VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Great Manchurian Plague: An Event of Nation-Making and the Experiences Failed to be Captured
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Great Manchurian Plague
Modern Chinese nationalism
history as experiences
Thesis

A pneumonic plague stormed Manchuria at the turn of the year 1910-11. Soon after its outbreak in October, a nationalist discourse dominated both regional and national print media in China, where the Chinese elite and intellectuals treated the plague as a national rather than a medical crisis. Guarding the nation’s health was defending the state’s sovereignty, and overcoming the crisis embodied a national transformation. Such nationalist narrative of the plague fit in the progress of nation-making in modern China but failed to capture the experiences of the inarticulate masses. The vast majority of the people was struggling for survival at the society’s bottom. The fear and anxiety that they suffered were not only caused by the disease but the state with which they were supposed to ally. But however much the grass-roots experiences deviated from the elite’s discourse, writers and leaders found ways to force them back into a coherent nationalist narrative. When the plague finally passed, the Chinese nation was strengthened and preserved while some lives were forever lost and forgotten.
The Impact of Food Insecurity on Mental Health, Physical Health and Wellbeing in Low-Income Seniors During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Keywords: Mental health
Physical Health
Wellbeing
COVID-19 Pandemic
Food insecurity
Text
Thesis

Adequate food and nutrition are vital components of human wellbeing, which are compromised by food insecurity in many low-income populations, especially during the COVID- 19 pandemic. Measuring the impact of the pandemic on the overall health and wellbeing of food insecure older adults is crucial to lower the burden of food insecurity and further senior wellbeing during this challenging time. The primary aims of this research study are to assess the impact of food insecurity on physical health, mental health, and social wellbeing among low-income participants during the COVID-19 pandemic, comparing 2 study groups among the study sample. The study consists of a survey with 4 sections related to COVID-19, mental health, physical health, and emotional wellbeing during the pandemic, as well as an optional follow-up interview to further discuss personal experiences related to food insecurity and/or health. SPSS software was used for data analysis. Overall, Plaza Tower residents experienced a greater decline in all health and wellbeing measures compared to Heritage residents. Heritage residents had significantly lower scores for “health status in terms of diet and nutrition” and “social network” compared to Plaza Tower residents. Heritage residents also reported “unintentional weight loss” and “trouble staying full between meals” more often than the Plaza Tower group. The number of individuals living in the household of residents was significantly associated with “feeling lonely and isolated from others”.
The Intergenerational Assimilation and Integration of Filipino Immigrants
Keywords:  Political Science Research Honors Program
Filipino Immigrants
Immigration
Assimilation
Integration
Intergenerational
Thesis

When children of immigrants grow up in the United States, many have to navigate between a cultural background from their parents’ country of origin and the environment they are currently living in. This dissonance can be resolved through assimilation. This paper asks the following research questions: how much and to which cultural groups do immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren assimilate? How does one generation’s path of assimilation influence their integration of the next generation? How does assimilation relate to integration? Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews, I conduct exploratory research on first-, second-, and third-generation Filipino immigrants. I employ questions from the IPL-12 to capture a quantitative measure of integration and assimilation. The results show there is positive intergenerational integration and assimilation to various identities and diverse social groups among Filipino immigrants, even when the first-generation lives in and socializes with coethnic communities. However, findings show a weak negative correlation between assimilation and integration, which suggests that assimilation can actually deter success in one’s host country. Lastly, interviews highlight that political events and crises lead to a disconnect to an American identity but a latent identification with a Filipino identity, underscoring the idea that assimilation is never truly complete.
The Li(v)es of Shirley Graham Du Bois: A Politics of Truth and Deception
Keywords: Political deception
Black political thought
African American literature
Thesis

My thesis explores the role of truth-telling and use of deception in Shirley Graham’s life
and literary work. In her personal life, Graham had a complicated relationship to the truth. She lied about aspects of her personal life (e.g., her age, the number of children she had, her marital status). Her own brother called her a “skillful liar.” At the same time, public truth-telling was core to her political projects and her literary works. I argue that Graham used deception and truth strategically to navigate the conditions of white supremacy and patriarchy. Both her deception and her truth-telling were oriented toward the same end: a just social order in which the founding ideals of the United States would truly apply to all. She lied about her individual characteristics to avoid the discrimination that would prevent her from achieving this end. She adopted an ethic of radical truth-telling in her public work in order to challenge a white male version of America’s history and contemporary circumstances.
The Origins of Corruption Perceptions: An Epidemiological Approach
Keywords: Culture, Institutions, Corruption Perceptions, Latin America.
Text
Thesis

Many Latin American countries have engaged in massive anti-corruption reforms in the past decade. Yet, these reforms have had very limited success in changing citizens’ perceptions of corruption in their respective countries. This calls into question the foundations of corruption perceptions and the dynamics that sustain them. This thesis is the first study to investigate the relative weight of institutions vis-à-vis culture for individual-level corruption perceptions. It does so using migration as a natural experiment that affords both institutional and cultural variation. Drawing data from the fifth round of the European Social Survey, this study finds no evidence that corruption perceptions are culturally stable or intergenerationally transmitted. Rather, it provides evidence that corruption perceptions are adaptive and malleable to institutional contexts. More specifically, it finds that if a person grows up in an institutionally corrupt country and moves to a less corrupt institutional context after their impressionable years, they are likely to adopt a more benign perception of corruption in the host country. The analysis ruled out the possibility of this effect being the result of socio-economic factors, education, discrimination in the country of residence, self-selection into economic sectors, or local country-level conditions. These results should spur optimism for anti-corruption crusaders in Latin America and around the world. The results suggest that fundamental institutional reform can in fact change individuals’ corruption perceptions – perceptions that are central to breaking out of suboptimal corruption equilibria.
“The Overlit Bathroom Mirror”: Self-Construction Through Technology And Media In The Work Of David Foster Wallace
Keywords: Wallace, David Foster
Postmodernism (Literature)
Identity (Philosophical concept)
Consciousness in literature
Twenty-first century
Technology
Media studies
Mass media
Self
Castells, Manuel, 1942-
Baudrillard, Jean, 1929-2007
Wallace studies
Television and literature
Art and technology
Literature and technology
Suicide in literature
Mass media in literature
Suffering in literature
Fiction
Nonfiction novel
Short stories
Identity (Philosophical concept)
Solipsism in literature
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951
Machine theory in literature
Uncanny, The (Psychoanalysis), in literature
Entertainers in literature
Irony in literature
Semiotics and literature
Boredom in literature
Digital media
Infinite in literature
Data network in literature
Computers in literature
Cyborgs in literature
Existentialism in literature
Text
Thesis

This thesis evaluates the role of technology and media in the development of the authentic self within David Foster Wallace’s oeuvre. From his earliest college work to his final, unfinished novel, Wallace’s writing remains interested in the omnipresence of technology and its effects on contemporary life. This preoccupation extends into his nonfictional essays as well, which investigate topics that range from the state of the pornography industry to the relationship between television and American fiction. He pays particular attention to broadcast media such as television, which he describes as “a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe.” Wallace also describes himself as a character-centered writer; as he once explained, he tends “to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience.” The vast majority of his writing is rooted in the existential crises of the lonely, solipsistic self. This project is intended to unite the theme of technological media, omnipresent in his work, with his narrative focus on selfhood.
The following work is divided into three chapters. Chapter I elucidates Wallace’s definition of the self and how it interacts with technology and language. It will also demonstrate how the language used to describe and formulate identity in Wallace’s work is fundamentally technological. Chapter II explains how technology interacts with self-conception in his work, examining the various ways that the self is reinterpreted within the information age’s proliferation of technological representations and digital networks. Finally, Chapter III ascertains the role of digital media in the construction of the narrative self, ultimately exploring technology’s function as an anesthetic, a mirror, and ultimately a grave.
The Poet and the Tragedy: Examining the Instability of the Poet and his World in Vladimir Mayakovsky: a Tragedy
Keywords:  Center for Russian
Stanford Global Studies
CREEES
Mayakovsky
Tragedy
Futurism
Russia
Thesis

Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1913 piece, Vladimir Mayakovsky: a Tragedy, is a landmark artistic work emanating from the early years of Russian Futurism. In this work, the author rejects traditional artistic conventions, permeates the work with instabilities, and depicts the poet as a perpetually unsatisfiable figure. This essay is a close examination of the text, analyzing the unstable nature of the poet and the world around him.
The "Politics" of Family Business: A Social Network Analysis of Turkey's Koç Family & Their Political Connections
Keywords:  Political Science Research Honors Program
Social Network Analysis
Family Business Groups
Political Connectedness
Network Theory of Private Protection
Turkey
Koç Family
Thesis

Outside of the United States and the United Kingdom, most firms are part of a pyramidal
network of firms controlled by a single family. For this reason, a growing body of literature concerns family business groups. In Turkey, the Koç family’s business activities accounted for a striking 6.4% of the nation’s GDP and 6.7% of total exports as of 2020. In spite of significant political upheaval, economic downturn, regime changes, and several military coups, the Koç family has maintained significant economic power for almost a century. How? To address this question, I build on a growing body of literature concerning the relationship between business elites and governments. This paper is therefore the first to employ social network analysis (SNA) to systematically identify and characterize relationships between political and economic actors in the context of family business groups. By constructing a novel dataset of all 509 board members of Koç Holding and its 51 subsidiary firms for the past 15 years, I show that the Koç network is relatively large, extremely dense, and centralized. Through network-analytic methods, I calculate several network-level and node-level measures to assess and quantify the level of professional and familial connections the network. Notably, I find strong evidence of substantial political connectedness; 22.6% of all board members and auditors in the network are politically exposed persons.
The Role of Black Linguistic Practices in the Transformation of Digital Space: An Examination Of Wendy's Social Media Strategy
Keywords:  Department of Science
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Science, Technology, and Society
African American Language
African American Vernacular English
Black discourse practices
Black technological activity
Black Twitter
brands
advertising
cool
authenticity
sass
hip hop
memes
digital culture
Science Technology &amp; Society
Stanford University
STS
Thesis

Previous scholarship has identified African American Language (AAL) as a historically stigmatized language and Black technological activity as an insufficiently researched area of study. This thesis examines both subjects, particularly through the case study of Wendy’s, a fast food restaurant, and their 2017-2018 social media marketing strategy. I argue that the combined technological activity and use of AAL by Black digital users informed Wendy’s social media marketing strategy and partially attributed to their success. I support my argument through the qualitative coding of Wendy’s most viral tweets, in which I found that Wendy’s used AAL, and Black cultural signifiers more broadly, in almost one out of every five tweets. Ultimately, I assert that the techno-linguistic activity of Black people has impacted the formation of mainstream digital culture and how users, such as Wendy’s, navigate it.
The South Asian Family Approaches to Disease (SAFAD) Study: Study Rationale, Design, and Progress
Keywords: Medicine
Breast > Cancer
South Asians
Caregivers
Text
Thesis

INTRODUCTION: An increasing number of South Asians (people with heritage from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and Bangladesh) are managing breast cancer due to rising prevalence and decreasing mortality of breast cancer in this population both globally and in the United States. The South Asian Family Approaches to Disease (SAFAD) study aims to better understand the unmet needs of South Asian breast cancer survivors and their informal caregivers and to create a support program for South Asians managing breast cancer.
METHODS: SAFAD is an ongoing study that is led in collaboration with a community advisory board. Health care providers and South Asian breast cancer survivors and their caregivers are recruited through two strategies: a community outreach approach, and a point of care approach. Survivors and caregivers are asked to complete a survey and a semi-structured interview. Providers are asked to complete a semi-structured interview. Interviews are recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using thematic coding. Quantitative data will be analyzed and compared via t-tests and chi-squares for continuous and categorical data, respectively.
RESULTS: The community outreach recruitment approach has yielded three providers but no patients or caregivers. The point of care recruitment approach has yielded one survivor-caregiver dyad and nine survivors. Data has been collected from the dyad and two providers. The survivor has a greater fear of cancer recurrence and greater feelings of isolation compared to their caregiver. The survivor and caregiver both stated that caregiving would be very different in their country of origin, and were comfortable with and could communicate well with their care team. The providers shared observations made when treating South Asian patients, such as their reluctance to discuss sexual dysfunction and to participate in cancer screening practices.
DISCUSSION: The SAFAD study’s recruitment challenges may stem from three barriers: stem changes in methods for accrual imposed by the COVID 19 pandemic, challenges inherent in conducting dyadic research, and cultural barriers to participation in quality of life research. We plan to continue to utilize both recruitment approaches with a greater focus on the point of care approach.
The Spaniards Who Built America’s Cigar City: The Immigrant Community of Tampa, Florida (1886-1939)
Keywords:  Department of History
Department of History
Spain
Spanish immigration
Tampa
Florida
cigar industry
Thesis

In the early twentieth century, Tampa, FL was home to a large Spanish, Cuban, and Italian immigrant population who primarily worked in the booming cigar industry. This thesis is a study of Spanish immigration to Tampa, Florida and the Spanish community there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines which regions of Spain these immigrants came from and why they settled in Tampa. It also analyzes the extent to which Spanish nationalism characterized the Spanish community in Tampa, especially through an examination of the Spanish mutual aid societies and the labor relations in Tampa’s cigar industry.
The Visual Word Form Areas Prefer Emojis to Text
Keywords:  Department of Symbolic Systems
Stanford University
Stanford Vision and Perception Neuroscience Lab
Symbolic Systems
vision
perception
visual word form areas
brain
neuroscience
emoji
Thesis

The Visual Word Form Areas (VWFAs) are two regions of the brain that have been found to be selective for processing words. My objective in this project is to determine the extent to which each VWFA is selective for the task of reading versus the visual presentation of text stimuli. I tested this hypothesis by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to scan subjects’ brains while they performed reading tasks and color-recognition tasks on English words formed by either text or emojis. The fMRI results allowed me to differentiate between neural responses from the different tasks and stimuli. My fMRI results suggest that the VWFAs are not selective for text stimuli; rather, they prefer emojis over text. Moreover, one or the other (depending on the participant) could be selective for the task of reading.
Theoretical approaches towards selective electrochemical nitrogen reduction
Keywords: Chemical Engineering.

Anthropogenic climate change poses an extraordinary risk to all aspects of life on the planet in the coming decades. There is an urgent need to diminish the world's reliance on fossil fuels. However, transitioning industrial chemical processes to renewable energy inputs presents a unique challenge to net-zero emission targets. Many processes struggle with the intermittency of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, and even worse, several rely on fossil fuels as chemical inputs. Ammonia synthesis is one such chemical process. Ammonia plays a vital role as fertilizer in the world's global food supply chain. At 182 M tonnes of production volume per year, the Haber- Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia is the largest chemical process operating today. However, inherent drawbacks to the Haber-Bosch process make it unsuitable for a sustainable future. The process utilizes fossil-fuel derived hydrogen as an input, accounting for 1.6% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Additionally, the process's centralization and high capital costs make it challenging to deploy in the developing world, resulting in prohibitively high fertilizer costs in regions of the world with the most food scarcity. Developing alternative, sustainable forms of ammonia production is essential towards attaining global emissions goals and decentralizing agriculture. Electrochemical ammonia synthesis is an attractive alternative to the Haber-Bosch process. By removing the need for fossil-fuel derived hydrogen and replacing the prohibitively high pressures and temperatures with moderate reducing potentials, the electrochemical nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR) addresses many of the Haber-Bosch process's fundamental drawbacks. However, electrochemical ammonia synthesis is hindered by prohibitively low selectivity; hydrogen production is kinetically favored over ammonia production on every potential electrocatalyst currently known. In this thesis, we show how insights from electronic structure calculations and theoretical kinetic modeling can be used to (1) understand the activity and selectivity challenges in electrochemical NH3 synthesis and (2) propose and improve alternative ammonia synthesis systems. In particular, we examine the role that metal nitrides will play in achieving these goals by developing a theoretical understanding of their formation, activity, and stability. We also develop kinetic models for understanding non-aqueous NRR, with a focus on lithium-mediated nitrogen reduction. These theoretical frameworks are further improved through successful experimental collaborations. The resulting systems demonstrate a promising pathway towards selective and sustainable ammonia production
Theoretical routes to advance oxygen electrocatalysis for energy conversion
Keywords: Chemical Engineering.

Developing sustainable energy technologies is an essential step towards addressing climate change, which remains one of the greatest global challenges of our times. Electrochemistry offers a promising avenue to convert variable renewable energy (VRE), like solar and wind energy, into reliable carbon-neutral fuels, such as hydrogen gas. However, widespread adoption of electrochemical routes of sustainable energy conversion necessitates the development of active, stable, and selective catalysts that are economically viable. In this thesis, we explore various aspects of catalyst design from a theoretical perspective with a focus on electrochemical oxygen reduction (ORR) and evolution (OER). ORR is the rate-limiting reaction of hydrogen fuel cells, which convert hydrogen fuel and oxygen into water and electrical energy. OER limits the overall efficiency of the opposite process in water electrolyzers. To consider approaches to improve catalyst design for these and other electrochemical processes, we first apply density functional theory (DFT) to evaluate the promise of single atom catalysts to achieve high theoretical activity towards ORR and circumvent fundamental activity limitations through strategic design. We then turn our attention to stability considerations by implementing a pre-processing algorithm within the Pymatgen code to improve the efficiency of Pourbaix diagram construction for increasingly complex materials. We apply this algorithm to extract stability trends for a wide range of ternary oxides and build predictive models. By investigating the impacts of catalyst dissolution on activity for Ru-based pyrochlores for OER, we also combine activity and stability considerations to gain a more complete understanding of catalyst performance. Finally, we focus on kinetic modeling of electrochemical steps by studying generalizable trends in activation barriers for proton coupled electron transfers (PCET). We find that these barrier heights are largely governed by the identity of the proton acceptor, which can have profound impacts on simplifying microkinetic modeling and analyzing reaction pathways. Collectively, our findings shine light on thermodynamic activity, stability, and kinetic treatment of catalysts for oxygen electrochemistry