VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A Path Dependent Prerogative: Why British Prime Ministers Gave Up Their War Powers
Keywords: CISAC
Prime Ministers
Britain
War Powers
constitutional conventions
war powers convention
political science
British foreign policy
British constitution
Iraq War
path dependence
critical junctures
historical institutionalism
Thesis

War powers in Great Britain have traditionally been the exclusive domain of the executive. Parliament did not hold a substantive vote of approval for war until 2003, when it supported regime change in Iraq. Parliament has since held four votes on military action: Libya (2011), Syria (2013), ISIS (2014, Iraq) and ISIS (2015, Syria). This abrupt shift, referred to as the War Powers Convention, has come without legal change in Parliament’s war powers. This thesis examines why parliamentary votes of approval started in 2003 and have been consistently replicated in an otherwise diverse set of political, strategic, and international legal contexts. I argue that the War Powers Convention emerged from a process of path-dependent institutional development enabled by Britain’s convention-driven constitution. Specifically, a contingent event in the vote over war in Iraq, forced by a significant Labour Party rebellion, was a critical juncture that launched a process of progressive reinforcement of the perceived superior legitimacy of parliamentary war powers. The more MPs and Ministers supported parliamentary war powers in their statements and actions, and especially as subsequent parliamentary votes were held, the more political-constitutional expectations adapted to affirm Parliament’s role. Through this reinforcement, what was a contingent choice to hold a vote in 2003 has become a politically-enforced constitutional convention that has constrained later Prime Ministers to follow earlier precedent, especially during the debates on military action against Syria and ISIS. Beyond war powers, path-dependence appears to be a promising framework to analyze convention-based constitutional change Britain more broadly.
A two-pronged approach to urban ants: How is behavior affected by habitat urbanization level and what characteristics of an urban tree are attractive to native ants?
Keywords:  Department of Biology
Urban Ecology
Ants
Biology
Ecology
Thesis

Urban landscapes offer a new and different ecosystem to organisms living in them, fostering different communities from neighboring natural areas and affecting the behavior of some organisms. Ants can be useful to urban ecology studies but are relatively understudied in this sphere. This thesis examines urban ants in two different ways. The first chapter compares seasonal foraging activity of a native ant, Liometopum occidentale, in urban and natural landscapes. I analyzed foraging activity at colonies in Naturalized Woodland, Urban Woodland, and Urban landscapes using rate counts and qualitative trail maps throughout the year. Results indicate that foraging activity is affected by season and an interaction between season and habitat urbanization type. Overall highest activity level occurred in the Spring, and lowest occurred in the Summer. During the Winter, Naturalized Woodland sites had higher activity than the colonies in other habitat urbanization types. During the late Summer, Urban colonies had higher activity than the colonies in other habitat urbanization types. This indicates a behavioral response to the different environmental conditions found in urban areas. The second chapter compares characteristics of native urban park oaks utilized by native and invasive ants. Of all ant species found in the surveys, the only invasive ant was Linepithema humile, the Argentine ant. Size and groundcover of oaks were found to be correlated with indigeneity of ants. Native ants were on significantly larger oaks than Linepithema humile and were disproportionately more likely than Linepithema humile to be on oaks with leaf litter groundcover, whereas Linepithema humile was disproportionately more likely than native ants to be on oaks with grass groundcover. Broadly, this thesis helps us understand how landscape influences behavior and how native ants occupy urbanized landscapes. These results have implications for behavioral ecology and urban planning.
A Virtual Solution to a Painful Reality: An Analysis of Virtual Reality Integration into Paediatric Pain Management
Keywords: Science
Technology &amp; Society
Thesis

Advancements in virtual reality (VR) technology have the potential to revolutionise many areas of medicine. In particular, VR use for paediatric pain management is offering promising clinical results, yet the long-term effects of this technology—both for patients and healthcare systems—remain unknown. The goal of this honors thesis was to analyse the current state of VR integration into paediatric pain management. This research answers two main questions: 1) How does VR function as an effective pain management tool for children? And 2) What are providers’ opinions of VR as an effective tool in paediatric pain management? This first part of this thesis addresses the former question through a comprehensive analysis of relevant literature related to VR use in children experiencing acute or chronic pain. To answer the latter question, interviews were completed with providers affiliated with the CHARIOT program at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, which is a groundbreaking initiative aimed at implementing VR in paediatric medicine. These interviews addressed five themes related to providers’ use of VR: motivations, barriers, experiences, challenges and opportunities. Providers’ responses were summarised and evaluated against published opinions of VR use in medicine. This thesis concluded that there is a significant need for further research on the use of VR in paediatric pain management. Additionally, in order for VR to be effectively employed in current clinical practice, it is essential that preliminary provider experiences be used to develop a standard VR implementation protocol that can be used by healthcare systems across the United States. Ultimately, this thesis contributes both to the academic literature on VR use and offers a novel analysis of provider opinions that will help to ensure that VR integration into paediatric pain management is done both with efficacy and integrity.
Achieving political control and regional development : spatial mobility in the Chinese bureaucracy
Keywords: Sociology.

The allocation of career opportunities to local officials has long been identified as a central strategy to promote conformity and discipline in authoritarian regimes. While previous studies of career mobility in authoritarian regimes mostly focus on the political incentives from position promotion, spatial mobility, as a crucial component of career mobility, is given little attention. Spatial mobility refers to the top-down process of transferring local officials across administrative jurisdictions. This dissertation advances the literature by examining the mechanisms, patterns, applications, and implications of spatial mobility in the contemporary Chinese bureaucracy, which provide an important lens through which to inspect the institutional logic of governance in this authoritarian regime, especially how it maintains a delicate balance between political control and regional development. Specifically, this dissertation consists of three inter-related studies. In the first study, I examine the dominant spatial mobility mechanisms in the Chinese bureaucracy. I propose that there are three dominant mechanisms: (1) mobility to reward bureaucrats, (2) mobility to train bureaucrats, and (3) mobility to achieve political control. The three mechanisms induce distinct mobility patterns at the aggregate level and have differential applications across top-administrative positions. In the second study, I focus on the implication of spatial mobility of local political leaders, i.e., the heads of local governments and party committees at the county-, prefectural-, and provincial jurisdictions. Specifically, I analyze how local political leaders' administrative ranks and jurisdictions of their immediate previous positions influence their promotion hazard in their current terms. Finally, in the third study, I examine how the different patterns of spatial mobility of local officials of different positions, particularly local political leaders and the more stable political elites, result in their different roles in promoting the local economy. This dissertation contributes to the comparative study of bureaucracy and, in particular, our understanding of the institutional logic underlying China's economic growth and political stability
Activating the sacred landscape : the visual culture of the Wuyi Mountains
Keywords: Art and Art History.

This dissertation examines the visual culture of the Wuyi Mountains, one of the sacred Daoist sites in China's southeastern Fujian province. Since the twelfth century, the breathtaking topography of Wuyi has inspired a great variety of cultural productions, including stone inscriptions, topographic paintings, cartography, and contemporary theatrical performances. Grounded in the cultural practice of boating initiated by the influential Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200), these cultural productions developed amid Confucian, Daoist, tourist, and contemporary political currents. Reflecting diverse ways in which humans engaged with Wuyi, these visual materials have defined and augmented the mountains' sacredness. Through integrated analyses of ecology, topography, and visual culture, this study traces the dynamic yet neglected ecological episodes of Wuyi. I argue that understanding ecologically engaged artistic production illuminates historical conceptions of the sacred, reveals histories of human intervention in and interaction with Wuyi, and exemplifies the ways in which we can re-imagine our relations with the environment.
Acts of commitment : prefigurative politics on the agitprop stage
Keywords: Theater and Performance Studies.

"Acts of Commitment" examines the purposeful conflation of theatrical and political acts in agitprop performance: a genre of anti-fascist street theater popular in the final years of the Weimar Republic (ca. 1926-1933). Using largely unpublished archival materials—production ephemera, performer memoirs, and police reports—I reconstruct the performance scenarios of this amateur theater movement, while also locating its trajectory within larger cultural debates about the social function of art. Although agitprop has long been dismissed as an overly simplistic aesthetic practice defined solely by its capacity to convey party doctrine (that is, as "propaganda"), my research dismantles the presumed unidirectionality between political conviction and artistic form. My findings demonstrate that agitprop's political import stemmed less from its (usually pro-Communist) discursive content than from the performative acts of the players, spectators, and police who co-produced the theatrical events. As a transient space that enticed participants to perform political commitments in the face of increasingly fascist state forces, the agitprop stage allowed urban workers to prefigure their own political identities, modes of discourse, and, most significantly, strategies of resistance. At stake in this research is a concrete understanding of how theater has functioned as a vital site for disenfranchised communities to negotiate theoretical models of revolutionary action and their embodied realization.
Adapting local minimax theory to modern applications
Keywords: Statistics.

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is influential because it can be easily applied to generate optimal, statistically efficient procedures for broad classes of estimation problems. Nonetheless, the theory does not apply to modern settings—such as problems with computational, communication, or privacy considerations—where our estimators have resource constraints. The thesis will introduce a modern maximum likelihood theory (through generalization of local minimax theory) that addresses these issues, focusing specifically on procedures that must be computationally efficient or privacy-preserving. To do so, I first derive analogues of Fisher information for these applications, which allows a precise characterization of tradeoffs between statistical efficiency, privacy, and computation. To complete the development, I also describe a recipe that generates optimal statistical procedures (analogues of the MLE) in the new settings, showing how to achieve the new Fisher information lower bounds.
Adhocracies, for chamber orchestra with dual soprano soloists
Keywords: Music.

Through recent works, I have been interested in the perceptual transitions between intelligibility and ambiguity with language in music. With Adhocracies I wanted to attempt a much larger scale transition between the states of unintelligible chatter, to ambiguous speech, to (finally) articulated prose. Adhocracies has become a vessel where I could address these language and speech procedures in the same context as several other compositional devices I have been developing concurrently.
Adjoint optimization of free-space metasurfaces
Keywords: Applied Physics.

Metasurfaces are ultrathin optical elements that are highly promising for constructing lightweight and compact optical systems. In order to enhance the capabilities of the technology beyond what is achievable with conventional optics, I introduce a method for designing free-space metasurfaces via adjoint topology optimization. Using silicon on glass as a platform, I demonstrate that the optimization of wavelength-scale sections can be used to construct both periodic and aperiodic optical devices. For periodic devices, I show the process for optimizing a polarization-insensitive grating which efficiently deflects light to 75 degrees, as well as gratings which are capable of independently splitting up to 5 separate wavelengths. For aperiodic devices, I demonstrate the process by which we construct large objects, such as lenses, using wavelength-scale sections that are individually optimized to deflect to specific angles with a specified phase delay. Overall, we envision that the proper application of optimization techniques to free-space metasurfaces can realize their usage in enabling technologies requiring compact control over multiple distinct channels of light.
Adjoint-based optimization and inverse design of photonic devices
Keywords: Applied Physics.

Photonic devices are important to a wide range of applications, from communications to fundamental science. However, the design of such devices is traditionally done by hand, using physical intuition and trial and error. The development of 'inverse design', where computational optimization techniques are used to design devices based on certain specifications, has led to the discovery of many compact, non-intuitive structures with superior performance. Among various methods, large-scale, gradient-based optimization techniques have been one of the most important ways to design a structure containing a vast number of degrees of freedom. These techniques are made possible by the 'adjoint method', in which the gradient of an objective function with respect to all design degrees of freedom can be computed using only two full-field simulations. In this thesis, we will discuss the application of inverse design to two emerging photonic technologies and discuss the generalization of the adjoint method to new scenarios. First, we will present the inverse design of laser-driven particle accelerators on a chip as well as our efforts to scale this technology to higher energy gains using photonic integrated circuits. Next, we will discuss how the adjoint method may be used to perform on-chip training of optical neural networks. We will show that this technique corresponds to a physical implementation of the backpropagation algorithm, commonly used in traditional neural networks. A procedure for measuring the gradient determined by the adjoint method will be introduced. Then, we will discuss the application of this technique to design general wave systems capable of perform machine learning computation on sequence data in the form of time series signals. Finally, we will discuss the generalization of the adjoint method to nonlinear optical phenomena and show that this may be used to devise compact photonic switches in a Kerr nonlinear material.
Advances on chip-in-cell wireless platform for continuous monitoring of physiological parameters in single cells
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Cells are the smallest functional unit of the human body, which contains 37 trillion cells on average. Current technology for intracellular sensing does not yet allow us to follow biological processes inside living intact cells on a continuous, real-time basis. Information about such processes is invaluable for understanding complex diseases, such as cancer, immune-pathological, and cardiovascular disorders. For example, the acidity in the micro-environment inside cancer cells can undergo transitory stages that last up to a few hours and are difficult to detect by non-continuous detection methods. However, most of today's diagnostic tests and medical monitoring operate at the body, organ, or tissue level. Continuous detection of cellular activities can significantly advance our knowledge of biology and disease and enable new discoveries in early diagnostics and tailored therapeutics. This dissertation presents the exploratory work on a new approach toward intracellular sensing with chip-in-cell (CHIC) devices. Each CHIC device has a wireless front-end to communicate data and a sensor interface responsive to a specific stimulus. We present the design, fabrication, and characterization of the wireless front-end with a radio-frequency identification (RFID) and a corresponding external detector. The RFID diameter is 22 μm and can be naturally internalized by certain classes of living cells. This is the world's first cellular-implantable RFID. The detector can identify RFID presence and distinguish RFID capacitance changes via resonance frequency shifts. Requirements on system-level integration with biological microfluidic platforms are included. To detect biologically meaningful parameters, a pH-responsive hydrogel is integrated as an example prototype CHIC sensor interface. The hydrogel is fabricated onto interdigitated electrodes. Capacitance shifts at gigahertz range are characterized in physiologically relevant pH ranges from 6 to 9, with steps as small as 0.25 pH identified. Overall, the CHIC sensors are addressable to individual cells, bio-compatible for long-term observation, and sensitive to specific chemical changes; a solid step toward continuous real-time intra-cellular sensing.
Aftershock : aid, Ebola, and civil society in West Africa
Keywords: Education.

Despite significant international aid to local and national organizations and their role in community education and mobilization, they are often marginalized during crisis. International humanitarian organizations cite the lack of technical capacity and the political nature of local organizations, as reasons to not work with them. Concurrently, the nonprofit sector experiences increased demands for metrics and specialization, assumed to reflect organizational capacity. As a result, nonprofit organizations dependent on foreign aid slowly move away from the grassroots, and towards professionalization and specialization. However, does the professionalization of civil society organizations, through an over-reliance on metrics, blueprints, and specialization, restrict organizational capacity to generate civic engagement? In this study, I explore a major paradox in terms of how international NGOs work with local organizations in developing countries by examining the 2013-2016 West Africa Ebola response. I address the lack of data on domestic organizations in Sierra Leone and Guinea by collecting my own unique data through extensive fieldwork. As a consequence of the expansion of bureaucracy by international organizations, I find that organizational professionalism potentially restricts broader civic engagement in two aid-dependent countries with different levels of foreign funding, Guinea and Sierra Leone. The evidence for these conclusions comes from a combination of interviews with domestic organizations in Sierra Leone and Guinea, automated text analysis of international humanitarian organization strategy reports, and a dataset merging cross-national survey data on social capital and WHO Ebola mortality data.
All-cause Mortality in Danish Multiple Sclerosis Patients Following a New Diagnosis of Cancer: A National Registry Analysis
Keywords: Multiple sclerosis > Epidemiology
Cancer > Epidemiology
Text
Thesis

Multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic, autoimmune neurological disease, typically has a prolonged natural course, conferring only a modest decline in life expectancy in treated patients. As such, MS patients remain susceptible to death from other diseases, including cancer. Although MS patients appear to be at a slightly decreased risk of being diagnosed with cancer, the prognosis of MS patients following a new cancer diagnosis has not been fully explored. Immunological mechanisms, interference with adequate treatment, co-morbidities, and diagnostic delays could all confer a worse prognosis compared to cancer patients without MS. In this population-based study using linked administrative datasets from Denmark, we compared the all-cause mortality of MS patients with a set of matched population controls, following a first-time diagnosis of cancer. We identified 2,178 patients diagnosed with MS between 1975-2015 in the Danish National Patient Registry and matched to 18,589 non-MS patients (up to 10 matches per MS case) on age, sex, year of cancer diagnosis, type of cancer, and cancer stage. All-cause mortality in a Cox regression model adjusting for all of the above factors demonstrated increased mortality of MS patients compared to the matched controls (HR 1.38, 95% CI 1.28-1.47). When stratifying the Cox regression models according to type of cancer, the greatest mortality differences were observed for melanoma and other immunologic- or infectious-related cancers. No mortality difference was observed for hematological cancers or for lung cancer. We conclude that MS patients have increased mortality following cancer diagnosis compared to non-MS patients. We hypothesize that immunological mechanisms that promote tumor progression or interfere with immune-based treatments may contribute to poorer cancer prognosis in MS patients, although we cannot exclude that increased deaths associated with MS may have impacted the observed survival differences.