VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Iron-based oxides for thermochemical splitting of water and carbon dioxide
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.

Approximately 40 Gt-CO2 is emitted from human activities per year globally, contributing to global warming. There are worldwide efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and hold "the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels". One approach to achieve this goal is the synthetic transformation of CO2. The splitting of CO2 to carbon monoxide and oxygen initiates CO2 transformation. Another approach is to split water to produce hydrogen and oxygen using GHG-free energy, and hydrogen can be used for storing intermittent solar and wind electricity, as a transportation fuel, for converting CO2 into organics, for decarbonizing the existing petrochemical and fertilizer industries, and as a fuel for industrial heating. For these to make a difference to global warming, the processes need to be cost-competitive with current approaches to synthesize chemicals and fuels and compatible for scale-up in an infrastructure capable of handling Gt-scale CO2. The chemical infrastructure today at the Gt-scale relies almost exclusively on thermochemical processes. Hence, such dominance of thermochemistry warrants research in creating options for the thermochemical splitting of water and CO2. The main requirements of two-step thermochemical splitting of water and CO2 include high thermodynamic equilibrium gas splitting capacity of the oxide, fast reaction kinetics and long-term cyclability of materials and system. Motivated by these requirements, this dissertation focuses on identifying materials design strategies, the thermodynamic mechanisms, and cost reduction methods for the two-step cycle. At the materials level, the strategy of cation mixing was used to lower the reaction temperature of the two-step cycle. The discovered poly-cation oxide (PCO) demonstrates higher water splitting capacities than state-of-the-art materials, especially at a thermal reduction temperature as low as 1100°C. Additionally, the strategy of tuning two-phase ternary materials was applied to ferrites which have been long researched for the two-step cycle. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it was discovered that when the ferrite is poor in iron and has a significant portion of the rocksalt phase, its gas splitting capacity can be several times higher than the traditional iron-rich ferrites. At the system level, for the two-step thermochemical pathway to be ultimately applicable in practice, the product cost ought to be competitive. The technoeconomic analysis of two-step thermochemical water splitting investigated systems using ceria and ferrites. Cost minimization was conducted to consider materials properties during system design. Also, the target properties of the oxide were recommended for a H2 cost to be
Irreverent : street life, race, and masculinity under a new Cuban socialism
Keywords: Anthropology.

As a New Socialism in Cuba moves toward liberalization and away from a longstanding centrally planned economic model, we are at a critical moment to grapple with how pandilleros (gang members), whose interests represent some of the island's most disenfranchised communities, are structuring their identities, desires, and sense of belonging within major urban cities. Aggregating two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation explores a set of interrelated, overarching themes that address pandillerismo (gang life) and Cubanidad (Cuban identity) alongside the transformation of the Cuban state. The first of these themes is the negotiation of socioeconomic status, race, and cultural capital amongst a once purportedly classless society. The second is the relationship between masculinity, the streets, and The PCC (Communist Party of Cuba), particularly in connection to the pervasiveness of the Cuban black market. At its core, this dissertation is an analysis of what pandillerismo and street life entail across various Cuban barrios marginales (marginalized neighborhoods.) To this end, I have collected and interpreted ethnographic accounts that highlight some of the key virtues and values undergirding Cuban sociality, exploring how poorer urban Cubans subsist under the specter of a revolutionary state that is at once highly regimented yet selectively pliable
Is Policymaking Data-Driven? A Mixed Methods Study on the Use of Teacher Assessment Results for Professional Development Policies in Peru
Keywords: teacher professional development
education policy
teacher assessment
datadriven
mixed methods
Peru
Stanford Graduate School of Education International Education Policy Analysis
Thesis

This study explores the purpose of Peruvian professional development policies and the extent to which they are driven by results from national teacher assessments. Using a mixed methods approach, the author analyzes the convergence of the policies with the results of the Prueba Única Nacional. The findings suggest that although the policies highlight the need to strengthen teachers’ pedagogical skills, they leave the implementation of professional development unclear and fail to establish a data collection mechanism that allows for a systematic review of teachers’ needs. The study concludes that data resulting from national assessments are not being used effectively to inform PD policy design, and provides policy recommendations regarding teacher professional development in Peru.
Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian Water Relations: An Analysis of Ecopeace Middle East’s Water-Energy Nexus Proposal
Keywords: Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Thesis

Ecopeace Middle East is an environmental advocacy organization bringing together Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians around regional water challenges in the Middle East. This paper critiques Ecopeace’s Water-Energy Nexus proposal, which is a trilateral water-energy exchange in which Jordan would supply Israel and Palestine with renewable energy in return for desalinated water from Israel and Palestine. The critique of Ecopeace’s approach is grounded in historical specificities of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Jordanian relations. The importance of land and water acquisition to Zionism and Israeli state-building is emphasized. The paper argues that the Water-Energy Nexus is unlikely to be implemented given historical and contemporary challenges. It concludes with short term and long term policy recommendations for Ecopeace.
Issues of educational equity for hispanic students
Keywords: Education.

Educational inequity persists for Hispanic students nationwide across both K-12 and higher education. Advancements in data collection and quality over the last two decades allow for new applications of panel-based research designs to study this topic. Each of the three papers of this dissertation applies a quasi-experimental research design to evaluate an educational issue of particular relevance to Hispanic students. Paper one shines a light on the demographic and educational effects of immigration enforcement partnerships established between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement agencies. Paper two explores the effects of English Learner status on Special Education placement, paying particular attention to Spanish speaking English Learners. Paper three examines the effectiveness of a new federal grant aimed at increasing Hispanic student completions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields in higher education. This dissertation adds novel evidence that can inform policy and practice affecting Hispanic students
Iterative cell extraction and registration for analysis of time-lapse neural calcium imaging datasets
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Neural calcium imaging provides experimental recordings of the activity patterns of large ensembles of individual neurons in awake, behaving animals. These recordings often span multiple sessions over extended time periods of days to weeks, with the imaging field-of-view kept approximately fixed. In such longitudinal studies, to address biological questions based on the calcium imaging data, one commonly needs to 1) computationally extract individual neurons from the datasets, and 2) track the same individual neurons across multiple recording sessions. Although the extraction of neural activity has been extensively studied for individual imaging sessions, the task of matching cells across multiple sessions has not been well investigated beyond post hoc cell alignment methods based on simple heuristics. To track cells' identities over time, we propose a fast and reliable cell-matching algorithm based on the Wasserstein distance between candidate cell pairs, and we demonstrate the superiority of this metric over other similarity metrics commonly used for cell tracking. We also introduce a new framework, an iterative approach to cell extraction and cell registration, which uses the full set of cells detected across all imaging sessions to improve both the set of the extracted cells and the accuracy with which these cells can be tracked over multiple sessions. Unlike standard analysis pipelines that perform cell matching after cell extraction, our iterative approach uses the set of all detected cells to re-initialize the next iterations of cell extraction. Using both simulated and real datasets, we show that our approach can enable substantial improvements in both the accuracy and numbers of extracted and registered cells. We also show that these improvements in cell quantity and quality increase the accuracy of biological findings in subsequent analyses
The Jewish vanguard of the revolution : Poale Zion in early Soviet period, 1917-1928
Keywords: History.

This comprehensive study emphasizes the persistence of Poale Zion's political influence, underscores the centrality of ideology and diplomacy in soviet politics, and traces its institutional adjustments to "construction of socialism" in Russia. In the process, Poale Zion interpreted its mission in light of Ber Borokhov's theory of Marxist Zionism. Thus, whereas in life, Borokhov failed to become a scholar and struggled as a revolutionary, after his death he was turned into prototypical charismatic revolutionary leader, teacher, and man of action par excellence
Joint inversion of reflectivity and background subsurface components
Keywords: Geophysics.

Reverse-time migration constituted the ultimate solution for imaging geologically complex areas. Nowadays, it represents the main engine behind sophisticated imaging techniques, such as linearized waveform inversion, migration velocity analysis, and full-waveform inversion. The latter is arguably the most ambitious attempt to obtain a complete and accurate picture of the subsurface. Unfortunately, it is vulnerable to cycle-skipping. Strategies to attack this problem include better acquisition, data processing, and different implementations of the full-waveform inversion algorithm. In this thesis, I propose a joint inversion of the subsurface reflectivity and the subsurface background component as different parameter sets, rather than being combined as in full-waveform inversion. During the early stages of my research, I posed the problem as a linear optimization problem. However, this approach does not have the expected properties. A nonlinear scheme corrected the problem. I test the method in synthetic 2D data and a 3D ocean-bottom node dataset from the Gulf of Mexico
Keeping Pace: Analyzing Different Strategies for Governing Dual Use Risk Across U.S. Government Agencies
Keywords: Center for International Security and Cooperation
dual use research of concern
biosecurity
biosafety
gain-of-function
Thesis

Why do different institutions address the same security challenge in different ways? A central challenge of biosecurity governance is how to stay apace of emerging biological science and technology. While almost all biology research incurs the risk for misuse, certain types of research that may incur greater risk to human health if misused have been categorized as dual use research of concern (DURC). U.S. government policies to guide public funding for DURC scope policy based on lists of experiment types and organisms that constitute DURC and require additional oversight. However, this and other definitions of DURC are often contested. Repeatedly, experts disagree on what research should be considered DURC. Moreover, they disagree on what oversight and risk mitigations strategies are appropriate. In this contested space, groups supporting research, including funding agencies, have options for how they approach DURC. This thesis analyzes how and why two major U.S. agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), took different approaches to the funding of two contested DURC experiment types: gene drives and virus engineering for pandemic preparedness. Tracing each agency’s approach to funding these experiments, as well as their organizational history and structure, leads to several findings. First, when experiment types test the limits of what biosecurity policies are scoped to address, the two agencies adopt different strategies to address these risks. While DARPA takes a more hands-on approach to risk mitigation through funding security-focused projects, the NIH is more deliberative and seeks to mitigate risk through safety and security oversight measures before approving funding. Second, I find that agencies are limited in the risk mitigation options that are available, a feature driven by the organizational structure and level of expertise expected in project overseers, which selects for the agency’s approach to risk. Coherent leadership and strategies are critical for preserving the integrity of the scientific enterprise and for protecting humanity from biological threats – including natural, accidental, and deliberate release of biological products that could cause suffering. By studying the ways different agencies respond when they have to address new biosecurity challenges, governments and other organizations can better assess the effectiveness of existing biosecurity strategies, design improved policies, and structure research programs in a way that allows society to enjoy the benefits of life sciences advances without undue exposure to risk.
#khmersralanhkhmer: Understanding the Cambodian Diaspora Through the Cyberspace
Keywords: Cambodian
Cambodia
Science Technology and Society
social media
intergenerational narratives
Thesis

Prior research has often looked at the intergenerational relationship between Khmer Rouge genocide survivors and their children through the lens of a silent history that struggles to be discussed. This thesis draws on that research to understand how this history is manifesting in an increasingly technological landscape. Through platforms such as Instagram, the 1.5 generation (children of survivors who were born in refugee camps) and second-generation (children of survivors) are able to cultivate a communal space that serves to celebrate the exchange of the spectrum of Cambodian experiences. In doing so, Cambodian people are redefining social media as both self-curation tools and community-curation tools. This thesis engages with Cambodian people’s employment of digital tools, particularly hashtags, to ask the question of how Cambodians are utilizing social media platforms and the global network afforded to them as a digital archival and advocacy tool that preserves their history, culture, and identity.
Kinetics of In Situ Combustion Reactions: Laboratory Experiments and Numerical Analysis
Keywords:  Energy Resources Engineering
Chemical kinetics
Ignition prediction
Reactivity mapping
Thesis

In-Situ Combustion (ISC) is an Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) method for heavy oil production with many open research questions. The objective of this work is to characterize the chemical kinetics properties of crude oil to predict ignition and the combustion reaction path following a successful ignition. It is important and necessary to predict ignition because it is the first step of ISC. Without successful ignition, ISC will not occur. The significance of reaction path prediction is to extrapolate the use of kinetics for further predictions, such as upscaling the simulation from kinetics cell scale to combustion tube scale, or even field scale.
Ramped Temperature Oxidation (RTO) experiments are conducted to measure crude oil oxidation kinetics. The selected heating rates for RTO experiments are 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 5.0, 10.0, 15.0, and 20.0 degrees Celsius per minute. The small heating rate cases capture the details of reaction, and large heating rate cases spread the range of heating rates for further analysis. Isoconversional analysis is the initial step to interpret crude oil kinetics, and history matching of effluent gas concentrations calibrates a reaction model to represent a particular type of crude oil.
A system automation algorithm is developed to interact with commercial software for iterative computations. This is applied to the history matching and ignition prediction workflows. The calibrated reaction model from history matching is therefore implemented in numerical models to predict ignition under various operational conditions (e.g. heat loss rate, air flow rate, etc.). There are four different ignition criteria implemented and compared in this work. The impacts of the ignition criteria on the final predicted ignition envelopes are investigated and compared. The uncertainty quantification results provide a range of confidence of predicted ignition regime for reference to field operations.
With successful ignition, the reaction conversion path is predicted through two approaches. The reactivity mapping method takes experimental measurements directly to predict conversion, with an arbitrary temperature schedule provided. In comparison, a history matching method predicts reaction path indirectly. The experimental data is used to calibrate the reaction model, and then the simulator predicts reaction under an arbitrary temperature design. The performance of predictions through these two approaches are compared and discussed.
The king can do no wrong : delegation and blame under authoritarian rule
Keywords: Political Science.

Research on blame avoidance suggests that dictators should struggle to avoid blame for poor governance outcomes because of their significant and highly visible powers. Nonetheless, many dictators appear to evade the public's attributions of responsibility even as their states confront significant economic and political challenges. This ability of some autocrats to avoid blame more effectively than others has important implications for understanding patterns of opposition and regime survival under autocracy. The dissertation explores this issue by evaluating how individuals attribute responsibility in authoritarian political systems and how these attributions shape interactions between the dictator, elites, and the public. Specifically, I show that dictators can minimize their exposure to blame successfully by ceding control over policy design and implementation, and I demonstrate that this possibility influences when and for which issue domains dictators are willing to share power with other elites. I also argue that autocratic monarchs are better positioned than other dictators to utilize delegation effectively as a blame avoidance strategy, which helps to explain the surprising robustness of royal rule in the modern period. The project sheds light on how, when, and why dictators are able to evade accountability for the poor performance of their regimes. The empirical components of the project are organized into three parts. The first involves a detailed case study of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, based on one year of fieldwork in the country. Evidence for the case study is drawn from more than 100 elite interviews, text analysis of documents from official Jordanian government websites, original survey and experimental data, Google Trends, the Arab Barometer surveys, and archival research in the National Archives of the United Kingdom. The second part demonstrates the applicability of the theory to autocracies generally, drawing on additional case studies and cross-national autocracy data. The third part analyzes my argument that authoritarian monarchs are more capable of using delegation as a blame avoidance strategy. Here, I analyze cross-national autocracy data and implement a case comparison of blame avoidance dynamics in Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt that leverages process tracing, survey data, and experimental evidence
Laboratories of Secrecy: Why Some U.S. States Have Sold Their Sovereignty to Criminals and Kleptocrats
Keywords:  Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy
shell companies
money laundering
corporate service provider
csp
aml
kleptocrats
kleptocracy
Delaware
Nevada
interest groups
corruption
federalism
state politics
secrecy jurisdiction
tax haven
financial secrecy
incorporation
race to the bottom
bar association
financial crime
offshore financial center
ofc
compliance
financial intelligence
state capture
bureaucratic capture
capture
Center on Development Democracy and Rule of Law
CDDRL
Thesis

Despite its reputation for the toughest anti-money laundering (AML) enforcement in the world, the United States remains the leading jurisdiction for the incorporation of anonymous shell companies used in grand corruption schemes. States like Delaware and Nevada have become notorious secrecy jurisdictions, frequently used by criminals and kleptocrats for money laundering. This thesis investigates why some U.S. states and not others have become the most secretive incorporation jurisdictions in the world. By employing the metrics from corporate secrecy scholars and NGOs and never-before-collected cross-sectional data on U.S. state incorporation fee revenue, this work reveals the correlates of U.S. state corporate secrecy. Moreover, through an interest group analysis of the corporate policymaking of two states (Delaware and Nevada) it posits a causal logic behind corporate secrecy in the most secretive U.S. states. It highlights how pro-secrecy interests in the United States have gained control over incorporation policymaking in Delaware and Nevada.
Landscape of protein aggregation and quality control in vertebrate aging and a case study on prion-like aggregation
Keywords: Chemical and Systems Biology.

Protein aggregation is a hallmark of age-related neurodegeneration. Yet whether aggregation drives age-related dysfunction and disease in other tissues is poorly understood. Here, I developed a method to isolate protein aggregates and leveraged the African turquoise killifish to obtain a systematic understanding of protein aggregation in seven tissues in an aging vertebrate. Interestingly, patterns of age-dependent aggregation were highly tissue-specific and not simply driven by tissue-specific protein expression. Age- and tissue-specificity of protein aggregation is linked to both protein autonomous biophysical features and selective alterations in protein quality control. Co-aggregation of protein quality control machineries during aging further reduces the proteostatic capacity and may contribute to aggregate burden in a feed-forward loop. Many age-related protein aggregates were associated with diseases of age, and diseases not previously linked to protein misfolding. In the aging brain, the enrichment of prion-like domains is a prominent feature among proteins with age-associated increases in aggregation. DDX5, an RNA helicase that is also involved in tau splicing, is one such protein that aggregates more in both old killifish and mice. DDX5 acts as bona fide prions in yeast. In vitro, DDX5 coacervates readily under physiological conditions, and the condensed state has enhanced activity than the diffuse state. Thus prion-like low complexity sequences make functionally advantageous coacervate more accessible at a cost of increased misfolded self-assembly that might contribute to cognitive decline during aging