VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Some Strings Attached: Explaining the Motivations for and Impact of Chinese Engagement in Ghana
Keywords: Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law
Stanford University
Belt and Road Initiative
China-Ghana Relations
China-Africa Relations
Chinese Influence in Africa
Thesis

China’s engagement in Africa is a hotly debated subject today. Policymakers in Washington D.C. increasingly see China’s actions as predatory and with the intention of domination over the continent. In Beijing, on the other hand, Xi Jinping frequently tout’s ‘win-win’, ‘no political strings attached’ cooperation. Drawing on publicly available data and 33 interviews with 29 individuals from a variety of backgrounds, this thesis seeks to analyze China’s actions in Ghana to shed light on the motivations for and the effects of China’s engagement in Africa. This thesis concludes that the Chinese government has both economic motivations and political objectives for its engagement with Ghana, and it utilizes a variety of strategies across different sectors to advance those economic and political interests. As for the effects of China’s increased engagement in Ghana, country-level generalized data indicates win-win outcomes for both countries. But closer analysis suggests that across different sectors, China’s engagement with Ghanaian elites has resulted in close financial relationships that threaten Ghana’s ability to conduct policy without undue influence from the Chinese central government. China’s engagement also has worrying implications for Ghana’s environment, local industry, and media and information and communication technology (ICT) freedom. But Ghanaian leaders, civil society organizations, and citizens also have exhibited significant agency in shaping the terms of the bilateral China-Ghana relationship.
Spatial and temporal constraints imposed on the hedgehog pathway by the primary cilium
Keywords: Developmental Biology.

Vertebrate Hedgehog (Hh) signaling requires the primary cilium, a microtubule-based organelle that projects from the cell surface and acts as a signaling antenna. Defects in cilium structure or function cause a range of Hh-related developmental disorders. Although much work has focused on understanding the mechanisms of Hh signal transduction in primary cilia, relatively little is known about how the cell biology of the organelle impacts its signaling capacity. Specifically, the primary cilium is a small organelle with respect to the total cell surface area, and it is a transient organelle with respect to the cell cycle. How do these spatial constraints and temporal dynamics of cilia affect how Hh signaling operates in developing tissues? To address this question, we developed new mammalian cell culture approaches to explore the spatial and temporal relationship between cilia and signal transduction. First, we used a medulloblastoma cell line to investigate how cilium transience during the cell cycle affects cells that require Hh pathway activity during the cell cycle to maintain proliferation. We show that cilia are competent for Hh signaling whenever they are present and that proliferative decisions are made in response to pathway activation in either the same cell cycle or the previous one. These results reveal that although the cilium is transient, Hh pathway control of the cell cycle is surprisingly robust. Next, we used these same cells to develop a screening approach to identify novel regulators of Hh signaling that are unique to proliferating cells. While our screen requires further optimization, our work reveals that screening for regulators of Hh pathway-dependent proliferation is a promising approach. Finally, we turned to the spatial constraint imposed by cilia, exploring how signaling operates when cilia only have access to a small proportion of the extracellular environment. We used polarized epithelial cultures in which basally-applied ligand could be spatially separated from apical cilia. We show that basally-applied ligand is not sufficient for signaling; apical ligand is necessary. These results suggest that in contexts where ligand is basal, there must be mechanisms to transport Hh ligand to the apical, ciliary compartment. Together, this work reveals that while cilia do impose spatial and temporal constraints on the Hh pathway, cells have mechanisms to ensure robust signaling during development. Further characterization of these mechanisms is an important goal of future work. It will also be interesting to expand these findings to other signaling pathways and functions of cilia in development beyond the Hh pathway
Speculating sapphires : mining, trading, and dreams that move gems across the Indian Ocean
Keywords: Anthropology.

Imagined as expressing the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism or reflecting its excesses, speculation is often theorized from the perspectives of bankers and investors who control global financial markets. Their practices of taking high risks with the anticipation of receiving high returns have shaped popular and scholarly understandings of speculation, yet many others who have limited access to capital and who deal with uncertainty as a feature of everyday life routinely make wagers on unpredictable futures. Theirs is not a vantage point through which speculation is often understood. This dissertation disentangles speculation from finance capital to ask: how do ordinary people take risks to pursue their dreams beyond possibilities immediately available to them, in circumstances that often lie outside their control? Speculating Sapphires seeks answers to this question through an ethnography of gem mining and trading in Sri Lanka and across the Indian Ocean, uncovering an alternative genealogy of speculation grounded in everyday worlds of work, shaped by the legacies of oceanic histories. As luxury commodities, Sri Lankan sapphires have been traded across the Indian Ocean for over a millennium; their mercantile networks continue to flow through old maritime routes to new sites of global capital. Lubricating these flows are the risky pursuits of ordinary people, from miners who work without wages for a share of gem revenue, to traders who exchange stones on credit across ethnic and religious lines with little recourse in the event of default. This ethnography seeks to understand how the speculative dreams of miners and traders shape the movement of gemstones. Its chapters follow sapphire networks from Sri Lanka's hinterland villages, where miners describe the aspirations that sustain their months of wageless work, to markets across the Indian Ocean, tracing the risky, secretive, credit-based trade of gems as they pass through the hands of gem cutters, commission agents, transnational brokers, and multi-generational family firms. Bringing within the same frame labor on land and trading across the seas, this dissertation examines the risks taken and returns sought in the subterranean depths of hinterland mines and across maritime landscapes traversed by mobile family firms, credit lines, and messages of stones bought, sold, admired, and stolen. Following these flows and the aspirations that fuel them, Speculating Sapphires reimagines speculation through ordinary forms of risk taking in labor and trade, shaped by oceanic histories and their long afterlives
Spring-slider and finite element modeling of microseismic events and fault slip during hydraulic fracturing
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.

Hydraulic fracturing increases reservoir permeability by opening fractures and triggering slip on natural fractures and faults. While seismic slip of small faults or fault patches is detectable as microseismic events, the role of aseismic slip is poorly understood. From a modeling standpoint, geomechanical analysis using the Coulomb criterion can determine if faults slip but not whether slip is seismic or aseismic. Here we propose a computational methodology to predict fault slip, and whether slip is seismic or aseismic, using rate-and-state friction. To avoid computational costs associated with resolving small faults, we use the spring-slider idealization that treats faults as points. Interaction between faults is neglected. The method is applied to study fault slip from a hydraulic fracture that grows past a fault, without intersecting it. We represent the hydraulic fracture stressing using an asymptotic expansion of stresses around the tip of a tensile crack. We investigate the effect of fault length, orientation, and distance from the hydraulic fracture. For velocity-weakening faults with stiffness smaller than a critical stiffness, slip is seismic, whereas faults with stiffness greater than the critical stiffness slip aseismically. Furthermore, we compare the spring-slider idealization with a finite element analysis that resolves spatially variable slip. The spring-slider idealization provides reasonably accurate predictions of moment and even moment-rate history, especially for faults having stiffness close to or larger than the critical stiffness. Differences appear for large faults where rupture propagation is important, though differences might still be negligible for many applications. The spring-slider methodology could be applied to model statistics of microseismicity and aseismic slip on a population of small faults in a reservoir by populating a stochastic fracture network with spring sliders having frictional properties drawn from a statistical characterization based on well logs and experimental correlations between friction and rock properties
State control over the internet in Russia and the role of online intermediaries
Keywords: Law JSD.

The overarching theme of my research was the evolution of state controls over the internet in Russia: How did Russian internet evolve from being free, open and almost unregulated phenomena to the stage where the government has tightened its controls and molded it to its liking so much that it can now censor and block a wide range of content, direct the behavior of all actors, and use it as a communication medium to its own advantage with very minimum oversight and opposition from the internet community? During the initial exploratory phase of the research, I collected and analyzed legislative history, court enforcement practice, and conducted a sentiment analysis of the attitude towards state control of the internet of the key policy stakeholders. As a result, I decided to address three areas which in my view are important to understand the scope and operationalization of state controls in Russia: 1) What online content the Kremlin is most concerned about; 2) What is the role of private intermediaries in the execution of state controls; 3) How transparent global platforms are when dealing with the Russian government. As I chose a "three paper" format, I provide background information in the attached memorandum as to the papers' primary research questions, methodology, key findings, and what they mean for public policy disputes. I also provide some recommendations for the US government and for private companies which practices I analyzed as part of my research
Stochastic multiscale modeling of complex materials
Keywords: Energy Resources Engineering.

Multiscale modeling and simulation of complex materials is still a formidable task. The challenge arises due to the lack of scale separation in systems that exhibit nonlinear and chaotic dynamics. In this dissertation, we develop stochastic, multiscale and data-driven methods for modeling complex systems, with a focus on the dynamic compaction of heterogeneous granular materials. We first devise an energy-conserving multiscale hybrid model that explicitly accounts for macropore compaction dynamics at the mesoscale. Subsequently, we develop a probabilistic generalization that models the heterogeneous initial microstructure as a random field to explain thermal localization. The results motivate a data-driven sparse regression method to discover analytical expressions for PDF equations from Monte Carlo simulation data. This method has shown to be a promising direction for data-driven coarse-graining in a wide range of physics and engineering applications. In addition, we introduce model uncertainty and subscale fluctuations that arise due chaotic intergranular stresses through the formalism of stochastic differential equations (SDE). Finally, a hybrid algorithm that couples SDEs with PDEs is developed to combine fine- and coarse-grained probabilistic models in the same domain
Streaming the Forgotten Land
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
China
East Asian Studies
new media
visual art
visual culture
Kuaishou.
Thesis

Kuaishou stands at the intersection of three dimensions: market economy, digital technology and mass culture. They interface with each other and create a vast cyber community that breaks rather than foregrounds the existing boundaries, debunking the conventional dichotomies drawn between labour and leisure, producer and consumer, elite/official culture and mass culture. From small towns to remote countryside, from fishing boat to plateau, there are numerous people using Kuaishou, unleashing their creativities. The rural labourers once left behind in China’s technological rise have finally found a base camp to establish and voice their own culture, to equally benefit from digital media technology and celebrate material prosperity. The opportunities brought by mobile technology enables them to pursue individual interests and to create their diverse communities in the cyberspace at an unprecedented scale.
On a higher level, works created by Kuaishou UGC producers constitute a cross- section of Chinese society, multifaceted and humane, radiating fresh takes on the forgotten lives of ordinary Chinese people. Together they weave a tapestry of the grassroots in China, formulating a diverse but collective image that questions and contradicts official grand narrative. Together they make themselves seen, self-empowered with the capacity to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Strengthening the study of migraine headache triggers through mobile health tools and n-of-1 methods
Keywords: Epidemiology and Population Health.

Episodic migraine headache attacks are thought to be triggered, or proximately caused, by a wide range of transient factors encountered in daily life. Even after a great deal of published research on migraine triggers, scientific understanding is limited. In order to reduce the societal burden of migraine, we need rigorous data collection and statistical analysis to understand trigger factors from causal and predictive perspectives and at individual and population levels. In this dissertation, we applied state-of-the-art mobile app methodology and careful statistical analysis to achieve two main objectives: (1) evaluate the predictability of migraine attacks among persons with episodic migraine based on commonly cited trigger factors and physiological data, and (2) evaluate the precision and power associated with Cox proportional hazards regression for estimating the effects of potential migraine trigger factors at the individual patient (n-of-1) level. We found that despite statistically significant associations between several known trigger factors and short-term risk of migraine, migraine attacks were not predictable based on the self-reported data or physiological factors collected. In order to predict migraines in a clinically relevant way, greater accuracy or breadth of data collection are required. In addition, we found that in an n-of-1 observational study of triggers of recurrent events (such as episodic migraine attacks) analyzed with Cox regression, at least 24 events were needed to reliably detect moderately sized statistical associations between potential trigger factors and event risk. In order to avoid wasted efforts in n-of-1 studies of episodic migraines and other recurrent events, the study design must include sufficient event numbers to yield informative results. These findings and the ensuing discussion highlight key current challenges and opportunities for strengthening the study of migraine triggers through mobile health data collection and n-of-1 methodology
A stress response that allows highly mutated cells to survive and proliferate
Keywords: Chemical and Systems Biology.

Cells, tissues, and organisms must deal with exogenous and endogenous sources of mutagenesis. High mutation rates are associated with disease, but they can also lead to more rapid acquisition of adaptive mutations. For example, in the cases of oncogenic transformation, infection, or environmental stress many cells are found to be hypermutators. However, mutations are on average deleterious. Understanding the mechanisms and pathways that cells employ to mitigate the toxicity of accumulating mutation burdens has broad implications for evolution, disease, and how biological systems tolerate the accumulation of mutations that come with stress and age. In this thesis, we present two studies utilizing Saccharomyces cerevisiae to create a model system to study the cellular response to accumulating mutation burden and a platform for high-throughput screening to identify compounds that selectively target cells with high mutation burden. We discovered a novel protective transcriptional response to accumulating mutation burden, that we term the Eukaryotic Mutation Burden Response (EMBR). We additionally identified the key regulator of EMBR induction: the transcriptional regulator UME6. Components of EMBR are required for cells to survive the toxicity of mutation burden. Likewise, UME6 is necessary to tolerate protein-folding stress and is required to survive accumulating mutation burden. Lastly, we identified a structurally diverse set of compounds that selectively target cells with high mutation burdens. These compounds implicate double-strand break repair and calcium homeostasis as additional mechanisms that protect against the toxicity of accumulated mutations and provide potential avenues for future development of therapeutics that target the mechanisms that cancers and pathogens use to survive mutation burden
Stressed and Confused: The Effects of an Informational Intervention on West Virginia Students’ Emotional Relationship to the College Application Process
Keywords: Graduate School of Education
college
college application process
decision-making
FAFSA
college access
rural
West Virginia
emotions
stress
confusion
intervention
counseling
survey
Thesis

The college application process is daunting for millions of high school seniors. Students must weigh the potential benefits and potential costs of pursuing higher education while balancing the interests of their school, their family, and most importantly, themselves. Minimal research has examined the emotional toll this process has on students, and similarly, there are few studies that examine how a rural setting further impacts student emotions and decision making. In order to address these voids and explore these topics, this study took a quasi experimental approach to examine the effects of an informational workshop on students at a public high school in West Virginia. Results show that an informational workshop was successful at reducing student confusion levels but increased student stress levels. Students were mainly concerned with the affordability of higher education and with the possibility of leaving their home towns, highlighting the strength and influence of a rural community. Additionally, this intervention did not reveal a significant impact on application rates. While increased information about the college application process is beneficial to students emotionally, this is only one component of the student decision making process. There are historical, economic, and geographical factors which also influence how students feel about higher education and if they choose to attend.
Structural foundations of optogenetics
Keywords: Bioengineering.

The brain is a remarkably complex structure, composed of hundreds of neurons in simple organisms and up to hundreds of billions of neurons in large mammals. The recent advent of optically-modulated, molecular tools for neuroscience ('optogenetics') has allowed unprecedented access to simultaneously modulate and observe the activity of hundreds of genetically-defined neurons with millisecond resolution. However, while optogenetics has enabled rapid advances in neuroscience, this powerful toolset remains constrained by a limited mechanistic understanding of light-gated molecules, including channelrhodopsins (ChRs). Here, I describe my efforts to understand structural and dynamical mechanisms of ChRs, using three complimentary approaches. First, to extend the available high-resolution ChR structural insights, I employed X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of natural and designed anion-conducting ChRs (ACRs). Next, I used a combination of these atomic-resolution structures, molecular dynamics (MD) computational simulation, and in vitro electrophysiology to assess functional dynamics of ACRs, leading to the identification of a variant with improved channel-closing kinetics. Finally, I used structure-guided genome mining, whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology, and two-photon imaging to identify and characterize a new red-shifted excitatory channelrhodopsin with large photocurrents and high light sensitivity. Taken together, this work provides a framework for the engineering and discovery of better optogenetic tools and lays a foundation for future studies of channelrhodopsin biology
Structure-activity relationships in CO2 electroreduction catalysis
Keywords: Chemistry.

Developing structure-activity relationships in CO2 electroreduction catalysts is critical to rationally synthesizing electrode materials with improved performance. While many studies have drawn correlations between the activity, selectivity, and stability of a CO2 electroreduction catalyst and catalyst particle size, shape, composition, roughness, comparatively less had been established about how bulk defects influence surface reactivity. We hypothesized that bulk defects could stabilize reactive surfaces that persist through electrolytic conditions and alter the reactivity of more ordered surfaces. In this dissertation, we detail our efforts to obtain the first direct evidence that CO2 electroreduction in enhanced at the surface terminations of grain boundaries (GBs) and dislocations. We used scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM) to show that the surface terminations of GBs engender regions of enhanced CO2 electroreduction activity that can be several µms wide. The magnitude of enhancements appeared to depend on local GB structure and ranged between 10%-300% relative to the adjacent grains. In contrast, the competing H2 evolution reaction was relatively insensitive to the presence of these defects. Mapping the lattice deformation of the regions surrounding these bulk defects using electron diffraction suggested that the local density of dislocation surface terminations, instead of local lattice strain, were correlated to the observed enhancements. Beyond electroanalytical SECCM studies, we demonstrated the utility of engineering bulk defects in CO2 electroreduction catalysts by showing that mechanical treatment enhances CO2 electroreduction by introducing new GBs and dislocations, while the H2 evolution reaction remains relatively unaffected. In addition, we report the development and validation of a scanning electron microscope (SEM)-based technique to rapidly and accurately characterize the grain orientation and defect structure of polycrystalline nanoparticles, relieving a bottleneck imposed by the inaccessibility of existing grain mapping techniques. These studies establish a new structure space for electrocatalyst design and motivate the exploration of GB and dislocation engineering to develop improved catalysts for electrochemical transformations