VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Using interferometric synthetic aperture radar data to improve estimates of hydraulic head in the San Luis Valley, Colorado [electronic resource]
Keywords: Geophysics.

Remotely sensed Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) deformation data have recently been used to study confined aquifer systems in urban/arid areas. The deformation measured at the surface by InSAR is a consequence of changes in hydraulic head in the underlying confined aquifer system. Deformation in agricultural areas, such as the San Luis Valley, Colorado, is difficult to measure using InSAR because changes in the height of the vegetation can degrade the measurement by altering the positions of individual radar scatterers. Nonetheless, agricultural areas like the San Luis Valley are of great interest because of the link between the groundwater resources and the local economy. The San Luis Valley is an 8000 km^2 valley, located mostly on the northern side of the Colorado-New Mexico border. The valley has a vibrant agricultural economy that is highly dependent on the effective management of limited water resources. State regulation established that hydraulic head levels within the confined aquifer system should be maintained within the range experienced in the years between 1978 and 2000. Effective management of water resources in the San Luis Valley requires both seasonal changes in hydraulic head as well long term trends during this time period. In this study we had three main goals: 1) to determine if high quality InSAR data can be collected in the San Luis Valley, 2) to determine the uncertainty of the InSAR deformation measurements, and 3) to determine to what extent the InSAR deformation data can be used to improve estimates of hydraulic head in the San Luis Valley. We found that high quality InSAR data could be acquired from the San Luis Valley. Many small areas, left unwatered by the center-pivot irrigation systems, yield high quality InSAR data when processed using Small Baseline Subset analysis. The InSAR deformation measurements showed the same seasonal periodicity as the hydraulic head data from monitoring wells. The next step in our research was to more accurately determine the uncertainty in the InSAR deformation measurements. We developed a novel algorithm that uses supplementary hydrologic data to identify InSAR acquisitions whose measurements may have been corrupted with uncertainty due to atmospheric phase effects. We then proceeded to quantify the uncertainty in the InSAR deformation measurement due to decorrelation of radar signals. In the final chapter of this work we explored ways in which the relationship between InSAR measured deformation and measurements of hydraulic head can be combined to increase the spatial and temporal density of hydraulic head measurements in the confined aquifer system. We found that at three well locations where the changes in hydraulic head were sufficiently large and the aquifer sediments were relatively compressible the InSAR deformation measurements can be reliably used to estimate hydraulic head during times when no well measurements were acquired.
Using the past to imagine the future [electronic resource] : the TAZARA railway, 1925-1976
Keywords: History.

This dissertation explores the self-referencing and reiterative nature of development planning through an historical investigation into fifty years of development debates that preceded the construction of the Tanzania-Zambia (TAZARA) railway. The railway connects the Zambian copperbelt with the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam. It was first conceived in the colonial period and built after independence with Chinese technical and financial assistance. Chinese engineers were only the last in a long line of development planners who were inspired by the prospect of building this railway. The first two chapters of this dissertation explore the meaning of the debates that enveloped railway surveys in two iterations of British-led development planning during the colonial era, from 1925 to 1930 and from 1946 to 1952. The second two chapters move to examine how African development planners and nationalist politicians revived the project after independence, exploring the processes by which a colonial development project was rehabilitated to become a nation-building project worthy of mass appeal and popular effort. The result is a project-based history of development planning in and for colonial and postcolonial Tanzania and Zambia that reveals not only the multi-valence and mutability of development planning, but the intersections and interconnections between successive development planning exercises. Analysis of the long history of development planning associated with one project reveals how developers' future-looking orientation does not preclude attention to the past. However much the newly-independent governments of Zambia and Tanzania sought in the 1960s to mark a distinct break from colonial-era policies and politics, their rhetorical erasure of the past hardly precluded strategic use of knowledge produced in the name and expectation of development during colonial rule. Each iteration of the TAZARA project returned to the development archive associated with it, re-inflecting and re-framing its contents to serve drastically different political imperatives. This dissertation shows the ways in which, at the level of the project, "the past" has proved technically expedient, politically useful, and central to development planning as an intellectual and practical enterprise. It shows how development planners marshaled the past, and, like historians, made selective use of the development archive, reinterpreting and translating its contents to craft arguments that bolstered their personal views on how and why the railway should or should not be built and, ultimately, what future they sought for the region. The uses of history were multiple and mutable -- changing at each stage not only according to the exigencies of the speaker but also shaped by the rapidly changing political and economic contexts into which development debates at each period were embedded. Studying the history of development planning in colonial and postcolonial Tanzania and Zambia reveals how developers use the past to imagine the future.
Utilizing polarized stomatal lineage proteins as tools for understanding mechanisms of cell polarity and cell fate determination in plants [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

Organisms utilize asymmetric cell division, in which a mother cell produces two daughter cells with distinct identities, to define cell fates, renew stem cells, and create patterning. A fundamental component of asymmetric cell division is the establishment and maintenance of polarity. This complicated task often requires defining plasma membrane domains as well as cellular machinery to target and capture polarized proteins. Establishment and maintenance of animal cell polarity relies on conserved molecular players but plants lack homologues for the genes that encode these conserved polarity components. As sessile organisms, cell polarity is a crucial mechanism employed by plants to adapt their development to environmental conditions. Since plants and animals independently developed multi-cellularity, it is likely that plants created their own solutions to generate cell fate diversity. The study of stomatal development provides a tractable system to study plant cell polarity and the events that determine cell fate. Stomata are tiny pores formed by pairs of guard cells on the epidermal surface of plant tissues that regulate gas exchange between the plant and surrounding atmosphere. Stomatal development in Arabidopsis requires asymmetric cell divisions to create and maintain a stem cell population, produce differentiated cells, and control the "one- cell spacing" pattern of stomata. A forward genetic screen identified BREAKING OF ASYMMETRY IN THE STOMATAL LINEAGE (BASL), a novel, polarized and asymmetrically inherited protein required for divergent cell fates following asymmetric cell division (Dong et al, 2009). In basl mutants, daughter cells often adopt the same fate, size and shape. BASL displays a dynamic pattern of subcellular localization in stomatal lineage cells; it is polarized at the membrane prior to asymmetric division and then unequally inherited into the larger sister cell. Proteins that physically interact with BASL, the BREVIS RADIX (BRX) family, also localize in coincident polarized domains of stomatal lineage cells. The work presented in this dissertation utilized BASL and BRXL2 as tools for understanding plant cell polarity and cell fate. Genetic, pharmacological, and quantitative cell biological techniques suggested that BASL and BRXL2 are actively maintained in polarized domains of stomatal lineage cells and that the cell wall plays a role in the maintenance process. Reporters expressing BASL and other stomatal lineage proteins were built to explore how cell identity feeds back on the establishment of polarity and to monitor developmental transitions of these polarized cell types. Finally, a role for BASL outside of the stomatal lineage, in asymmetrically dividing cells of the root, was identified.
La vanguardia feminista [electronic resource] : Pan-American feminism and the rise of international women's rights, 1915-1946
Keywords: History.

From 1915 to 1946, a vibrant movement of feminist activists and organizations from throughout the Western Hemisphere not only helped secure women's civil, political, and economic rights in the United States and Latin America but also advanced the creation of international "human rights." Drawing on research from over twenty archives in the United States, Uruguay, Cuba, and Chile, this dissertation is the first sustained, transnational study of Pan-American feminism. It charts the movement through its six most influential activists: Paulina Luisi (Uruguay), Ofelia Domínguez Navarro (Cuba), Clara González (Panama), Doris Stevens (United States), Bertha Lutz (Brazil), and Marta Vergara (Chile). Some well-known, others largely forgotten, these women, all recognized as national feminist leaders in their day, played a pivotal role in the creation of a movement for women's international rights. Their efforts propelled national campaigns for the vote, for equal work and equal pay, and for maternity legislation. They also created the first inter-governmental organization of women in the world, the Inter-American Commission of Women (1928); the first international women's rights treaty in the world, the Equal Rights Treaty (1929); and, later, the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women (1946). These activists were vanguards as well in their agenda for "equal rights, " which reached beyond the narrow focus on equal political and civil rights ascribed by the U.S. National Woman's Party. Rather, Latin American feminists shaped the meaning of Pan-American feminism by pushing a broad "equal rights" agenda that included not only political and civil rights but also social and economic welfare and multi-lateralism. At times, U.S. dominance hindered Latin American leadership in inter-American feminist organizations, but conflicts over these power dynamics resulted in a Pan-American feminism that bore the profound ideological stamp of Latin American regional politics when activists explicitly denounced imperialism and insisted on a more multi-lateral world. Culminating in the 1945 conference in San Francisco that created the United Nations, these Pan-American feminists played crucial roles in constructing the founding principles of international human rights.
Visual propaganda, popular culture, and nation-state building in Argentina under peronism (1946-1955) [electronic resource]
Keywords: Art and Art History.

This dissertation explores the visual program that post-war Peronist Argentina generated and standardized from 1946 to 1955 through the visual and conceptual analysis of the propaganda volume La nación Argentina: justa, libre, soberana (1950), the fourth-grade textbook La Argentina de Perón (Perón's Argentina, 1954), the second-grade schoolbook Ya sé leer (I Already Know How to Read, 1954), and a representative selection of black and white photographs drawn from the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires. Since Peronist cultural artifacts and its propaganda visual program emerged at the intersection of governmental policies of modernization, the struggle of avant-garde practices to counteract the encroachment of popular culture, and the regime's endeavors to intensify a process of nation-building and at the same time open itself to international markets, this dissertation also examines the cultural and political axes that buttressed Peronism. Peronism basically employed a set of conservative visual strategies, such as the iconographical repertoire of children's literature, and the narrative and visual techniques drawn from 1920s American advertisement, and from cinematic melodrama borrowed from the content of Hollywood-type movie fan magazines. It also appropriated the photographic conventions from both earlier studio photographs—which formally portrayed royalty or Argentinean heroes—, and from press pictures that depicted Argentinean presidents participating in political events. This dissertation demonstrates how Eva and Perón built a successful political empire upon the relationship between public relations, propaganda efforts and visual resources.
Volume Preserving Sinusoidal Muscles for Surface Skinning
Keywords: Computer Science.
Computer graphics
Human body > Computer simulation
Thesis

The problem of modeling and animating realistic humans is well known in computer graphics. In particular, it has been difficult to arrive at a skinning method that allows for realistic skin deformation during motion. In this thesis, I outline the development of a volumetric muscle model that can be embedded within a skin mesh to induce realistic, physics-based deformation during simulation. These volumetric muscles are layered on top of a dynamic framework of linear, segment-based muscles that drive the underlying skeletal structure. The result is an integrated system that supports
realistic skin deformation along a specified target motion.
Water in the Milan of Alda Merini, Daria Menicanti, and Milo De Angelis [electronic resource]
Keywords: French and Italian Literature.

This dissertation is a literary, cultural, historical, and ecocritical study of the role water has played in the specific urban environment of the city of Milan. It traces an innovative cultural history of the canals of Milan and claims that the citizens feel a conflicted and visceral bond with water and that the canals are a physical monument to nostalgia. A close-reading of the work of three contemporary poets, where the use of liquid images is connected to each poet's specific vision of Milan, provides examples of that nostalgia, which stems from a desire to keep alive a type of citizenship deeply tied to the canal. This dissertation aims to define and view critically the 'mythology of water' that for many centuries has shaped the city of Milan, its geography, its culture and its literature.
What goes bump in the hall [electronic resource] : the ghost critical field and Gaussian superconducting fluctuations
Keywords: Applied Physics.

In this thesis we study disordered two-dimensional superconductors. We examine both the nature of superconducting fluctuations in these films, and also the effect of disorder on the normal and superconducting states. In the first part of this work, we will examine in detail the growth and characterization of ultra-thin, disordered tantalum nitride (TaN) films. By tuning the film growth conditions, we are able to deposit amorphous superconducting films that lie on the edge of the metal-insulator transition. We study disorder-enhanced antilocalization at nonzero temperature, and extract electron scattering lifetimes, dephasing rates, and superconducting materials parameters. As these films become sufficiently disordered, the superconducting ground state gives way to purely insulating behavior. Using transport techniques to investigate this zero temperature superconductor-insulator phase transition, we show evidence for classical percolation scaling and a superconductor-to-Fermi insulator scenario in TaN. Finally, we compare measurements of the Hall effect across the superconductor-insulator transition with companion work on indium oxide films, and find evidence for a metal-insulator crossover in the high-field insulating state at zero temperature. The second part of this work examines superconducting fluctuations. In a superconductor above its transition temperature Tc, short-lived regions of local superconductivity known as fluctuations can dramatically affect both thermodynamic and transport properties. Fluctuations are strongly enhanced in systems of reduced dimensionality, such as in a thin films, and remain incompletely understood in both conventional superconductors as well as in more exotic materials. For example, the importance and extent of superconducting fluctuations within the ``pseudogap'' phase of high-Tc superconductors are not fully understood. Recent Nernst effect measurements of high-Tc and conventional superconductors have tentatively identified a characteristic magnetic field for the suppression of fluctuations, but such a field has not been identified in the Hall effect or explained quantitatively. We present new measurements of the fluctuation-enhanced Hall effect in a disordered thin film. Above Tc, we can describe this enhancement quantitatively using new time dependent Ginzburg Landau theory results. We can also track the fluctuations to temperatures below Tc, and I will compare this evolution with independent measurements of the upper critical field Bc2, and the ``Ghost Critical Field, '' a field analogous to Bc2 above Tc. We find that the enhancement in the Hall effect represents a distinct magnetic field scale from Bc2 and the Ghost Critical Field, and I will contrast these results with other experimental work in the field.
What neighborhoods signal about race [electronic resource] : norms of racial residential segregation, biological conceptions of race, and preferences for same race neighbors
Keywords: Psychology.

Forty-five years after racial residential segregation was outlawed, we might expect America's neighborhoods to be fully integrated. Segregation, however, persists. Across five studies, I explore how the prevalence of segregation can fuel its own perpetuation by setting powerful descriptive norms. In Study 1, when participants were exposed to information about high rates of residential segregation in the United States, they conformed and expressed significantly stronger preferences for same race neighbors than those exposed to low rates of segregation. Further, this normative information changed individuals' conceptions of race. In Study 2, learning that segregation is common, rather than uncommon, caused participants to endorse a more essentialized or biological conception of race. This conception of race as biological was itself significantly associated with preferences for same race residential contact in Studies 3 and 4. Further in Study 5, I demonstrated that biological conceptions of race can cause preferences for racially segregated neighborhoods. This work illustrates that physical arrangements of racial groups within residential spaces can shape preferences for social contact with members of different races and can signal how essential race is as a category.
When policy and rights collide [electronic resource] : a case study of right-to-health litigation in Colombia (1991-2012)
Keywords: Law.

In this dissertation I provide an empirically based account of the trajectory of right-to-health litigation in Colombia during the past twenty years (1991-2012). Focusing on several critical junctures of this trajectory and drawing from the results of multi sited fieldwork, I reconstruct how a set of stakeholders (policymakers, judges, litigants, activists and pharmaceutical companies) spurred the surge of right-to-health litigation in Colombia, which according to recent estimates is the highest among middle-income countries. Additionally, I explore how a set of structural judicial remedies handed down by the Colombian Constitutional Court in 2008—ruling T-760/08—addressed the institutional determinants of the surge of right-to-health litigation and nudged policymakers in the direction of health-care reform.
Why flimsy frameworks lead to behavior change for stuck individuals [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

Organizations have access to over 3,500 documented frameworks. Even more frameworks develop regularly to proliferate within organizations. I define a "flimsy framework" as a framework that individuals would not expect a priori to be able to achieve its stated goal. Traditionally, it has not been clear why flimsy frameworks propagate in organizations. Some researchers have suggested it is due to the momentum of having an early success streak. I argue that flimsy frameworks may propagate precisely because they are flimsy and non-threatening. Before experiencing a framework, individuals expected a flimsy framework to be less effective than either no framework or more substantial frameworks (Studies 1a and 1b). However, after experiencing a framework, individuals that were stuck on their projects achieved a different actual result. A flimsy framework led stuck individuals to put more effort into their projects than did no framework or more substantial frameworks (Studies 2-4). This effect can be explained by the fact that the flimsy framework decreases the degree to which taking an action feels overwhelming (Study 4). Taken together, this research demonstrates that individuals underestimate the expected effectiveness of a flimsy framework. Because flimsy frameworks feel non-threatening, such frameworks disinhibit individuals that are stuck into moving forward on their projects.
Women navigating fertility goals and multiracials navigating partnership [electronic resource] : three papers examining inequality in the family domain
Keywords: Sociology.

This dissertation features three papers examining inequality in the family. The first paper, published in Demography 49(4): 1433-1452, uses data from the National Survey of Family Growth (2002) to examine race and education differences in the likelihood that women have ever used particular forms of hormonal birth control and have ever stopped using hormonal birth control because of dissatisfaction. The second paper, conditionally accepted at Gender & Society, draws on interviews with 88 women from the College and Personal Life Study to demonstrate the importance of cultural messages about gender in women's understandings of the seriousness of particular hormonal birth control side effects. The final paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine attitudes about the importance of race in partnership and the likelihood of having a black marital or cohabiting partner among multiracial and monoracial people in the United States.