VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Capitalism, resistance, and environment in Tunisia's Gafsa phosphate mining region, 1880s-1960s
Keywords: History.

This dissertation combines archival and oral historical sources to narrate the social and environmental history of Tunisia's Gafsa phosphate mining basin, from the industry's 1880s beginnings under French colonialism to its 1960s post-independence nationalization. In the early twentieth century, Gafsa was the world's single largest phosphate exporter, one of France's most important colonial interests in Tunisia, and Europe's primary supplier of an ingredient essential for industrially produced fertilizers. This dissertation argues that Gafsa's integration into global capitalist markets cannot be understood from the top down. Mineworkers, their families, local merchants, and small farmers shaped the trajectory of capitalism in Gafsa and the spatial interconnections - local, regional, imperial, and global - that emerged around it. By centering Gafsa's residents, this dissertation pushes for a capacious understanding of capitalism that encompasses not only the exploitation of wage labor but also the techniques of expropriation - raced, gendered, environmentally grounded, and enforced by state power - that kept production costs low, molded by resistance and contestation. Dynamics that do not fit conventional definitions of capitalism nonetheless structured the commercial networks sustaining modern heavy-input agriculture, drove ongoing processes of environmental degradation, and situated Tunisia within transnational resistance movements across the Global South. In short, putatively "peripheral" sites have shaped capitalism's trajectory much more than the term "peripheral" implies. To illuminate the face of capitalism in Gafsa, this dissertation traces how expropriation, exploitation, and resistance developed in ways both locally grounded in Gafsa and interwoven within regional and global circuits of capital, commodities, biomedical knowledge, and people. Not only does this address Tunisia's relative absence from global histories, but it also challenges dominant conceptions of the Tunisian nation. The persistent trope of Tunisian exceptionalism, emboldened by Tunisia's status as the only post-"Arab spring" procedural democracy, sequesters the country within its national frame. In contrast, this dissertation traces how modern Tunisia developed out of regional and global connections, shaped by the actions of non-elite Tunisians who are typically marginalized within exceptionalist accounts
Capitalizing on addiction : the United States, China, and the transpacific opium economy, 1804-1909
Keywords: History.

"Capitalizing on Addiction" offers a new interpretation of the Opium War as an event that had surprising connections to and consequences for Americans in the nineteenth century. It follows the arc of when Americans first sold opium in China to when the Chinese first sold opium in America following the mass emigration of Chinese across the Pacific Ocean. At the heart of "Capitalizing on Addiction" is a novel account of capital formation, detailing how opium transmuted the body's debts into a supple form of currency that could traverse oceans, penetrate borders, and dissolve racial allegiances with both Chinese and Americans collaborating to profit from its exchange. Using records from 16 different archives, this study draws on the methods of economic, business, legal and social history to revise our understanding of the relationship between capitalism and opium. Its central contention that the trade in opium did not occur in the extralegal peripheries of the transpacific economy; through embodying a form of capital itself, the production, consumption and exchange of the drug contributed directly to the flourishing of the transpacific economy, and that Americans were instrumental in promoting its expansion
Capturing and understanding people's experiences in cars : design research methods for real roads
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.

This thesis develops and evaluates three primary methods for capturing and understanding in-context car experiences. A deeper, more nuanced understanding of the in-car driving experience will enable designers to generate user-centered concepts to improve the in-vehicle experience. Understanding the qualitative nature of the driving experience is not only useful for the effective design of vehicles, but also for the development of novel transportation technologies and infrastructure improvements. Critically, this work has implications for the design of self-driving technologies being developed and deployed today. This thesis asks: How we might enable researchers and designers to gain a novel perspective of the driving experience centered on naturalistic driving events and environments? To answer this question, I developed a platform, a method, and a dataset aimed at understanding driver's on-road experiences. The work presents novel insights attained by examining drivers in experimental as well as prosaic scenarios. It also positions the work relative to other approaches for understanding, eliciting, and tagging driver states. This thesis has three major components: Part One presents the Real Road Driving Simulator, a platform that can be used to safely simulate an autonomous vehicle on real roads in order to enable designers to evaluate prototypes and interaction principles intended to be deployed in autonomous driving scenarios. Part Two presents a method to safely and reliably elicit a state of distress in drivers of single-occupancy vehicles. This methodology can be used to test novel approaches for identifying driver states, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of interventions intended to address such a state of distress. Part Three develops an open-source dataset and tagging methodology using 50 real-world commutes. I discuss a novel approach for tagging data to leverage both qualitative and quantitative data to understand driver experience within the context of the urban commute
Carceral logics : family, race, and responsibility in a San Francisco county jail
Keywords: Anthropology.

The city of San Francisco is widely recognized as one of the most progressive in the US, if not the world. However, with a Black population of just 5%, its' jail population is 60-70% Black, marking one of the greatest racial disparities of any US city. Drawing from three years of ethnographic field work with men incarcerated in a San Francisco County jail and with their family members in the outside world, this dissertation explores the nature of race in the everyday encounters, rhythms, and operations of the criminal justice system. It asks, how is it that race can be at once so prevalent in the effects and in the causes of mass incarceration and yet disavowed in its daily operations? This dissertation is the first US-based 'prison ethnography' with broad access to a cohort of incarcerated people in nearly 50 years. It is also the first in the US to have every examined incarceration from the perspective of incarcerated people and their families simultaneously. With this perspective it reveals the intersecting dynamics of family, race, and responsibility in which provide the ongoing justification for American mass incarceration. It outlines a number of operative 'carceral' logics within the jail which displaced the discourses of race and racism with the discourses of family failure, individual responsibility, and heritable criminality. I argue that the US criminal justice apparatus maintains a social distinction which is much wider than who is, or has been, incarcerated -- maps race onto criminalization and impoverishment
Category-level object perception for physical interaction
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Perceiving and performing physical interaction is a crucial ability of humans and therefore an important topic for machine intelligence. Human object interaction and robot object interaction, both of which involve interactions with objects, have been intensively studied for decades, leading to many research problems and applications in both computer vision and robotics community. Therefore, perceiving objects under physical interactions or for the sake of performing interaction becomes a key problem in this field. This thesis covers works on learning interaction-oriented object-centric visual representations for the sake of perceiving and performing physical interactions. The key idea is to perceive objects in a category manner and extract actionable information (e.g. pose, affordance, articulation) that is shared across different object instances from the same object category. The goal of such a vision system is to allow machines to perceive objects from a physical interaction perspective and in a generalizable, interpretable and annotation-efficient way. Here being generalizable means the vision system can well handle many object instances that may have never been seen before; being interpretable means the learned visual representation should be explainable and understandable by humans; and being annotation-efficient means we want to minimize the amount of labels required for learning such visual representations. The thesis starts with three works on estimating and tracking category-level object pose for rigid and articulated objects, which generalize the problem of pose estimation from instance level to category level.Following that, we introduce a novel semi-supervised 3D object detection framework to allow annotation-efficient learning of category-level object information. Lastly, we present a work on multi-step interaction generation, where the built system learns to perceive category-level object states and their changes in human object interaction videos and build a generative model that can be used for generating new interaction sequences as well as robotic motion planning. The thesis concludes by summarizing the projects and discusses potential future directions in the field
Caught On Camera, But Not Convicted: Understanding The Embeddedness of Racial Bias In Police Body Cameras
Keywords:  Department of Science
Science Technology and Society
Stanford University
Honors program
policing
social constructivism
equity
racial justice
race
police body cameras
body cameras
marginalized communities
defund police
abolish police
racial inequity
police technology
surveillance
film analysis
case analysis
Thesis

Police body cameras have been popularized as a tool that will be used to hold officers accountable after unlawfully engaging in excessive and deadly force with civilians. However, after being widely adopted by police departments, instances of excessive force and deadly force have not drastically declined. In fact, several instances of excessive and deadly force have been caught on police body camera and have shown victims that were unarmed, compliant, or nonviolent. Though footage of the interactions may exist, offending officers are often not charged with criminal behavior or are not convicted. These occurrences disproportionately affect people of marginalized backgrounds. This thesis seeks to explore the way that police body cameras can create biased, pro-police narratives and the surrounding social and technical environment that supports this bias. The environment that supports police body cameras is explored by analyzing legal cases, news reports, academic studies, and historical records of the relationship between police, technologies, and marginalized communities. Due to the environment in which they exist, an environment that has historically allowed police technologies to criminalize marginalized people and justify the actions of law enforcement personnel, it is argued that police body cameras cannot capture objective insights into violent officer-civilian interactions. This thesis argues that police technologies, even ones designed to increase transparency and social good, fall short due to protections in place for officers, technical limitations of the body camera, bias embedded into police data, and historical criminalization of marginalized people. This understanding of the police body camera’s social environment is used to directly examine visual and auditory elements of body camera footage that displays violent officer-civilian interactions. This thesis concludes with paths forward for decreasing violent officer-civilian interactions, including structural reform, increased consideration of social contexts when policing, and defunding the police.
Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Cardcaptor Sakura: A Print and Digital Publishing History of Manga from 1996 to 2021
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
Manga Studies
Cardcaptor Sakura
CLAMP (Mangaka group)
TokyoPop (Firm)
Kōdansha
Mixx Entertainment
Dark Horse Comics
Comic books, strips, etc.
Comic books, strips, etc. > Collectors and collecting
Comic books, strips, etc. > Publishing > History
Graphic novels
Japan
Japanese comic books, strips, etc.
Text
Thesis

Manga’s materiality significantly alters the reading experience, and by studying these properties it becomes possible to document how changes in a fan-reader’s personal or shared reading experience inform a type of humanistic manga publishing history for Japan and North America as well as globally. What does this rise in manga’s popularity which took it from a national to a global product look like? CLAMP’s Cardcaptor Sakura and Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card tell us thanks to extensive republishing efforts by four different publishers over a span of twenty-five years. While this thesis only touched one aspect of this phenomenon by trying to address how manga publishing transformed from one where the most esteemed manga artist said it would not become global to one where multiple editions of a series are present outside its country of origin, it grew to comment on manga as a global product with origins in Japan due to the remarkable spreadability of digital manga.
A cellular roadmap of ribosome heterogeneity that controls stem cell fate and organismal development
Keywords: Biology.

The regulation of translation is fundamental to the diversification and control of gene expression across cell types and tissues. The processes of stem cell renewal and differentiation have been reported to be particularly sensitive to changes in protein synthesis, suggesting that finely tailored translation is necessary for the proper regulation of gene expression during cell fate specification, but the mechanisms underlying this translational control remain poorly understood. A source for this regulation may be the ribosome itself, which has recently been shown to be heterogeneous in composition within mouse embryonic stem cells, with distinct ribosomal populations specialized for the translation of particular sets of mRNA transcripts. However, as ribosome heterogeneity has previously been measured only within individual cell types, we lack a systematic view of how ribosome composition changes across development and whether particular ribosome compositions have tissue-specific functions. To this end, I present work delineating changes in ribosome composition across cell differentiation and identifying specialized functions for ribosomal components in the translation of core developmental signaling pathways needed for organismal patterning
Centriole and cilium formation in the development of mouse olfactory sensory neurons
Keywords: Biology.

Olfaction, the sense of smell, is mediated by olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) and the multiple cilia which protrude from the dendrite into the nasal cavity. A cilium (plural: cilia) is a microtubule-based structure which arises from a centriole, located at its base. The centriole, itself, is also made up of microtubules as well as hundreds of associated proteins. Many eukaryotic cells, including most cell types in the vertebrate body, maintain a strict count of two centrioles and one cilium per cell. Although OSNs have long been known to have multiple cilia, how they arrive at this state has remained largely unknown. Here, we characterize centriole-related events during the OSN differentiation in the olfactory epithelium of mice. Using electron microscopy and fluorescence microscopy, we build upon work by Cuschieri and Bannister (Cuschieri and Bannister, 1975) by demonstrating that cells in the olfactory epithelium of both adult and embryonic mice amplify centrioles via rosette structures, and that free centrioles are also present in the rosette-bearing cells. Intriguingly, cells amplify centrioles during S phase and go on to divide, rather than amplifying centrioles after cell cycle exit, as canonical multiciliated cells are known to do. Furthermore, we identify the early immediate neuronal precursor stage as the developmental time during which centrioles are likely to be amplified. In addition to traditional fluorescence microscopy, we also developed a procedure for expansion microscopy. We use these techniques to characterize what happens to centrioles after they are amplified in progenitors near the basal lamina, building on earlier work (Heist and Mulvaney, 1968; Mulvaney and Heist, 1971). We observed migrating centrioles in the mouse olfactory epithelium, and although they migrate in one or a few groups, the cohesion protein rootletin is missing from migrating centrioles. Migrating centrioles also have less abundant γ tubulin than do centrioles in mature OSNs, and all but one centriole lack distal appendages during migration. These data suggest that centrioles in immature OSNs migrate in a reduced state and proteins associated with mature OSN centrioles only accumulate once centrioles reach the apical surface, where olfactory cilia ultimately form. Together, our findings describe major events and characteristics associated with centrioles during the development of OSNs
Changes of geometry and properties of porous media
Keywords: Geophysics.

This work enables the computation of material properties, both static and dynamic, from 2D images, and of course, from 3D images. For example, we may compute the porosity of a rock from a microscopy image. Moreover, from that single microscopy image, we can produce a 3D geometry that changes as a function of time, subsequently obtaining permeability changes as a function of some processes (such as compaction). We highlight that only a single 2D image of a material may be used to get the results and predictions that we explain. We introduce a method based on geometry that increases the dimension of a single 2D image to a 3D image, where computational simulations provide reasonable estimates of the reality. Then we move on to increase the dimension even more by including time, where we simulate physical and chemical processes that change the material structure. Consequently, getting the history of changes in the material properties. We provide powerful tools for any industry working with porous materials. This work is the first step towards explaining natural and man-made: diagenesis, cementation, dissolution, pressure solution, filter degradation, and any other process that changes the underlying structure of a material
Characterization and linking of imaging and molecular patterns in hepatocellular carcinoma
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

A wealth of cancer imaging data is becoming available due to routine clinical care. Similarly, public research efforts are unprecedently making large genomic cancer data sets more accessible. These data present unique opportunities: with the right statistical tools we can improve our clinical decision making and biological knowledge of disease. One instance of disease where computational models can be used to improve medical treatment is hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). HCC is the third most common cause of cancer-related death in men, accounting for three billion dollars in direct and indirect costs. In this dissertation, we present the application and development of methods that leverage clinical radiological image data and genomic data of cancer with a focus on hepatocellular carcinoma as an example. This work comprises applications of statistical tools and machine learning algorithms to create surrogate cancer biomarkers, and the development of statistical methods that improve clinical diagnosis and discovery of cancer mechanisms. First, (I) we evaluate inter-reader reliability in annotating semantic features on preoperative computed tomography and investigate the potential of semantic features of radiological images to provide a surrogate imaging biomarker to microvascular invasion. We then show the overall superiority of consensus models over single-reader semantic-based models. Second, (II) we employ a radiomic-based approach to develop an imaging signature and develop a radomics model with superior performance over previously reported semantic signatures. Third, (III) we develop a new model for gene regulatory inference and learning. Specifically, our framework is the first to combine Bayesian and module-based approaches. It tackles an important limitation in module-based methods by allowing probabilistic assignments of target genes to modules. Our method outperforms current methods on sparsity metrics, with similar performance in modeling module expression. We show that our method can recover a range of diverse liver functions from metabolic and immune to protein synthesis
Characterization of centromere assembly machinery interactions in Xenopus laevis
Keywords: Biology.

Centromeres are specialized chromosomal regions that mediate chromosome segregation during mitosis by providing the assembly site for the mitotic kinetochore. Centromeres are epigenetically defined by the incorporation of the histone H3 variant, centromere protein A (CENP-A), into centromeric nucleosomes. In vertebrates, CENP-A nucleosome assembly is coupled to the exit from mitosis and requires the targeting of soluble CENP-A to the centromere in complex with its histone chaperone the holliday junction recognition protein (HJURP). Two centromere specific factors, centromere protein C (CENP-C) and the Mis18 complex (Mis18α, Mis18β, and M18BP1) are required for recruiting HJURP to centromeres. However, how these factors coordinate the cell cycle specific assembly of CENP-A at centromeres is poorly understood. Using a cell free system for centromere assembly in Xenopus laevis frog egg extracts, I discovered a mechanism for regulating the cell cycle dependent interaction between HJURP and CENP-C. Non-phosphorylatable mutations in HJURP serine 220 result in constitutive interaction between HJURP and CENP-C in metaphase yet do not trigger new CENP-A assembly, while phosphomimetic mutations prevent HJURP binding to CENP-C and inhibit new CENP-A assembly. I show that the inhibitory activity that prevents HJURP localization and new CENP-A assembly in metaphase is due to competition for HJURP's binding site on CENP-C by M18BP1.S. My results identify two important mechanisms for coupling CENP-A assembly to the cell cycle; negative regulation of HJURP-CENP-C interaction by mitotic phosphorylation and competitive inhibition of metaphase HJURP-CENP-C interaction by M18BP1.S.