VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Policy, not Politics: An Examination of California ELA Teachers’ Text Selection Practices, Motivations, and Barriers
Keywords: California schools
high school
Graduate School of Education
undergraduate honors
high school teachers
ELA teachers
text selection
text diversity
diverse books
English
curriculum
teachers
Thesis

Despite the increasing diversity of students in the United States and the varied benefits of diverse literature, the high school literary canon still primarily reflects the voices, values, and beliefs of dominant whiteness. This thesis interviews seven and surveys thirteen public high school English language arts teachers at a school district in Southern California in order to explore this phenomenon, and to answer the following questions: what book-length texts are being taught in the 2017-2018 academic year in these particular high school ELA classrooms, and how do they compare to the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of texts in previous studies and surveys done on teacher text selection? What range of reasons do ELA teachers give behind keeping certain book-length texts in their curriculum? What do these teachers see as their barriers in bringing new texts into the classroom, and, conversely, what encouragement or support do they receive in bringing new texts into the classroom? What are the policies surrounding literary text selection in California high school ELA classrooms, and how do they translate into practice? This thesis examines the responses of these teachers through a qualitative, thematic lens, identifying four main barriers (time, money, comfort, and controversy) teachers confront when navigating the text selection process and providing recommendations to take steps towards a more diverse and inclusive high school literary canon.
Political animals : emotion, materiality, and media in the learning of animal liberation activists
Keywords: Education.

This learning sciences dissertation uses sociocultural learning theory to understand political learning in the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of an animal liberation network called Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). It asks, how do humans come to understand politically the other animal species in the ways they do? It draws on research from other social sciences and the humanities in the posthumanist and nonhuman turns to consider how human learning occurs under conditions of vulnerability and in concert with multiple forms of nonhuman agency. Based on in-person and online participant observation conducted between 2014 and 2017, open-ended interviews of 20 current and former activists, and an analysis of media artifacts, it addresses how learning involves changes in identity, ideology, and practice across scales. It is structured according to three focal lenses: emotion, materiality, and media. Whereas emotion is often approached in learning research as a driver or inhibitor of separate learning processes, this dissertation applies a practice view on emotion, considering how practices of emotion are sometimes targets of learning in their own right. It introduces the concepts of guided affect experiences and casual emotion work to describe different means by which activists shape their own and others' emotions, with implications for identity, ideology, and practice. Materiality is the central theme in an analysis of activists' ideological development. Conventional conceptualizations of animals and tools in learning research often render them as "dead" material for human agency. Attending closely to the flows, frictions, and expectations of socio-material arrangements, this dissertation find that activists' ideological development is strongly shaped by encounters with nonhuman agency, including nonhuman animals and other things. The concept of ideamatter is proposed, describing human sense making as an outcome of mutating configurations of heterogeneous materials and the practices they organize. Building on research at the intersection between the learning sciences and critical pedagogy, this dissertation then explores the place of nonhuman animals in Freirean notions of "reading and writing the world." Approaching the body as a lexical medium, it expands the conversation on multiple literacies and critical consciousness to include embodied encounters between humans and nonhuman animals. Activists learn to read and write the signs of these encounters as a privileged site of ethical learning. Across the lenses of emotion, materiality, and media, this dissertation develops a vision of learners and learning that tempers the Enlightenment ideals of autonomy, reason, and strong agency that still haunt sociocultural theory and empirical investigations. Instead, we find that learners are more porous and susceptible than we often imagine. Implications for the ethics of learning research, educational practice, and learning environment design are discussed.
The political pollution cycle : an inconvenient truth and how to break it
Keywords: Political Science.

Scholars have applied the principal-agent (p-a) framework widely to explain policy implementation in democratic and authoritarian contexts alike. The conventional wisdom is that the misalignment of interests and information asymmetry between the principal and the agent contribute to policy distortion on the ground. Building on the p-a tradition with more recent insights, this dissertation challenges the implicit assumption in existing p-a models that the level of local compliance is constant over time, especially in autocracies like China. The dissertation centers on the critical case of air pollution control policies. Air pollution is the biggest environmental health threat to humanity in the twenty-first century, causing one in eight deaths and endangering the health of 95 percent of the world's population. As the dissertation demonstrates, politics play a major role in the regulation of air pollution. Furthermore, air pollution is highly responsive to the intensity and scale of regulatory efforts (i.e., very little time lag). Hence, the case of air pollution has offered a unique opportunity to fathom the effect of political incentives on policy implementation over time. This dissertation offers a new answer for when environmental policy implementation becomes deficient or excessive while extant works have almost unanimously focused on why. Using China as a natural experiment, this dissertation shows that local agents in China catered to the policy prioritization of the principal and in the process fostered local political regulation cycles. These cycles resulted in regional patterns of air pollution over time. Towards the end of a local leader's tenure in office, s/he would ease environmental regulation when the economy and stability were highly priced by the principal, leading to what I call "political pollution cycles." When the environment became significantly valued by the principal, s/he would order more environmental regulation near the end of tenure, resulting in dampened political pollution cycles, or even what I call "political environmental protection cycles." Both types of political regulation cycles incurred tremendous welfare losses and human costs. Different from extant publications, while dirty economic growth (or degrowth) explains why the amount of pollution, regulatory relief (or pressure) ordered by career-minded local leaders or politicians accounts for the systematic variation in air quality over time. Combining empirical evidence from China and some very preliminary analysis based on the United States and Mexico, I argue that electoral and career incentives of local politicians or leaders influence their prioritization of multiple policy goals over time, with systematic environmental consequences, and this may hold across regime types.
Political Uprisings and Skilled Migration: An Empirical Analysis of the Arab Spring
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Department of Economics
Arab Spring
Middle East and North Africa
uprisings
emigration
Thesis

This study identifies the relationship between the Arab Spring-induced domestic conflict and interest in emigration among a country’s skilled workforce. I measure interest in emigration by the volume of United States Diversity Visa applications from each source country. Using differences in differences regression models, I find that the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent transition periods motivated positive interest in migration to the United States among the skilled workforces (high school education or more) of several Arab countries. I find no differential effects between states that experienced the most combustive Arab Spring uprisings and those that experienced weaker shocks. This suggests that it was not necessarily the political violence induced by the uprisings that spurred greater interest in emigration. Rather, attitudes concerning the failures of the post-uprising transition processes to address the economic and political challenges that paved the way for the Arab Spring – such as disproportionately high unemployment especially affecting educated populations – are more likely determinants of this increased interest in skilled migration.
Polling in Practice: Accuracy of National and State Polls in the 2016 Election
Keywords:  Department of Communication
survey methodologies
pre-election polling
mode
sampling
Stanford University
Department of Communication
journalism
2016 presidential elections United States
Thesis

This study focuses on the impact of mode and sampling procedures on polling accuracy during the period of the 2016 presidential election. Utilizing all national and state level polls released during the final 7 days of the election, polls are classified based on the mode and sampling procedure utilized. Accuracy is then analyzed using the average absolute error of the top two candidates (Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton). The study finds that polling methodologies are utilized at very different rates, with polling in the final weeks of the 2016 election being dominated by Internet / River sampling methodologies (45% of polls). Within the sample of polls, RDD / Live Interviewer polls were the most accurate at both the state and national level. The least accurate polls were those that utilized online / river sampling methods. Significance testing was also conducted to measure the significance of the differences in average absolute errors between RDD / Live interview polls and the least accurate, Internet / River Sampling. Both a stratified Fisher-Pitman permutation test and a test using the untransformed absolute difference from the election outcome find strong support for the hypothesized difference between RDD and river surveys.
Population genetic analyses of gene expression and complex traits
Keywords: Biology.

A central goal of human genetics is to understand how the genome contributes to complex traits like height, BMI, and risk for many common diseases. This question is particularly challenging to answer in that analyses of human complex traits rely largely on observational data. In this dissertation, I present several projects that utilize statistical models and careful interpretation of data to infer features of latent process from observational data. First, I aim to improve our understanding of human complex trait architecture by exploring the effects of selective constraint on gene expression. I demonstrate that, while there is clear evidence of widespread constraint on gene expression, this selection is weak. Much of the variance of gene expression across individuals is, therefore, attributable to common genetic variants. Consistent with existing literature, this suggests that the genetic architecture of complex traits is highly polygenic. I also consider the role of previously under-studied contributors to genetic variance (e.g., epistatic interactions, somatic variation, and short tandem repeats) in complex traits. In addition, I apply the same careful consideration of confounders and data interpretation to measure, and understand possible drivers of, gendered differences in behavior between men and women scientists at academic meetings.
Portfolio management and optimal execution via convex optimization
Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.

We study three related applications, in the field of finance, and in particular of multi-period investment management, of convex optimization and model predictive control. First, we look at the classical multi-period trading problem, consisting in trading assets within a certain universe for a sequence of periods in time. We develop a framework for single- and multi-period optimization: the trades in each period are found by solving a convex optimization problem that trades off expected return, risk, transaction cost and holding cost. Second, we look at the classical Kelly gambling problem, consisting in repeatedly allocating wealth among bets so as to maximize the expected growth rate of wealth. We develop a convex constraint that controls the risk of drawdown, i.e., the risk of losing a certain (high) amount of wealth. Third, we look at an optimal execution problem, consisting in buying, or selling, a given quantity of some asset on a limit-order book market. We study the case when the execution is benchmarked to the market volume weighted average price, and the objective is to minimize the mean-variance of the slippage. In all three cases, we provide extensive numerical simulations (using real-world data, whenever possible), developed as open-source software. In practice, these problems are solved to high accuracy in little time on commodity hardware, thanks to strong theoretical guarantees from modern convex optimization and a rich and growing ecosystem of open source software.
Portraits of the West: Representations of California in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
Japan
California
San Francisco
Japanese maps
Castaways
Iwakura Mission
Japanese geography textbooks
Japanese perceptions of the West
Interactions between Japan and the West
Japanese travelers to America
Thesis

Japan saw many changes in the 1800s, one of which was an increase of knowledge about the West. After more than two hundred years of restricting the information that came into Japan from foreign lands, the Japanese state began to actively study Western countries in order to learn from them; the goal was for Japan to become a modern nation like those in the West, which were the most powerful in the world at the time. This thesis will look into the types and amount of knowledge available in Japan during the nineteenth century regarding one specific region of the West – California. It will study maps, travelers’ accounts, and geography textbooks that were available to Japanese during the 1800s in order to examine the development of knowledge regarding California in Japan. This thesis will address the following questions: What sort of image of California did Japanese people hold during the 1800s? How did perceptions change as the nineteenth century progressed and more accurate information about California and the West entered Japan? Depictions of California found in late Edo and early Meiji maps, travelers’ accounts, and geography textbooks ultimately portrayed a land of wealth and success by the end of the nineteenth century.
Post-translational regulation of cerebellar development and its implications in pediatric brain cancer
Keywords: Developmental Biology.

Tumors often result from temporal and spatial dysregulation of developmental signaling pathways. A striking example is medulloblastoma, the most common malignant pediatric brain tumor. During normal cerebellar development, granule neuron precursors (GNPs) proliferate extensively in response to hedgehog (Hh) signaling before differentiating into granule neurons. Sustained Hh signaling in GNPs, due either to reduced function of pathway components that negatively regulate Hh signal transduction or to heightened function of activating Hh signal transducers, results in continued maintenance and division of precursor cells beyond the normal proliferative stage of development, and eventually to formation of a medulloblastoma. To better understand the molecular mechanisms driving proliferation in GNPs and medulloblastoma, I characterized changes in transcript, protein and protein phosphorylation at the beginning of the proliferative stage of GNP development (P1), at peak proliferation (P7) and in the first moments of differentiation (P14). The proliferative period of GNP development had few changes in transcript (<5% of all transcripts changed greater than 2-fold, of which 92% decreased), or protein abundance (<4% of all quantified proteins changed greater than 2-fold, 50% decreased). In contrast, GNP differentiation was accompanied by a moderate increase in transcription (<5% changed 2-fold, 86% of which increased) and widespread protein turn-over (31% of the entire proteome changed 2-fold or more, equally up and down). Notably, phosphorylation was highest at P7 (4.9% of the phosphorylation sites increased >2-fold between P1 and P7) but differentiation was accompanied by widespread dephosphorylation (21.4% of the phosphoproteome decreased > 2-fold). The medulloblastoma-like, peak proliferative stage of GNP development was characterized by high levels of phosphorylation of a specific set of proteins which become dephosphorylated upon differentiation. This suggests that increased activity of a particular kinase might played a role in proliferation of GNPs, and by inference, medulloblastoma. Protein kinase CK2 emerged as a driver of hundreds of phosphorylation events during the proliferative, medulloblastoma-like stage of GNP growth, including three of the eight genes commonly amplified in medulloblastoma. I found that CK2 is required for normal GNP proliferation due to its action on two late steps in Hh signal transduction: stabilizing the transcription factor Gli2 and promoting Gli2-regulated transcription. Treatment of highly aggressive human SHH MB cell lines with CK2 inhibitors resulted in a dose-dependent increase in cell death. Furthermore, treatment of medulloblastoma-bearing mice with CK2 inhibitors blocked growth of mouse medulloblastomas resistant to previous hedgehog inhibitors and resulted in longterm tumor regression. This work has now directly led to a phase 1/2 clinical trial investigating the use of the CK2 inhibitor CX-4945 for treatment of SHH medulloblastoma.
Pound-Drever-Hall Frequency Stabilization for Atom Interferometry
Keywords:  Department of Physics
Pound-Drever-Hall Frequency Stabilization
Atom Interferometry
Thesis

We present the development and implementation of a Pound-Drever-Hall laser frequency stabilization system for two lasers for use in a prototype of an atom interferometric gravitational wave detector. Techniques of coupling our lasers into an optical cavity, a measurement of our optical cavity finesse employing an optical cavity transient simulation fit, a measurement of the transfer functions of our stabilization components, a design of our locking circuitry, and our analysis of the lock stability are presented. We also present an outlook describing implementing these stabilized lasers into our larger experimental setup.
Practical applications of variability in thermal tolerance of reef-building coral in a changing climate [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

Natural ecosystems are faced with threats of climate change and rising temperatures and are expected to exceed biological thresholds in many systems in the foreseeable future. However, ecosystems consist of individual organisms that vary in their inherent natural tolerance to changes in climate, in particular to thermal resilience. A better understanding of this variation in resilience is critical to ensure that the services from natural ecosystems persist into future. In this thesis, I focus on thermal tolerance in coral reef ecosystems to explore variability across space (at individual and species levels at small and large geographic scales) and time (through seasonal acclimatization) to better understand how to build resilience in coral reef ecosystems. First, I demonstrate the important role of individual variation of coral colony hosts in reef restoration processes and assess the maintenance of thermal tolerance through two consecutive natural bleaching events in American Samoa. From this work, I characterize simple proxies of thermal tolerance that allowed the identification of resilient individuals before bleaching occurred. I then take a closer look at the gene expression response to acute bleaching stress after two distinct periods of natural seasonal acclimatization in two coral species in American Samoa. I show that a surprisingly small portion of the transcriptome reacts significantly to heat stress in both seasons. After characterizing orthologous regions across the two tested species, I also show that their response to heat stress is similar to each other only after a period of acclimatization to more variable temperatures. I then expand our understanding of the shared transcriptomic response to heat stress to five species of reef-building coral. Using orthologous regions across species, I characterize sets of orthologs that respond across species that bleach, sets of orthologs that respond across species of the same genera, and sets of orthologs that respond in a species-specific fashion. I then test biomarkers characterized in other studies of coral response to heat stress and map them to orthologous regions across species. Using these orthologous regions, I validate sets of biomarkers that detect thermal stress across all five species of coral. Finally, in the coral reefs of Palau, I search for more populations of resilient coral across a broader geographic scale. I show that patch reef environments in Palau have both high and low variability thermal environments similar to those characterized in American Samoa. However, after testing the thermal tolerance of coral from these distinct thermal environments, I show that they do not differ as expected but rather exhibit exceptionally high overall thermal tolerance. Taken together, the dissertation demonstrates the critical role of individual variation in thermal tolerance in understanding and ultimately managing coral response to climate change.