VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Renewable Energy and American Federalism: The State’s Influence in Tribal Wind and Solar Development
Keywords:  Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Democracy Development and the Rule of Law
Freeman Spogli Institute
tribal lands
renewable energy development
state energy policy
wind
solar
School of Engineering
development
Federalism
Thesis

Many tribal lands across the western United States (US) are rich in wind and solar energy resources. Tribal nations’ harnessing of their lands’ wind and solar potential presents opportunities for community and economic development. However, the American Federalist system curbs tribes’ right to self-determination in the context of renewable energy. In the Federalist system, tribal nations are legally subject to the US federal government’s authority but exempt from states’ authority because of tribal sovereignty. As a result, the literature has focused on the federal influence on tribal energy endeavors. This paper spotlights the role of states: I examine how state energy policy influences tribal wind and solar development. Though independent, tribes are affected by state energy policies as each state governs its electricity grid and market. In my thesis, I complete a case study of tribal wind and solar energy development in the context of Montana’s and California’s state energy policies. These two case studies vary greatly in the degree to which each state forwards a clean energy transition through regulation and market incentives, also known as the “aggressiveness” of the state’s energy policy. Through interviews, policy review, and surveying documentation of tribal energy projects, I examine how each state’s renewable portfolio policies, net energy metering, interconnection regulations, tax incentives, and grant and loan programs have impacted tribal wind and solar efforts. As a result, I prove that tribes in states with more aggressive renewable energy policies have greater resources and opportunities to enter the renewable energy market. More critically, I find that tribal circumstances are often neglected in state policies, and consequently many state energy programs and incentives are out of tribal entities’ reach. Moving forward, states must work to consider tribal circumstances and ensure tribal inclusion in all state energy policies to ensure equitable access to the nation’s growing renewable energy market.
Replica wormholes, entanglement wedges and the black hole information paradox
Keywords: Physics.

Hawking famously argued, based on semiclassical calculations, that the radiation from evaporating black holes is always perfectly thermal and contains no information about the matter that fell in. Such a result is inconsistent with the unitarity of quantum mechanics. In this thesis, I argue that a more careful replica trick calculation shows that the gravitational path integral becomes dominated at late times by saddles containing spacetime wormholes. These wormholes cause the entropy to decrease after the Page time, consistent with unitarity, and allow information to escape from the interior of the black hole. In very simple toy models, we can evaluate the path integral exactly, and see the information emerge. In more realistic black holes, the full wormhole solutions cannot be found explicitly. However, their existence, and their most important consequences, can be derived by studying the location and properties of a non-trivial `quantum extremal surface' in the original Hawking solution. We can also see how various paradoxes, including the famous rewall paradox, are avoided. A crucial role is played by the framework of universal subspace quantum error correction. This framework is also fundamental to the theory of quantum teleportation and can be used to decompose the process of sending qubits from Alice to Bob into distinct `entanglement' and `communication' pieces. Finally, we see how the complexity of decoding information from Hawking radiation can be explained by the existence of a bulge or `python's lunch' in the spacetime geometry
Restoring vision with electronic photoreceptors : from Petri dish to patients and back
Keywords: Physics.

Treatments of neurological diseases using electro-neural interfaces are rapidly advancing. Inspired by the deep brain stimulators for Parkinson's patients and by cochlear implants for the deaf, we developed a photovoltaic subretinal prosthesis for restoring vision to patients blinded by retinal degeneration. Our "electronic photoreceptors" replace the function of the natural photoreceptors lost due to age-related macular degeneration. This is an array of photovoltaic pixels that convert incident light into electric current to convey the visual information to the secondary neurons in the retina by electrical stimulation. Images captured by a camera on augmented-reality glasses are projected onto the subretinal photovoltaic implant using pulsed near-infrared light. Patients with such prosthesis can read with acuity closely matching the pixel size of the implant currently used in a clinical trial (100 um), corresponding to 20/460 to 20/550 vision. This work presents the interaction between electronic photoreceptors and the retina, describing the properties of prosthetic vision in preclinical studies and in clinical trials, while informing future prosthesis design. In this thesis, We first explore the characteristics of the retinal response to pulsated electrical stimulation, focusing on the retinal neural code and features of natural retinal signal processing preserved in network-mediated retinal stimulation. We then describe how performance of visual tasks with pixelated images improve with resolution and contrast. Afterwards, we describe the results of behavioral and in vivo electrophysiological studies in rodents demonstrating the contrast sensitivity and visual acuity achievable with various configurations of subretinal implants. Finally, we conclude with the outlook into the ultimate limits of resolution and our progress toward scaling pixel size down to cellular dimensions
Revolutionary competition : coalitions, labor, and the birth of French antitrust, 1791-1864
Keywords: History.

In 1791, The revolutionary French National Assembly enacted the Le Chapelier Law, abolishing all corporate bodies and collective economic associations. The old guilds were the embodiment of ancien régime privilege and a scourge to economic liberty and social progress. Though the law was primarily concerned with the regulation of labor, the animating principles behind it revealed a much broader and more sweeping anti-corporatist social vision. In introducing his proposal, Isaac Le Chapelier declared emphatically, "Corporate bodies no longer exist in this country. There exists only the particular interests of every individual and the general interest." But just what an economy lacking corporate "intermediary interests" was supposed to look like—and how it was supposed to function—remained an open question. The Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810 cleaved the Le Chapelier Law's anti-corporatist prohibitions into separate labor and antitrust statutes. Articles 414, 415, and 416 prohibited "coalitions" of workers and employers, while Article 419 prohibited business "coalitions." Despite their conceptual similarities and overlapping terms, these provisions governed different activities and different parties within the economic system. The Penal Code's creation of separate but related and coevolutionary bodies of law encouraged both workers and businesses accused of coalition to be opportunistic in the way they defended themselves, glomming on to developments in one area of the law to support their cause or defend their actions in the other. This dissertation traces the nineteenth-century history of the Le Chapelier Law, from its enactment in 1791, to its bifurcation in the 1810 Penal Code, to its effective abolition following the 1864 Ollivier law. It shows how, when French courts ruled that companies could not be guilty of coalition under Article 419 if they acted in parallel and charged similarly predatory prices—but did not explicitly agree to work in concert to put a competitor out of business—workers opportunistically began to defend their own collective actions in similar terms, as consciously parallel but not part of a concerted agreement. Similarly, when Articles 414, 415, and 416 were amended in 1864 to remove the prohibition of peaceful, non-violent coalitions, producers and legal commenters immediately argued that the amendment applied equally to business coalitions, effectively nullifying Article 419
Riparian Avifauna of the San Francisco Bay Region: Population Dynamics and Future Outlooks with Anthropogenic Climate Change
Keywords: School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
bird banding
songbirds
passerines
population dynamics
avian demographics
climate change
common yellowthroat
Thesis

Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to drive widespread avian population declines, range contractions, and global extinctions in the coming century. Recent research has largely focused on identifying past trends and phenological disruptions; however, relatively little is known about how climate variation impacts the ultimate drivers of population change: demographic rates.
Throughout my project, I worked to expand this area of research by establishing two new bird banding stations for monitoring demographics and conducting analyses of existing banding data from the Coyote Creek Field Station in Milpitas, CA. I built demographic models in a Bayesian framework to evaluate the effects of growing-season precipitation, spring mean temperature, and mean winter minimum temperature on the adult apparent survival and reproductive success for nine songbird species from 1995–2018. One study species – the San Francisco common yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas sinuosa) – is of immediate conservation concern. I simulated possible population trajectories for the period 2020–2100 using my estimated parameters and the predicted local climate from two global climate/circulation models under three future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.
The demographic rates for six of these species were significantly affected by local climate variation. Reproduction was highest in years with the most growing-season precipitation and warmest spring mean temperatures. In contrast, adult apparent survival was lowest in years with the highest growing-season precipitation. There were several interesting exceptions to these general patterns as well. Among the study species, climate variation most impacted the survival and reproduction of the San Francisco common yellowthroat. Simulations with projected climate change suggest that this population will decline over the next 80 years.
To my knowledge, this is the first study to simulate population trajectories for a North American songbird species under future climate scenarios. The models show that immigration may buffer climate effects, which suggests metapopulation management of this species will be beneficial. This study highlights how population demographics can be applied to conservation and demonstrates the need for expanded research in this area.
The rise of entrepreneurship in China : modernity, social mobility, and entrepreneurialism
Keywords: Sociology.

This dissertation investigates the social-psychological motivations to pursue entrepreneurship in the context of post-reformed China. Using an inductive in-depth interview approach tapping into individual motivations, it argues that rather than pure economic calculations, people pursue entrepreneurship as a project of self-making and that such a project is towards an aspired future self, informed by one's past and by the collective meaning of entrepreneurship. To further examine how public representation of entrepreneurship may impact people's decision to pursue entrepreneurship, I use a survey experiment to randomly assign members of the general public to one of the treatment conditions where the framing of entrepreneurship is manipulated. My findings establish that public representation of entrepreneurship can promote entrepreneurial intention and behavior. However, its impact is heterogeneous for different audiences and operates via mechanisms un-identified by existing theories. Contributions and avenues for future research are discussed
Robust causal inference and machine learning with clinical applications
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

As healthcare data becomes increasingly ubiquitous, improving data-driven biomedical research is timely and important. There is a rush to learn from these new sources of data, and to implement research findings into clinical practice. While machine learning methods provide compelling examples of recognizing sophisticated patterns in data, their impact rests heavily on their ability to use data to influence decision making, especially in healthcare. The relationship between machine learning and decision making becomes particularly clear through the lens of causal inference. In general, the harm and benefit attributed to a medical decision depends on the causal treatment effect of the decision in the appropriate population, beyond their baseline risk of poor outcomes. In precision medicine research, the goal is to develop treatment decisions for individual patients by considering the sub-population of individuals with similar covariates to each patient. This thesis advances methodology and practice for applying machine learning to learn better decision-making rules that influence clinical practice, and understanding the fundamental possibilities and limitations of using data to learn to make optimal decisions. First, we develop an approach for personalized treatment effect estimation based on the relative ratio of treatment outcomes. Second, we study when we can trust causal results learned from data, and develop a sensitivity analysis for conditional and average treatment effects to bound the bias created from unobserved confounding. Third, noting that treatment benefit is highly correlated with baseline risk for preventative treatments for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), we use machine learning approaches to improve ASCVD risk predictions from longitudinal cohort data that affect clinical prescribing practice, particularly among under-represented minorities
Robust dynamic wireless power transfer based on parity-time symmetry
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Wireless power transfer offers users the ability to access power provided by the electrical grid without the hindrance of power cables. The technology is gaining importance with the increasing number of mobile battery-powered devices we use in our everyday lives. Already, wireless inductive charging pads are commercially available for many devices, from electric toothbrush to smart devices and even electric vehicles. In many of these conventional wireless power transfer setups, their power and efficiency performance is sensitive to the relative movement of the device receiving power with respect to the power source. Thus, at present, wireless power transfer is largely restricted to the scenario of stationary charging. The ability to deliver robust and efficient dynamic wireless power transfer should open new application opportunities, from dynamic charging of electric vehicles travelling on roadways to powering electronic devices on the move. In this Thesis, we present our recent efforts in the development of a robust dynamic wireless power transfer scheme based on the concept of parity-time (PT) symmetry. In our PT scheme, power is provided to the system through an amplifier on the power source pad. This amplifier provides gain to the electromagnetic energy inside the system in balance with the loss contributed by the device's energy draw. This construction enables the system to reach a steady state where the electromagnetic field in the system oscillates at the steady state frequency that corresponds to the maximum transfer efficiency regardless of the transfer distance. The result is robust wireless power transfer that automatically self-adjusts as the transfer distance varies such that high transfer efficiency is maintained without the need of any external tuning circuit
The role of ecophysiology and paleoenvironmental dynamics in the Ediacaran biostratigraphic record
Keywords: Geology.

The Ediacaran Period (635 to 539 million years ago; Ma) represents one of the most dynamic periods in Earth History. Terminating the Neoproterozoic Era, the Ediacaran begins immediately after the second of two Snowball Earth global Glaciations, the Sturtian (717 to 560 Ma), and the Marinoan (640 to 635 Ma), which among other things had profound impacts on the global carbon cycle. Upon the final melting of the Marinoan Glaciation, a period of over 50 million years (Myr) passed in the early Ediacaran with no evidence of complex macroscopic eukaryotic or animal life. Bookending this interval is the continental-scale Gaskiers Glaciation (580-579 Ma) which shows up in deep-marine glaciogenic strata in Newfoundland and England today. Several hundred meters above these deposits are the earliest macroscopic eukaryotes and purported animals to appear in the fossil record, known as the Ediacara biota. These deep-water communities, identified as 'Avalon Assemblages' initially appear only in deep-marine slope and basinal environments for some 15 Myrs before radiating up into the continental shelves worldwide ca. 560 Ma. However, the basins in which they appear have no equivalent shallow-water facies, making it impossible to discern whether this pattern is a genuine evolutionary pattern, or the product of bias in the stratigraphic record. By cs. 555 Ma, the shallow-water 'White Sea Assemblage' became the most diverse interval in the Ediacaran, and records newly emerging 'Cambrian-style' fauna including mobile bilaterians and increasingly complex trace fossils. These groups continue into the terminal Ediacaran, known as the 'Nama Assemblage' ca. 550-539 Ma when all Ediacara biota go extinct at the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary. The circumstances that surround the timing and drivers of this initial diversification however are unclear, and hypotheses have focused primarily on the role of environment, including global reorganization of marine redox conditions, changes in primary productivity, ecological escalation, and climate stability following the end of Snowball Earth glaciations. As a result, the interval remains actively studied by geologists and paleontologists, however, there remain critical unanswered questions regarding the timing and spatial evolution of the Ediacara biota
The role of host arginine metabolism in murine malaria
Keywords: Microbiology and Immunology.

Infection disrupts host metabolism, but it is not well-known how the nature and magnitude of metabolic disruption relates to the severity of infectious disease. In this dissertation, I describe our efforts to uncover new links between metabolism and disease severity in murine malaria. To more closely model disease in a diverse population like that of humans, we infected eight genetically diverse, inbred mouse strains with Plasmodium chabaudi and tracked their symptomatic, pathological, immunological, and metabolic responses to acute infection. In chapter 2, we describe a wide range of disease severity and metabolic phenotypes in the eight strains. We use supervised and unsupervised techniques to identify metabolic biomarkers for severe disease that change in both murine and human Plasmodium infection. With this approach, we uncover arginine depletion as a specific indicator of P. chabaudi-induced liver damage. Given the established importance of arginine in malaria, chapters 3 and 4 describe how host enzymes that catabolize arginine affect infection severity. In chapter 3, we test the hypothesis that liver damage causes plasma arginine depletion by releasing hepatic arginase-1 into circulation and examine the role of host arginase-2 in limiting infection severity. In chapter 4, we characterize the role of nitric oxide synthases in P. chabaudi infection and find that host endothelial nitric oxide synthase promotes host tolerance to P. chabaudi infection. Collectively, this work leverages phenotypic diversity and genetic tools in inbred mice to improve our bioinformatic and mechanistic understanding of relationships between metabolism and infectious disease severity
The roles of virus-host interactions in the pathogenesis of Dengue and Zika viral infections
Keywords: Microbiology and Immunology.

Dengue virus (DENV) and Zika virus (ZIKV) infections are threats to global health. However, the viral and host determinants underlying disease pathogenesis are incompletely understood. To study the host immune responses to dengue infection we aimed to elucidate mechanisms of disease pathogenesis and identify biomarkers predictive of severe dengue (SD). To capture tissue heterogeneity, we developed a single-cell transcriptomic platform that quantifies viral RNA abundance and the host transcriptome in thousands of single cells, and used it to monitor the host response to natural infection in adults' PBMC samples from a Colombia dengue cohort that we established. We showed large heterogeneity in the host response to dengue in a cell subtype specific manner. We discovered that naïve B cells are the predominant cell type associated with viral RNA and that their interferon response genes are upregulated relative to bystander or control uninfected cells. We revealed cell-type specific alterations in gene expression levels prior to progression to SD, such as upregulation of MX2 in naïve B cells and CD163 in CD14+CD16+ monocytes. In parallel, to capture real-world heterogeneity, we used a multi-cohort analysis framework that integrates heterogeneous datasets to identify robust host gene signatures that are generalizable across cohorts, and discovered a 20-gene set predictive of SD using publicly available dengue datasets. The prognostic power of this gene set to distinguish uncomplicated from SD early in the course of illness was validated in silico and prospectively in our dengue cohort. Another flavivirus infection associated with significant morbidity whose pathogenesis is poorly understood is ZIKV. The recent ZIKV epidemic has been associated with microcephaly in neonates as well as Guillain-Barre syndrome and encephalitis in adults. ZIKV infection causes cell death in neuro-progenitor cells, and increased expression of p53, a major regulator of cell death. Here, we evaluated the role of the ZIKV protease (NS2B3) in activating the p53 apoptotic pathway. Our studies showed that NS2B3 alone can trigger apoptosis and identified several novel NSB23 binding partners, including MDM4, an inhibitor of the transregulatory functions of p53, which is a candidate substrate of the protease activity, and two E3 ubiquitin ligases COP1 and CARP2, which lead to p53 degradation by the proteasome. Our data suggests that NS2B3 may inhibit the function of p53 regulatory proteins thereby increasing its protein expression and upregulating p53 target gene transcription leading to apoptosis. Together, these studies have shed light on the roles of virus-host interactions in the pathogenesis of flaviviral infections and provide potential translational avenues for targeted diagnostic and therapeutic interventions for these globally important viruses