VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Dominant group members' experiences of entitative subordinate groups [electronic resource] : the role of valence and variance in subordinate group collectives
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation examines how highly entitative subordinate group collectives may induce a threat of status loss among dominant group members. Extending past research on entitativity to the context of hierarchies with more than two groups, I explore two factors that may increase dominant group members' perceptions of subordinate group collectives' entitativity: 1) Positive attitudes between members of subordinate groups, and 2) The homogeneity of subordinate group collectives. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the possibility that White Americans experience a threat of losing their dominant group position when they learn about positive (as compared to negative) inter-minority group attitudes. I argue that inter-minority group harmony signals the existence of an entitative superordinate minority category, which can more effectively challenge the status quo hierarchy. In initial support of this, I found that Whites' perceptions of Black-Latino relations are positively associated with their perceptions of Blacks' social standing relative to Whites (Study 1). Across three experiments, I found causal evidence that Whites' perceptions of positive inter-minority group attitudes lead to perceptions of greater minority collective power (Study 2), and this relationship is partially mediated by Whites' perception that minorities share a common in-group identity (Studies 3a-c). Furthermore, consistent with the idea that positive inter-minority group attitudes induce a threat of status loss and motivate dominant group members to reinforce the hierarchy maintenance, Study 4 found that pro-dominance Whites oppose affirmative action in response to learning about positive, as compared to negative, inter-minority group attitudes. The second chapter explores how White Americans perceive and respond to collectives composed of members of multiple minority groups (e.g., an Asian-Black interracial couple) as compared with collectives composed of members of a single minority group (e.g., a Black couple). Given that heterogeneous collectives are likely to be perceived as less entitative and thus less hostile than homogenous collectives, I hypothesize that Whites will judge multi-minority collectives more positively than single-minority collectives. In support of this prediction, Study 5 found that high-dominance White college students judge multi-minority group student organizations more positively than single-minority group student organizations. Additionally, a large-scale field study of White wedding planners found that Whites respond to emails from Asian-Black interracial couples more quickly, using with more words, compared to emails from Asian and Black same-race couples (Study 6). Implications to literatures in intergroup relations, social hierarchies, and diversity are discussed.
Don't hesitate! The length of inter-turn gaps influences observers' interactional attributions [electronic resource]
Keywords: Psychology.

What can we learn from a pause? This dissertation examines whether a pause between speaking turns in a conversation (a gap) can change how we view that conversation and its participants (a gap effect). In particular, it asks whether the length of a gap can influence interactional attributions—that is, attributions of the participants' engagement with each other (e.g., attentiveness) and the overall quality of their interaction (e.g., its awkwardness). In four experiments, I manipulated the length of the gap between spontaneous, recorded questions and answers, and then asked observers to listen to each question-answer pair and rate a range of interactional attributes. These experiments addressed four primary research goals: extend the gap effect to new attributes, develop a broader account of gap effect moderation, clarify the role of gap length in the gap effect, and generalize the gap effect to new measures and stimuli. Indeed, lengthening the gap changed observers' interactional attributions (Experiments 1, 2 and 3). These attributions were moderated by observers' expectation that a long gap would occur, which was shaped by the presumed mental effort required to process or respond to the question (Experiment 3). These attributions were not due to conscious reasoning about the gap or changes in the observers' listening experience (Experiments 2 and 3). However, none of these effects replicated when the question-answer pairs were presented in their original conversational context (Experiment 4). There is still much to learn about what a pause can tell us in everyday conversations.
Drawn together [electronic resource] : using visualization as a problem-solving strategy in project management
Keywords: Education.

Spatial inscriptions of information--visualizations--can be a great asset to problem solving. Calendars and Cartesian graphs are two examples of visualizations that reorganize non-spatial information (temporal and quantitative) into a visual format. People readily rely on these visualizations to plan and see patterns, which intuitively attests to their value. Pre-made visualizations, however, are not always available. As we document here, people can produce their own as needed, even for novel tasks, yet they often do not. This is a problem of transfer, where people have the requisite knowledge and skills but they do not spontaneously apply them when it would be appropriate to do so. We provide four hypotheses that might explain a lack of transfer. Three studies examine whether and when people spontaneously visualize and how to encourage the transfer of visualization to a novel problem. In the first study, we demonstrate that people infrequently visualize spontaneously on a project scheduling task that is similar to what one might find in a project management textbook. We show that performance on the project scheduling task without a visualization is poor. We also find that just seeing visualizations that reveal information not obvious in a table format will not support spontaneous transfer to a spatially-based problem or a temporally-based problem. In the second study, we teach participants explicitly to make a visualization for a spatially-based network problem. We see that people can make sense of a matrix in answering questions about a spatially based problem. We also find that seeing a visualization of that problem helps people to correctly use that visualization to answer questions. Therefore, the lack of visualizations in Study 1 was not due to participants not understanding the problem or not being able to interpret a visualization. Finally, we find that even though people can read and make visualizations for a spatially-based problem, this does not transfer to a temporally based problem. In the third study, we teach participants explicitly to make a visualization for a spatially-based network problem again. We also introduce a task between the spatially-based problem and the temporally-based problem that has both spatial and temporal surface features. The participants who received this "bridge" task spontaneously transferred visualization on the temporally-based project scheduling task.
Dress & Power in the Legal Profession: Gender, Uniformity, & Commerce
Keywords:  Department of Science
Science Technology &amp; Society
law
gender
fashion
clothing
aesthetics
power
retail
Thesis

This paper explores the historical, cultural, and economic factors that have influenced professional dress norms for women in the legal profession. A multi-method approach, using market data, retailer purchasing data, and qualitative ethnography, seeks to paint a holistic picture of the diverse forces that shape the clothing choices these women make. The male suit is the standard “uniform” for men in most formal professions, but no equivalent standard exists for women. Existing research articulates the tension between looking too “masculine” when emulating the male suit, and looking too “unprofessional” when wearing traditionally “feminine” garments. This phenomenon is well documented in the legal profession, where formal suits are generally expected of men and define the image of professionalim. However, little work has been done to explore how this dichotomy arose, and what roles apparel marketplaces have played in their formation. This paper seeks to add depth to this conversation, and begin analysis of the impacts of e-commerce marketplaces on shopping and selection behavior. Ultimately, this paper concludes that a professional female uniform remains elusive; given the lack of a coherent standard, these women seek to express power through constrained, carefully balanced displays of powerful individuality. While this is a compelling strategy, it ultimately does not address the issues generated by the absence of cohesion, yet the interests of the online apparel industry seem firmly poised to perpetuate this behavior.
Dual-stage crosslinking hydrogels for cell extrusion in bioprinting and transplantation applications [electronic resource]
Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.

Nature has provided the human body with complex systems of wound healing that enable us to overcome many of the assaults inflicted upon us. Typically, these systems are categorized as either regeneration, where the native tissue and its structure are replaced, or repair, where a different tissue structure forms in the wound site. While there are several strategies in the literature to achieve this goal, this thesis focuses on two: the delivery of regenerative aids in vivo to promote regeneration at the wound site and the development of tissue replacements ex vivo for future implantation. This thesis proposes two families of hydrogels that each employ two stages of crosslinking to specifically tune material properties for various biomedical applications. The use of protein engineered materials to create a shear-thinning, injectable hydrogel is central to both. For promotion of in vivo regenerative wound healing, cell transplantation within a biomaterial scaffold will be explored. This thesis explores the use of Shear-thinning Hydrogel for Injectable Encapsulation and Long-term Delivery, or SHIELD, for Schwann cell delivery in vivo for a spinal cord injury model. This material uses a thermal secondary crosslinking mechanism for altered material properties at body temperature. To be able to engineer tissue replacements ex vivo, bioprinting has emerged as a promising technique due to its ability to precisely pattern multiple cell types into structures found in native tissues. This work discusses the design and development of a dual-stage crosslinking bio-ink for use in 3D printing, named Recombinant-protein Alginate Platform for Injectable Dual-crosslinked ink or RAPID ink, to overcome some of these challenges. This ink uses an ionic secondary crosslinking mechanism to maintain the printed structure and allow for full cell hydration during printing.
Dynamic control of processing systems for jobs with decaying value [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

In myriad processing systems, delays can degrade the internal state of jobs in the system. Explicitly modeling the decay in internal job value allows us to generalize the concept of a "hard" deadline to that of a "soft" deadline: while hard deadlines are characterized by abrupt value decay, soft deadlines allow for gradual value decay. We leverage optimal control and stochastic simulation methodologies to study two models that incorporate job value decay as an essential modeling attribute. The first model, motivated by patient triage problems, features jobs that are characterized by stochastic service times and deterministically decaying internal value. Since the internal value of a job models the overall health of a patient, we aim to find a non-preemptive scheduling policy that maximizes the total expected value of the jobs after they have completed service. Finding an optimal scheduling policy is computationally intractable so we choose to focus on some heuristics. We provide an- alytic performance guarantees and use numerical experiments to compare the policies in a variety of scenarios, including patient triage scenarios. The second model, motivated by wireless streaming systems, is a service rate control model in which jobs decay in value only upon reaching the server. When a job has zero value, the job is ejected from the queue. In packet streaming, this value decay ensures that the stream does not get "stuck" on any single packet. We formulate an optimal control problem in which power is used to modulate the service rate. We characterize the monotonicity structure of the optimal control and use these analytic results to build power control schemes that adapt to the backlog and decaying value. Simulations show that our proposed schemes outperform benchmark algorithms.
Dynamic strategies for crowdsourced data management [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

As the world becomes ever-more connected to the Internet, crowdsourcing marketplaces such as Amazon Mechanical Turk give us a mechanism for the large-scale inclusion of humans into computational workflows. However, many crowdworkers make mistakes and disagree with one another, some workers are malicious and only contribute spam, and the crowd can often be both slow and expensive. Despite these many challenges, in this thesis we develop new algorithms that allow us to effectively utilize the crowd while still ensuring quick, low-cost, and accurate results. First, we consider the commonly encountered labeling or filtering problem, where we use the crowd to label or filter items in a dataset. We describe CrowdDQS (Crowd Dynamic Question Selection), a general-purpose system we developed that can reduce the cost of labeling by up to 6 times in practice by dynamically issuing questions to workers and automatically detecting and blocking poor workers. Next, we consider the maximum problem, where we are presented with a set of records, each with an unknown intrinsic score, and our goal is to use the crowd to find the record with the highest score. We develop hybrid strategies that judiciously use a combination of both a ratings interface and a comparisons interface to more efficiently find the maximum than typical single-interface strategies. Finally, we consider the problem of using the crowd to cluster together similar records or to perform entity resolution (ER). We significantly reduce the cost of pairwise crowd clustering approaches by soliciting the crowd for attribute labels on records, and then asking for pairwise judgments only between records with similar sets of attribute labels. We describe strategies which allow us to finely control the accuracy of our results while still maintaining significant cost reductions.
Dynamical constraints on the galaxy-halo connection [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics.

Dark matter halos comprise the bulk of the universe's mass, yet must be probed by the luminous galaxies that form within them. A key goal of modern astrophysics is to robustly relate the visible and dark mass, which to first order means relating the properties of galaxies and halos. The aim of this thesis is to develop and evaluate models of the galaxy-halo connection using observations of galaxy dynamics. In particular, I build empirical models based on the technique of halo abundance matching for five key dynamical scaling relations of galaxies -- the Tully-Fisher, Faber-Jackson, mass-size and mass discrepancy-acceleration relations, and Fundamental Plane -- which relate their baryon distributions and rotation or velocity dispersion profiles. I then develop a statistical scheme based on approximate Bayesian computation to compare the predicted and measured values of a number of summary statistics describing the relations' important features. I find some features to be naturally accounted for by an abundance matching approach and others to impose new constraints on the galaxy-halo connection; the remainder are challenging to reproduce and may imply galaxy-halo correlations beyond the scope of basic abundance matching. Besides providing concrete statistical tests of specific galaxy formation theories, these results will be of use for guiding the inputs of empirical and semi-analytic galaxy formation models, which require galaxy-halo correlations to be imposed by hand.
Dynamics and liquid-like behavior of the pyrenoid of the green alga chlamydomonas reinhardtii [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

Approximately 30--40% of global CO2 fixation occurs inside a non-membrane-bound organelle called the pyrenoid. Pyrenoids are found in chloroplasts of most eukaryotic algae and some hornworts, and are densely packed with the carbon-fixing enzyme Rubisco. The pyrenoid is a core component of the algal carbon concentrating mechanism (CCM), which enables more efficient inorganic carbon capture than that of most land plants by supplying Rubisco with a high concentration of its substrate, CO2. In this thesis, I show that, in contrast to long-held assumptions of the field, the pyrenoid matrix is not a solid crystal, but is strikingly dynamic, and can likely be considered a phase-separated, liquid-like organelle. The studies detailed in the following chapters focus on the dynamics of fluorescently-tagged pyrenoid proteins in live cells of the model green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, assayed by state-of-the-art quantitative fluorescence microscopy techniques. I tracked the inheritance of fluorescently labeled pyrenoids in live cells for the first time, and observe that pyrenoids are primarily inherited by fission, but that de novo growth is also possible. Strikingly, I have discovered that much of the pyrenoid matrix rapidly disperses into the chloroplast stroma immediately before division and quickly re-aggregates afterwards, suggesting that pyrenoid components undergo a phase transition during division. Furthermore, I demonstrate through Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP) experiments that the major protein components of the pyrenoid matrix undergo rapid internal mixing. Finally, by targeting a genetically encoded pH fluorescent biosensor to the pyrenoid matrix, I have shown that the pH of the pyrenoid increases during photosynthesis, like the stroma. These findings strongly suggest that the pyrenoid matrix undergoes liquid mixing as a phase-separated compartment in equilibrium with the stroma. This new view of the pyrenoid matrix as a phase-separated compartment resolves the paradox of how the chaperone Rubisco Activase can access Rubisco throughout the pyrenoid matrix. More broadly, my findings provide a new paradigm for understanding the structure, regulation, and inheritance of the pyrenoid, new facts that can be used to guide future attempts to engineer such compartments into higher plants.
The economics of recapitalizing large failing financial firms [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics.

Is it legally and economically possible to resolve a large failing financial firm without either imposing systemic costs upon the broader economy or increasing banks' risk-taking incentives? This dissertation grapples with two facets of this question. The first chapter assesses a particular proposed resolution mechanism, a new Chapter 14 of the Bankruptcy Code, and applies it to the economic history of Lehman Brothers' case. It shows that, because the run on Lehman was driven by perceived insolvency, because that run was foreseeable, and because Lehman had sufficient long-term and subordinated debt, Lehman's would have been the type of case that Chapter 14 and other new recapitalization mechanisms are best structured to address. Chapter 14 would have imposed real losses on creditors, while also reducing aggregate losses by hundreds of billions of dollars. Expectations that short-term lenders and clients would be paid in full at maturity would have dramatically reduced the risk of runs and systemic costs. The second chapter undertakes to identify a market-based measure that can help to predict more precisely a large financial firm's distress and consequent need for resolution. The chapter demonstrates that a new measure of market perceptions of solvency, the "Solvency Ratio, " theoretically and empirically outperforms the existing measures of Distance to Default and CDS spreads when predicting distress at large financial firms. In a sample of 11 systemically important U.S. financial firms over the 2004-2013 time-frame, a rule based upon the Solvency Ratio performs remarkably well whereas one cannot construct a similar highly performing rule for either Distance to Default or CDS spreads. These results and others presented demonstrate that policymakers and investors would do well to track the Solvency Ratio in order to better understand when systemically important firms will require resolution in the future.
An economy of words [electronic resource] : precarity, solidarity and innovation in digital book publishing
Keywords: Communication.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which predicted a massive "creative apocalypse" and increasing "precarity" for cultural workers following the digital disruption of media (Johnson, 2015), this dissertation shows that romance writers, unlike many other creators, have seen an increase in both autonomy and economic security under digital conditions. Through an income survey of 4,200 romance authors, I show that these authors became more economically secure after the rise of e-books, while income for authors in all other book genres declined. Drawing on interviews and participant-observation, I show that starting in the 1980s, romance authors responded to widespread industry sexism with feminist social tactics that, paradoxically, gave them an advantage over other writers after the rise of e-books. Specifically, these authors—who were outsiders in the highly elite book industry—developed a very different type of professional network than most writers. This "open-elite" network, a type of network that has been associated with innovation at specific times and places across history (John F Padgett, 2010; Powell & Owen-Smith, 2012; Stone & Stone, 1986), accelerated innovation after the digital disruption of the publishing industry. These findings contribute to debates on the future of entrepreneurial labor in the so-called "gig economy" and the underrepresentation of particular voices in public discourse. First, contrary to both scholarly and media assumptions, this work shows that increased precarity is not inevitable for media workers under digital conditions. Rather, I show that new forms of solidarity can accelerate innovation and improve working life. Second, my research shows that certain social and technological configurations can amplify the voices of some creators. While the networked public sphere has not proven an inherently more democratic domain, as some scholars hoped, my work suggests that social tactics can expand opportunities for marginalized voices.
The effect of induced stress heterogeneity in pore space on solid substitution [electronic resource]
Keywords: Geophysics.

In this dissertation, we introduce a new approach of predicting effective elastic properties upon solid substitution using strain energy and reciprocity theory. We confirm that the exact solution for fluid and solid substitution requires parameters that depend on pore geometry; therefore, substitution is non-unique if only pore-fill volume fraction is known. Using the new equations, which require less computational simulation as compare to a previous study (Saxena and Mavko, 2013) we find that the difference between pore geometry parameters stays unchanged in the same pore compliance. Hence, using this assumption we can predict effective elastic properties upon fluid and solid substitution. After introducing our approach, we discuss methods for obtaining the parameters of stress heterogeneity in the pore space. Finally, we demonstrate the new approach using an actual data set and accompanying 3D CT-scan image.