VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Advancing equity in higher education : the zone of proximal self
Keywords: Education.

This dissertation is motivated by a need in the higher education learning sciences field to understand the cultural, social, and emotional processes of student learning and development in advancing equity for students from first-generation, low-income, and marginalized backgrounds. To address this need, I develop and examine a sociocultural conceptual framework called the zone of proximal self. The zone of proximal self is the distance between a learner's current self and their possible selves which can be bridged through support from institutional figures, resources, and materials across a broad learning ecology in higher education. The structure of this dissertation paper includes the three papers followed by an integrated discussion in the conclusion. In a series of three papers, I use the zone of proximal self as a lens to study college students' interactions in postsecondary settings during the Covid-19 pandemic. In my first paper, I use mixed methods approaches to analyze survey results from 524 students at a private four-year university to explore first-generation students' experiences with institutional resources. In my second and third paper, I draw on a study of 50 students at a public four-year university who were asked to meet with a counselor or advisor throughout an academic term and share their experiences through diary entries, surveys, and an interview across a 14-week semester. Results from the first paper reveal how barriers persist for students in interacting with institutional resources; and it reveals the importance of shifting the focus from the role of student meritocracy to that of institutional structures and variability in access to interpersonal and material resources. The second and third paper highlight three pillars of effective practices from counselors and advisors — creating a brave space, validating students, and supporting students' social-emotional competencies — which are associated with higher growth in students' professional and personal goals for their possible selves. Taken together, a zone of proximal self lens illuminates how advancing equity in higher education will require humanizing notions of college student success beyond a narrow focus on academic outcomes. The findings which surfaced from an "interpersonal plane of analysis" (Rogoff, 2003) offer design implications for formal and informal learning environments in higher education to incorporate dimensions of humanizing relational practices between students and institutional figures and resources. Moving forward, this work opens up new lines of research to better theorize and assess how humanizing relational practices emerge and foster growth in the zone of proximal self for students from first-generation, low-income, and marginalized backgrounds
The African turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri, as a model for genetic regulation of suspended animation phenotypes
Keywords: Genetics.

Suspended animation states allow animals to persist in extreme environments while also slowing or resisting the progression of molecular damage and aging hallmarks, effectively gaining free 'biological time'. The African turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius fureri, has evolved a form of suspended development to survive complete drought of its natural habitat. This state, termed diapause, is extreme even among vertebrate states of suspended animation, able to persist for months or even years. But the mechanisms underlying the evolution of extreme survival states are unknown. To understand the evolution of diapause, we performed integrative multi-omics, including gene expression, chromatin accessibility, and lipidomics, in the embryos of multiple killifish species. Additionally, we generated an embryonic CRISPR screening platform to evaluate the role of key genes and transcription factors during diapause. Our analyses reveal that diapause evolved by a very recent remodeling of regulatory elements at very ancient gene duplicates (paralogs) present in all vertebrates. Transcription factors such as REST/NRSF, FOXOs, and PPARs are central to diapause evolution. These factors are likely implicated in a unique lipid metabolism, leading to accumulation of specific triglycerides -- with very long chain fatty acids -- in diapause. Our work suggests a mechanism for the evolution of complex adaptations and offers strategies to promote long-term survival by activating suspended animation programs in other species
Against the Current in the Kingdom of God: Isaiah Berlin’s Value-Pluralism and the Teachings of Leo Tolstoy
Keywords: Berlin, Isaiah, 1909-1997
Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744-1803
Vico, Giambattista, 1668-1744
Voĭna i mir (Prokofiev, Sergey)
Maistre, Joseph Marie, comte de, 1753-1821
Enlightenment
Counter-Enlightenment
Text
Capstone
Thesis
Student project report

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) opens one of his most famous essays, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” with a quote from the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Even if this classification may be overly simplistic, “every classification throws light on something,” and this scale can be particularly useful when discussing the central subject of Berlin’s essay on hedgehogs and foxes: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Berlin posits that “Tolstoy is a fox who believed passionately in being a hedgehog,” meaning that, in his literature, Tolstoy paints pictures of life as complex, full of diversity and contradictions, and not adherent to any singular ideology or worldview. Meanwhile, in his didactic writings, particularly on the subject of history, Tolstoy seeks to explain events with a monist view; thus, Berlin believes that Tolstoy is “in constant contradiction with himself.” However, just as this classification of hedgehogs and foxes can provide insight into the nature of Tolstoy’s literary and philosophical writings, it can also be turned back upon Berlin to help one understand why Berlin may reach this conclusion about Tolstoy in the first place. This paper argues that Berlin himself is actually in the same quagmire he accuses Tolstoy of being trapped in, as he is a fox who nevertheless has a central hedgehog idea. Berlin is foxlike in rejecting the idea that a utopia can be created on earth according to one unitary set of scientific, historic, political, or even aesthetic values. This approach leads Berlin to seek many varied answers to life’s problems, but in seeking these answers, he has become so obsessed with value-pluralism that it is the one big idea he continually returns to, even if the subject in question does not demand it.
AI-mediated communication : examining agency, ownership, expertise, and roles of AI systems
Keywords: Communication.

AI-Mediated Communication (AI-MC) occurs when an AI system operates on behalf of an individual in communication between people. Building on literature in psychology and human-machine communication, this dissertation aimed to answer two overarching questions: 1) how do people perceive their own agency when an AI system operates on their behalf in interpersonal communication? and 2) how do people perceive the role(s) of the system under these circumstances? Through a think-aloud study, as well as an online experiment, this dissertation revealed that people strive to maintain their agency in AI-MC, and devise various strategies to do so. Additionally, perceptions of ownership over interpersonal messages are likely just as important as maintaining one's agency in AI-MC. Moreover, even though AI systems can play many roles in a communication task, people view them as social actors instead of as extensions of the self, which impacts how they attribute agency, perceive ownership over messages, and behave in human-AI interactions. Lastly, people show increased reliance on the AI system when they lack expertise, which underlies decreased feelings of agency and ownership, as well as changes in collaboration dynamics and linguistic features of a message. Taken together, this dissertation applies research on agency and human-AI interaction to the nascent study of AI-MC. The results provide insights into the effects of AI-involvement and topical expertise on people's perceptions and behaviors, as well as how they think about the roles of AI systems
al•go•rhy•thm: How Black Gender-Marginalized DJs Urge Us to Reimagine Remix Theory & Culture
Keywords: Remix Theory
Remix Culture
Sampling
African Americans in popular culture
Black Feminist Thought
Hip-hop feminism
Performance Theory
Hip-hop (Music)
Hip-hop culture
Sound > Recording and reproducing > Digital techniques
Black Gender-Marginalized
Audio essay
Music festivals
Mixed materials
Sound
Text
Sound recording
Thesis

When one hears the word “DJ”, typically the only role that comes to mind is that of playing music at a party. This thesis fundamentally challenges that reductive perception by describing the intensive, expansive, and critical cultural work that happens behind the scenes as well as live on the dance floor. Furthermore, the unique positionality of influential Black gender-marginalized DJs across the United States is revealed through an instrumental case study approach that utilizes narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and DJ Scholarship. At the intersection of Remix Theory, Hip-Hop Feminism, and Performance Theory, this paper finds that DJs operate eerily similar to a computer operating system psychologically - where intergenerational knowledge accumulation, the art of selection, performance pattern recognition, and adaptability to new sound technology contribute greatly to their developed skill set and progressive social influence. The complimenting creative project, Pink Party Festival, is a live event that demonstrates the DJ’s meticulous curation and community-building methodology at work with the explicit intention to honor the impact Black gender-marginalized music artists have made on Hip-Hop and DJ culture.
All the lenses : large-scale hierarchical inference of the hubble constant from strong gravitational lenses with Bayesian deep learning
Keywords: Physics.

Unprecedented volumes of data from upcoming sky surveys will yield precise constraints on parameters governing the evolution history of the Universe. One that has received particular attention over the past decade is the Hubble constant (H0) describing the expansion rate of the Universe. This thesis focuses on measuring H0 from an astrophysical phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing. The Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will increase the sample size of strong lenses from ~100 to ~100,000. This creates an opportunity to obtain the most precise measurement of H0 to date. Fully realizing the potential of LSST data entails rapidly extracting cosmological information from the images, tables, and time series associated with these lenses. My research has focused on developing analysis techniques using Bayesian deep learning, which combines the efficiency of deep learning with principled uncertainty quantification. The techniques promise to automate the analysis of tens of thousands of strong lensing systems in a robust manner. They constitute core methodology that can combine information from all the LSST lenses -- with varying types and signal-to-noise ratios -- into a large-scale hierarchical inference of H0
Allegations: The Proto-Public Sphere and the Figure of the Female Accused (1550-1640)
Keywords: female juries
English literature > Early modern
English prose literature > Early modern
English drama > Early modern and Elizabethan
Beware the Cat
The Roaring Girl
Dekker, Thomas, ca. 1572-1632
Middleton, Thomas, Sir, 1586-1666
The Women's Sharpe Revenge
Law
cheap and popular print
Pamphlets
Baldwin, William, approximately 1518-1563?
Habermas, Jürgen
Public sphere
Text
Thesis

"Allegations" charts how accused female characters across a number of early modern texts convene and organize relations among the English legal system, the emerging realm of popular print, and the proto-public sphere. Because these systems in their existing state largely fail to serve the women accused, the women instead refashion these established channels and summon their own assemblies in hopes of vindicating themselves. This assembled court of public opinion thus has the opportunity to override and modify the initial judgements that the existing channels of power hand down. The printed realm and the popular engagement it facilitates come to offer a counterweight to traditional arrangements, and the accused who reimagine the legal sphere through print lead the way towards more participatory elements in literature.
An Opportunity to Rectify History: China's 2014 Outline for the Semiconductor Industry
Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Semiconductors
High technology industries > Government policy
History
Political science
Communist parties
China
Text
Thesis

This thesis seeks to understand the process over the period 2010–14 that led to the issuing of one of China’s most important and consequential techno-nationalist industrial policies, the “Outline for Advancing the Development of the National Semiconductor Industry” (“the 2014 Outline”). It is motivated by the observation that in 2013–14, Beijing’s articulation of the importance of its domestic semiconductor capabilities emphasised the industry’s centrality to information security and national security more prominently than the preceding years. This shift towards “hard techno-nationalism” coincided with a set of developments that changed Beijing’s assessments of China’s strategic circumstances. The documentary evidence suggests that Beijing’s concerns about American containment of China’s rise, anxiety about the new dimensions of information security, aggravated by the Snowden revelations of June 2013, and perception that China’s “period of strategic opportunity” to develop its national power was narrowing all motivated China’s leaders to take urgent and major action to develop China’s core technological capabilities in a short period of time. The urgency visible in the documents and speeches from this time reflect the Party’s narrative that China’s weakness and national humiliation were intimately linked to its failure to exploit periods of opportunity to develop its technological capabilities. The genesis of the 2014 Outline, therefore, must be understood as the final attempt to rectify a history of failures.
Analysis of Pathologic Complete Response Rates Between Different Neoadjuvant Radiation Treatment Regimens for Rectal Cancer
Keywords:  Department of Biology
Biology
rectal cancer
total neoadjuvant therapy
Text
Thesis

The standard of care for rectal cancer is long or short course radiation followed by surgery with or without adjuvant chemotherapy. Recently, total neoadjuvant therapy (TNT), an approach consisting of giving all chemotherapy and radiotherapy prior to definitive surgery, has been demonstrated to be a promising alternative. This study aims to assess the pathologic complete response (pCR) rates among different neoadjuvant treatment regimens and determine if neoadjuvant chemotherapy improves pCR rates. Electronic medical databases were queried to identify rectal cancer patients treated with neoadjuvant therapy at one institution from 2006-2019. Patients were grouped accordingly: long-course chemoradiation (CRT), long-course chemoradiation with chemotherapy (CRT TNT), short-course radiation (SCRT), and short-course radiation with chemotherapy (SCRT TNT). Patients without follow-up data or surgical pathology reports were excluded. pCR was defined as no evidence of disease at surgery. pCR rates were compared using descriptive statistics and Chi-square analysis. 249 patients were analyzed. There were 200 (80.3%) patients who received CRT, 26 (10.4%) who received CRT TNT, 13 (5.2%) patients who received SCRT, and 10 (4%) patients who received SCRT TNT. Initial stage was different between groups, with metastatic patients more likely to receive SCRT TNT (p<0.001). The median time to surgery were significantly different between groups (p<0.001). 11 (42.3%) and 6 (60%) patients received FOLFOX, and 13 (50%) and 4 (40%) of the patients received XELOX for CRT TNT and SCRT TNT, respectively. The remaining patients (7.7%) in the CRT TNT group received Capecitabine. For CRT, 53 (26.5%) patients achieved pCR, 3 (11.5%) in CRT TNT, 1 (7.7%) in SCRT, and 2 (20%) in SCRT TNT. None of these differences were statistically different (p=0.19). On univariate analysis, age (p=0.13), clinical T stage (p=0.13), clinical N stage (p=0.95), time to surgery (p=0.82), and presence of chemotherapy in the neoadjuvant regimen (p=0.22) were not significant predictors for pCR. Surprisingly, in this analysis, total neoadjuvant treatment for rectal cancer did not improve pCR rates over CRT or SCRT alone. Because of the relatively small numbers of patients in the TNT and SCRT groups, interpretation of these data should be considered preliminary. These data indicate that given the high pCR rates achievable with standard of care CRT, additional gains in pCR rates may require a more intensive TNT approach. Future studies are needed to further investigate this hypothesis prospectively.
Analyzing Candidates' Ideological Messaging Throughout the Electoral Cycle
Keywords: Machine Learning
Social Media
Stanford University Department of Economics
Political Communication
Ideology
Elections
Text Analysis
Political Economy
Text
Thesis

Conventional wisdom suggests that primary elections attract a loyal base of partisans, and consequently, political candidates must take more extreme positions to secure the nomination before moderating for the general electorate. Yet, the academic literature contains little empirical evidence on candidate positioning over the electoral process. I address this gap by using congressional candidates' tweets to quantify ideological rhetoric during the 2020 election using three different approaches. First, I adopt a data-driven approach to select the most partisan bigrams and specify a multinomial model of speech; second, I use a theoretically-derived dictionary to measure the frequency of moral values associated with political convictions; finally, I specify a natural language model using a deep learning architecture. I provide one of the first empirical analyses on the evolution of candidates' ideological messaging over the entire election cycle. I find statistically significant evidence of moderation among Republican but not Democratic candidates, with mixed support for greater movement in competitive general elections. I conclude that Republicans likely face stronger incentives than Democrats to employ extreme rhetoric in primaries and thus to moderate in general elections.
Analyzing the Relationship Between Exchange Rate Pass-Through and Inflation Persistence
Keywords: Exchange rate pass-through
Inflation persistence
Monetary policy
Text
Thesis

I measure the relationship between exchange rate pass-through and inflation persistence across 22 small and medium sized economies with mostly flexible exchange rates. Using data from the International Monetary Fund, national statistics offices, and the Bank for International Settlements, my estimates for exchange rate pass-throughs and inflation persistence present two main results. First, I find that a positive, non-linear relationship exists between exchange rate pass-through and inflation persistence across the sample countries. Second, I find some evidence that countries that have had varying levels of monetary policy success display a similar non-linear relationship between exchange rate pass-through and inflation persistence across time. These two results suggest that the dynamics of inflation depend in part on the sensitivity to inflationary shocks and thus the efficacy of monetary policy.
Angafakafonua as Tongan identity : Tongan Mormonism, the Tongan crip gang, and sacred education spaces
Keywords: Religious Studies.

In this dissertation, I survey Tongan historical narratives, ethnographies, social media, and personal interviews to understand the role of religion in producing a Tongan American identity. In analyzing details from this survey, I identify the religious thread of angafakafonua (way of the land) as the process by which Tongans navigated their new American landscape in the 1950s and beyond. The thread of angafakafonua connects 19th c. Wesleyan Methodist Christianity, Tongan Mormonism, and Tongan Crip Gang members in Utah. My dissertation argues that religion is essential to understanding Tongan collective identity in America. Tongan Americans construct their ethnic and racial identities through the lens of religion—that is, Tongans navigate their racial identity in America through a religious epistemology. Indeed, for Tongan Americans, religion and race are co-constitutional: their religious and racial identities are created over and against each other
Animal entanglements : interspecies performance in South Asia
Keywords: Theater and Performance Studies.

Animal Entanglements investigates how performance articulates the ways in which humans and nonhuman animals encounter, transform, and entangle each other. Situated within the context of the resurgence of a nationalist political discourse in India that asserts the importance of certain animals to the Indian social and religious fabric, the dissertation explores how nonhuman animals shape the discourses of religion, caste, class, gender, and sexuality. It queries how animals entangle us in their mythological and material charge, and move us to reconsider normative forms of sociality, subjecthood, and belonging. Drawing upon a capacious understanding of performance that includes political protest, traditional sport, independent film, performance art, and folklore, each chapter considers affective and embodied entanglements that are premised on touching, venerating, consuming, protecting, and imagining animals. My case studies contend that interspecies performance is not limited to practices of intimacy, adoration, and kinship, but also addresses encounters with nonhuman animals that are precarious and contested. Animal Entanglements connects performance to broader questions of religious assertions and state violence; casteist and gendered marginalization; and nationalistic and migrant belonging. In doing so, this dissertation provides critical insights into the ways in which interspecies modes of performance are crucial to the processes of being and becoming in South Asia and its diasporas
Animal migration and behavioral flexibility in an era of rapid global change
Keywords: Biology.

Migration is a widespread, critical, and increasingly-threatened behavior expressed by diverse animal taxa. Beyond being one of the most awe-inspiring biological phenomena on Earth, migration also plays a key role in ecosystem functioning worldwide. Despite the prevalence of this behavior and its ecological and evolutionary significance, migration is a complex behavior, leaving significant knowledge gaps in understanding how animals navigate environmental variability and human-induced rapid environmental change in deciding when and where to migrate. This gap stems in part from the difficulty of observing and integrating individual-level and population-level behavior of migratory species in the wild, especially in oceanic ecosystems. The complexity and scale of animal migration also challenges applied ecologists and natural resource managers to develop more dynamic management strategies for the protection of migratory species alongside human resource use. In this dissertation, I aim to advance both theoretical and applied ecological understanding of animal migration by exploring the role of social cues and environmental variability in migration, linking individual and population-level behavior for observation of migration in remote ecosystems (specifically in the migratory Eastern North Pacific blue whale population), and considering the tools and strategies required for dynamic and equitable management of migratory populations and the ecosystems they inhabit