, exacerbating such inequalities.
In this paper, I study ways to increase the political participation of poor and minority citizens. As a synthesis, it draws together research on social movements, community organizing, voter mobilization, civic engagement, and political persuasion. By combining this existing literature with interviews from four California case studies – a mayoral race in San Diego, a ballot proposition to raise the minimum wage in San Jose, an organizing effort to enact a living wage ordinance in Los Angeles, and an innovative voter engagement program also in San Diego – I explore how these campaigns can most effectively mobilize communities and drive policy change responsive to their needs. I then identify common themes shared by these case studies and suggest ways different social change approaches could be integrated into a combined model.
Practical reasons, practical reasoning [electronic resource]
Keywords: Philosophy.

A normative reason for an agential response (such as an action or the formation of a belief) is a consideration that counts in favor of someone's having that response, or that to some extent justifies someone in having that response. What is the nature of this relation of "counting in favor"? The project of this dissertation is to defend an answer to that question for the case of intentional actions, which I call the Reasoning View about normative reasons for action. The central claim of the Reasoning View is that we should understand facts about such reasons in terms of facts about the norms of practical reasoning. Modulo some important qualifications, this means that p is a normative reason for A to X just in case p is the content of a premise-state in a possible piece of sound and undefeated practical reasoning that concludes in the intention to X. I argue for the Reasoning View on abductive grounds: I claim that it better balances the ethical, action-theoretic, and epistemological demands on a theory of normative reasons for action than does any of its competitors.
Preadaptation to the anthropocene [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

Human impacts, principally land-use change and habitat conversion, are radically changing the environment. While our collective footprint harms some species, it simultaneously benefits others. These beneficiaries are enigmatic, succeeding in what superficially appear to be evolutionarily novel habitats. However, many of the mechanisms by which species benefit from land-use change likely derive from preadaptations—anthropogenic habitats fortuitously match environmental conditions that the species evolved to exploit in natural habitats. But which characteristics preadapt species to land-use change, and what environmental gradients are relevant in filtering human-tolerant communities, are not well established. Using studies of organismal physiology, species distribution modeling, and standardized field surveys, I show that species' climatological niches predict their affinity towards human-made agricultural habitats across tropical amphibians, reptiles, and birds. Further, because species' responses are conserved phylogenetically, agricultural intensification erodes phylogenetic diversity faster than it undermines species diversity. By understanding the environmental gradients that determine community composition, rapid anthropogenic change becomes more predictable, and thus, its undesirable impacts may be minimized.
Precise-first models for incorporating global constraints in coreference resolution [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Coreference resolution, the task of finding all textual mentions that refer to the same real-world entity, is crucial for many natural language processing applications, including information extraction, question answering, and summarization. Previous research has shown the importance of a rich feature space that models lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse phenomena. Incorporating this varied information during the resolution process is a key factor in high performance coreference resolution. This dissertation introduces a simple scaffolding framework that deploys strong features through tiers of models that perform significantly better than a single-pass model. The sieve architecture applies a battery of deterministic coreference models one at a time from highest to lowest precision, each model building on the previous model's cluster output. The approach makes use of global information through an entity-centric model that encourages the sharing of features across all mentions that point to the same real-world entity. I also show that this precise-first architecture can be applied to a statistical as well as rule-based classification. Replacing the rule-based sieves with a hybrid system, using a precise-first sequence of (supervised) statistical coreference resolution models in the same framework leads to state-of-the-art performance in coreference resolution. Finally, I show how this hybrid classifier can be made faster and with a smaller memory footprint to widen its practical applicability. Compared to the extensive work on entity coreference, the related problem of event coreference remains relatively under-explored, with minimal work on how entity and event coreference can be considered jointly on an open domain. I introduce a novel coreference resolution system that models entities and events jointly. The iterative method cautiously constructs clusters of entity and event mentions using linear regression to model cluster merge operations. As clusters are built, information flows between entity and event clusters through features that model semantic role dependencies. My system handles nominal and verbal events as well as entities, and the joint formulation allows information from event coreference to help entity coreference, and vice versa. All the approaches presented in the dissertation rely on two high-level insights: incorporating both local and global information effectively in coreference resolution, and using this information in a precise-first manner, allowing high-precision information to propagate throughout the system.
Precisely localized guidance signals instruct dendrite branching and morphogenesis [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

The establishment of a complex, cell type-specific dendritic arbor is crucial for many neurons to receive the appropriate inputs from their receptive fields and to properly function within a neural circuit. However, the immense complexity of dendrite morphology has made it far more challenging to study than the pathfinding of a single axon. In the model nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the sensory neuron PVD establishes stereotypical, highly-branched dendrite morphology. Using genetic approaches, we identified a novel ligand-receptor complex of membrane adhesion molecules that is both necessary and sufficient to instruct spatially restricted growth and branching of PVD dendrites. The ligand complex SAX-7/L1CAM and MNR-1 function at defined locations in the surrounding hypodermal tissue, while DMA-1 and HPO-30/Claudin act as cognate co-receptors in PVD. Mutations in this complex lead to dramatic defects in the formation, stabilization, and organization of the dendritic arbor. Ectopic expression of SAX-7 and MNR-1 generates a predictable, unnaturally patterned dendritic tree in a DMA-1 and HPO-30 dependent manner. Both in vivo and in vitro experiments indicate that these molecules function as a ligand-receptor complex to instruct dendrite morphogenesis. Similar to developing axons, growing dendrites also encounter intermediate targets marked by guidance signals but must switch their response upon arrival so that they can move away and complete the next stage of development. During the development of wild-type PVD neurons, dendrites bypass a zone of high level SAX-7 without responding to the signal. We found that in mutants lacking KPC-1, a C. elegans Furin homolog, dendrites fail to escape from this intermediate target but are trapped in the area. Further analysis revealed that KPC-1 down-regulates the level of the branching receptor DMA-1 on dendrites by targeting it to late endosomes. In a kpc-1 mutant, the level of DMA-1 is abnormally high on dendrites, resulting in trapping of dendrites at locations where a high level of SAX-7 is present. Thus, precise regulation of guidance receptors creates flexibility of responses to guidance signals and is critical for neuronal morphogenesis. In summary, we identified a pair of skin-derived, precisely localized guidance molecules that instruct dendrite morphogenesis and their cognate neuronal receptors, as well as an intracellular mechanism that regulates membrane targeting of the dendritic receptor to ensure that signalling happens at the right place and right time.
Prickle and spiny-legs isoforms of the prickle locus control the direction of tissue planar polarization through both microtubule dependent and independent mechanisms [electronic resource]
Keywords: Genetics.

Planar cell polarity (PCP) signaling directs the alignment of cells within the plane of the tissue perpendicular to the apicobasal axis. In PCP signaling in flies, a group of proteins known as the core module polarizes each cell and communicates that polarity to neighboring cells to create local areas of alignment. Alone, the core module has no mechanism for sensing the axis of the tissue; however, the core module may be able to interpret global directional signals that can specify tissue axes including those from Fat, Dachsous, and Four-jointed. Identifying and understanding the mechanistic links between these global and core signals is an important goal in the field of PCP signaling. The prickle locus in flies produces multiple protein isoforms including Prickle (Pk) and Spiny-legs (Sple). Pk and Sple are part of the core module, but they are required in mutually exclusive tissues. Further, swapping which isoform is expressed in a given tissue reverses the direction of tissue polarity. This makes Pk and Sple interesting candidates for molecules that could allow the core module to interpret tissue wide signals thereby linking the direction of core module polarization to the tissue axis. Here, I use the developing wing and abdominal epithelia of the fly as model systems to investigate the cell biological mechanisms underlying the ability of Pk and Sple to determine the direction of tissue polarization. I show that in some tissues Pk and Sple specify the direction of tissue polarity by differentially controlling the polarity of an apical microtubule (MT) network. In other tissues, Pk and Sple control the direction of tissue polarity without affecting MT polarity. I explore the tissue-wide signals that provide directional cues in all of these tissues and discuss both MT dependent and independent mechanisms that Pk and Sple may use to interpret various global signals.
Problems in change-point detection [electronic resource]
Keywords: Statistics.

This thesis discusses two projects about change-point detection problems. The first part of the thesis focuses on the comparison between the higher-criticism and the Berk-Jones statistics, both of which belong to an optimal sub-class among a larger class of statistics for testing Gaussian mixture models. Despite the asymptotic equivalence in the power, we heuristically compare the power of them by considering the rejection regions under nite sample settings, followed by numerical simulations that verify the argument. We deduce and prove the approximate formula for the tail probabilities of these two statistics, with which one can efficiently determine the threshold for any specific significance level (that is, the probability of getting a false positive). A slight generation of the derivation provides the formula for computing the power of both statistics under Gaussian mixture alternatives. Besides, we explore two applications of the problem: construction of a lower confidence bound for the proportion of the false null hypothesis and copy number variation detection in aligned DNA sequences. The second project is concerned with change-point detection in a stochastic process. The project is motivated by the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in 1986. The general scientific question was whether radioactive fallout from the disaster had an impact on human health, specifically the viability of human fetuses, in southern Germany. Professor H. R. Lerche of the University of Freiburg provided data from 1980/01/01 to 1996/12/31 on live births and still births in several regions of southern Germany. We model the probability of stillbirths with a logistic model, and test if there is a change-point in the intercept after the accident. We derive approximations for the overall p-value of the test statistic by two different methods and compare them with numerical experiments to assess their performance. Finally we apply out method to the data, which do not provide sufficient evidence to infer an impact of the accident, in agreement with the results of previous studies.