VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Energy-efficient receiver design for the internet of everything
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

The nascent Internet of Everything (IoE) will likely be dominated by highly asymmetrical links with bursty communication, shifting the focus away from power consumption and to an obsession with low energy per bit or per packet. This thesis focuses on the challenges involved in designing an energy-efficient receiver for the IoE and the choice of the superregenerative architecture to meet these challenges. We will show that the superregenerative receiver can be analyzed as a linear time variant system and exploit insights into design tradeoffs obtained from such an analysis. We will discuss the design of a 28 GHz superregenerative receiver with symbol-by-symbol automatic gain control fabricated in 65 nm CMOS technology. The synthesizer-free receiver enables fast startup to reduce energy by close to an order of magnitude for short packets and achieves a steady-state energy consumption of 125 pJ/bit for a data rate of 40 Mb/s. The peak power dissipation of 5 mW and active area of 0.36 mm2 make it a particularly attractive receiver for the IoE.
Engineering inequality : public policy, school finance, and the roots of educational inequality in California, 1850-1950
Keywords: Education.

"Engineering Inequality" provides a social, intellectual, and political history of inequality in school funding. Various approaches to school finance competed for dominance during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with western states adopting alternatives to district-property taxation and the inequities produced by local financing. With California as its focal point, this dissertation explains why those alternatives were eventually rejected. The project explores the process through which politicians, reformers, residents of expanding communities, and experts in emerging fields like school administration and public finance came not only to accept inequities in school funding, but to recast them as inevitable and natural features of American public schooling. Based on government documents, regional newspapers, personal papers, court cases, and digitized quantitative and spatial data, this study examines the political and ideological struggles shaping school finance and situates those struggles within the broader history of public education, the state, and inequality. Ultimately, "Engineering Inequality" upends familiar historical narratives about how Americans have paid for their schools in the past, narratives that overstate the use of the district property tax and underestimate the extent to which inequality in school finance emerged through state action. In explaining how state policies created funding inequities at the precise moment that public education became the path to economic opportunity for many Americans, this project brings into view the role of educational finance, as an often neglected domain of social policy, in expanding and entrenching inequality in modern America.
Engineering Resistance: A CRISPR/Cas9-mediated Gene Drive for Schistosomiasis Control
Keywords:  Department of Bioengineering
Bioengineering
biology
global health
CRISPR
Cas9
gene drive
schistosomiasis
modeling
python
genetics
gene editing
genetic engineering
disease
infectious disease
disease control
Thesis

Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that afflicts over 200 million people worldwide, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa. Schistosomes are parasitic worms that infect humans, feed on blood nutrients, and may cause anemia, tissue damage, and cognitive impairments. The disease persists despite mass drug administration efforts, partially because schistosomiasis transmission depends on several environmental factors. Schistosomes spend a significant portion of their lives as parasites of aquatic snails. Targeting the snails may better control the disease. Gene drives represent one snail control method. A CRISPR/Cas9-mediated drive could engineer snails to be resistant to schistosome infection, over several host generations. This type of gene drive could prevent disease transmission to humans. However, design and implementation of a gene drive faces barriers from complex host-parasite genetics. Previous studies focused on a single gene that dictates snail resistance against schistosomiasis, but in reality, resistance depends on highly variable genetic loci. Snails use multiple genes that confer compatibility, recognition, and removal of schistosomes during infection. The thesis uses an originally designed model to monitor gene drive performance in these complex conditions. We found that neither polymorphic genetic conditions nor compatibility-based infections affected gene drive performance as much as its ability to persist within a genetically diverse population. In a multi-faceted genetic environment, with many levels of wild-type resistance, the gene drive must outcompete other genotypes in order to become fixed in a population. Field implementation of a gene drive must consider existing, wild-type resistant genotypes of resistance.
Engineering virus-like particles for targeted delivery of macromolecular therapeutics
Keywords: Chemical Engineering.

Nanoparticles, carrying therapeutic cargo, offer a potential solution to a number of diseases or disorders where targeted delivery could improve efficacy while at the same time reducing off-target side-effects. Previously in the Swartz lab, virus-like particles (VLPs) from the Hepatitis B core viral capsid have been heavily engineered for stability and host immune system avoidance. Using this as a basis, I have expanded the functionalities of these VLPs to include improved VLP assembly, targeted cell specificity, and loading of therapeutic payloads. We have shown efficient loading of multiple types of cargo, including mimics of siRNA and therapeutic proteins, using VLPs that can assemble at significantly reduced ionic strengths. Using Prostate Cancer cells as a model disease target, we observed specificity of our construct for the targeted cells. Furthermore, these engineered VLPs can be easily modified for treating other cancers or genetic disorders and, in the future, for neurological disorders. The modularity and flexibility of this targeted delivery platform offers great promise for a broad range of medical applications.
Enhanced sampling methods for kinetics of biomolecules and application to triazine polymers
Keywords: Chemistry.

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are becoming essential tools for many different fields, including biology, chemistry, and materials science, that provide us with a molecular picture of what is really happening at the molecular level for many biophysical phenomena. With MD simulations, we can see how the molecule forms and moves and obtain insight into its mechanisms with higher resolution than experiments. Unfortunately, MD simulations are not without limitations. They are restricted in predictive power because the molecules routinely get "stuck" in metastable states and do not change their conformations for an extended period. Hence, there is currently a huge gap between what MD simulations can model and the timescales of biological processes. Consequently, many methods have been developed for MD simulations over the past few decades to overcome this timescale barrier between MD simulations and biological processes. These are referred to as enhanced sampling methods. We need these methods to overcome the timescale barrier so that critical biophysical phenomena can be observed in a computationally tractable period. Current enhanced sampling methods have demonstrated that they can efficiently obtain thermodynamic and/or kinetic properties. However, there is still a need for an enhanced sampling method that requires little a priori knowledge about the system, is less heuristic, can obtain both thermodynamic and kinetic properties, and can be easily parallelized over the available computational resources for computational efficiency. I will go over several classes of enhanced sampling methods before diving into my new enhanced sampling methods that aim to address the issues mentioned above.
Entertainment in Containment: Courtesans and Space in the Game of Romance in Taiping guangji and Yijian zhi
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
Premodern Chinese Literature
Taiping guangji
Yijian zhi
Space
Courtesan
Thesis

This thesis studies the lives of Chinese courtesans within the space assigned to them, as portrayed in courtesan-related stories in Taiping guangji and Yijian zhi, two voluminous collections of stories compiled in the Song Dynasty, each of which has the reputation of being an encyclopedia of life in premodern China. Among a corpus of approximately 124 stories that mention courtesan from Taiping guangji and 81 from Yijian zhi, this thesis pays special attention to ìHuo Xiaoyu Zhuanî (the Story of Huo Xiaoyu) and ìLi Wa Zhuanî (the Story of Huo Xiaoyu), which by themselves provide note-worthy details exemplifying the relation between space and romance. To better illustrate the history and definition of courtesans, and explore specific themes, examples from beyond the two aforementioned collections are also eclectically drawn from premodern Chinese literary texts from different periods, including poems and lyrics, bi ji stories, and novels. The nature of the occupation of a courtesan is to provide entertainment. This particular kind of entertainment often requires separate space. In a narrow sense, the space of a courtesan is the place in which they live and work, sometimes love, and when betrayed, hate and plot revenge. In a broader sense, the space of a courtesan is constructed by the courtesanís value in menís hearts, position in society, identity in relation to marriage, and symbolic function in literature. The contained space of courtesans is also an indicator of womenís assigned roles and space in menís comfort zone in premodern China, which can be perceived through literary phenomena intertwined with male imaginations and social realities.
Entertainment-Education and Narrative Persuasion in the Context of the Culture Cycle and Communication Theories
Keywords:  Department of Communication
media
culture
entertainment education
narrative persuasion
communication
media studies
Stanford University Department of Communication
Thesis

Media narratives are an extremely powerful communication tool that affect society, culture, and individuals in many ways. As people increasingly reject explicit persuasive attempts, the work of spreading prosocial and health information that was previously disseminated through directly persuasive outlets will fall to interwoven narratives that do not interrupt the freely selected user experience of media, and utilize entertainment tactics that elude perception. Using Markus and Conner’s (2013) culture cycle framework throughout, I will use theories of communication and media psychology to illustrate how narratives intersect with culture at the individual level (and at the levels of interactions, institutions, and ideas). Through the lens of cultivation theory, this paper sheds light on how inadvertent pieces of media narratives can maintain invisible social structures that privilege certain ways of being, and suggest how these same pathways might be used to dismantle these structures in the future. Much of the focus will be on how culture, social information, and internal processes influence the attitudes and behaviors of the individual in the context of persuasion and change. This paper also describes why narrative persuasion is effective, especially in the media environment of today, and why it is important to consider this potential impact in health and prosocial realms. Additionally, I will explore how storytelling and narrative processing change the way messages are perceived, and highlight the strengths of entertainment-education and narrative storylines in the context of both the culture cycle and communication theory.
Entrepreneurial capitalism : the making of the Central Pacific Railroad, 1861-1899
Keywords: History.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented economic and social change in the United States. Largely agrarian in 1850, by 1900 the United States had become the world's premier manufacturer. My thesis is that these changes were wrought, in part, when millions of immigrants were engaged in entrepreneurial actives. In California over a million immigrants came to join the gold rush, and many stayed to build the railroad and/or engaged in agriculture and manufacturing. An examination of the development of the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) gives us a window into the workings of the early American capitalist system. Specifically, I demonstrate how the political power of the company's early investors and principals - Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Charles Crocker - was derived from social networks. During the period under study, the networks of trusts these entrepreneurs brought from home to operate in California were place-based, which was in essence race-based. Because the terms of economic exchange were set politically, groups with strong political connections experienced wealth accumulation that was significantly better than other social groups. These results were evident in the making of the CPRR. Using the CPRR's own accounting ledgers and daily cash books as supplemented by railroad commission testimonies, I analyzed the motivations and decisions made by management at critical junctures. By tracing the timing and amount of cash receipts and disbursements, I infer the relationship of the payee/payer to the company, including the early investors taking the most risks. I also examine the mechanism by which conflicted transactions involving transfer of company assets to individual shareholders were effected. I introduce a business perspective into the discussions of the CPRR born of my thirty-years at the intersection of technology and finance in the Silicon Valley. Very much like Mark Hopkins, I was chief financial officer of a start-up company, and our team managed the day-to-day cash flow, making sure we made payroll every two weeks. We went through private funding with venture capitalists and finally brought the company to Wall Street in a public offering. The road show covered money centers such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco, cities that Stanford and Huntington tapped in the 1870s. What emerges is a picture of an entrepreneurial capitalist system with strong ties to political power centers where legislation was often to benefit one group to the detriment of others. This study contributes to our understanding of how our sociopolitical system came about and how our world came to be.
Episodic degassing from unsteady lava lake convection in Ray Lava Lake, Mount Erebus, Antarctica
Keywords:  Department of Geophysics
School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
Lava Lakes
Magma
Convection
Thesis

Lava lakes are surface features that represent the upper portion of volcanic systems, and their behavior places limits on processes occurring in the interior of volcanoes. Persistently active lava lakes show continuous degassing and open convection over years to decades, which implies near steady-state conditions. The persistently active lava lake on Mount Erebus, Ross Island, Antarctica, known as Ray Lake, shows periodic activity in the form of small pulses of gas and hot magma at the surface every 5-18 minutes and occasional Strombolian eruptions while maintaining long-term near steady-state behavior in temperature, heat flux, gas flux, and composition when time-averaged over multiple cycles. This episodicity has been most commonly attributed to gas slugs: large gas bubbles rising through the conduit that burst at the surface. Alternate hypotheses, however, include unstable bidirectional flow in which episodicity is driven from the upper portion of the conduit. These hypotheses invoke a conduit source for episodicity. We present numerical simulations of Ray Lake with a constant inflow rate of gas-rich magma from the conduit and consider periodicity present in the convective pattern of the lava lake, consistent with a near-surface cause of episodicity. Our simulations of convection on Mount Erebus show drip instabilities with a periodicity of 5-20 minutes. Our results match the observed behavior well, showing a similar period as field observations. An increase in ascent velocity when magma enters the openly convecting lake can result in periodic behavior without invoking conduit dynamics, challenging existing ideas about near-surface volcanic conduit processes in persistently degassing volcanoes.
Epistemic roles of mathematical diagrams
Keywords: Philosophy.

Visual representations of various kinds are ubiquitous in pure and applied mathematics, in the natural and social sciences, as well as in many other human activities. By investigating these visualizations, many questions arise: What are they? How do they function? What are the conditions of their correct use? Why are they, at times, such eﬀective aids to cognition? What type of knowledge can they promote? In this thesis, I focus on diagrams in mathematics, not exclusively in geometry, but in diﬀerent mathematical domains as well. Despite the extreme variety of mathematical diagrams, it is possible to distill some of their characteristic properties. Diagrams are not usually static bookkeeping devices, but displays for advancing thought in a dynamic way: experts can manipulate diagrams in order to discover and prove mathematical results. In this thesis, I will first provide an epistemological framework for investigating mathematics in a way that appreciates how human agents actually practice it and in particular how they engage with concrete external artifacts. I will show that the normative dimension at play in mathematics is not monolithic, but multi-dimensional, with different objects of normative assessment and diﬀerent appropriate sorts of evaluation. After this general discussion, I will investigate the importance of mathematical notations and then I will put diagrammatic notations into focus. I will propose a technical deﬁnition of mathematical diagrams based on their two-dimensionality and on their operative dimension, which is constituted by the supported manipulations that correspond to mathematical operations. This deﬁnition will allow me to unveil the features of diagrams that underwrite the possibility of them entering into the inferential structure of proofs. To exemplify and sustain my theses I will then present three case studies from contemporary mathematics; these examples are representative of diﬀerent ﬁelds (knot theory, homological algebra, and category theory) and will allow me to exhibit the heterogeneity of diagrammatic notations in mathematics. I will show that in all these cases diagrams not only have important heuristic roles, but play a justiﬁcatory role as well.
The equivariant cobordism category
Keywords: Mathematics.

For a finite group G, we define an equivariant cobordism category C_d^G. Objects of the category are (d-1)-dimensional closed smooth G-manifolds and morphisms are smooth d-dimensional equivariant cobordisms. We identify the homotopy type of its classifying space (i.e. geometric realization of its simplicial nerve) as the fixed points of the infinite loop space of an equivariant spectrum.
Essays in econometrics
Keywords: Business.

In this dissertation, I propose novel approaches to causal inference in the settings characterized by an explicit clustering structure. I study different aspects of this problem, considering settings with few large clusters as well as with many small clusters. The dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay proposes a new model for causal inference in the settings with few large clusters and cluster-level treatment assignment. The second essay studies causal inference questions in the settings with many clusters of moderate size and individual-level treatment assignment. In the first essay, I construct a nonlinear model for causal inference in the empirical settings where researchers observe individual-level data for few large clusters over at least two time periods. It allows for identification (sometimes partial) of the counterfactual distribution, in particular, identifying average treatment effects and quantile treatment effects. The model is flexible enough to handle multiple outcome variables, multidimensional heterogeneity, and multiple clusters. It applies to the settings where the new policy is introduced in some of the clusters, and a researcher additionally has information about the pretreatment periods. I argue that in such environments we need to deal with two different sources of bias: selection and technological. In my model, I employ standard methods of causal inference to address the selection problem and use pretreatment information to eliminate the technological bias. In case of one-dimensional heterogeneity, identification is achieved under natural monotonicity assumptions. The situation is considerably more complicated in case of multidimensional heterogeneity where I propose three different approaches to identification using results from transportation theory. The second essay is co-authored with Guido Imbens. We develop a new estimator for the average treatment effect in the observational studies with unobserved cluster-level heterogeneity. We show that under particular assumptions on the sampling scheme the unobserved confounders can be integrated out conditioning on the empirical distribution of covariates and policy variable within the cluster. To make this result practical we impose a particular exponential family structure that implies that a low-dimensional sufficient statistic can summarize the empirical distribution. Then we use modern causal inference methods to construct a novel doubly robust estimator. The proposed estimator uses the estimated propensity score to adjust the familiar fixed effect estimator.