VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Chemical and electrochemical studies to improve homogeneous electrocatalysts
Keywords: Chemistry.

The electricity derived from renewable energy sources (e.g. solar, wind) is intermittent and not perfectly matched with consumer demand. The widespread adoption of these renewable energy sources as a replacement for fossil fuels subsequently depends upon the development of energy storage systems. Homogeneous electrocatalysts are promising energy storage systems as they can mediate the efficient interconversion of electrical and chemical energy in a highly tuneable fashion. In this thesis, various electrochemical and spectroscopic studies have been conducted in order to improve homogeneous electrocatalysts along various metrics of activity (i.e. turnover frequency, overpotential), selectivity (i.e. Faradaic efficiency), and stability. Chapter 1 reviews the electrochemical and spectroscopic techniques used to assess homogeneous electrocatalysts; highlights the key metrics by which electrocatalysts are evaluated; and provides selected examples of homogeneous electroreduction and electrooxidation catalysts relevant to the work presented in this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the reactivity of a cyclopentadienyl Co complex bearing a protonated phenylazopyridine ligand towards proton, hydride, and hydrogen atom transfer. Chapter 3 uses Co K-edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), density functional theory (DFT), and time-dependent DFT methods to investigate the effect that various bidentate ligands have on the electrochemical and protonation properties of cyclopentadienyl Co complexes. Chapter 4 uses Mn K-edge XAS, Mn-Kβ X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES), and DFT to understand the impact that redox active ligands have on the electrochemical properties and speciation of Mn tricarbonyl complexes. Chapter 5 examines the ability of an electrochemically regenerable hydrogen atom transfer reagent to lower the overpotential of electrocatalytic alcohol oxidation. Chapter 6 investigates the use of an Fe-based acceptorless alcohol dehydrogenation catalyst for the electrooxidation of alcohols. Chapter 7 examines the factors that mediate demographic performance gaps and the impact that various pedagogical changes have had on student performance in the introductory chemistry sequence.
Chemistry and mass spectrometry for protein structure determination in living cells
Keywords: Biochemistry.

Protein structures speed discovery of life's molecular basis, but the artificial conditions of our structural techniques often disrupt natural protein behaviors. This could be sidestepped by chemically crosslinking adjacent residues together while a protein is still in its native cell. The protein could then be extracted and digested into mass spec--amenable peptides so the crosslinks can be seen by high-throughput mass spec. This would make a list of residue adjacencies useful to common structure determination software. Unfortunately, easily detectable crosslinkers are long and therefore vague about just how adjacent crosslinked residues are. This is because they facilitate detection by incorporating bulky moieties with distinctive behaviors during mass spec and purifiable tags. We show that a mass spec behavior ideal for crosslink detection can be encoded in a single well-placed atom in the crosslink. We also purify crosslinked peptides without adding anything to the crosslinker by inventing a method that isolates molecules with two peptidic N-termini. This frees us up to design crosslinking agents uncompromisingly tailored for high-resolution results. We synthesize these designs and investigate their utility.
Children, Childhood, and Neighborhoods in a Japanese Suburb: Toward Implications for Children’s Neighborhoods from Post-Humanist Perspectives
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
childhood studies
the modern family
neighborhood
suburb
Japan
post-humanism
Thesis

This paper aims to unpack processes through which children’s neighborhoods are constructed in a Japanese suburb. In this endeavor, I do not take for granted childhood which is often placed on developmentalism or regarded as a human embodiment of the future. Rather, in examining the forming processes of children’s neighborhoods, I pay particular attention to the relationality between children’s neighborhoods and childhood while contextualizing and denaturalizing childhood from post-humanist perspectives. The analysis based on an ethnographic data shows how the spatially, temporally, and socially intertwined separation between children and the general public and among children and parents dominantly takes place in the neighborhood while their integration also occurs to a limited extent. I contend that this dominant separation is prompted by the hegemony of childhood and the accompanying structures both of which are (re)produced within constant negotiation in the age of uncertainty. Further, with regard to that childhood, I showcase three modalities—the vulnerable child, the troublesome child, and the child-parent relationship—as significant aspects to shape children’s neighborhoods. This separation would, in turn, reinforce the hegemony of childhood and those structures, further (re)producing and maintaining itself. However, this separation is not a static phenomenon. Rather, since it is caused by dynamic and multilevel processes, it contains variances, particularly in a practical term. This variability produces a room that the integration instead takes place. Hence, in a Japanese suburb, children’s neighborhoods consist of the dominant separation and the limited integration both of which are the results of dynamic and complex negotiation processes revolving around childhood.
Chilnualna : numerology, speech orchestration, and natural sound
Keywords: Music.

This dissertation consists of five musical works composed at Stanford University between 2014 and 2019. (1) Aux Imagistes II: Wide Arc -- Low in the Northern Sky (2016), String Octet, Ca. 13 min. Written for the JACK and Spektral Quartets; (2) Six Silver Rings of (((Aquamarine))) (2017), Flute, Clarinet, Electric Guitar, Percussion, Violin, Viola, Violoncello, Ca. 5 min. Written for Distractfold; (3) Songbird (2018), String Quartet and Birdsong (Tape), Ca. 10 min. Written for the JACK Quartet; (4) Linguaglossa (2018), Vocal Sextet, Narration, Film, Ca. 16 min. Written for Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble; (5) Chilnualna (2019), Two Voices, Natural Sound, Chamber Orchestra, Ca. 14 min. Written for Ensemble Dal Niente. In the following sections, I will outline the practices employed within individual pieces and sketch a broader trajectory spanning these works. Although beginning as poetic etudes in mimesis, my music becomes oriented towards a deeper introspective journey, in which each piece is understood as a pathway to self-discovery.
China's Belt and Road Initiative: The Malaysian Dilemma
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
Belt and Road Initiative
China
Malaysia
East Coast Rail Link
Melaka Port
Kuantan Port
Policy
Political Science
Thesis

The Malaysian Dilemma presents the case of a small, middle-income country’s engagement with China through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While the BRI’s global reach and ambitions have drawn attention to the potential risks and benefits of Chinese investment, this thesis aims to study one partner country’s perspective through an analysis of the political economic logic and decision-making calculus of its top leaders. Malaysia provides an instructive case, with the leadership transition between Prime Ministers from Najib Razak to Mahathir Mohamad that catalyzed the evolution of the BRI locally. This opportunity for the Malaysian government to reshape its BRI involvement is evaluated through three in depth case studies: the high-profile East Coast Rail Link (ECRL), and the Melaka and Kuantan ports. The Malaysian government’s subsequent renegotiations and cancellations of BRI projects reflect the balancing of complex interests and opportunities for small states to advance their agenda through political maneuvering. Based on the analysis of Malaysian political economic logic surrounding these cases, further avenues for research and policy recommendations are proposed to address key BRI challenges surrounding good governance, transparency and sustainable development.
Choral orientations : spatial cognition and geopoetics in Pindar, Bacchylides, and Simonides
Keywords: Classics.

Cognition theory describes the human experience of space as dynamic both in terms of the many scales at which we perceive places and landmarks, and in terms of the many orientations through which we organize locations and distances within such scales. This is also the case for the presentation of space in late choral poetry. Such dynamism may be detected in the songs' construction of and interplay between different orientations within the visual and local scales of experience. Respecting the dynamic, network-bound nature of real experience and memory is part of what made this celebratory and occasional poetry appealing and believable to diverse audiences. "Choral Orientations" provides a critical method to support future work both on larger, regional spaces, and on multiscalar and multimodal narratives.
Chow groups and characteristic numbers on the space of complete quadrics
Keywords: Mathematics.

It is well-known that there are 3264 conics in P^2 that are tangent to 5 general smooth quadrics. This result can be proved by taking a suitable space that parametrizes conics in P^2 and computing C^5, where C is the divisor corresponding to the condition of being tangent to a general conic. To answer similar enumerative questions about quadrics in P^n, we use the space of complete n-quadrics, X_n. In this thesis we will give a brief overview of the equivalent ways of defining this space, determine ranks and generators of its Chow groups, and describe how one would use intersection theory on this space to compute the answers to enumerative problems involving hitting and tangency conditions.
Circle method and the subconvexity problem
Keywords: Mathematics.

Munshi demonstrated the usefulness of the circle method in understanding the subconvexity problem, by exhibiting a subconvexity bound for GL3 automorphic forms twisted by a Dirichlet character. We take this idea further by exhibiting a subconvexity bound for GL2 X GL2 Rankin-Selberg L-functions using the circle method. We exhibit a subconvexity bound for the Rankin-Selberg L- functions in the level aspect when both the automorphic forms are varying independently (i.e the arithmetic conductors don't have a large common factor). We beat the best-known exponent for this problem using the circle method. We also use a different version of the circle method to exhibit a subconvexity bound in t-aspect.
Cities in action : city climate action, civil society, and the organization of cities
Keywords: Sociology.

Some cities are at the forefront of finding and enforcing solutions to social and environmental problems; others remain stuck on the back benches. This dissertation examines the case of city climate action-strategic attempts to mitigate and adapt to climate change by local means---to understand the profound variation in cities' capacities to act. I bring together theories from organizational, political, and urban sociology to develop a framework of city action that shows the interplay of a place-based organizational ecosystem and a shared institutional environment. Comparative analyses of and expert interviews in cities in the United States and around the world show how public officials have shaped cities' responses to the changing climate. Three empirical chapters illuminate the global rise and stagnation of strategic commitments to tackling climate change, the political and institutional contexts of urban sustainability efforts in city administrations, and the public--private interactions in the origins and spread of green construction. Across these studies, civil society emerges as an anchor of urban innovation that leads by example, guides the actions of public administrations, and knits an emergent professional network of cities. This research contributes to sociological theory by inserting contemporaries Max Weber and Robert Park into a long due conversation that explains disparities in urban innovation. It also reveals durable differences in the organizational infrastructure of cities, which are shown to catalyze or curb city action by shaping civic and state capacities. Lastly, this research contributes to our understanding of organizational society in the urban age by its comparative study of meso-level mechanisms through which organizations influence their urban environment. In closing, I recall Charles Tilly's last book to caution against a bifurcation into isolated and networked cities.
Citizens of the future, subjects of the past : civic identity and aesthetic deviance in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia
Keywords: Comparative Literature.

This dissertation explores normative and deviant representations of citizenship in Russia, tracing continuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in state-produced models of the proper citizen and deviations therefrom in artistic works. I contend that citizenship in Russia, beyond simply a legal definition, has historically been entangled within an array of state symbols and national myths, with both politics and culture at play. This argument hinges upon the notion of citizenship in the Russian context as an embodied practice, and one that entails a particular relationship to time as an instrument of ideology or propaganda—the radiant future in socialist times and the victorious past under Putin. To trace the evolving role of Russian citizenship, I first consider the symbolic New Soviet Man and Lenin's body in the early Soviet era. Next, in the context of rigidified policy, law, and rhetoric under Brezhnev, I examine disillusionment and deviance in fictional texts by Venedikt Erofeev, Eduard Limonov, and Vladimir Voinovich. The third section examines Putin's rule, marked by legal and biopolitical regulations on citizens' bodies and a mythic construction of history, while in the artistic sphere, corporeal deviance, often involving gender non-normativity and pain or immobilization, has emerged as a means of reclaiming agency and voice, as illustrated in the cases of Petr Pavlensky and Seroe Fioletovoe. Through these examinations of political and aesthetic interpretations of civic identity, this study claims that both Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have used citizenship as a tool for maintaining power, while artistic works that engage an aesthetic of deviance attempt to reclaim civic and cultural belonging through artistic resistance to autocratic practices.
The classics, revised edition : readers, authors, and editors in sixteenth-century France
Keywords: French & Italian.

If we take sixteenth-century poets by their word, then the labor of reading and the practice of imitation that go into becoming an author of classical stature require nothing more than personal diligence and access to ancient texts. Like a bee flying from flower to flower and culling nectar, the Renaissance poet, we are led to believe, gathers what he can from his readings and transfroms the harvest into his own blend of literary honey. Modern literary critics have in part adopted this famous trope as their frame of reference to account for Renaissance practices of reading, writing, and authoring. As a critical shorthand, however, this account glosses over the complexities of sixteenth-century textual practices and misleadingly implies that the only constraints the poet faces stem from the availability and nature of ancient texts. This dissertation shows how, from the first steps of reading to the final publication of an authorized work, sixteenth-century humanists and poets both depend on and are constrained by their audiences, their competitors, and their editors. Mapping out these contemporary networks means revising fundamental conceptions about the Renaissance. The period does not revolve around an exclusive relationship to antiquity; rather, its engagement with the classics is sustained in the present, mediated by contemporaries, and oriented towards the future.
Classification and testing under robust model assumptions
Keywords: Statistics.

In this thesis, we develop methodologies for two well-known problems under more realistic and robust model assumptions. First, we consider the target gene identification problem using gene perturbation data. We propose a simple data-adaptive model by incorporating information across the genome as an alternative to the traditional two-group model testing for differential gene expression. The data-adaptive model is more robust than the traditional two-group model without assuming zero-effect for the null model. Second, we consider a multi-class classification problem where the training and the out-of-sample test data may have different distributions. We propose a method that simultaneously makes good predictions for samples similar to the training data and makes rejections otherwise, as well as methods for performance evaluation in this mismatched setting. The proposed method is robust to distributional changes in the data distribution and has good performance in high dimension.
Classification of Electrophysiologic Responses to Speech Processed Through an Acoustic Simulation of a Cochlear Implant
Keywords:  Department of Biology
Biology
Auditory Neuroscience
Speech Perception
Auditory Processing of Speech
Vowel Classification
Cochlear Implants
Cochlear Implant Simulation
Electroencephalography
Frequency Following Response
Thesis

Hearing-impaired individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) often face difficulty accurately reporting what they hear. Consequently, clinicians require objective tools to differentiate whether auditory deficits in CI patients arise from inadequate signal delivery from their implants or from difficulty with assigning perceptual labels. One objective tool to evaluate speech perception involves applying classification—a machine-learning technique—to the frequency following response (FFR), an evoked potential of the auditory brainstem recorded with electroencephalography. While classification has been successful evaluating FFRs to normal sounds, it is unknown if this approach is valid in conditions where signals are degraded in a way that simulates CIs. We assessed perception of 13 normal hearing participants to six vowel stimuli in two conditions: 1) intact condition with unaltered stimuli, and 2) vocoded condition, where stimuli were processed through an acoustic simulation of a CI. Participants completed a vowel identification task, achieving an average accuracy of 92.81 % in the intact condition. As expected, participants performed worse in the vocoded condition, achieving an accuracy of 77.25 %. FFR data was classified to reveal high accuracy (73.08 %, p < 0.001) in the intact condition. Notably, classification was more accurate (85.13 %, p < 0.001) in the vocoded condition, suggesting that CI simulations may enhance features of the vowels that contribute to accurate classification. These findings imply that classification is feasible for objectively assessing perception of degraded signals. Thus, classification remains a potentially useful tool for directly evaluating speech perception of CI patients. Further investigation is required to determine how perceptual responses relate to neural features relevant to the classification model.
Classified : the effects of English learner status on high school and college opportunities
Keywords: Education.

Every one in ten students in US public K-12 schools today is an English Learner (EL). Educators are becoming increasingly concerned over their low achievement and high school graduation rate. Qualitative research shows that EL underachievement can be attributed to limited access to a rigorous curriculum. This dissertation compares the level of access ELs and non-ELs have to secondary and postsecondary educational opportunities. The first study uses regression analysis to compare the high school course-taking and credit-earning patterns of non-ELs and ELs with various lengths of EL status. The second study identifies the causal relationship between summer credit recovery and newcomer ELs' academic outcomes using a difference-in-differences-in-differences design. The third study applies a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal impact of EL classification on high school graduation and college attendance. I find that academic course-taking vary substantially not only between ELs and non-ELs but also within the EL population. Summer credit recovery significantly increases course access for recent immigrants. Initial EL classification has no significant effects on graduation and college enrollment, but reclassification just before school transition (5th and 8th grade) may impact graduation and, conditional on college attendance, college choice and enrollment intensity. This dissertation extends our understanding of ELs' academic access in high school, improving upon previous studies with detailed analyses on a much larger sample. The findings also inform policymakers of inequities in educational opportunities by EL status and provide evidence for the efficacy of targeted interventions.
Cleanliness: The Impact of Moral Foundations Theory’s Sanctity/Degradation on Decision Making
Keywords: Department of Economics
moral judgment
sanctity
deception
ethical decision making
moral foundations theory
die-under-the-cup paradigm
behavioral economics
experimental economics
Thesis

How is our desire to behave morally influenced by cleaning the body, specifically tested by washing hands?
Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory is grounded in psychology and argues that, despite the differences in moral systems, every person shares the same five moral foundations regardless of culture or group: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Within economics, we gain positive utility by adhering or appearing to adhere to our own moral matrix comprised of these foundations. However, sometimes we either do not pay attention to or we ignore our moral code, allowing us to make immoral actions. Previous research has shown that certain outside forces, such as being watching or acting in a group, can lead people to behave more morally. My thesis outlines an experiment used to determine if the state of being clean might change our decision making and lead us to behave more morally by increasing the cost of behaving immorally and the benefit of behaving morally. The experiment asked participants to rank moral issues and play the die-under-the-cup paradigm after washing their hands and "cleaning" themselves. The results revealed no significant difference between any combination of groups, suggesting cleanliness does not change decision making. However, several external factors might have impacted the results and more research could be done to ensure accuracy.