VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Janus [electronic resource] : media access in full-duplex wireless networks
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Single-channel full-duplex wireless is a radio technology that transmits and receives at the same time and on the same frequency band. It is a nascent and exciting field of research that provides new opportunities to greatly improve wireless networks. Traditional wireless systems isolate transmission and reception in time, such as in timedivision duplex (TDD), or in frequency, as in frequency-division duplex (FDD). This is necessary because huge self-interference from the transmitting antenna is usually millions of times stronger than the signal at the receiving antenna and it saturates the receiver analog-to-digital converter (ADC). However, feasibility of full-duplex radios has been recently demonstrated at the physical layer with off-the-shelf components. Since then, there has been a lot of progress towards the goal of suppressing the huge self-interference signal with clever multi-stage cancellation schemes. Existing full-duplex work focuses on the physical layer and has not yet deeply studied its impact on the the MAC layer. There are several proposals that provide simple extensions from CSMA/CA popularly used in WiFi networks, but experiments show that these extensions poorly utilize the full-duplex channel, falling far short of the projected theoretical 2x throughput increase. In order to make the most out of the unique characteristics of a full-duplex physical layer, it is important to design a clean-slate MAC layer. This dissertation presents Janus, a media access protocol for full-duplex wireless local area networks. By allowing nodes to simultaneously transmit and receive on the same band, full-duplex by itself provides at most a 100% throughput improvement over half-duplex networks. Janus demonstrates that a media access control protocol designed especially for full-duplex can allow a network to achieve even greater gains: experimental results with WARP software radios show improvements of 150%. Janus achieves these gains through three mechanisms: inexpensively maintaining real-time interference topology information, centralizing scheduling at access points to use this information while reducing control overhead, and an intelligent scheduling algorithm that maximizes full-duplex cooperations while simultaneously minimizing bitrate reductions from inter-client interference. The effectiveness of such a centralized media access protocol design suggests that full-duplex may benefit from revisiting and rethinking many long-held assumptions about wireless protocol design.
Job-Lock and Health Insurance Premiums: Evidence from the Massachusetts Health Care Reform
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Labor mobility
turnover
health insurance
government policy
Thesis

In this paper, I use the 2006 Massachusetts state health care reform to analyze the effect of a change in the price of individual market insurance on job-lock. I find that lower individual market insurance premiums do not reduce job-lock at levels significantly different from zero. Previous studies of job-lock have not explicitly quantified the relationship between premium prices and job-lock for the aggregate working population. My findings suggest that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, which is largely modeled after the Massachusetts reform, may have a smaller effect on job-lock than originally anticipated.
John Dewey's pragmatic utopianism [electronic resource] : a critical analysis of his views on education, religion, and their influences upon social life
Keywords: Education.

John Dewey (1859-1952) is well known as a founding figure of the American philosophical school of Pragmatism. However, his vision for future social life, especially with regards to the role of education and religion, does not seem to fit comfortably within this philosophical framework. While Dewey believed that the scientific method, a key component of his Pragmatism, if widely adopted and internalized, would usher in a new era for American life, he was also drawn to envision the future in terms that expressed kinship with Utopian and spiritual aspirations that can seem in tension with his Pragmatism. John Dewey's Pragmatic Utopianism: A Critical Analysis of his Views on Education, Religion and Their Influences Upon Social Life examines how Dewey's philosophy, rooted in Pragmatism, contained some characteristics of Utopianism as well. Byway of a careful analysis of some central Deweyan texts including The School and Society (1900), A Common Faith (1934) and Experience and Education (1938), written during two important eras of his career, his tenure at the University of Chicago and during the period immediately following his official retirement from Columbia University, this work demonstrates how Dewey was able to develop a Utopian-inspired vision for future social life in accordance with his philosophical commitment to Pragmatism. This unique approach is best described as Pragmatic Utopianism. Throughout his lengthy career, Dewey brought his Pragmatic Utopianist outlook to bear upon his understanding and vision of the role of education and religious life in improving society.
Joint Decisions and The Allais Paradox
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
couples
pairs
collaborations
Allais
decision making
behavior under uncertainty
experimental economics
Thesis

This thesis discusses an experiment designed to determine whether the famous Allais paradox is robust to changes in the number of agents per decision. That is, if the Allais gambles are presented to two people who can collaborate, will their preferences tend to be less paradoxical? Or will they systematically violate von-Nuemann Morgenstern (vNM) expected utility theory the same way individuals have been shown to do? Making use of short surveys containing Allais and common-ratio examples over small hypothetical payouts, this study compares the preferences of two types of “agents”: the control agent, a single individual, and the experimental agent, a two-person pair making shared decisions. The results indicate that allowing for collaboration generates a statistically significant reduction in the number of violations of vNM expected utility. Such findings are interpreted as evidence that people in teams tend to gravitate toward an expected utility approach because it facilitates the joint decision-making process.
Judicial criticism [electronic resource] : performance and aesthetics in Anglo-American copyright law, 1770-1911
Keywords: Theater and Performance Studies.

With the appearance of performing rights--the right to perform a theatrical or musical work--in nineteenth-century Anglo-American copyright law, performance became a commodity. The law, as the creator of that commodity, exercised the power to define both what performance was and how to value performance, economically and aesthetically. "Judicial Criticism: Performance and Aesthetics in Anglo-American Copyright Law, 1770-1911, " explores litigation, legislation, and contemporary debates to trace the emergence of legal theories of theater and music and to document how those legal theories altered artistic and commercial practices. Through close readings of performing rights lawsuits, I interrogate the development of the performance-commodity, the abstract dramatic or musical work defined by copyright law. The appearance of performing rights shifted the discourse of performance from personal and political spheres to the economic realm. Jurists worked diligently to reconcile claims about a performance's aesthetic value with its economic value. In the process, they theorized ontologies of drama, worried over the inherently public nature of performance, and parsed how contributions by actors affected a work's success. I offer evidence of how performing rights laws influenced theater-making, best evinced by the phenomenon of the "copyright performance" and the rise of literary drama. And I consider how and why performing rights laws developed in markedly different fashions for theatrical and musical performances. Narrating the law's slow development, I document performance's incongruous relationship to commodity capitalism at the moment copyright law wrote performance into that system.
Kant's moral anthropology [electronic resource]
Keywords: Philosophy.

Kant sometimes argues that all interest of reason in its worldly or cosmopolitan sense comes down to four questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is the human being? Fundamentally, however, the first three questions, Kant tells us, fundamentally come down to the last one. Furthermore, in his ethical philosophy, Kant insists on a philosophical division of labour, and he divides ethics into morality [Moralität] and what he refers to as a practical or moral anthropology [practische/Moral Anthropologie]. Notwithstanding his insistence about the centrality of anthropology for his philosophical vision, many scholars have tended to either neglect his anthropological works entirely, arguing that Kant does not have a conception of the human being at all. Others have claimed that because it is a largely empirical science, anthropology is a side-project, for Kant, and moreover one that is inconsistent with the critical philosophy. Contra many traditional interpretations of Kantian philosophy, this dissertation develops an interpretation of Kant's moral anthropology and argues that anthropology is not only consistent with the critical philosophy, but that it is also the most fundamental component of Kantian philosophy.
The key to happiness depends on how you ideally want to feel and the activities you engage in [electronic resource]
Keywords: Psychology.

Does wanting to feel happy alter your likelihood of actually feeling happy? Empirical answers to this question are mixed, in part because they do not differentiate among the different types of happiness that people ideally want to feel (e.g., excitement vs. calm) or among the types of activities people engage in (e.g., exciting vs. calming). To address these limitations, we conducted four studies in which participants recalled (Study 1) and actually engaged in (Studies 2-4) exciting and calming activities. Across studies, we found support for the "enhancement" hypothesis when people valued calm states: the more participants valued calm states, the more they recalled enjoying calming (but not exciting) events (Study 1), and the more they anticipated and actually enjoyed calming activities (amusement rides and exercise) immediately after (on-line) and several days later (recalled) (Studies 2-4). The findings for valuing excitement, however, were mixed: the more participants valued excitement, the more they recalled enjoying exciting (but not calming) events (Study 1) and the more they anticipated enjoying an exciting amusement park ride (Study 3). Valuing excitement, however, was not significantly correlated with on-line or recalled enjoyment of exciting activities (Studies 2-4). These findings suggest that valuing calm (and engaging in calming activities) may be an easier path to enhancing happiness than valuing excitement.
Kinase-regulated stabilization of beta-catenin at mitotic centrosomes [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

[Beta]-Catenin is a multifunctional protein with critical roles in cell-cell adhesion, Wnt-signaling and the centrosome cycle. Whereas the roles of [beta]-catenin in adhesion and Wnt-signaling are well understood, how [beta]-catenin regulates the centrosome cycle is not. NIMA-related protein kinase 2 (Nek2), which stimulates centrosome separation, binds to and phosphorylates [beta]-catenin. Using in vitro and cell-based assays, we show that Nek2 phosphorylates the same regulatory sites as Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3[beta] (GSK3[beta]) in the N-terminus of [beta]-catenin (S33/S37/T41) as well as additional sites. Significantly, Nek2, not GSK3[beta], is responsible for phosphorylating [beta]-catenin at centrosomes. Nek2 binding promotes [beta]-catenin stability by inhibiting binding of the E3 ligase [beta]-TrCP to [beta]-catenin, thereby preventing [beta]-catenin ubiquitination and degradation. Thus, [beta]-catenin phosphorylated by Nek2 on S33/S37/T41 accumulates at centrosomes in mitosis. We further show that Plk1 regulates Nek2 activity in stabilizing [beta]-catenin. Taken together, these results identify a novel mechanism for regulating [beta]-catenin stability, and provide new insight into a pathway involving Plk1, Nek2 and [beta]-catenin that regulates the centrosome cycle.
Lanekeeping at the limits of handling [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.

Approximately one-third of fatal vehicle crashes in the United States involve a collision with a fixed object in the environment as the first harmful event. Lanekeeping assistance systems, designed to help the driver avoid unintended lane departures, have the potential to directly prevent these accidents. Automakers have begun to offer such active control systems, which use either the steering or the brakes to help guide the vehicle back into the lane if it begins to veer out. These systems are intended to be used during "normal" driving, and are either limited or completely shut off in highly dynamic situations, when the tires might be sliding relative to the ground due to a limited amount of available friction. This is far from ideal since the driver arguably needs more assistance when the vehicle is operating at the limits of handling, not less. In order to improve vehicle safety beyond what is currently offered, lanekeeping assistance should be extended beyond "normal" driving scenarios. This requires guarantees that the system will operate in a stable and predictable manner even in the presence of highly saturated tire forces. Finding such guarantees is the focus of this dissertation. One particular lanekeeping system, based on the idea of a virtual potential field, is used for discussion in this dissertation. It applies a steering input to the vehicle and seeks to control a combination of the vehicle's lateral and heading errors, which are measured relative to a desired path. In order to analyze this system's stability at the limits of handling, a method for including tire saturation in the vehicle model is required. By formulating the nonlinear tire force as a scaled version of the force in the linear tire region, the impact of the friction limits on the vehicle dynamics can be analyzed independently of a particular nonlinear tire model. Then, a Lyapunov-based approach for finding regions of guaranteed stability is used to show stability up to and beyond the peak of the tire curve. In addition to analyzing the potential field lanekeeping system, a framework for designing other lanekeeping feedback controllers with guaranteed stability at the limits of handling is presented. Results from a by-wire research vehicle are also included to experimentally demonstrate stability in the presence of highly saturated tires. While the focus of this dissertation is on lanekeeping assistance systems, the methods presented could also be used to design and analyze other types of driver assistance systems and vehicle control algorithms.
The largest ever spectroscopic survey of [gamma]-ray blazars [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics.

This thesis reports on new optical spectroscopy of nearly 500 Fermi blazars---over 150 Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars (FSRQs) and over 300 BL Lacertae Objects (BL Lacs) drawn from the First and Second Fermi LAT AGN Catalogs. Including archival measurements (correcting several erroneous literature values) we have spectroscopic redshifts for 62% of the LAT AGN (46% of the BL Lacs). We establish firm lower redshift limits via intervening absorption systems and statistical lower limits via searches for host galaxies. This provides redshift constraints for an additional 49% of the BL Lac sample leaving only 5% of the BL Lacs unconstrained. Photometric monitoring and triggered large telescope spectroscopy is shown to improve these limits, but redshift identifications remain challenging. The new redshifts raise the median spectroscopic z of the BL Lacs from 0.23 to 0.33 and includes redshifts as large as z=2.2. Spectroscopic absorption limits have < z> = 0.70, showing a substantial fraction at large z and arguing against strong negative evolution. We find that detected BL Lac hosts are bright ellipticals with black hole masses ~ 10^{8.5-9} M_sun, substantially larger than the mean of optical AGN. The FSRQs have smaller virial estimates of black hole mass than the optical quasar sample. This appears to be largely due to a preferred (axial) view of the gamma-ray FSRQ and non-isotropic (H/R ~ 0.4) distribution of broad-line velocities. The power-law dominance of the optical spectrum extends to extreme values, but within the BL Lac class, this does not strongly correlate with the gamma-ray properties, suggesting that strong beaming is the primary cause of the range in continuum dominance. This substantially complete survey provides new opportunities for understanding the evolution of supermassive black holes and their spins over cosmic time; this LAT sample also helps elucidate the blazars' contribution to, and probes of, the cosmic extragalactic backgrounds.
L-band InSAR estimates of Greenland Ice Sheet accumulation rates [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

The Greenland Ice Sheet contains nearly 3 million cubic kilometers of glacial ice. Were the ice to completely melt, that would cause the sea level to rise about 7 meters. Each year, the ice sheet gains ice from snowfall and loses ice through iceberg calving and other ablation mechanisms. Thus assessing the ice sheet's mass balance (annual net gain/loss of ice) requires accurate spatial mapping of accumulation rates (mean annual snowfall). In this thesis, we examine how recent satellite radar remote sensing data can be used to supplement in-situ accumulation rate estimates in the inner regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet. We present a method using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data to obtain estimates of snow accumulation in Greenland. InSAR is a technique that provides images of the Earth from radar data collected by a spacecraft. We show that the second-order phase statistics (coherence) of InSAR images is related to subsurface structure, which, in the inner dry-snow zone of the Greenland ice sheet, is related to accumulation rate. We have implemented software to form and geocode InSAR images of Greenland and correct for ionospheric inhomogeneity, which has limited the accuracy of longer-wavelength measurements of the Earth's polar regions. We developed a model to relate accumulation rate to InSAR measurements. By inverting the model we obtain estimates of Greenland ice sheet accumulation rates. We show a comparison of our results with in-situ measurements over a 1,400 km strip spanning the entire dry-snow zone, and demonstrate that they follow the in-situ measurements more accurately than state-of-the-art results derived from radar amplitude measurements alone.
Learning networks in biological systems [electronic resource]
Keywords: Applied Physics.

Learning networks from experimental evidence is an important problem to understand many biological systems. With the help of recent technological developments, such as high dimensional flow cytometry and gene expression arrays, a large amount of quality data are available for the task. Many different approaches exist, to model and learn biological networks from such data. Among those, we have developed methods for probabilistic models and differential equation models. The first part of this paper will cover our research on the Gaussian network model learning and its application to recover signal transduction networks. We develop a fast algorithm to learn Gaussian networks from data, based on a novel heuristic. We show that this algorithm can be extended to handle difficult situations such as non-Gaussian noise as well as limited number of simultaneous measurements. The performance of the algorithm against the standard alarm network is showed. Finally we apply the method to learn signal transduction networks from single cell level multi- channel flow cytometry data. We show that the method can recover networks with limited number of channels and non-Gaussian measurement noise. The second part will cover our research on the dynamical model of gene regulation. In this model, gene regulation is represented with differential equations in rational forms. We show that this type of model is able to reflect complex behaviors of gene regulation, compared to other existing models. Reconstucting the structure and parameters of such dynamical model is not triv- ial, given that limited measurability of gene expression. We develop a novel method to recover networks from measurements at so-called perturbed equilibrium. We show that this method can reconstruct gene regulatory networks with well-established ex- perimental designs. Model benchmark based on simulation data will be presented.
Learning to take turns on time [electronic resource] : perception and production processes involved in keeping inter-speaker gaps short
Keywords: Linguistics.

Across human cultures children learn language through their interactions with caregivers and peers. These early interactions, whatever form they take, are the basis for children's linguistic development, and result in something we universally recognize as human language. Children's linguistic development depends on their simultaneous acquisition of language use skills, and here I present my work on one such skill: turn-taking. Turn-taking is a requisite skill for conversation that patterns similarly across cultures: interlocutors switch between one turn and the next in less than 200 ms on average. This quick timing in a back-and-forth turn structure forms a perfect framework for contingent action, allowing us to achieve fine-grained behavioral coordination and mutual estimations of common ground via rapid feedback and conversational repair. A turn-based framework is key to our interactive efficiency, but it also shapes children's language-learning environments. Children begin to take turns (of a sort) long before their first words, but their mastery of turn-timing is a protracted process during which their responses are significantly delayed in comparison to adults. In a series of studies focusing on the production and perception of speech by adults and children ages 1-6, I explored the development of turn-taking skill and its relation to linguistic development. I found that turn-timing is intimately linked to children's linguistic development. Both in their production and perception of conversational speech, children become sensitive to different types of exchanges as they acquire new linguistic knowledge. Advances in their syntactic and prosodic knowledge during development result in a non-linear trajectory of turn-timing over their first few years. I discuss the implications of this tight relationship between linguistic processing and turn-structure, both for language learning and predictive processing during adult online language comprehension. By focusing on a signature property of human conversation, the ultimate goal of this research is to better conceptualize how the fundamental principles of human interaction shape human language use and structure.