VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Electronic structure factors in the reactivity of strained and ligand modified platinum surfaces [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics.

The ultimate goal in catalytic design is to have complete synthetic control of the material properties that determine the reactivity. Catalysts that consist of two metals (bimetallic) allow for potential greater reactivity and more flexible design. There are two factors that contribute to the modification of the electronic properties of a metal in a bimetallic surface: strain and ligand effects. Strain effects are due to a modified atomic arrangement of surface atoms in terms of distances and may include compressed or expanded lattices. Ligand effects are caused by chemical interaction of a metal atom with other metals in its vicinity. Having complete control of the electronic properties of a particular bimetallic surface, however, remains challenging. In this thesis, we have focused on using the strain and ligand effects to controllably tune the electronic structure of a metal surface and hence the metal-adsorbate chemical bond. We have investigated the electronic factor in the modified reactivity of epitaxially strained (Pt/Cu and Pt/Ag) and ligand modified (Pt-3d-Pt, 3d = Fe, Co, Ni) platinum surfaces towards the adsorption of oxygen. The electronic nature of chemisorbed oxygen on these surfaces was studied by probing occupied and unoccupied Pt-O states using synchrotron based x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), respectively. Using XES and XAS we are able to study the electronic states relevant for surface chemical bonding. For each surface structure studied, we observed significant perturbation in the valence electronic structure of adsorbed oxygen. Observed results are discussed within the framework of the d-band model -- a theoretical tool for predicting the adsorption properties of transition metal surfaces based on the average energy of the d-band.
Embodied experiences in immersive virtual environments [electronic resource] : effects on pro-environmental attitude and behavior
Keywords: Communication

Immersive virtual environments (IVE) allow users experience vivid sensorimotor stimuli by digitally simulating sensorimotor information. As a result, users are able to embody experiences by seeing, hearing, and feeling realistic perceptual cues linked to those experiences. Embodied experiences are defined as being surrounded by simulated sensorimotor information in mediated environments that create the sensation of personally undergoing the experience at that moment. Based on the theoretical framework of embodied cognition, which stipulates a close connection between sensorimotor experiences of the body and mental schemas, the current dissertation studies demonstrated that embodied experiences in IVEs are able to influence attitudes and behaviors in the physical, non-mediated world. Two studies explored the effect of embodied experiences on proenvironmental attitude and behavior by having participants embody the experience of cutting down a redwood tree as a result of using non-recycled paper products. Focus was also placed on investigating individual elements of embodied experiences in IVEs and the moderating effect of individual differences in the capacity to feel presence, the perception that a mediated experience is real. In both studies, actual pro-environmental behavior is observed and compared to self-reports of attitude and behavioral intention.
Emotion regulation for drivers [electronic resource] : an exploration of variables that promote positive emotional states and safe driving
Keywords: Communication

Aggressive driving behaviors and driver frustration cause accidents and fatalities. Current attempts by academic researchers and car manufacturers to combat driver frustration focus on detecting the emotional state of the driver, and then determining an appropriate reaction to that state. Recognizing driver emotion through facial, voice, and physiological cues is a difficult task in the due to light, noise, and individual differences in driving and expressive styles. Similarly, responding appropriately to affective state of the driver requires a careful implementation of a voice interface. The work presented in this dissertation targets driver frustration but shifts the technology burden away from capturing driver state to understanding the environment. Instead of studying interfaces that require precise knowledge of the driver state, the dissertation work presented here assumes that drivers will experience negative emotion based on common frustrations (e.g., traffic, being cut-off), and that the technology to detect these conditions is currently available. The dissertation study examines the effects of emotion regulation type (cognitive reappraisal vs. suppression), source (self vs. other), and timing (pre-drive vs. in-drive) on driver performance and emotional states in a between-participants design (N = 112). Regulation type strongly affected driver attitudes, but only had a minimal effect on measures of driving behavior. This suggests that the demand of the driving environment Implications for application and theory are discussed.
Emotional bureaucracies [electronic resource] : sojourners and the politics of exclusion and inclusion in Israel
Keywords: Anthropology

Abstract This dissertation argues that the decisions of Israeli state bureaucracies and the bureaucrats who work for them, regarding the deportation and naturalization of non-citizens are predicated on emotions as they are based on rules and regulations. I examine the way different Israeli state bureaucrats cope with the new waves of Gentile migration and with the challenges they pose to Jewish hegemony and Israeli sovereignty. I refer to this category of legal and illegal migrants as sojourners. This dissertation documents how feelings of state bureaucrats contribute to the shaping of Israel's de facto immigration regime and affect the lives of disempowered sojourners, and is based on ethnographic research from 2006-2007 with Israeli state bureaucrats of the Enforcement Unit and Visa Section of the Interior Ministry, adjudicators of the Detention Review Tribunal of the Justice Ministry, teachers and educators from the Public School, Bialik-Rogozin, and Israeli activists in NGOs that help sojourners. I demonstrate how different arms of the state have different worldviews, agendas, and goals and, thus, act in different ways toward sojourners. Through detention and deportation of sojourners as well as the rejection of sojourners' requests to naturalize in Israel, practices of exclusion and coercion cause suffering to undocumented non-citizens. To fathom how these processes operate, I study how state bureaucrats utilize diverse techniques of the self that enable them to maintain a positive self-image. I identify how the Israeli state is attempting to preserve Jewish majority and dominance in the face of an influx of migration. Thus, although the state has been granting citizenship status on the basis of conversion, marriage, and, for certain minors, living in Israel, the fundamental logics and politics of belongings remain relatively unchanged. The politics of belonging in Israel continue to emphasize the Arab-Jewish dichotomy and enmity overlooking sojourners as a negligible category. While initially "migrant workers" and "refugees" were seen as benign because they replaced the threatening Palestinians, they have not been accepted as having a right to remain permanently in Israel. Consequently, only a small number of sojourners who are conceived of as Israelis have been permitted to naturalize.
Empirical analysis of the organization of venture capital firms [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

The dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 presents a model in which the internal organization and size of a professional partnership reflect contracting problems associated with collaboration between junior professionals and senior professionals. The model offers an economic rationale for the formation of multiple partners firms and demonstrates that when arrival of clients is uncertain they allow for better utilization of the juniors. Additionally, the analysis proposes a new approach to defining firm boundary which applies the incentive-system theory of the firm to the institutional context of professional partnerships. Chapter 2 studies the economic factors determining the size and composition of Venture Capital (VC) firms. I construct a panel data set documenting California VC firms' composition and investments and derive statistical relationships between firm size, its partners' experience, and industry trends. To interpret these empirical findings, the chapter considers several theories of partnership and firm size that vary in their economic rationale for forming firms and the factors determining equilibrium firm size. I discuss under what assumptions these theories can explain the empirical regularities and highlight methodological differences between these approaches. Chapter 3 quantitatively studies the surplus gains obtained by senior and junior partners who group together in a profit sharing partnership. The analysis addresses two empirical challenges: 1) the inability to observe and measure the surplus gains; and 2) the dependency of the gains on unobserved characteristics of the partners. I develop a model inferring the gains from the optimality of firms' decisions to recruit junior partners. The model exploits turnover and mobility of partners between firms to capture unobserved heterogeneity at the partner level. I estimate the model using a novel panel data set documenting California VC firms' composition, investments, and investment outcomes. Chapter 4 empirically studies whether mandatory unbundling delayed the deployment of DSL service by BellSouth by exploiting a law change in Kentucky and variation in access prices across markets. I find that deregulation in Kentucky triggered deployment, but I find no evidence that access prices affected deployment pace. An upper bound on the welfare loss due to late deployment in rural markets is
The encoding of motion events in Chinese [electronic resource] : multi-morpheme motion constructions
Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.

This dissertation investigates the relative order of verbal morphemes that express motion in Chinese motion constructions consisting of multiple motion morphemes, e.g., the order of pao 'run' and jin 'enter' in the construction pao-jin fangjian run-enter room 'run into the room'. It argues that the order is predictable. Drawing on recent work on "scale structure", it divides Chinese motion morphemes into four types according to the type of scale each lexicalizes. Then it proposes a Motion Morpheme Hierarchy formed of these four types of motion morpheme that can be used to predict the order of motion morphemes. The hierarchy is supported by two extensive studies of multi-morpheme motion constructions using corpora of recent Chinese novels. In addition, the dissertation proposes a More Specific Constraint that explains why the Motion Morpheme Hierarchy emerges. The results of this study provides new insight into the distribution of motion morphemes in Chinese motion constructions and a more fine-grained analysis of the semantic relationships between the morphemes in these constructions; thus, it contributes to an increased understanding of how motion events are expressed in Chinese. The findings of this study may also illuminate the distribution of motion verbs in other languages, as well as constructions in domains other than motion.
The encounter of knowledge [electronic resource] : technical ekphrasis Between Alexandria and Rome
Keywords: Classics

ABSTRACT. This dissertation is a study of the techniques used to represent mechanical technology in ancient literature from Hellenistic Greece to late-ancient Rome. Ancient authors used a variety of verbal descriptive techniques, as well as visual elements like diagrams and tables, to bring their audience into imaginative contact with the artifact. Certain texts also make use of an instructional mode of description, presenting the artifact as a creation that comes together before the reader's eyes; many of these texts implicate the reader in this process through direct address and imperative commands. Ancient descriptions of machines make use of a rich store of rhetorical techniques in order not only to provide the reader with a mental picture of the artifact's physical form, but also to interpret the artifact and provide it with cultural context by unfolding the different types of knowledge it embodies (including scientific, mathematical, and craft knowledge). This process of interpretation is key to the classification of these passages as a kind of ekphrasis. Because of this interpretive aspect, ekphrasis should not be understood simply as description, but rather a powerful rhetorical mechanism illuminating the connection between objects and their culture of production or use. In order to encompass the full range of such connections, the project draws not only on technical literature such as construction manuals, but also on the representations of technological artifacts found in ancient historical, philosophical, and poetic works. This work shows that technical authors like Vitruvius and Hero of Alexandria, far from producing "naïve" descriptions of machines isolated from their culture, are in fact self-conscious participants in an ongoing discourse about the place of technical knowledge within the landscape of scientific, philosophical, and cultural values. This discourse reaches beyond the community of technical practitioners to influence literature in other genres; at the same time, the response of authors in other genres to contemporary technological developments influences the way technical authors present themselves and their work. In this way the project serves to explore the complex integration of ancient mechanical technology with the surrounding culture.
The end of the concessionary regime [electronic resource] : oil and American power in Iraq, 1958-1972
Keywords: History.

This dissertation analyzes the historical process that culminated in the 1972 nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) -- a consortium that included four of the world's largest and most powerful corporations. I draw on IPC archives, recently declassified U.S. Government documents, and the Arab press to trace the impact of Iraq's 1958 "Free Officers' Revolution" on IPC interests in Iraq. I show that the Revolution set in motion a process of institutional development that resulted in the complete nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry at a relatively early date, and I emphasize the agency of a particular group of Western-trained Iraqi technical experts in producing this outcome. Moreover, I examine U.S and IPC efforts to counter Iraq's radical movements and offer an original interpretation of the relationship between the American government and the international oil industry. I show that the Iraqi challenge to the IPC undermined the stability of an implicit "corporatist bargain" between the U.S. State Department and the major American oil companies, and that the breakdown of this relationship was part of a larger crisis of American hegemony in the early 1970s. In so doing, I reveal powerful underlying factors that continue to drive the historical encounter between the U.S. and the Middle East.
Endowments, inequality, and aggregation [electronic resource] : an inquiry on the foundations and methods of distributive justice
Keywords: Philosophy

This dissertation is organised around the development and defence of a novel distributive principle and its philosophical foundations. This principle serves as a refinement of the view that distributive justice requires the mitigation of endowment differences, which otherwise stand to make some people worse off than others. The principle of distribution itself is extensionally intermediate between Utilitarian principles of distribution, and principles that have (typically) been offered as expressing the idea of giving priority to the worse-off.
The engineering of Japan's modern river regime, 1600-1920 [electronic resource]
Keywords: History.

This dissertation is a history of the formation of Japan's modern river regime under the Home Ministry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until that time, Japan's rivers had been integral to regional irrigation systems and the transportation networks by which much of goods, people, and information moved about the country. Widespread upstream logging and downstream reclamation also caused rivers to frequently flood, leading to widespread suffering for nearby communities and over time an erosion of the fiscal and moral foundations of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. Following the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the new government's powerful Home Ministry initially pursued what its engineers later called a "low-water" policy that sought to balance flood control with the need for navigable rivers in the "promotion of production and encouragement of industry." However, as flooding continued and railways began to stretch across the countryside in the 1890s, ministry engineers jettisoned concerns about river navigation to create a new national "high water" policy that emphasized the reengineering of the country's largest rivers to handle the highest predicted water flow during summertime floods. In formulating this modern "high-water" river regime, the Home Ministry drew in part from the late nineteenth-century transnational flow in engineering knowledge and expertise, but in administering and carrying out its riparian work, the ministry participated in the creation and strengthening of a new national framework for infrastructural development. Because Japan's rivers are ultimately regional entities, the ministry's administering and reengineering of the nation's waterways had profoundly local effects on nearby fisheries, farms, and factories.
Engineering team performance and emotion [electronic resource] : affective interaction dynamics as indicators of design team performance
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering

Emotions play a crucial role in the practice of designing in teams. Engineers engaged in the activity of designing complex technical systems constantly negotiate dis- agreements with their peers and sometimes these disagreements turn hostile. Excite- ment and interest are suddenly replaced by frustration and contempt, and what started as a promising project falls short of expectations. Even though there is now a growing body of research about the relationship between social dynamics and engi- neering team performance, we still lack a coherent body of knowledge about the role of emotions in engineering team interactions. The reasons for this lack of research might be partially found in an absence of appropriate research methods and theory. This lack of research on emotions in engineering design interactions is opposed to an extensive body of work on emotions in marital interactions, an area in which re- searchers were able to powerfully relate emotional interaction dynamics with short and long-term outcomes. The present work adapts theory and methods that have been successful in pre- dicting satisfaction and divorce in marriages to study relationships between affective interaction characteristics and performance relevant outcomes in engineering design teams. In three studies, I show that Group Hedonic Balance, the balance between positive and negative affect present in a team, is a strong correlate of engineering team performance. Drawing from this work, I then propose a theory about the rela- tionship between intra-group conflict and performance based on affective distinc- tions of conflict types. This affect based intra group conflict theory departs from es- tablished theories, which are based on topical distinctions of conflict as either task, process or relationship-oriented.
The Enriched xenon observatory, 200kg [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics

The Enriched Xenon Observatory-200kg (EXO-200) is a liquid noble gas detector which measures both the anti-correlated light and charge signals produced during the potential neutrinoless double beta-decay of 136Xe. The rate of this decay gives insights into fundamental properties of the neutrino, such as its absolute mass scale and whether it is its own anti-particle. This thesis provides an overview of the EXO- 200 experiment, along with a detailed discussion of the slow controls system. It also discusses a method for determining the electron lifetime within the detector and describes the incorporation of an anti-correlation algorithm into the detector simulations. Finally, initial detector calibration data is shown which is used to determine both the detector's resolution and the electron lifetime within the detector.
Environment-wide associations to disease and disease-related phenotypes [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biomedical Informatics.

Common diseases arise out of combination of both genetic and environmental influences. Advances in genomic technology have enabled investigators to create hypotheses regarding the contribution of genetic factors at a breathtaking pace. However, the assessment of multiple and specific environmental factors--and their interactions with the genome-- has not. We lack high-throughput analytic methodologies to comprehensively and systematically associate multiple physical and specific environmental factors, or the "envirome", to disease and human health. We claim that the creation of hypotheses regarding the environmental contribution to disease is practicable through high-throughput analytic methods that have been well established in genomics. In the following dissertation, we develop and apply methods to systematically and comprehensively associate specific factors of the envirome with disease states, prioritizing factors for in-depth future study. The current disciplines of studying the environmental determinants of health include toxicology and epidemiology, which operate on molecular and population scales, respectively. This dissertation proposes approaches in both of these disciplines. For example, we have developed a framework to conduct the first "Environment-wide Association Study" (EWAS), systematically associating environmental factors to disease on a population scale. We have applied this framework to investigate type 2 diabetes and heart disease on cohorts that are representative United States population, finding novel and robust associations in diverse and independent cohorts. Given the lack of explained risk resulting from current day genome-wide studies, the time is ripe to usher in a more comprehensive study of the environment, or "enviromics", toward better understanding of multifactorial diseases and their prevention.