VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
When neural and behavioral forecasting works : the critical role of matching
Keywords: Psychology.

Over the last decade, decision neuroscientists have documented several stylized examples of neuroforecasting -- the idea that neuroimaging data collected from a small sample of subjects can be used to estimate how populations will behave. Frequently, these studies demonstrate significant neural forecasts even when forecasting is not possible with choice. Additionally, only three brain regions have been demonstrated to forecast: the Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc), Medial PreFrontal Cortex (MPFC), and the Anterior Insula (AIns). However, these studies vary on which brain regions forecast the market outcome of interest. To date, two concepts have been proposed that may help explain discrepant neuroforecasting results. According to a "partial scaling" account, the generalizability of a choice component depends on how basic or integrative the process in question is. Acording to a "market matching" account, choice components that are closely matched to the market outcome of interest will provide better forecasts. This dissertation comprises three studies that aim to test generalizability and matching in forecasting. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that components that generalize well do not always outperform components that are well matched to the market outcome of interest. Chapter 4 demonstrates that when market matching is achieved by matching demographic features between the sample and the population, less generalizable components forecast better. Chapter 5 discusses implications of this research for theory and practice
When new markets and powerful institutions collide : how mission-driven entrepreneurs form strategy, organize, and compete
Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.

This dissertation explores how entrepreneurs form strategy, organize, and compete in nascent markets that emerge within institutional fields. In these settings, entrepreneurs face the dual challenges of creating successful ventures while also navigating (and perhaps changing) the institutional field. Despite the challenges, nascent markets within institutional fields offer enormous potential for both financial success and social impact—a particularly attractive combination for mission-driven entrepreneurs. Yet, prior research overlooks how entrepreneurs form successful strategies, organize their ventures, and compete with rivals in these challenging but important settings. Given limited theoretical understanding and empirical evidence, I use a multiple-case theory-building approach to explore the nascent MOOC (massive open online course) market that emerged within the field of U.S. higher education. I present three related emergent theoretical frameworks. The first, Mavericks and Diplomats, identifies two contrasting but effective processes to form strategy in nascent markets within institutional fields. The second, Mission and Money, explores competition over time between ventures that organize as hybrids by integrating the logics of multiple institutions. The third, The Pain of the Pivot, unpacks the often-painful processes of enacting significant changes in a venture's strategy, commonly referred to as pivoting. Jointly, these three theoretical frameworks provide novel insights into how mission-driven entrepreneurs form strategy, organize, and compete when new markets collide with powerful institutions. Overall, this dissertation contributes to strategy, entrepreneurship, and organizations research and practice
Whole genome approaches to uncover etiology of disease in endangered animals and critically ill humans
Keywords: Genetics.

Identification of disease etiology using whole genome data has the potential to promote the health and wellbeing of both humans and other animals. Historically, the cost to generate genomic data has been restrictive. However, advances in genome sequencing technologies have enabled high throughput data generation at a reduced cost. Now genome data is being generated at an unprecedented scale leading to rapid growth in the field of genomics, and as a result is ready for widespread applications in humans and other animals. The overarching goal of the work presented here is to harness the power of next generation sequencing- combining it with refined analysis pathways and novel applications- to advance precision human medicine and promote the integration of genomic data into veterinary and conservation medicine. In the first section of this dissertation, I demonstrate the utility of whole genome sequencing data in population management of critically endangered ex situ living non-human great apes. Using genomic data from these species, I accurately determine kinship, a measure of relatedness used to select appropriate mating pairs, in effort to promote genetic diversity. Additionally, I investigate genetic determinants of two overrepresented disease phenotypes in ex situ living great apes: interstitial myocardial fibrosis in western lowland gorillas and arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy in bonobos. These data suggest that integration of genomic data into population management has the potential to profoundly impact these endangered species. In the second section of this dissertation, I describe the development of an ultra-rapid whole genome sequencing diagnostic test for use in a critical care setting. This protocol took as little as 7 hours and 18 minutes to complete using highly parallel nanopore sequencing, a high-performance cloud compute system, and a custom scheme for variant prioritization. Rapid genetic diagnosis can impact the early clinical decision-making process, enabling clinicians to provide fast and precise medical care. My thesis research has focused on the utility of whole genome sequencing in a variety of medical settings with the aim to promote the health of animals and humans alike
Why Did Big-City Machines Decline in the South?
Keywords:  Department of Symbolic Systems
political machines
The American South
Symbolic Systems
Newspapers.com
Stanford
Thesis

The conventional explanations for machine decline in the United States, including welfare reform, civil service reform, and income growth, were largely developed without considering Southern machines. The South adopted civil service reform later than did the North, the welfare expansion of the New Deal was significantly more limited in the South than in the North, and the South was much poorer than the North until at least the 1980s. Therefore, according to the existing literature, Southern political machines should have declined at a slower rate than did their Northern counterparts, since the conventional explanations for machine decline are weaker in the South than in the North. This thesis uses the Newspapers.com database to build the first census of Southern citywide machines from 1920 to 1970, and finds that Southern political machines peaked in the same decade as did Northern machines, and declined at approximately the same rate thereafter. The fact that the peak and decline of Southern machines was similar to that of Northern machines, despite Southern machines not being influenced by the ostensible factors that caused the decline of Northern machines, suggests that the prevailing explanations for why machines declined in the United States are insufficient, or at least do not apply to the South. This thesis, then, presents a puzzle for future research: why did Southern machines decline at the same rate as did Northern machines, even though the conventional explanations for machine decline do not apply to the South? After outlining this puzzle, this thesis begins the work of future researchers by using the Newspapers.com database to review contemporary newspaper articles that analyzed the decline of prominent Southern citywide machines as they collapsed in real time and build a dataset that categorizes these explanations for machine decline. By centralizing all explanations that contemporary journalists, who are experts in municipal politics, offered for the decline of Southern machines, this thesis provides a starting point for future researchers to determine whether these explanations generalize across the South and Nation. In particular, the elimination of the poll tax and other restrictive Jim Crow era voting measures, the end of one-party Democratic dominance in the South, and the return of politically active GIs from WWII who fought to defeat political machines are promising, understudied explanations for Southern machine decline that merit more attention.
Why does leviathan innovate? The law and economics of technological change at state-owned electric utilities
Keywords: Law JSD.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are the dominant firm type in the global electricity sector. Yet, little is known about why some state-owned electricity utilities adopt new technologies more readily than others. Economists are divided about SOE innovation. Neoclassical scholarship suggests that government-owned firms lack the market incentives for adopting new technologies. By contrast, evolutionary economists suggest that precisely because they are less affected by market demands, SOEs can be effective innovators. This dissertation contributes a legal perspective to this broader economic debate. The dissertation argues that SOE innovativeness (or lack thereof) does not derive from their ownership. Instead, SOE innovation is a consequence of the interaction between host government interests and the legal and financial institutions which shape the risk taking ability of SOE managers. Using mixed methods, the dissertation provides evidence supporting this theory from SOEs in high-income countries. The dissertation provides nuance to evolving economic theories on state-led innovation. It also offers policymakers guidance on how to reform SOEs in the electricity sector to incentivize technological change
Winged insects and insect wings : geological, ecological, and functional context
Keywords: Geological Sciences.

There is little doubt that insects---particularly winged insects---represent a uniquely successful evolutionary radiation. Nor is there much doubt that wings were a key innovation that facilitated this diversification. In light of this, it is surprising just how few studies have examined how transformative insect wings really were when they first originated just below the Mississippian/Pennsylvanian boundary. Chapter One of my dissertation examines the influence of atmospheric oxygen on the origin of insect wings. Chapter Two examines the feeding ecology of winged insects throughout deep time, focusing on the diversity of insect damage types on fossilized leaves. Chapter Three examines insect wings themselves: how they function, and what the underlying selective pressures may be
Wiping out Black and Evil Forces - Understanding China’s campaign to combat criminal syndicates
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
Campaign
Propaganda
Saohei
Criminal Syndicate
Anti-Corruption Campaign
Thesis

This thesis examines China’s campaign, Wiping out Black and Evil Forces (扫黑除恶,
hereafter WBEF) to analyze its relationship with the long-existing Anti-Corruption campaign. First, WBEF was launched for both preemptive and preventive reasons. Second, because of WBEF’s bottom-up strategy design and rhetorical ambiguity, WBEF can capture lower-level officials and law enforcement personnel who eluded the net of the Anti-Corruption campaign. Third, local officials and the police both play dual roles as regulators and perpetrators, which undermine campaign legitimacy and efficacy. Based on 239 cases from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the People’s Republic of China, the thesis elucidates the number of WBEF members indicted per court case, their misconducts, and social backgrounds. The thesis explores the implementation process by analyzing the operational structure of the campaign, which involves the police and the WBEF leadership teams at each level of administration. Lastly, the thesis makes the observation that Beijing’s campaign design is either extremely centralized or overly local. The former results in insufficient coverage at lower-level localities, whereas the latter leads to opaqueness in local operations.
With Many Faces: Vladimir Putin as Literary Character
Keywords: Postmodernism (Literature)
Russia (Federation)
Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1952-
Russian fiction
Historical fiction
Stanford Global Studies, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
Text
Thesis

In this paper, Jasmine Alexander-Greene examines works of fiction from around the world in which Russian president Vladimir Putin appears as a protagonist, secondary character, or significant cameo. Rather than a uniform approach to Putin, Alexander-Greene finds significant variation not only in how Putin is represented but also the works' origins, perspectives, and literary approaches. Together, they underscore the paradox between the fantasy of control, tied to the figure of the Russian leader, and the more chaotic reality. (Master's thesis)
Without a word of WARN-ing : advance notice, the information environment, and labor market outcomes
Keywords: Business.

This thesis examines mandated advance notice of employment loss, a disclosure made by firms to workers, not investors. It has two components. First, I study the impact of mandated advance notice on workers' labor market outcomes. The impact is theoretically ambiguous. While advance notice mechanically increases job search time before displacement, it may also reduce both aggregate employment and the marginal incentive to search for new employment. Using the staggered adoption of advance notice laws and worker-level data, I find advance notice as practiced in the U.S. is associated with a five percentage point reduction in joblessness incidence immediately after displacement and a three percentage point increase in labor force participation measured one year after displacement. Second, I study the role of internal information quality on firm compliance with mandated advance notice laws. The prior labor economics literature interprets imperfect compliance as evidence of deliberate non-compliance. I propose an alternative explanation for imperfect compliance: low internal information quality. I predict that firms with high internal information quality will unwind operations before financial constraints bind and prevent the provision of notice. Using government records of notice provision, I find the days of advance notice provided is increasing in a firm's internal information quality. Collectively, my results suggest a critical role of disclosure and the information environment in aggregate unemployment
XinSheng
Keywords: Music.

Xinsheng is a 20-minute opera. The storyline follows a young boxer, Andrei, who gets badly injured in an illegal underground fight in Berlin. Fan, a woman in her late thirties working as a nutritionist/pharmacologist, has just fallen in love with Andrei. Fan calls her best friend Anne, a surgeon and her ex-lover, to operate on Andrei in an undercover hangar in the outskirts of Berlin. Because Andrei is about to die, Fan demands that Anne administers Xinsheng to him in order to make the operation and his chances of survival more successful. Xinsheng is a new experimental drug that Fan invented. It has great regenerative properties, but since it's not completely perfected, it also has severe side effects. At first, Anne is reluctant to administer the drug. However, when Fan says she'll never speak to her again (should Andrei die), Anne (still in love with Fan) decides to go along with Fan's plan. In the opera, the ideas of fake versus real and various perspectives on the same event are crucial elements around which the music has been structured. With the use of electronics (notably concatenative sound synthesis) and the compositional strategy called "microlage" (neologism coined by the author from words micro and collage), the music attempts to create atmospheres in which the blurry textures signify the double entendre, floating around, yet never settling for a particular sonic shape or clear musical gesture. The piece was performed and recorded as video by Decoder Ensemble and directed by Heinrich Horwitz in March 2021 in Berlin
You Are What You Watch: The Netflix Recommendation System and the Rise of the Algorithmic Culture Industry
Keywords:  Department of Science
culture industry
algorithmic culture
Netflix
Science Technology and Society
recommendation system
Thesis

Netflix is a film and media streaming service with over 200 million subscribers and a quarterly revenue of $7.16 billion. Netflix catalyzed massive change in media distribution, and the company continues to dominate the marketplace. By examining Netflix’s conceptualization of and interaction with its millions of users, I demonstrate how Netflix’s algorithmic recommendation system evolved older cultural models by moving away from user ratings, demographic categories, and human decisions around film distribution. These shifts happened gradually and with little awareness on the part of Netflix’s subscriber base. I trace Netflix patents, publications, press releases, and more to make visible the opaque algorithmic system. I find that the Netflix algorithmic system pronounces the user’s identity through recommendations, a process I link to Althusser’s theory of interpellation. I argue that iterated interactions with the algorithmic system structure user behavior and give rise to an algorithmic culture. I demonstrate how the system limits user autonomy by collecting data without the user’s active participation, constraining the user’s behavior, and manufacturing the user’s desires. The algorithmic system creates a culture that shares elements with Adorno and Horkheimer’s description of the “culture industry,” including the valuing of consumption over fulfillment and the narrowing of tastes toward the mainstream to maximize profits. Algorithmic culture moves beyond what Horkheimer and Adorno describe, however, because a non-human actor becomes the dominant cultural force.
2D materials for logic and memory integration
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Today's data-driven applications, such as big data analytics, neural networks, and machine learning, require huge memory and computing resources. The latency and energy incurred for data movement between processing unit and memory has become a significant limitation (known as the "memory wall") as traditional techniques such as caching are no longer effective for the data-intensive applications that dominate modern computing. Solving the "memory wall" problem requires future computer technology to directly integrate memory and transistor devices with high density vertical interconnect accesses (vias) to provide parallel, high bandwidth memory access. However, the high temperature of silicon processing is not compatible with this 3D monolithic integration. A desired low temperature integration can be achieved by using two-dimensional (2D) materials which have intrinsically layered and flat atomic structures, because devices made of 2D materials can be fabricated at lower temperatures. This thesis introduces three exploratory studies on advancing 2D materials for developing 3D monolithic integrated systems. First, I focused on improving transistor performance and studied high-mobility 2D material black phosphorous (BP) transistors using various metals as the contact metal. This work achieved unipolar n-type BP transistors by using ultra-low work function metals, demonstrating record high n-type current. Furthermore, the study revealed the physical mechanisms of controlling doping and de-pinning effects for n- and p- type BP transistors. Beyond transistor studies, I then demonstrated the first 3D sequential monolithic integrated two levels of 1-transistor-1-resistor (1T1R) memory cells. The cell is fabricated entirely using 2D materials: hexagonal-Boron Nitride (hBN) serves as the resistive switching memory cell and monolayer Molybdenum Disulfide (MoS2) serves as the channel material for the transistor selector. In order to achieve a high-density memory array, a two-terminal selector with a high nonlinear current-voltage characteristic is necessary. I developed a new two-terminal selector utilizing a 2D material heterostructure with an H-shape energy barrier. This new device design in theory should have high on-state current density and virtually unlimited endurance due to its quantum tunneling mechanism. Our results characterized the first out-of-plane current through an ultra-thin (3 monolayer) heterojunction and provide the critical foundation for a high endurance selector using a 2D heterojunction. Due to the transferable feature of 2D materials, these processes can be easily adopted for 3D monolithic integrated transistors and memories in multiple logic and memory layers connected vertically by fine-grained nanoscale vias, thereby overcoming the "memory wall.".
A Centriole-less Pericentriolar Material Serves as the Base of C. elegans Sensory Cilia
Keywords:  Department of Biology
biology
cilia
basal body
MTOC
Pericentriolar material
neuronal microtubules
C. elegans
Thesis

Cilia are complex sensory and motile organelles found on almost all cells of the body. Sensory cilia act as the cell’s antennae, detecting and managing external signals. Perturbation of cilia related genes leads to a large scope of diseases, ciliopathies, such as retinal degeneration and polycystic kidney disease. While the assembly of cilia by basal bodies, which are re-purposed centrioles, is shared among unicellular organisms and animal cells, in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans basal bodies are necessary for ciliogenesis, but are degraded upon cilia maturation. This raises the question of how ciliary microtubules are maintained in the absence of the basal bodies from which they are templated. We used CRISPR-generated endogenously tagged alleles to assess the localization of centrosomal proteins. Surprisingly, although the base of cilia lacks an association with centriole proteins or the PCM protein SPD-2/CEP192, SPD-5, ZYG-9/XMAP-215 and the conserved microtubule nucleating γ-tubulin ring complex (γ-TuRC) localize to this region. We named this previously unidentified structure the “centriole-less PCM.” Confocal microscopy revealed distinct subdomains of the centriole-less PCM, with a subset of proteins localizing closer to the ciliary axoneme and others localizing closer to the dendrites, a region nucleating the assembly of dynamic microtubules into the cell body, confirming that the base of cilia is a microtubule organizing center (MTOC). Using tissue-specific degradation, we tested the role of SPD-5 at the base of cilia at different time points in development. Degradation of SPD-5 after cilia maturation did not grossly impact cilia structure or function. However, degradation of SPD-5 during ciliogenesis perturbed cilia structure, suggesting that SPD-5 is required to maintain the axoneme in the absence of a canonical basal body. Moreover, SPD-5 is necessary for γ-TuRC localization at the ciliary base and nucleating dynamic microtubules into the cell body of the neuron. Unlike at the centrosome, the localization and regulation of SPD-5 appears to be independent of mitotic kinases. The presence of a RFX-type transcription factor binding site in the promoter region of SPD-5 indicates a pressure to maintain its expression in ciliated neurons. Thus, I propose that, in the absence of a canonical basal body, SPD-5 maintains the cilia structure while also recruiting the γ-TuRC, which imparts MTOC function to the centriole-less PCM.