VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Orders and disorder in high-temperature superconductors [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics.

Strongly correlated electronic systems have stimulated numerous developments in theoretical frameworks, numerical tools, and experimental techniques. One group of materials that have been attracting meticulous efforts is the high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors, not merely due to its large transition temperature, but also because it offers a well characterized laboratory for the study of exotic phenomena such as quantum criticality and non-Fermi liquid behavior. One pressing question in the field is the role played by disorder: inevitable in real materials, disorder is able to fundamentally alter the properties of system under certain circumstances. This thesis studies, from a theoretical point of view, how disorder affects various electronic orders in several model high-Tc superconductors, in particular copper-based high-Tc materials (cuprates). Various recent experiments in these materials are readily interpreted in light of our results.
The origins and requirements of the duty to promote justice [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science.

This dissertation addresses a simple moral question that is often taken for granted in political theory: do citizens have a duty to promote political justice through their political actions and in their everyday lives? Furthermore, if they do, what kind of a duty is it, and how does it relate to other moral duties they may have? Many theorists, including Bernard Williams, Bonnie Honig, William Galston, Raymond Geuss, Jeremy Waldron, and Marc Stears argue that politics is a unique sphere governed by its own standards and logic, meaning that guidance about such matters cannot come from our everyday intuitions about morality. Richard Posner and others go even further than this, arguing that citizens do not have any duty at all to promote justice or the common good through their political activities, denying that it is realistic or even desirable for them to base their political choices on anything but purely self-interested motivations. In my dissertation, I mount a principled defense of the duty to promote justice against such criticisms. First, I argue that it is not unrealistic to think citizens may be motivated to promote the common good through their political actions. In fact, I claim, this norm is already widespread among citizens, though it is often misidentified or mischaracterized as being grounded on self-interest. Second, I argue that this motivation may find a philosophical justification in the ordinary kinds of moral obligations we hold towards others in our daily lives. Citizens are enmeshed in a range of authoritative and non-optional legal orders from which they may benefit or under which they may be burdened, and over which they may often exert (or attempt to exert) a degree of influence in common with others in society. These laws and institutions deeply affect the interests of others, and I argue that by attempting to change them, individual citizens are effectively "doing things to others" to whom they hold direct moral duties. Therefore, we might view the focus on establishing more just laws and institutions as a necessary substitute for the impossible moral calculus that would be required if they were to carry out a complete pairwise moral justification of choices and actions from each individual to every other individual.
Overburdened: How School Nurses Struggle to Meet Health Needs of Students
Keywords:  Department of Communication
Stanford University Department of Communication
Master's in Journalism Program
school nurse
public education
California
student health
pupil health
Thesis

Blood glucose testing, carbohydrate counting and insulin administration are common tasks for a majority of the registered nurses in Redwood City School District. Diabetic care, however, is but one of many medical conditions being managed by the nursing team, made up of five registered school nurses serving 7,951 students across 16 elementary and middle school campuses in Redwood City.
The dynamic found in Redwood City represents a trend facing school districts across the country to varying extents. Gone are the days of school nurses solely doing vision screenings and doling out Band-Aids.
As the medical needs of students have increased – including conditions such as diabetes, asthma, food allergies and seizure disorders, the ability of the school nurses to cover the health needs of all students has become more difficult.
In 2010 California ranked 42nd in the nation for nurse-to-student ratio with 2,187 students per school nurse, according to the National Association of School Nurses. In 2015, the average statewide ratio of nurses to students grew to 2784 to 1, but the ratios vary widely among districts, according to KidsData.org.
The overriding power of ought nots [electronic resource] : evidence from microfinance for why some types of hybrid organizations fail to achieve comprehensive performance
Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.

Prior work suggests that when organizations are faced with multiple performance demands, performance is diminished unless it is concentrated on only one set of those demands. However, recent scholarship on "hybrid" organizations describes organizations that arrange to simultaneously fulfill multiple types of demands. Do hybrid organizations tend to achieve comprehensive performance on more than one demand at once? In this dissertation study, I use quantitative and qualitative methods to address the question of hybrid organizational performance in the context of microfinance. Microfinance is an industry where small, "micro" loans are given to borrowers in extremely low income situations, often with the intent to lift the recipient out of poverty. For qualitative study, I review secondary resources and perform numerous informal interviews with industry affiliates, complete semi-structured interviews with 38 industry affiliates, and analyze keyword frequency patterns in 1,339 organizational mission statements. For quantitative analysis, I compare the performance of non-hybrid and hybrid organizations relative to two types of demands (social and financial), by analyzing 10,069 firm years of data from 1,640 organizations in the microfinance industry over the past fifteen years. In this industry, two types of hybrid and two types of non-hybrid organizations regularly report both their social and financial performance. These industry characteristics allow for testing hypotheses related to hybrid organizational performance and for investigation of a key contingency. I develop a theoretical model which proposes that when a hybrid organization combining two logics is dominated by a logic that is negatively valenced (i.e., repulsed by) its counterpart logics, then hybrid organizational performance will tend to be diminished. When a hybrid organization is dominated by a logic that is positively valenced (i.e., attracted to) its counterpart logic, then the organization will tend to achieve more comprehensive performance. Empirical study of informal interviews, semi-structured interviews, mission statements, and annual performance data largely corroborate the theoretical model. This study's findings have implications for hybrid organizations combining multiple logics, for organizations reconciling social and financial performance, and for organizations dealing with various other combinations of multiple, concurrent demands.
Palo Alto Civic Notes
Keywords:  Department of Communication.
Journalism
Search
CivicTech
Palo Alto
California
Thesis

City Council and other public meeting notes offer a trove of information informing a city’s history, development, and actions. Taken together, they can map a timeline of development projects and legislation. However, this longitudinal perspective is difficult to obtain unless one is actively following a project because the meeting minutes and agendas are posted as individual PDFs and, in its current form, is difficult to perform a full-text search on. If I wanted to search for the city’s recent actions with relation to Palantir or follow the development of an affordable housing project, I would either have to know in advance which city council meetings were related to the query in question or skim through the entire trove of meeting minutes to find what I am looking for. Luckily, technology provides us with a solution.
Parallel education and the reproduction of inequality [electronic resource]
Keywords: Sociology.

Recent research has unexpectedly revealed that the largest gaps in academic performance occur in more socioeconomically advantaged communities and school districts (Reardon, Kalogrides and Shores 2017). In this dissertation, I ask: How do students become "high-performing" students in elite (public) high schools? And, how do the strategies that students use to excel academically affect students across the class spectrum? To answer these questions, I draw on a case study of a high-performing, well-resourced high school that I refer to as Willow Creek. The data come from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 72 in-depth interviews with high school students and key informants, including teachers, staff, administrators, and parents. Analysis of the data reveals the mechanisms that support the stratification system that operates within the school. I show that performance is tied to access to parallel education—which I define as private educational activities (such as tutoring and counseling) that families obtain from sources outside the school and that become institutionalized via the school environment. Parallel education is a mechanism that drives the divergence in academic outcomes by class and exacerbates within-school inequality in well-resourced, high-performing public schools.
Passive seismic study of a magma-dominated rift [electronic resource] : the Salton Trough
Keywords: Geophysics.

In this PhD thesis I study earth's crustal and upper-mantle structure in southern California, focusing on the magmatic structure beneath Salton Trough transtensional rift basin in southernmost California. Seismic data was collected with a temporary array of seismometers deployed across the basin and its margins, and augmented with seismic data recorded on permanent and other temporary seismometer arrays throughout the western U.S.A.. I use ambient-noise tomography to create a 3D shear-velocity model of southern California's crust and upper-mantle. The new 3D model reveals previously unimaged structure beneath the San Andreas Fault, Peninsular Ranges batholith, southern Sierra Nevada batholith and the Salton Trough, with implications on the geologic and tectonic history of the region. I use shear-wave splitting of seismic waves, caused by anisotropic upper-mantle structure beneath the Salton Trough, to show evidence of a sharp rheological boundary in the upper-mantle beneath the Salton Trough region, at the southwest limit of the San Andreas Fault system, and infer the presence of upper-mantle melt-filled inclusions oriented parallel to transform motion on the San Andreas Fault.
Pathway discovery and engineering of pharmaceuticals from medicinal plants [electronic resource]
Keywords: Chemical Engineering.

It is estimated that a quarter of prescribed medicines from industrialized countries are inspired or directly derived from plant small molecules. Owing to their structural complexity, large-scale synthetic methods do not yet exist for most of these plant-derived pharmaceuticals. Instead, they are extracted directly from natural sources. Industrial farming of medicinal plants, however, is susceptible to pests, diseases, and climate fluctuations, which can result in unreliable supply. In addition, many medicinal plants are difficult to cultivate and are critically endangered. One promising alternative is the engineering of faster growing organisms, such as microbes or the development of chemoenzymatic processes to produce these natural products. However, knowledge about their biosynthetic pathways -- the collection of enzymes required to produce these molecules-- is limited. Traditionally, pathway discovery in plants has been slow due to the complexity and size of their genomes, proteomes, and metabolomes. However, in the last decade, due to recent technological advances, there has been a surge in genomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic datasets, which have provided valuable insights into plant metabolism. Here, we will present our strategy towards accelerated pathway discovery in medicinal plants, combining these new insights and more recent advances in next-generation sequencing with high-resolution mass spectrometry and a plant (tobacco) heterologous expression platform. First, we will describe our efforts in characterizing the dirigent protein family in Arabidopsis thaliana, which we suspect are involved in the biosynthesis of many unknown plant natural products that may have interesting biological activities. Second, we will describe the discovery of six enzymes from the Himalayan Mayapple for the biosynthesis of the etoposide aglycone, a precursor to the clinically used anticancer agent, etoposide. With these discovered enzymes, we engineered a non-native plant to produce this compound and other non-natural derivatives that cannot be easily accessed by chemical synthesis. Third, we will describe the elucidation of enzymes for the biosynthesis of the ester side chain of homoharringtonine, a drug used in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia. Lastly, we present the identification of several biosynthetic enzymes involved in the production of colchicine, a medication for the treatment of gout. This work demonstrates the efficacy of our approach towards pathway discovery in non-model plants, and enables future efforts in the engineering of alternative biological platforms for the biosynthesis of these plant-derived pharmaceuticals.
Pencils of fermat hypersurfaces and Galois cyclic covers of the projective line [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mathematics.

Let $Z$ be a smooth intersection of two degree $ Fermat hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{P}^n$, and let $\pi:X\rightarrow \mathbb{P}^1$ be the pencil of hypersurfaces containing $Z$. We show that the irreducible $\mathbb{Q}$ sublocal systems of $\mathbf{R}^{n-1} \pi_*\underline{\mathbb{Q} }_X$ arise from monodromy of the Galois cyclic covers of $\mathbb{P}^1$. This can be viewed as a higher degree analog of M.\ Reid's result on the correspondence between smooth intersection of two quadrics and hyperelliptic curves.
Perceptual and social realism in virtual reality [electronic resource] : the effect of immersion on children's psychological responses
Keywords: Communication.

This dissertation examined the potential effects of immersive technology, like virtual reality, (VR) on young children's everyday lives. An experimental study tested the effect of technological immersion (VR versus TV) on 4-to-6-year old children's inhibitory skills, approach behaviors toward an embodied agent, and their perception of the character as a live social actor. In addition, children's emotional distress, physical distress, visual perception of the characters, and enjoyment of the virtual environments were assessed.
PetMe: Sharing Digital Pets, Building Real Collaboration Skills
Keywords: Tablet
Game
Children
Collaboration
Pet
Communication
Two-Player
Social-Emotional Learning
Learning Design and Technology
Graduate School of Education
Thesis

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is critical for student success. We created PetMe, a tablet game for children ages 6-8, to provide much-needed instructional materials for schools. In this two player game, children take care of a shared pet. They learn how to navigate their different perspectives and empathize with the pet’s problems in an effort to collaboratively reach their shared goal of solving the pet’s needs. Along the way, the players are taught to express their points of view and work toward resolving conflicts.
Petro-elastic interpretation of seismic impedances [electronic resource]
Keywords: Geophysics.

Success in petroleum exploration and production is closely linked to correct estimation of the properties of the subsurface. Yet, the state-of-the-art technology lacks a robust deterministic approach to integrate different physical measurements, especially if their scales are different (e.g., well versus seismic data). Such consistent integration can help in interpreting seismic data for as yet unknown petrophysical properties and conditions. I have created a new methodology to estimate the rock properties (porosity and clay content) at the seismic scale from the seismically-derived impedances: petro-elastic interpretation. The basic concept behind this methodology is a rock physics phenomenon known as self-similarity where both the P- and S-wave impedances depend on the same combination of the porosity and clay content. By examining well data, I have found that this effect often does not hold, hence allowing two elastic measurements to determine two petrophysical unknowns. This discovery allows me to go from the seismic-scale impedances to desired rock properties. I tested this methodology on a dataset from NW Australia, where the interpretation results, when compared to blind-test data, fell within acceptable error bars. The first step in this methodology is to connect two procedures: rock physics diagnostics and simultaneous seismic impedance inversion. Rock physics diagnostics is a method to find the rock physics model that quantitatively describes the measured well data. Simultaneous seismic impedance inversion uses the information from well and seismic data to obtain the elastic properties that satisfy both. The second step is to take the inversion results (P- and S- wave impedances) and interpret them together to obtain the porosity and clay content at the seismic scale. One implication of this methodology lies in the importance of S-wave velocity correction and prediction, highlighting its critical role in the accurate estimation of the subsurface properties.
Physics and applications of a plasma deflagration accelerator [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.

Pulsed, gas-fed plasma accelerators are known to operate in a mode that is characterized by ultra-high velocity, collimated plasma jets known as a ``plasma deflagration.'' Despite a degree of continuous scientific attention over several decades, both the basic underlying physics and the complex dynamics that contribute to the formation and evolution of these jets remains poorly understood. The high energy densities and inherently transient nature of these pulsed systems make for a challenging diagnostic environment, and offer an array of both physical questions and potential applications that are the focus of this dissertation. This work concerns the experimental investigation of several aspects of a pulsed plasma accelerator operated in the deflagration mode. Particular focus is given to physics governing the formation and subsequent behavior of the collimated outflowing jet, whereas prior studies have primarily engaged with the acceleration process in the inter-electrode region of the plasma gun. Three main diagnostics were implemented and are discussed, each with the aim of characterizing a specific feature of the plasma accelerator. First, an immersed probe was used to simultaneously measure multiple magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) and thermodynamic state variables at a single point in the plasma flow in order to experimentally test the MHD Rankine-Hugoniot model for plasma deflagrations and detonations. Spectroscopic methods were then applied to quantify the plasma density distribution in the near-field of the accelerator plume, using a high-resolution imaging spectrometer to spatially and spectrally resolve a transaxial slice of the plasma emission from the jet. A radial density profile was computed from the spatial variation of the observed spectral line broadening. A laser schlieren imaging apparatus was then developed, and combined with a high speed camera to capture the evolution of the plasma density structure within the jet during the entire discharge period. Finally, various applications of the deflagration-produced plasma jets were considered, including space propulsion, plasma-material interactions, and laboratory astrophysics. All three of the developed diagnostics were used, alone and in combination, to characterize the deflagration accelerator as applied to these areas. This work represents a comprehensive investigation of the detailed physics of a complex and practically useful plasma accelerator, and improves our theoretical understanding of its operation and performance.
Physiological and genetic requirements for water perception driving lateral root hydropatterning [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

Water is necessary for all known forms of life. Due to their sessile lifestyle, land plants employ an array of physiological and developmental responses to enhance uptake of water from the environment and limit its loss in times of water deficit. These responses occur at several spatial scales of organization, including at the level of single cells, multicellular tissues, organs, and organ systems. Despite the importance of these acclimatory processes to plant survival, the mechanisms of water perception upstream of acclimation responses are poorly understood. To gain a better understanding of these processes, I performed experiments to examine the genetic and physiological basis for hydropatterning, a recently discovered developmental response to water availability. During hydropatterning, lateral root branches are induced in regions of the main root directly contacting sources of available water, and are inhibited in regions exposed to low water availability. I used hydropatterning as a model to understand water perception in plants using two experimental strategies. In my first approach, I asked whether developmental competence to respond to water was limited, and if so, what biological processes were required to establish competence. Through a combination of physiological and mathematical-modeling experiments, I revealed growth to be a requirement for competence, and demonstrated that growth-associated changes in tissue biophysical properties were predictive of future lateral root patterning decisions. In my second approach, I sought to identify genetic loci required for hydropatterning. I uncovered phenotypic variation in hydropatterning through a mutant screen and a survey of natural maize accessions, and identified a 1-Mb interval of the maize genome associated with this phenotype. I conclude with a discussion of how my findings will inform future studies on water sensing, and what key experimental and technological advances will be necessary to move this field forward.