VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Magical Orality in Tess Uriza Holthe’s When the Elephants Dance
Keywords:  Department of English
magical realism
magic
orality
trauma
Filipino-American literature
miseducation
World War II
Manila
Battle of Manila
Holthe
imperialism
Japanese colonization
Stanford University
Department of English
Thesis

Nearly half a century after the end of World War II, Filipino-American author Tess Uriza Holthe brings to life the near-forgotten history of the Battle of Manila in her 2002 novel, When the Elephants Dance. Through an illumination of character systems in relation to "magical orality," Pacio demonstrates how Holthe's reclamation of memory serves to disrupt traditional historical portrayals and create an entirely new narrative of the revolutionary history of the Philippines.
Magnetic resonance angiography using non-Cartesian trajectories [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a versatile medical imaging modality that provides excellent soft-tissue contrast without ionizing radiation. Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) is a type of MRI that is specifically aimed to image blood vessels, and is a powerful clinical tool for the diagnosis and management of arterial diseases. Various techniques can be used for MRA to produce bright blood signals while suppressing background signals such as muscle and fat. This dissertation describes two MRA methods that use non-Cartesian k-space trajectories to improve the contrast between the arterial signals and the background signals while achieving shorter scan times than conventional approaches. The ultimate goal of this work is to make MRA more clinically practical and reliable in terms of scan time and diagnostic image quality. The first method is a non-contrast-enhanced peripheral MRA sequence using a 3D concentric cylinders trajectory. The concentric cylinders are acquired in a sliding interleaved manner over a series of thin slabs. Concentric cylinders enable improved scan time efficiency while providing less noticeable artifacts from k-space amplitude modulation compared to a conventional Cartesian sequence. The thin-slab-scan nature of the proposed sequence and the centric-ordered sampling geometry of concentric cylinders are exploited to implement efficient fluid-suppression and parallel imaging approaches. In vivo experiments in healthy subjects and a patient with arterial stenosis demonstrate that the proposed method can provide improved artery-vein contrast even with slow arterial flow. The second method is a first-pass contrast-enhanced coronary MRA sequence using a 2D spiral-ring trajectory. In addition to the speed inherited from a regular spiral trajectory, the spiral-ring trajectory is capable of effectively capturing transient contrast generated by the first-pass contrast agent. The centric-ordered structure of the spiral-ring trajectory is exploited to efficiently generate time-resolved datasets, which makes the sequence more robust to the variation of the timing of contrast bolus and more flexible to capture different contrast fillings in different coronary branches. In vivo experiments in healthy subjects and patients demonstrate that the proposed method can provide improved blood-muscle contrast within a single breath-hold.
La Mamelle [electronic resource] : early Bay Area conceptual performance art and the alternative art archive
Keywords: Theater and Performance Studies.

La Mamelle: Bay Area Conceptual Performance Art and The Alternative Art Archive examines the La Mamelle/Art Com archive. This project frames the relation between conceptual performance art and the alternative art space movement of the 1970s as deeply co-productive in terms of aesthetic development, engagment with new media, and the advancement of collaborative and participatory art practices. I historicize La Mamelle's production of various sites for the exhibition of performance art. These sites include alternative print publications, video and televisual productions, social networks, and the archive. While tracing this relation between conceptual performance and its spaces of emergence, I redress the dominant focus on New York and European neo-avant gardes in performance art history through an inclusion of West Coast conceptualists. Ultimately, I argue for creative models of archival research through what I describe as 'performative archiving.'.
Mandibular mechanics uncover patterns of dietary evolution in Eulipotyphlan mammals
Keywords:  Department of Biology
Biology
Eulipotyphla
Mechanical Potential
Thesis

Mammalian orders that are highly speciose in the modern day tend to be comprised of species covering a broad range of feeding behaviors, as indicated by a diverse dentition. Yet the order Eulipotyphla, which includes the shrews, moles, and hedgehogs and relatives, all have teeth adapted for shearing, despite dietary specialization of the Eulipotyphlan families. To test the hypothesis that Eulipotyphlans pursue an alternative pathway to achieving dietary diversity by altering the amount of force they can apply with their jaws, I sampled specimens from across the order, photographing mandibles and measuring their mechanical potential, a metric of bite force. I found that there is highly significant between-family variation in mechanical potential in Eulipotyphlans; I also found this between-family diversity is tied to prey hardness. Further, there is high phylogenetic signal of mechanical potential, agreeing with family-specific results. To broaden my analyses, I compared the mechanical potential of modern Eulipotyphlans to two fossil groups: (1) two species of the earliest known mammaliaform fossils, which were also insectivorous and lived during the Jurassic, and (2) extinct stem-group Eulipotyphlans that lived in the Paleocene. My results tentatively suggest increasing bite force from the Jurassic to the Paleocene, such that these insectivorans appear to have adapted to apply greater force, possibly an adaptation to pierce through harder insect carapaces, thereby accessing a broad niche. This paper presents the first quantitative analysis that spans all of the families in the order, including one of the most recently extinct mammalian families, the Nesophontidae, and contributes to a growing body of biomechanics-based knowledge on mammalian dietary patterns.
Manipulating light absorption in ultrathin semiconductor layers for optoelectronic applications [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

The achievement of strong light absorption in ultrathin layers of material has been of great scientific and practical interest for many years. The realization of ultra-thin strongly-absorbing layers can increase performance, reduce fabrication and materials cost of many thin-film optoelectronic device applications, including next generation solar cells, solar fuel generation and ultrathin photodetectors. In this thesis, we have demonstrated how to attain strong light absorption in the ultrathin layer of active materials in both theory and experiment. We have achieved this goal by harnessing two fundamentally different skills of light trapping based on the ray optics or wave optics. The first approach of ray optics utilizes geometric light traps that configure the substrate into the form of V groove and increase optical path length. We briefly mentioned this skill in chapter 2 by applying it to the organic solar cells to improve device efficiency. The second approach of wave optics relies on the resonance effect of nanostructure to concentrate light in the nano-scaled volume of material. We assembled these resonant building blocks into the form of array configuration to realize ultrathin strongly absorbing layer. The second approach is explained in most part of this thesis with detailed sub-skills. Specifically, we exhibited two different designing strategies for wave optics light trapping, the wavelength scaled design (in chapter 3) and the subwavelength scaled design (in chapter 4 & 5). We analyzed the two designing strategies in terms of their conceptual and physical differences and applied each to particular applications. The first designing strategy is applied to the solar fuel generation by nanostructuring photocatalysts materials to facilitate hydrogen generation rate. And the second strategy is demonstrated by designing germanium metafilm absorber for general optoelectronic applications. In addition to the specific examples demonstrated above, these light absorption methods can be used in the more general ultrathin optoelectronic applications such as diverse solar energy harvesting devices, photodetectors, and even light emitting devices by efficiently extracting light.
The marriage of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson [electronic resource] : an inquiry into spousal poetics
Keywords: English.

Though Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman spent their lives unwed, their afterlives have never been free of marital vows. Take Whitman, who—having ducked an early proposal from Anne Gilchrist, a widowed, English admirer—finds himself the imaginary suitor to Ronald Johnson and Hart Crane. Dickinson, however, on account of her perceived seclusion, prompts us not to thoughts of consummation, but of extended courtship. In the following study I investigate how marriage and weddings permeate the core poetry in question, before exploring the marital permutations in the afterlives of Walt and Emily. Marriage serves as both subject matter and metaphor, leading me to such texts as Edward Weston's photographs for a 1941 Leaves of Grass (made with Charis Wilson, his new, and soon to be ex-, wife); the poetry of same-sex weddings; Jerome Charyn's daring novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010); Joyce Carol Oates's short story "EDickinsonRepliLuxe" (2008); and Paul Di Filippo's peculiar steampunk novella, "Walt and Emily" (1995), where the titular characters fall in love.
Masks, Origins, and Copies in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker
Keywords:  Department of English
Lee
trauma
trauma theory
Asian American
poststructuralism
Thesis

Published at a time when the Los Angeles Riots remained fresh in America’s mind, Chang-Rae Lee’s novel, Native Speaker, skyrocketed to critical acclaim. Kim’s paper explores how Native Speaker navigates the implications of belonging and control over a narrative. This research focuses on how the narration of a traumatic moment can become an entry point for understanding the narrator’s agency, and what such readings might illuminate in transnational literatures.
A matched pair, cluster randomized, controlled trial of a novel film intervention designed to motivate earthquake-resistant construction in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal [electronic resource]
Keywords: Geological and Environmental Sciences.

A 20-minute documentary film was created to accelerate the rate at which Nepalese communities retrofit or rebuild their local public school buildings to be life-safe in the event of a major earthquake. It features local Nepalese as role models who have already strengthened their schools, and is based on the theory of communicating actionable risk, diffusion of innovation theory, and social cognitive theory. Public schools in Kathmandu Valley with buildings in need of seismic work were assessed for eligibility in the study. Of these, 16 were selected and matched into 8 pairs based on seismic condition of the buildings. One school in each pair was randomly assigned to see the intervention film and the other to see an attention placebo control film on an unrelated topic. Pre and post observations were recorded from 761 adult participants, using a questionnaire created for this purpose. Comparisons between the two groups of schools were made with the school as the unit of analysis. When compared to the control schools, the schools whose community members saw the retrofit intervention film statistically significantly increased their: 1) knowledge of specific actions to take in support of earthquake-resistant construction, 2) belief in the feasibility of making buildings earthquake-resistant, 3) willingness to support seismic strengthening of the local school building, and 4) likelihood to recommend to others that they build earthquake-resistant homes. This outcome suggests that employing a film featuring community members who have already taken the desired action increases factors that may accelerate adoption of risk reduction actions by others who are similar to them.
Mean field games with common noise [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mathematics.

Mean Field Games (MFG) are a limit of stochastic differential games with a large number of identical players. They were proposed and first studied by Lasry and Lions and independently by Caines, Huang, and Malhame in 2006. They have attracted a lot of interest in the past decades due to their application in many fields. By assuming independence among each agent, taking the limit as N goes to infinity reduces a problem to a fully-coupled system of forward-backward partial differential equations (PDE). The backward one is a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation for the value function of each player while the forward one is the Fokker-Planck (FP) equation for the evolution of the players distribution. This limiting system is more tractable and one can use its solution to approximate the Nash equilibrium strategy of N-player games. In this thesis, we consider the MFG model in the presence of common noise, relaxing the usual independence assumption of individual random noise. The presence of common noise clearly adds an extra layer of complexity to the problem as the distribution of players now evolves stochastically. Our first task is proving existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium strategy for this game, showing wellposedness of MFG with common noise. We use a probabilistic approach, namely the Stochastic Maximum Principle (SMP), instead of a PDE approach. This approach gives us a forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE) of McKean-Vlasov type instead of coupled HJB-FP equations. This was first done by Carmona and Delarue in the case of no common noise and we extend their results to MFG with common noise. We are able to extend their results under a linear-convexity framework and a weak monotonicity assumption on the cost functions. In addition to wellposedness results, we also prove the Markov property of McKean-Vlasov FBSDE by proving the existence of a decoupling function. In the second part of this thesis, we consider MFG models when the common noise is small. For simplicity, we assume a quadratic running cost function while keeping a general terminal cost function satisfying the same assumptions as in the first part. Our goal is to give an approximation of Nash equilibrium of this game using the solution from the original MFG with no common noise, which could be described through a finite-dimensional system of PDEs. We characterize the first order approximation terms as the solution to a linear FBSDE of mean-field type. We then show that the solution to this FBSDE is a centered Gaussian process with respect to the common noise. By assuming regularity of the decoupling function of the 0-MFG problem, we can find an explicit solution showing that they are in the form of a stochastic integral with respect to the common noise with the integrands adapted to the information from the 0-MFG only. We then are able to compute the covariance function explicitly.
Measurement and interpretation of travel-time shifts in the context of time-distance helioseismic detection of meridional flow [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

The role of meridional flow in maintaining the solar dynamo and differential rotation in the solar convection zone is not well understood and is currently under scrutiny. Traditional flux-transport dynamo models have posited the well known single-cell meridional flow with poleward flow at the photosphere and equatorward flow near the base of the convection zone. However, recent investigations seem to be revealing a discrepant picture of meridional flow which is at least double celled in the radial direction. In this work standard time-distance helioseismic techniques are modified and used to probe the solar convection zone to accurately determine the structure of meridional circulation. Helioseismology is a powerful tool for measuring the structure and flows on the solar surface and within the solar interior. It uses the photospherically visible aspect of (acoustic, surface-gravity) waves, that propagate and interfere throughout the Sun to form standing oscillation modes, as probes to make inferences about the structure and flows on the solar surface and interior. Time-distance helioseismology is based on measuring the travel-times of wave-packets moving between distinct points on the solar surface. Specifically, travel-time shifts obtained by calculating the difference in the travel-times of counter-propagating waves between pairs of points on the solar surface yield information about flows throughout the Sun. In this work time-distance helioseismic techniques are applied on artificial as well as solar velocity images to detect travel-time shift signals due to meridional flow, and modifications are suggested to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of travel-time shift measurements. The artificial datacubes are constructed by embedding various meridional flow models in 3D acoustic wave propagation simulators, which are then used to discuss the interpretation of travel-time shifts, so that in the future an inversion procedure may be designed to accurately calculate meridional flow velocities. The solar data is obtained from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft and is used to measure travel-time shifts due to meridional flow in the solar convection zone non-standard helioseismic techniques. The issue of a systematic error dubbed as the "center-to-limb" effect that contaminates the travel-time shift measurements of solar meridional flow is also addressed in this work.
Measuring and modeling DDT, chlordane, and mercury in activated carbon amended sediments and water [electronic resource]
Keywords: Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Activated carbon (AC) as an in-situ amendment for the remediation of contaminated sediments has attracted considerable attention from researchers, regulators, and industry. However, knowledge gaps related to field measurements of AC performance and long-term modeling of AC-amended sediments currently impede the widespread adoption of the technology. The intent of this study is to improve in-situ measurements of AC-amended sediments and to test the prevailing conceptual and mathematical models describing AC performance in the field. Polyethylene (PE) passive samplers can be used to estimate water concentration of hydrophobic organic contaminants. A Fickian approach to modeling hydrophobic organic compound uptake by PE developed in this study significantly improved the accuracy of these water measurements in non-equilibrium conditions, particularly in well-agitated systems in which PE-phase mass transfer resistance is significant. Polyethylene partitioning and diffusion coefficients were measured for the organochlorine pesticides DDT, DDT metabolites, chlordane, and dieldrin. An 18-month field mesocosm study was conducted at an intertidal marsh creek impacted with organochlorine pesticides to evaluate AC amendment under several application conditions. Organochlorine pesticide availability, as measured by PE concentration, was reduced throughout the trial period, with chlordane and DDT PE concentration reductions of 85-91% and 83-85%, respectively, 18 months post-treatment in the mesocosms amended with granular activated carbon (GAC). A substantial particle size effect was observed. For example, chlordane concentration in PE was reduced by 91% 6-months post deployment in the powdered AC mesocosm (PAC), compared with 68% in the GAC mesocosm. An existing mass transfer model was parameterized and applied to the mesocosms for model validation purposes. Overall, the mass transfer model reproduced the field observations well for the major constituents of pore water concentration and the model captured the relative impact of the application conditions. In preliminary field studies, AC amendment reduced mercury and methylmercury sediment pore water concentration by 70 and 81%, respectively. Activated carbon dosed at 5% reduced mercury pore water concentration by > 85% in confirmatory laboratory tests.
Measuring and recreating hydrodynamic environments at biologically relevant scales [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

Marine communities are fundamentally shaped by water motion, which provides many essential functions for a wide variety of marine organisms, such as gamete fertilization, transportation, and food and nutrient delivery. However, it often remains challenging to directly measure how individual organisms are affected by their immediate flow environments. Water motion in marine habitats is often dynamic and unpredictable, so average velocity measurements are unlikely to adequately capture the environment at biologically relevant scales. Furthermore, many organisms (e.g., plankton) are small (≤1mm), which limits potentially available techniques. Finally, the physical harshness of some environments, such as wave-swept shores, further constrains the number of viable tools. To address these challenges, I have developed several novel techniques to both measure and recreate environmental water motion at very fine temporal and spatial scales. First, I designed and manufactured a field-deployable flow sensor capable of measuring water velocities in the rocky intertidal zone at scales relevant to settling spores and larvae. I found that high water velocities (> 2m/s) can occur often (more than once per minute) even at heights just 0.250mm above the substrate. A larva attached to the substrate may find shelter from these peak velocities by hiding behind local topography or by settling in the right tidal conditions. Second, I built a wave chamber capable of replicating the extreme flows found in the intertidal zone and recorded adult barnacles feeding in these flows. I observed that barnacles are able to feed in high water velocities (> 1m/s), and that their feeding rates may potentially be independent of wave velocity. Finally, I measured flow patterns on the Great Barrier Reef at scales relevant to settling coral larvae, and then exposed coral larvae to a replication of these flow patterns in a lab setting. I found that because coral larvae are weak swimmers compared to their ambient flow environment, they are unable to affect their trajectories in even benign flows. Thus, these coral larvae require turbulence to deposit them onto the substrate. The studies in this thesis explore several ways in which marine organisms directly interact with their hydrodynamic environments, and how their performances during these interactions can potentially shape the distributions we observe in the field.