VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019: Revisiting Indian Secularity
Keywords:  Public Policy Program
Public Policy
India
Citizenship Amendment Act
CAA
NRC
NPR
Indian Muslims
CAA protests
Assam
Detention centers
Secular
Indian Constitution
India-Pakistan Partition
1947
Thesis

When the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) was first introduced in the Indian parliament on December 2019, protests erupted all over India over the perceived non-secular nature of the proposed bill. Despite the outrage, India passed the legislation rendering it the official status of Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019.
The main beneficiaries of this act are illegal immigrants of certain minority religious faiths from neighboring Islamic countries, who fled to India to escape religious persecution in their own countries. This act accelerates their path to Indian citizenship thereby securing a safe life in India as citizens with freedom to practice their religion without any fear.
However, it is the first time that religion has featured prominently in an Indian legislation, thereby sparking unrest among indigenous population, especially more so because it excludes Muslims. Additionally, it possibly negates the efforts of the border states in North East India, that have been battling the issue of infiltration of illegal immigrants for decades.
As the protests continue in India despite the COVID19 crisis, this thesis aims to analyze this act in the context of the Indian constitution and secularity, the history and perspective of the people in the North Eastern states and Indian Muslims, and the impact its implementation could possibly have all across the country.
Clinging to Power: British Economic Policy and Political Coercion in Egypt, 1930-1952
Keywords: Program in International Relations
Egypt
Britain
economic policy
politics
political coercion
archival research
empire
Thesis

By the onset of the Great Depression, the British Empire was in decline. As a result, the British government began to seek new methods to continue exerting British power and influence in strategically important regions overseas without risking confrontation or revolt.
What were these “new methods” of control, and to what extent were they successful? My thesis studies the interplay of British economic and political power in Egypt between 1930 and 1952 and examines how the British used economic policy to maintain political influence in Egypt during this time. Egypt constitutes a unique case among the regions most crucial to British imperial strength due to the defensive importance of the Suez Canal and the strength and coherence of its nationalist movement, which offered a singular challenge to British imperial power.
By relying on qualitative analysis of British archival records, I find that the British employed economic policy in two ways: when political negotiation was not possible, and when the government needed to cover up the political damage of its actions. In the 1930s, economic and political relations between the two countries were favorable enough that the British were willing to offer economic concessions to achieve their political goals in Egypt. Yet during and following the Second World War, the British dropped the guise of goodwill and began to impose changes by force, hoping that economic compromises offered after the fact would forestall any serious backlash from the Egyptians over this political interference. However, these cover-up methods ultimately failed, setting the stage for Egyptian revolution in 1952.
Coarse-grained, semiflexible copolymer behavior with applications to heterochromatin
Keywords: Physics.

The properties of polymer materials can vary widely and depend on their organization and the identity and interactions of their monomers. By requiring many monomers to occupy adjacent spatial locations, the connectivity of a polymer amplifies relatively weak monomer interactions. In this thesis I use theoretical and computational techniques to predict the resulting phase behavior and structure. These techniques use the wormlike chain model to incorporate the structural rigidity of the polymer backbone and use coarse-graining to capture the interactions. A semiflexible polymer backbone coupled with a repulsive Flory-Huggins interaction between blocks of a random copolymer causes frustration in the microphase segregation of the monomer types. The resulting phase diagram and structures can be adjusted by varying the statistics of the random sequence and the polymer rigidity. When the interactions depend on the orientation rather than identity of the monomers, a liquid crystal phase forms. I calculate the Frank elastic constants for liquid crystal solutions of wormlike chains that interact via a Maier-Saupe type interaction. A particular focus is devoted to the application of polymer physics techniques to the biological system of chromatin. An HP1-H3K9me3 interaction model of heterochromatin is found to be capable of explaining features of Hi-C data and aid in the interpretation of ChIP-seq data. This interaction is used to provide a density-based physical explanation for the prevalence of peripheral heterochromatin
Cognitive Development and Stimulating Parenting Practices: A Comparative Study of Infants and Toddlers in Rural China
Keywords: Infant and toddler cognitive development
infant and toddler stimulation
stimulating parenting
rural China
Stanford Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education and International Education Policy Analysis
Thesis

Recent studies have found that children living in rural communities in China display substantial rates of cognitive delay. Low rates of stimulating parenting practices are one of the major contributors toward cognitive delay in children. This article compiles datasets from three Chinese provinces to explore the ways stimulating parenting practices relate to cognitive development, and the roles that family socioeconomic status (as measured by household assets), primary caregiver type, caregiver educational attainment, and geographic location play in cognitive delay. The results of our multivariate regression analyses reveal that there is a significant negative relationship between household assets and cognitive scores, as well as between stimulating parenting practices and cognitive scores. Additionally, our findings indicate that children of better educated caregivers and children born and raised in one particular province (Hebei) are exposed to significantly more frequent stimulating parenting practices and demonstrate higher cognitive abilities. Variables such as child age and sex are not statistically significant in our study.
Coherent synchrotron radiation effect mitigation studies for high brightness beams/accelerators
Keywords: Applied Physics.

Many particle accelerator applications today call for high-brightness electron beams. In this dissertation, research is described on the mechanisms driving self-radiating forces arising from high-brightness beam environments and the mitigation of such forces. In the first half of the dissertation, we will focus on quantifying the Coherent Synchrotron Radiation (CSR) Effect for various accelerator scenarios. New expressions for the CSR RMS energy spread are developed for transient regime with and without bunch compression and for the subsequent drift section after a bend. The expressions are rigorously tested with the particle tracking codes ELEGANT and CSRTrack [14, 15]. In the latter half, we will take a particular focus on the final-stage bunch compression systems of linacs for X-ray free-electron lasers (XFEL), where these self-forces are prevalent, and introduce a new bunch compressor chicane design: the 5-Bend chicane. The new chicane's performance is compared versus a standard 4-Bend chicane in terms of emittance preservation and XFEL performance in a comprehensive simulation study. Though the work presented here pertains to the XFEL linac environment, the physics and techniques can be applied to any sort of accelerator involving high-peak current, low-emittance charged particle beams
Colloidal design of active, selective, and stable catalysts for methane utilization
Keywords: Chemical Engineering.

Due to recent advances in locating and extracting natural gas resources, scientists in academia and industry are looking for new processes to take advantage of methane as a chemical precursor and fuel. However, there remain significant challenges in methane utilization; these are related to the strength of methane's carbon-hydrogen bonds, which makes this molecule difficult to activate and utilize. Without a catalyst, methane activation necessitates very high temperatures (~1000 oC), which lead to high energy costs, advanced infrastructure, toxic by-products, and poor product selectivity. Our work focuses on developing catalysts with well-defined structural properties to understand what makes materials active, selective, and stable for methane transformations. To understand which specific nanostructures are best for methane activation, size- and composition- controlled Pt/Pd nanocrystals were designed and studied to reveal the effect of catalyst structure on methane activation. Here, we discuss the effect of these unexplored parameters on methane activation rates, resistance to common catalytic poisons, and changes in oxidation state -- each of which has an important role in contributing to low-temperature activity. Perhaps the greatest challenge in methane activation is selective product formation. In this area, we studied how tuning catalyst support can help selectively produce valuable products (synthesis gas) rather than typical combustion products (carbon dioxide and water). Additionally, we started looking at even more unique nanostructures, involving both organic and inorganic components, for selective methane transformations. The high temperatures needed to activate methane require stable catalysts. By taking advantage of modular colloidal catalyst assembly, we demonstrated synthetic approaches to tune, and measure, the spatial properties of nanocrystal active sites. We found that in many conditions, the spatial properties of active sites determined catalyst stability. In Pd/Al2O3 materials we observed that closer nanocrystals are more stable, in a distant-dependent degradation process. However, in Pd/SiO2 materials we found the opposite - that stability properties are largely distant-independent. Overall, by developing colloidal approaches to catalyst synthesis, we created well-defined catalysts with precisely-controlled sizes, compositions, and spatial properties, which have helped us uncover important design rules for active, selective, and stable methane transformations
Combating tumor heterogeneity with early cancer detection and immunotherapy
Keywords: Bioengineering.

Tumor heterogeneity refers to the existence of clonal subpopulations of cells within and between neoplastic lesions and is an important driver of tumor progression, resistance to therapy, and relapse. Precision medicine offers one strategy of combating tumor heterogeneity by using genetic information about these subpopulations to inform personalized therapy. Despite notable successes, the degree of heterogeneity in tumors is often too great for this "drug cocktail" approach to be effective, and patients frequently develop refractory or relapsed disease. Here we present an alternative approach to precision medicine, arguing that tumor heterogeneity can best be addressed by either (1) avoiding its emergence with early cancer detection or (2) combating it with equally heterogeneous therapies that leverage the naturally diverse repertoire of the adaptive immune system. To this end, we describe four technologies that address key limitations in the fields of early cancer detection and cancer immunotherapy. Beginning with early cancer detection, we first address the problem of biomarker scarcity by engineering an intravascular system of magnetic enrichment capable of collecting circulating cancer biomarkers from the entire blood volume. We continue by asking how we can overcome low signal-to-noise ratios in cancer liquid biopsies, and we present a method of enriching rare mutant alleles in cell-free DNA to enable more sensitive mutation detection. Acknowledging that there are inherent limitations to early detection using endogenous biomarkers, we also present an engineered immune cell sensor for ultrasensitive tumor detection in living subjects. Finally, we consider how we can leverage the body's natural immune diversity to theoretically cover all neoplastic clonal subpopulations. Using chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy and epitope spreading as an example, we present a method of delivering ectopic surface antigens to malignant cells to generate a universal approach to adoptive cell therapy in solid tumors. The approaches detailed in this thesis provide a conceptual framework for how to strategically approach translational cancer research and can inform continued efforts towards reducing the global burden of cancer
Comment est-ce que Maurice Barrès essaie de convaincre ses lecteurs de l’importance du nationalisme dans son livre Les Déracinés ? Une analyse littéraire, psycholinguistique et philosophique
Keywords:  Department of Symbolic Systems
nationalism
Thesis

Dans ce mémoire, j’explore les manières par lesquelles Maurice Barrès convainc ses lecteurs de la validité de sa vision du nationalisme. La thèse est que Maurice Barrès utilise le contraste entre le désir des sept lycéens lorrains d’aller à la capitale de la France et leurs malheurs à Paris pour discréditer l’éducation républicaine et démontrer l’importance de garder nos racines régionales, celle-ci est son idée du nationalisme français. Ce mémoire emploie les analyses littéraire, psycholinguistique et philosophique.
Competition, pricing, and product entry in markets with costly search
Keywords: Business.

In the first chapter of this paper, I study how much consumers benefit from new products in markets with information frictions. I analyze new products in the U.S. hard drive market, a market with ample product innovation. Using unique browsing data, I measure the magnitude of two frictions, limited consideration and costly search, and show that both play a crucial role in shaping consumer demand. Omitting these frictions from analysis makes the researcher underestimate consumer surplus from new hard drives, as it appears that consumers do not like the attributes these hard drives offer. Partly eliminating frictions substantially increases consumers' ability to benefit from new hard drives. In the second chapter, I study the estimation of preference heterogeneity in markets where consumers engage in costly search to learn product characteristics. Costly search amplifies the way consumer preferences translate into purchase probabilities, generating a seemingly large degree of preference heterogeneity. We develop a search model that allows for flexible heterogeneity in preferences and estimate its parameters using a unique panel dataset on the search and purchase behavior of consumers. The estimation results reveal that when search costs are ignored, the model overestimates standard deviations of product intercepts by 68%. We show that the bias in heterogeneity estimates leads to incorrect inference about price elasticities and seller markups and has important consequences for targeted marketing
The complexity of optimization beyond convexity
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Gradient descent variants are the workhorse of modern machine learning and large-scale optimization more broadly, where objective functions are often non-convex. Could there be better general-purpose optimization methods than gradient descent, or is it in some sense unimprovable? This thesis addresses this question from the perspective of the worst-case oracle complexity of finding near-stationary points (i.e., points with small gradient norm) of smooth and possibly non-convex functions. On the negative side, we prove a lower bound showing that gradient descent is unimprovable for a natural class of problems. We further prove the worst-case optimality of stochastic gradient descent, recursive variance reduction, cubic regularization of Newton's method and high-order tensor methods, in each case under the set of assumptions for which the method was designed. To prove our lower bounds we extend theory of information-based oracle complexity to the realm of non-convex optimization. On the positive side, we use classical techniques from optimization (namely Nesterov momentum and Krylov subspace methods) to accelerate gradient descent in a large subclass of non-convex problems with higher-order smoothness. Furthermore, we show how recently proposed variance reduction techniques can further improve stochastic gradient descent when stochastic Hessian-vector products available
Composing social dynamics
Keywords: Music.

The performance-installation one to one (2018-20) presents music as a dynamic, social interaction--a site to forge connections via entrainment. It is an intimately staged sequence of three pieces, each for one performance and one audience member at a time. Interpersonal entrainment describes how human beings mutually adapt to and coordinate with one another over time. These processes facilitate pro-social effects across a variety of activities, including music making. In one to one (2018-20), I contribute novel resources (i.e. conceptual frameworks, situative scoring strategies, heuristics) for creative practice, means of composing social dynamics, which nuance and expand the field of performer-audience interactions. Nonverbal communication studies offer the (quasi-)periodic cues performers attend to in each audience member. Interpersonal entrainment describes the dyadic micro-dynamics that unfold between them--reframing musical rhythm in social terms. By reciprocating each audience member's attentional and behavioral rhythms in a sensitive, co-operative manner, the performers offer exercises in empathetic imagination
Computational and empirical exploration of the interaction between semantics and pragmatics in vague language
Keywords: Gerstenberg, Tobias, degree supervisor
Psychology.

Some language is straightforward to interpret, regardless of the context. Other language is more vague, and requires a context in order to reach a concrete interpretation. This work is focused on formal models of vagueness in language, which requires a joint inference about the person's intention (i.e. what information they're trying to convey) and the meanings of the words they are using in this context. In this work, we present several empirical and model explorations of how people use vague language. We provide experimental exploration of how the particular prior expectations and numeric amounts in sorites paradox lead to different endorsements of the premises. We show how a simple extension of an RSA scalar adjectives model quantitatively predicts endorsement levels for sorites premises. We further modify this adjective model to account for intensifying degree adverbs, and demonstrate a surprising prediction of this model: that the form and meaning of intensifying degree adverbs are closely related, with intensifier degree proportional to utterance cost (where cost can be approximated by length of phrase or in inverse frequency). Finally, we apply principles of pragmatic reasoning to the meanings of different periphrastic causal expressions and compare the predictions of two pragmatic models to participants forced choice responses. Much of language is inherently vague, and so in order to communicate, people must reason over uncertainty about the particular meanings of their words in context. This leads to surprising inferences and relationships between utterances under standard logical approaches to semantics, which can be explained by pragmatic principles of communication
Computational flame propagation studies in support of launch vehicle risk assessment
Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Understanding how flames propagate in a failure scenario and the associated risk is important to many different fields, including hydrogen storage facilities, mines, and other relatively confined industrial settings, but the focus here is launch vehicles. Large, uncontained, explosive failures occurring in the engine bay of space launch vehicles and resulting from the unwanted release, mixture, and ignition of a fuel source, pose a significant risk to the crew, surrounding personnel, and equipment. Explosions in these failures involve complex physical phenomena and the flame propagation can be extremely sensitive to specific conditions at the time of ignition, for example, confinement and congestion. The combination of complex physics, potentially complicated geometries, and flame sensitivities make blast environments very difficult to characterize. There are three main options for characterizing the environment for use in risk assessments, including physical experiments, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, and engineering-level blast models. Low cost (time, money, resources) engineering models are the most practical option for a probabilistic approach, but insight from experiments and CFD studies are needed to inform and develop the models. The goal of this work is to use CFD simulations to better understand various flame propagation mechanisms and sensitivities to different parameters. The results will be used to support the development of physics-based probabilistic risk assessment models leading to guidelines for designing safer launch vehicles. The work was broken into two main computational studies, each with several substudies analyzing the effects of varying different parameters. The first study focused on mechanisms of deflagration to detonation transition in confined, obstructed flows, and found that scenarios with limited non-bluff obstacles, limited points of ignition, and lower initial pressure, density, and temperature reduced the risk of detonation initiation because these factors all reduced the potential for large flame accelerations. The second study focused on the influence of underlying flow parameters on deflagration flame propagation, and found that characterizing the underlying flow is important because scenarios with features in the flow tend to cause local flame deformations and acceleration, increasing flame speed and overpressure and changing the potential risk. Parameters like vorticity magnitude and invariants of the velocity gradient tensor may be effective indicators in the model for when local acceleration is likely to take place. All of the approximately 35 cases considered between the two studies were chosen to represent possible scenarios in rocket engine bays, and the insight developed will lead to improved launch vehicle risk assessments