VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Peacekeeping with Chinese Characteristics?: A Case Study of PRC Involvement in Peacekeeping Operations in South Sudan
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
China
United Nations
Peacekeeping
South Sudan
Non-interference
Thesis

Originally deeply opposed to United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs), which it saw as a violation of its non-interference principle, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is now the largest troop contributor to PKOs of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. In spite of increased participation levels, however, China still only supports PKOs that have received the host nation’s consent. Furthermore, until the PRC sent combat troops to participate in the PKO in South Sudan in 2015, China only provided police, observers, medical, and engineering troops as peacekeepers. This thesis uses South Sudan as a case study of Chinese peacekeeping, examining how a convergence of economic, reputational, and military interests made the PRC willing to send combat troops to participate in peacekeeping operations for the first time ever. By comprehensively analyzing China’s UN policy, peacekeeping history, and ties to Africa, it examines how Chinese interests in South Sudan shaped the PRC decision to become so involved in the peacekeeping mission there in spite of its commitment to non-interference. The thesis also analyzes what Chinese commitments to PKOs reveal about the PRC’s conceptions of sovereignty and non-interference and the relative flexibility with which it applies these concepts in its foreign policy. It finds that China is increasingly flexible in its adherence to non-interference when core interests, including economic, reputational, and military ones, are at stake.
PEDAGOGY AND ARCHITECTURE AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY: A NINETEENTH-CENTURY PARADOX
Keywords: Master of Liberal Arts Program
School of Humanities and Science
Leland Stanford Jr. University
Leland Stanford
Stanford University
Campus planning
Campus Design
Urban Design
Ninteenth Century Architecture
Architecture
Pedagogy
American Campus Architecture
Architectural History
Richardsonian Romanesque
Fredrick Law Olmsted
Francis Walker
Main Quadrangle
Memorial Church
Palm Drive
Sandstone
Sandstone buildings
Text
Thesis

Today Stanford University’s celebrated Richardsonian-Romanesque Revival architecture has a traditional feel that appears to contrast with the university's reputation for innovation. Yet at Stanford's founding in 1891, this architecture was a deliberate departure from the dominant English Collegiate Gothic trend adopted by peer institutions. Within the university's Romanesque walls, the Stanfords aspired to create an experimental pedagogy that combined practical training with a greater commitment to humanitarian ideals. Exploring the ways in which architecture and pedagogy combine to create a campus, this colloquium argues that despite the classical allusion made by the round-headed arcade, symmetrical quadrangle, and church that terminates the principal axis, Stanford University’s architecture was as progressive as its pedagogy.
Peers, teachers, and the mechanisms of schooling : using big data to understand education processes
Keywords: Education.

My dissertation intends to contribute to the knowledge of the mechanisms of education production by specifying the micro behaviors such as absences and classroom interactions among students, teachers and peers. Through using novel empirical approaches and unusually detailed data that track classroom processes, I am able to measure student and teacher behaviors and examine how these behaviors affect student short-term learning and longer-run outcomes. The three papers span from online higher education to in-person K-12 classrooms, and have immediate implications for current policy debates about virtual learning and teacher policy. In paper one, with Eric Bettinger and Susanna Loeb, I examine how peer interaction affects student learning outcomes and persistence in online courses offered by a large for-profit university. We creatively measure peer interaction using detailed written communications between students in online discussion board. To my knowledge, this is the first paper that examines peers by "what they do" instead of "who they are". This paper was published in 2016 by the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. The second paper uses "text-as-data" methods to create objective metrics of teacher practices in English language arts (ELA) at 4th to 5th grade. Different from the conventional approach of teacher observation, I quantify teacher behaviors through their language and interaction with students from word-to-word transcriptions of classroom videos. I then compare these new measures with ratings created from classroom observation protocols and value-added scores. With Susanna Loeb, the third paper measures teachers' contribution to student engagement in secondary school using students' unexcused class absences. After creating value-added to student attendance, we compare this measure with teachers' impact on student test scores, and how these different dimensions of teacher effectiveness influence student high school graduation, dropping out, and Advanced Placement (AP) courses taking. This paper expands our understanding about the multidimensionality of teacher effects. The three papers use new types of data that are not often seen in educational research, including written communication in virtual classrooms, verbal interactions in elementary school classrooms, and class attendance records in secondary school. They together exemplify how the use of detailed data from education processes can significantly deepen our understanding of the complex mechanisms of schooling and inform education policymaking.
Performers' interpretation and expression of local melodic groupings : neural representations and evidence of embodiment
Keywords: Music.

Performers' interpretations include representations of melodic shape, resulting either in an emphasis of short melodic groupings or a stronger integration of such groupings into a phrase. Through a collection of three studies, the current project seeks to better understand if such interpretations are differentially embodied by performers, and if the similarity of local groupings within implied melodic lines affects performers' neural representations reflecting the segregation of those lines. Chapters 2-3 present studies where performers' audio and motion is recorded and analyzed while playing passages in which local grouping interpretations are made explicit (Chapter 2) or are not explicit, but where segments are manipulated in pitch to suggest either a strong or weak melodic discontinuity (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, performers had their electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded while playing melodic motifs whose similarity between implied lines was manipulated. Overall, the findings suggest that performers' interpretation and expression of local melodic groupings is reflected in nontechnical gestures such as side-to-side body motions in violinists and up-down head motions in cellists, and that the presence of similar or dissimilar motifs is impactful in performers' neural representations of multiple implied melodic lines.
Performing the self : cosmetic surgery and the political economy of beauty in Korea
Keywords: Theater and Performance Studies.

This dissertation construes cosmetic surgery as a mode of performing oneself in contemporary South Korea. Reimagining beauty as an incessant doing, partaking, and embodying oneself that is more "becoming" than "being, " I use cosmetic surgery as its performative measure to discuss the political economy of neoliberal self-management within the Korean media, popular culture, and everyday life. With case studies from reality television, performance art, photography, and K-pop, I locate the representational discourse of beauty as precariously imbricated within the social fabric interwoven by neoliberal, patriarchal, and heteronormative systems of power. Interdisciplinary in nature, this project renders the performance of beauty as an ever-shifting construct of subjectivity determined by race, gender, and sexuality. In the process of interrogating what lies at stake for not only the individual subject but for all parties partaking in the Korean cosmetic surgery industry, I hope to destabilize the rhetorical devices that choreograph, construct, and negotiate a particular image of Koreanness.
Persuasive Design Techniques in the Attention Economy: User Awareness, Theory, and Ethics
Keywords: Symbolic Systems
SymSys
Human-Computer Interaction
HCI
Thesis

The systematic study of persuasion has captured researchers’ interest since the advent of mass influence mechanisms such as radio, television, and advertising. With the unprecedented growth of popular social media applications that are ubiquitously accessible on smart devices, consumers’ attention, attitudes, and behaviors are constantly influenced by persuasive design techniques on platforms that profit by maximizing users’ time spent on site. We take three different approaches - empirical, theoretical, and philosophical - to better understand the awareness, mechanisms, and ethicality of persuasive design techniques in the modern attention economy. Many users feel that these digital platforms draw them in and manipulate their time and behavior, but they lack a detailed awareness of persuasive design techniques in context of their use of the products. We discuss the creation and evaluation of a system called Nudget that makes persuasive design techniques visible on social media. We compare the effectiveness of our system in improving user knowledge of such techniques to traditional methods of educating users, finding a significant improvement when our system is used. Although there exists a rich social psychology literature on methods of persuasion and exploitable cognitive biases, we lack a mapping of the specific persuasive design techniques used by products like Facebook or LinkedIn onto this persuasive space. We take a theoretical approach to persuasive design with the goals of showing how design techniques interrelate to function as influential systems, and of providing a more nuanced vocabulary with which to discuss them, drawn from a range of relevant disciplines. We map our datasets of persuasive design techniques used on Facebook and LinkedIn onto existing theoretical frameworks in behavioral design, and also identify useful dimensions for future taxonomies. Finally, we find it important to include a detailed discussion of the ethical questions surrounding persuasive technologies in the attention economy. We discuss philosophical approaches to the balance between persuasive structure and human agency, and compile useful ethical heuristics to make progress on the question of what constitutes ethical persuasive design. We discuss the method of value-driven design as a way to create products designed for intention-fulfillment rather than impulse-fulfillment, and we provide a sample phenomenological analysis of a modern product to showcase how philosophy of technology can add value to our understanding of what technology adds and subtracts from our lives.
Pf bacteriophage as novel pathogenic factors in pseudomonas aeruginosa infections
Keywords: Immunology.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative pathogen that contributes to the morbidity and mortality of a variety of chronic infections. P. aeruginosa is particularly known for infecting the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients and colonizing non-healing wounds, where its presence is strongly associated with poor clinical outcomes. With the increasing incidence of antibiotic-resistant strains, it is important to gain a better understanding of the virulence factors that contribute to P. aeruginosa pathogenesis, as such knowledge can lead to new effective treatments. One such proposed virulence factor is Pf phage, a family of filamentous bacteriophages specific to P. aeruginosa, which have been found in high numbers in P. aeruginosa biofilm. For the studies outlined in this dissertation, we investigated the impact of Pf phage on P. aeruginosa pathogenesis, both in mouse models and human clinical infections. We describe how Pf phage organize extracellular polymers in the P. aeruginosa biofilm matrix into a protective liquid crystal. Furthermore, we utilized a newly-developed wound infection model to determine that Pf phage contribute to wound colonization, morbidity and mortality through induction of antiviral immunity, which inhibits protective antibacterial immune responses. In addition, we found that active and passive immunization against Pf phage coat protein protect against P. aeruginosa infection. These findings were translated to the clinic, where we found that presence of Pf phage is correlated with chronic infections and poor health in patients with cystic fibrosis and non-healing wounds with P. aeruginosa infections. Ultimately, our investigation of Pf phage provides new mechanistic insights into the pathology of P. aeruginosa colonization and persistence of infection, toward the development of new treatments for patients infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Photoemission study of exotic quantum states in ZrTex and development of new spin-resolved spectrometer
Keywords: Applied Physics.

Zr-Te compounds is a very interesting family of materials, with a great many stable stoichiometry and different lattice structures. Known for its large thermopower, resistivity anomaly, and recent discovery of superconductivity under high pressure, ZrTe5 3D crystal has been predicted to be near the transition boundary between weak and strong topological insulator (TI), offering a promising platform to study topological phase transition. The existence of a gap and the existence of topological surface state (TSS) are two critical criteria to make such a categorization. However, different previous studies have reported discrepant results. Using 6eV-laser-based ARPES, I have performed a high-momentum-resolution and photon-energy-dependent measurement on ZrTe5. My experiment gives a defining quantification of the gap size and reconciles the discrepancies of previous works regarding the TSS, suggesting ZrTe5 not a 3D strong TI. With a different stoichiometry, ZrTe2 not only exhibits a significantly different lattice structure, but shows a more exciting physics than ZrTe5 as well. Recently, charge density wave (CDW) has been observed in monolayer (ML) form ZrTe2. Given that there has been no work officially reporting CDW in bulk ZrTe2, it is important to understand whether the CDW in ZrTe2 ML is lattice-driven or exciton-driven, the latter of which indicates a new platform to study excitonic insulator. One way to distinguish the two scenarios is to see the ultrafast response of the system. Using femtosecond-resolved 6+1.5 eV pump-probe ARPES, I have observed the ultrafast disappearing of CDW folded band at Gamma point in ZrTe2 ML, which shows a time scale much faster than what is expected to be a lattice-driven CDW, indicating that CDW in ZrTe2 ML is contributed by exciton. Tuning knobs like photon-energy and ultrafast snapshot reveal us important information of quantum materials; are we able to observe spin-dependent phenomena? Traditional way to detect spin is to use a Mott detector attached to a hemispherical analyzer, which is commercially available but has very low spin-resolving efficiency and low data-acquisition throughput. Therefore, in parallel to my scientific exploration, I have been developing a next-generation spin-resolved ARPES using time-of-flight (TOF) method to detect kinetic energy and low-energy exchange (LEX) scattering to detect spin, with a significant improvement of both efficiency and resolution. A deflection mapping capability with different focusing modes is also incorporated. After a series of experiments and simulations, I conclude that the newly developed spin-TOF spectrometer achieves a comparable energy and angular resolution compared to the state-of-the-art spin-ARPES setup.
Photon counting detector Cross talk model and optimizing information in spectral CT [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Spectral computed tomography (CT) provides additional information about energy dependent object attenuation and material composition that can be diagnostically useful. Conventional CT images display the linear attenuation coefficient (often represented in Hounsfield units HU) of the material. This value represents the tissue property in the voxel but is affected by the x-ray spectrum. Different materials in a conventional image could have similar HU due to its effective energy set inherently and potentially non-optimally by the system based on spectrum used. In contrast, x-ray spectral information can be used to reconstruct images solely of object properties (i.e., independent of energy) and can, in principle, be free of beam hardening artifacts. Macovski and Alvarez introduced a theoretical framework for material decomposition. Material decomposition allows separation of materials in object into two (or more) basis functions based on spectral acquisition of x-ray transmission measurement. This in turn allows physics based material segmentation, and the possibility of quantitative CT imaging and representation of effective energy images at desired energies where contrast between materials are optimal. There has been increasing interest in the x-ray and CT research community to utilize energy discriminating photon counting detectors (PCD), previously used in nuclear medicine and other disciplines, but PCD suffers from several algorithmic and detector challenges. This work attempts to explore some of the challenges in PCD for x-ray and CT imaging. A material decomposition algorithm for an over-determined multi-bin PCD system that provides a practical balance between speed, accuracy and noise properties for such an overdetermined system is a challenge. This work also studies and compares methods of producing "conventional" looking CT images using multi-bin PCD measurements. Count rate limitation and spatio-energetic cross-talk between signals in PCD degrade measurements. Smaller detector pixels may be preferred so each detector pixel can operate below flux saturation region. However, smaller detector pixels suffer from more severe spectral degradation and strong cross-talk between pixels. This work derives a correlation model for multi-counting in PCD due to spatio-energetic cross talk caused by charge sharing, scatter and fluorescence in the detector. The study also presents comparison of frequency dependent detector performance for different CdTe pixel sizes for a spectral task and effective monoenergetic imaging. We find that spectral degradation and spatio-energetic cross talk affect smaller pixels more severely for spectral task than for effective monoenergetic tasks. As an auxiliary to the study, this work also presents the impact electronic noise in PCD can have in imaging applications. We find that electronic noise for the simulated CdTe detector at the lowest can have up to 15-25% degradation in spectral imaging applications while effective energy imaging is relatively immune to electronic noise.
Poetic nation : Iranian soul and historical continuity
Keywords: Religious Studies.

This dissertation reviews the presence and participation of Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez Shirazi, the fourteenth century Iranian poet, in the life of a nation who considers him to be the core of her constitution. It looks at self-understandings in the twentieth-century Iran that imagine the Iranian soul traversing through history with unique associations with poetic and mystical traditions, epitomized in the figure of Hafez and unfolded in new understandings of the category of ʻerfan or Iranian Mysticism. The intellectual debates around the topic are saturated with immense political overtones and this study looks at a range of them from Pure Aryanism to Islamism to Communism in the works of And al-Hosay Hazhir, Ahmad Kasravi, and Ayatollah Morteza Motahari on the one hand, and the poetry of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and H. E. Sameh on the other.
The poetics of style in the shield of Heracles : speech, ekphrasis, and sound
Keywords: Classics.

This dissertation assesses the style of the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles and its significance in the Greek hexameter tradition. Since antiquity, the style of the Shield has been the lynchpin of its reception and the test by which it has been included or excluded from the Hesiodic corpus. This dissertation addresses the poem's style in two parts. Part one uses quantitative means to identify characteristic features of the poem's diction, narrative, and traditional composition. Part two then interprets three remarkable elements in the Shield, namely, its character speech, ekphrasis, and sound. For each element, the Shield does two things: it conforms to Hesiodic style while progressing a Hesiodic program. Chapter two shows that, as in Hesiod's didactic poetry, the Shield's speeches ensure compliance and suppress verbal dissent. Chapter three outlines how the Shield's ekphrasis promotes Zeus' cosmos through an act of philosophical imagination. Chapter four charts the soundscape of the Shield, which matches the harmony and thunder of the Theogony and Catalogue of Women but now soundtracks the exploits of Zeus' son, Heracles. The conclusion synthesizes these findings by looking to the poem's use of voice as an instrument of Zeus' divine order. This dissertation thus argues for the centrality of style to our understanding of the Shield, its composition, and its position in early Greek hexameter poetry.
Polarons, disorder and charge transport in polymeric semiconductors
Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.

Polymeric semiconductors are an exciting group of materials with the potential to enable a new generation of solution-processable, flexible electronics for a wide variety of applications. Due to their complex microstructure, however, it can be difficult to determine the structure-property relationships that govern polymer performance. For the development of new, high performing polymers, a better understanding of the polymer microstructure and the processes that limit charge transport in both doped and undoped polymeric semiconductors is crucial. In this dissertation, I focus on understanding how the polymer microstructure influences charge transport. First, I present experimental evidence supporting the findings of a new, vigorous and complete theoretical model, crucial for interpreting infra-red (IR) studies of polaron absorption in order to glean rich information about the local, nanoscale packing of the polymer. Through a combination of experimental measurements with theoretical simulations, these IR studies reveal the link between disorder, polaron localization, and charge transport in polymers. By correlating polaron measurements in a model polymer system to independent studies of carrier mobility, I provide direct evidence demonstrating the effect of charge delocalization and crystallite connectivity on charge transport. Next, I discuss the effect of doping on the polymer microstructure and charge transport at various dopant loadings. When dopants are present in trace amounts, I show that measurable changes in the local hole environment and polymer conformation occur, influencing the carrier mobility. At high dopant loadings on the other hand, a series of complementary spectroscopy techniques are used to gain further insight into the doping mechanism in polymers, as well as the potential to use doping as a method of tuning polymer morphology. Finally, I use the techniques developed in this dissertation to study a novel high performing donor-acceptor copolymer material, demonstrating the general applicability of the experimental strategies outlined for revealing insights into the local nanoscale disorder and charge transport in polymer semiconductors. An understanding of how the different microstructural features influence charge transport in polymeric semiconductors at multiple length-scales, as explored in this dissertation, is important for material design and will serve to inform the engineering of new, improved organic electronic devices of the future.