VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Wildfire-specific PM2.5 and risk of ED visits for mental health, pregnancy, respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes: evidence from 2020 California wildfires
Keywords: Wildfires > Health aspects
Public health
Text
Thesis

Beyond their immediate devastation, the 2020 wildfires in California increased the risk of exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) at the population level to a broad region, which could have led to increased emergency department visits. However, studies to date have been on limited geographic areas and found inconsistent results. Additionally, the impact on mental health outcomes and pregnancy-complication in the aftermath of the fires is understudied. This is a retrospective, cross-sectional, ecological study conducted among people residing in California and presenting to California hospitals from July 1, 2020, to December 31, 2020. We studied patients who had an emergency department (ED) visit due to potentially PM2.5-related diseases (respiratory, cardiovascular, mental, and pregnancy-related) as identified by the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision codes. Using a distributed non-linear lagged model, we investigated the immediate (day 0) and delayed (up to 4 days after exposures) association between 10 ug/m3 increases in wildfire-specific PM2.5 and ED visits after adjusting for COVID-19 co-occurrence. The effect of an increase in wildfire specific PM2.5 concentration per 10 ug/m3 over 4 lag days was statistically significantly associated with an increase in the number of ED visits for chronic lower respiratory conditions (cumulative relative risk (cRR)1.121 [95% CI 1.071-1.174]), asthma (cRR 1.154 [1.090-1.222]), and all combined respiratory conditions (cRR 1.026 [1.001-1.052]). The additional significant relationship was evident for COPD (lag 0-3: cRR 1.126 [0.949- 1.336]), all combined mental health conditions (lag 0-2: cRR 1.052 [1.017-1.089]), other mood affective disorders (lag 0-3: cRR 1.189 [1.035-1.364]), and all combined pregnancy-related conditions (lag0-4: cRR 1.035 [1.001-1.071]) when we examine with multiple exposure windows. Our subgroup analyses indicated that Medicaid enrollees, females, and adults (age 25-64) had higher risks for ED visits during wildfires. Mediation analyses showed that the percent excess risk of wildfire-specific PM2.5 on outcomes explained by COVID-19 was -7% for respiratory and -31% for pregnancy-related outcomes. After using wildfire-specific PM2.5 across the entire of California and controlling COVID-19, our results found that increases in wildfire-specific PM2.5 are more likely to increase the number of ED visits at the ZCTA-level. We found elevated associations with mental and pregnancy-related outcomes and confirmed previously reported associations with respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes. Each health outcome has different lag times of susceptibility to wildfire smoke exposure and varies by sociodemographic characteristics, including age, sex, race/ethnicity, and health insurance types.
Win-Win Cooperation for Who? The Political Economy of State-Business Relations in Global China
Keywords: China
Belt and Road Initiative
Intergovernmental fiscal relations
Central-local government relations
China-Africa Relations
Agency costs
Property rights
Transaction cost economics
China-Ghana Relations
China political economy
Going Out Strategy
Text
Thesis

China’s increased global engagement has animated debate among policymakers and academics alike. Prevailing analyses of China’s role in the world tend to frame China as a unitary actor under the control of Beijing. This thesis offers an alternative, granular approach to assessing the incentives and constraints that drive political economic activity in “Global China.” Drawing on foundational concepts from property rights theory, transaction cost economics, and agency theory, I introduce the “global state corporatism” model through which to analyze the complex set of actors, interests, and interdependencies subsumed within Global China. I conceptualize China’s state sector as a large corporation characterized by a series of nested principal-agent relationships. Within this structure, Beijing, local governments, and firms each have their own set of interests; when the interests of one actor are in conflict with another, principals are more likely to incur agency costs. This thesis draws on one case study of fiscal reforms to China’s export taxes and two case studies of Chinese firms operating in Ghana to interrogate the proposed model of global state corporatism. Perhaps the most important contribution of this work is my analysis of the fiscal reforms to the export VAT rebate mechanism. Previously unexplored, the export VAT rebate mechanism provides a specific political economic rationale behind local governments’ enthusiasm to participate in China’s internationalization initiatives. The logic of the export VAT rebate mechanism provides new alternative explanations for several key trade statistics in China. Finally, I demonstrate how host countries can exploit Global China’s nested principal-agent structure to exert significant agency in shaping outcomes from China’s engagement.
Won't you be my neighbor? : reactions to online racial discrimination disclosures across U.S. neighborhoods and the promise of empathy
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Psychology.

While American neighborhoods remain largely segregated by race, they offer valuable opportunities for people of different racial identities to interact, learn from, and support each other. This potential is amplified by technology, specifically neighborhood based social media platforms. However, the convergence of diverse individuals sometimes gives rise to conflicts and discrimination. In the face of discrimination, individuals may turn to the community to share their experiences. As listening and learning about racialized experiences often serves as the first step towards thriving of diverse communities, in the present research we ask whether individuals who choose to share their encounters with racial discrimination in their neighborhood receive the same level of empathetic support as those sharing negative race-neutral experiences. With access to millions of social media posts (Chapter 2), we learn that neighborhood racial discrimination disclosures face heightened censorship by both algorithms (Chapter 3) and humans (Chapter 4), compared to negative race-neutral disclosures. This disparate censorship against racial discrimination disclosures negatively impacts even third-party viewers, who feel more alienated from the community and the hosting platform (Chapter 5). Further, we propose an empathy intervention as a mitigation strategy (Chapter 6). These studies illuminate the emerging landscape of digital discrimination, highlighting how the actions of everyday people impact support and alienation in communities. These insights hold significance as communities navigate the complexities of constructive integration in an increasingly diverse society.
Word Explorer Masters Project Report and Video
Keywords: Morphology
Literacy
Readers (Elementary)
Vocabulary > Study and teaching (Elementary)
Text
Report
Thesis

Word Explorer is a web-based game that supports teachers in using morphology (the study of the structure of words) to help students in grades 3-6 understand the complex vocabulary needed to succeed in middle school and beyond. By constructing words from bases, prefixes, and suffixes and then connecting them to meaning, students improve their ability to decipher multisyllabic words, recognize them automatically, and understand their meanings. Reading research indicates these skills are necessary for successful reading comprehension.
Words of passion : narrative technologies of modern China
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
East Asian Languages and Cultures.

This dissertation brings together Chinese literary and cultural studies, cognitive narratology, and digital humanities (DH) to explore the relationship between embodied cognition and the narrative form. Whereas traditional scholarship considered Chinese narrative artifacts as reflections of distinct ideological configurations (e.g., "Late Qing, " "Mao's China, " "post-socialism, " etc.), the techno-cognitive framework developed in this project brackets such historiographical categories and instead foregrounds formal continuities across political divides and epistemic shifts. Rather than explaining such observable transhistorical patterns through the prism of "Chinese tradition, " however, this project employs computational tools of humanistic inquiry to anchor formal features of narratives in the transcultural phenomenology of the human body, thus departing from the politicized and nationalized focus of much previous and current scholarship. Since the late 1960s, one of the dominant interpretive paradigms in literary and cultural studies has been Marxist historicism, also known under the term "genealogy, " which grounded cultural phenomena in historically situated structures of power. By contrast, this dissertation recovers the forgotten tradition of formalist school of literary criticism and showcases narrative elements whose significance is not exhausted by the sociohistorical contexts of their emergence. Specifically, my project draws upon findings from affective neuroscience indicating that human cognition is fundamentally embodied, i.e., the whole human body is deeply involved in how we perceive, make sense of, and interact with the world. As such, my dissertation offers a corrective to the disembodied paradigm of "distant reading" as it has been formulated so far in DH literature. In accordance with its anti-historicist ambition, this dissertation is conceived as a problematical rather than a chronological study. Each chapter explores a different narratological question from a biocultural perspective, including the Theory of Mind, situational schemas, narrative empathy, social identity, and the problem of character, which are then localized in the specific context of Chinese literary and cultural studies. Narrative technologies considered in this project include the metaphor of the heart (xin 心) as the center of cognitive and emotional life, the aesthetic of the sublime, the trope of the suffering woman, the we-narrative, and the distribution of agency among fictional characters. Dispersing narrative artifacts onto desynchronized timelines and multiple recursive structures, this dissertation demonstrates that narratives contain a mixture of historically stable and unstable elements, as does any technology, and encourages us to appreciate the "texture" of narrative works -- ordered collections of lexemes or words -- rather than treating them as mere epiphenomena of collective tradition
Working the gray areas : gender and labor in the digital age
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.

Digital technologies are transforming the conditions and meaning of work in the twenty-first century. Yet research on the digital economy has often neglected the role of gender, while feminist scholarship has yet to account for how digital technologies are restructuring the relationship between gender and labor across economic sectors. This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach including close visual and textual analysis and ethnographic interviews to examine case studies of technological "disruption" of gendered labor in three different sites of production: the home, the service industry, and corporate management. Attending to the exclusion of historically feminized work from formal employment, this project contributes to both digital media studies and feminist studies by showing how digital technologies are enabling new modes of formalization and visibility of gendered labor across economic spheres. At the same time, my research demonstrates how the specific socio-technical dynamics in each site create tensions between workers, employers, and platforms, leading to new avenues for bias and exploitation as social norms fill in the gaps between legal and technical regulation in a shifting world of work. I argue that dichotomies of formal/informal and visible/invisible labor are insufficient to understand gendered labor in the digital age. Rather, we must contend with how gender reattaches to different tasks, bodies, and skills in the gray areas created by new socio-technical configurations. This interdisciplinary cross-sector study highlights the complexity of labor formalization and illuminates challenges for policy makers, technology designers, and labor organizers seeking to address gender equity in the digital economy. My project not only demonstrates the importance of gender as a critical lens through which to understand the changing dynamics of technology and labor in the twenty-first century, but also shows how digital technologies impact how gender itself "works" in the digital age
Woundedness and reintegration : the phenomenology and transmission of women's trauma in modern and contemporary Italy
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
French & Italian.

This project investigates the way in which the figure of the hysterical woman has been taken up and reworked by Italian women writers in the decades following WWI. The first section identifies the importance of surgical imagery in the works of Enif Robert, Goliarda Sapienza, and Elena Ferrante, and proposes that such imagery shifts characterization away from madness towards an experience of woundedness. With the help of Adriana Cavarero's feminist narrative philosophy and in dialogue with contemporary thinking on trauma, this section complicates the simplistic tendency to equate storytelling with agency and healing. The second section focuses on envied or desired wounds and wounds that cross generations, with a focus on Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante. This analysis identifies the fervent witnessing of the wounds of others as significant for the feminist project of countering isolation; woundedness can then be understood as part of the work of a dark feminism. Taking Ferrante's call for the exploration of the dark sides of female experience as a theoretical point of departure, the third section analyzes four recent works of Italian film that explore maternity beyond the confines of traditional representation. The project identifies a strong Italian contribution to contemporary transnational feminist thought, and its connection to a long, underrecognized, pattern of carving out artistic space for darkly feminist forms of expression, particularly those that emphasize wounds as both evidence of painful experience and opportunities for deepened understanding
The yellow brick road to artificial intelligence : an empirical study of developers developing artificial intelligent conversational socialbots
Keywords: Engineering.
Management Science and Engineering.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly becoming ubiquitous and invisible - nudging, making recommendations, influencing and making decisions, providing information, forming long-term relationships with users, or merely providing company. Despite this prevalence, few studies have examined how these technologies are designed and developed. This study examines how developers of AI technologies, faced with high levels of ambiguity, approach their work. Development of artificial intelligent (AI) technologies presents a unique phenomenon in which two of the three, input-process-output variables are ambiguous. There is opacity in cause-effect, that is, it is difficult if not impossible to know how inputs to AI technologies are related to outputs, thereby making multiple interpretations of causality plausible. The evaluation of outputs of AI technologies is often based on datasets called ground truth that are inherently ambiguous and dependent upon subjective decisions such as what categories to include in the classification system, and on the interpretation of people assigning these categories to different entities in the dataset. Through this ethnographic study of the development process of conversational AI technologies, I find that developers engage in three ambiguity attitudes - avoiding ambiguity by using manually coded, rule-based response generation techniques to exert control over the output of the technology. They also exhibit ambiguity seeking by employing opaque, deep learning, large language models to auto-generate responses to build resilience in the technology to produce an output in unexpected situations in which the technology would otherwise 'fall off the cliff' or fail. At the same time, developers attempt to resolve ambiguity by engaging in a process of building an empirical understanding from first principles of the phenomenon being automated, by ad hoc experimentation with proxy metrics and intuitions. I call this process 'reverse-building of phenomena.' Developers who embraced ambiguity and built resilient technologies fared better in the competition than those who did not. I contribute to an understanding of how modern-day work is changing for developers with the advent of opaque and ambiguous artificial intelligent technologies
Zirconium-doped hafnium oxide based ferroelectric materials for memory applications
Keywords: Engineering.
Electrical Engineering.

As data processing and storage needs continue to grow at a rapid pace, the development of innovative memory technologies is crucial. The discovery of ferroelectricity in hafnia (HfO2)-based materials has garnered significant attention in both academia and industry, owing to their potential to revolutionize non-volatile memory (NVM) technology and enable novel computing architectures. HfO2-based ferroelectric materials offer advantages over conventional perovskite oxides, such as low-temperature synthesis and conformal growth in three-dimensional structures on silicon, making them compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology and ideal for device scaling. However, several challenges still exist for implementing ferroelectric HfO2 in commercial products, such as polarization variation during cycling (wake-up effect), high operation voltage, compatibility with back-end-of-line (BEOL) processing temperatures, and low memory density. In this dissertation, I tackled the challenges outlined above. I began by focusing on the Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 (HZO) material itself and addressing the wake-up effect through the introduction of an HfO2 buffer layer at the HZO/electrode interface. Subsequently, I developed a new measurement setup capable of directly measuring individual nm-sized devices, which enabled investigating the scaling effect in HZO-based ferroelectric capacitors. Through my research, I was able to demonstrate excellent ferroelectricity and reliability in ultra-thin HZO (4 nm) capacitors with molybdenum (Mo) electrodes. These capacitors exhibited low operation voltage, wake-up-free behavior, high endurance, and low RTA temperatures, making them highly desirable for practical applications. I also studied the size scaling effect down to 65 nm × 45 nm devices, where I observed ultra-high remanent polarization (2Pr) for the first time at this scale. In addition to exploring two-dimensional scaling to improve density, I also proposed a hybrid structure for 4 bits/cell storage, increasing the multi-bit capability in a single cell
3D vertical resistive switching memory towards ultrahigh-density non-volatile memory
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

To meet the exploding information processing and data storage demands, memory technology, as one of the cornerstones in modern computing systems, faces the constant challenge of advancing to the next technology node with a larger capacity and higher density. As difficulties arise in the further scaling of conventional memories, new memories show the potentials to bridge the performance gap between memory and storage, providing new opportunities to innovate computing systems and architectures. Among emerging memories, resistive switching memory (RSM) is a promising solution due to its high device density and reasonably fast write/read operation speed. Resistive random-access memory (RRAM), as an example of RSM, has a simple structure and uses low-temperature fabrication that is compatible with back-end-of-the-line (BEOL) metal wiring of typical CMOS logic technology, thus potentially leading to low cost and on-chip integration with logic for high bandwidth access. Research efforts have been made to explore various material options, device and array structures, and chip architectures. However, to achieve an ultrahigh-density memory, a practical co-design must take into account all the above considerations to arrive at a superior solution. In this dissertation, I present a way to realize ultrahigh-density memory with 3D vertical RRAM (VRRAM). I develop a design guideline for ultrahigh-density 3D VRSM using simulations of 3D memory arrays based on an accurate and computationally efficient model of the memory and parasitic resistance of the memory wired in 3D. I detail the model formulation and validation with physics-based simulations. Combined with simulation results, I discuss design specifications for different physical levels from device to array to chip architecture and provide a comprehensive list of design tasks to achieve an ultrahigh-density 3D VRRAM. To prioritize design tasks among different levels, I focus on the rudimentary design constraints at the device level and extend design requirements to a ready-to-build memory device in the lab. I then experimentally demonstrate an 8-layer 3D Ru/AlOxNy/TiN VRRAM towards an ultrahigh-density memory. This 3D VRRAM satisfies the design requirements for a tera-bit class memory when integrated with a proper selector. I further investigate the downscaling potentials of 3D VRRAM based on experimental data and ongoing scaling techniques and trends in the industry. Incorporating these scaling prospects, I project that 3D VRRAM can achieve a much higher density and capacity with the same number of 3D layers and fewer bits per cell compared to the state-of-the-art 3D NAND. With the structural and process flexibility (e.g., BEOL), 3D VRRAM can expand its high-density applications to be integrated on-chip with CMOS logic for high bandwidth memory access
A democracy at what cost? The rise of drug cartels in Mexico's democratic transition
Keywords: Mexico
Drug traffic
Democracy
Text
Thesis

Over the last three decades, Mexico has undergone two radical changes. With the dawn of a new millennia, Vicente Fox of the opposition National Action Party (PAN) was elected as the nation’s chief executive. Through his victory, Mexico transitioned from seventy years of single party rule under the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) to a democratic system that persists to this day. At the same time, however, the smuggling of narcotics across the country’s northern border fueled the rise of violent drug cartels that threaten political stability. In this thesis, I seek to examine the forces of these seemingly unrelated events in four different ways. First, I provide a survey of existing literature pertaining to the topic. Second, I develop a game theory framework that explains how drug cartels evolved from small bandits to transnational operations capable of challenging the state. Third, using a multivariable regression, I delve into the effects of Mexico’s democratic transition on the criminal world, advancing a new approach to measure the presence of drug cartels. Finally, I invert the relationship to determine the impact of drug cartels on democracy—namely, the influence of drug cartels on electoral patterns. I find that Mexico’s transition had a significant impact on criminal activity as measured by drugs seized by the state. Furthermore, I show that drug cartels tacitly influence electoral results across all parties. In the end, this thesis shows the growing relationship between drug cartels and the state, suggesting these two are closely interconnected despite of common misconceptions.