VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The gospel of freedom : agency, idealism, and the forms of Victorian fiction

My dissertation argues that conventional literary histories of the Victorian period have obscured a major tradition of nineteenth-century writing: a uniquely Victorian transcendentalism. Such histories typically define the "Victorianism" of Victorian literature in terms of an aspiration to realism, epitomized by the widening of the novel's mimetic range and the consolidation of its techniques for representing ordinary experience. Equally fundamental to the period's literature, however, was an impulse leading away from the world of experience and towards the reality of some transcendental phenomenon, whether this be mind, spirit, or idea. For the writers I consider, the growing dominance of empiricism and naturalism throughout all domains of life was a cause for concern, as well as celebration—especially insofar as these modes of explanation threatened the metaphysical and epistemological structures that had traditionally secured human freedom. Across its five chapters, my dissertation explores how Victorian writers drew on the formal resources of literature to articulate and reflect upon these threats, and to generate new and compelling representations of transcendental agency. To contextualize these representations and to clarify their stakes, I turn to the transcendental discourses that flourished in Victorian culture: in metaphysics and moral philosophy, aesthetics, theology, political theory, and literary and cultural criticism.

Advisor: Woloch Alex
Daub Adrian 
Duncan Ian
Greif Mark
Gratitude and compassion during adolescence

Informed by recent research findings on the benefits of gratitude and compassion, an increasing number of schools are keen to implement education lessons to help youth cultivate gratitude and compassion. The available research literature reveals, however, that there are only a handful of studies that have investigated the nature of gratitude and compassion among children and adolescents. Given the growth in interest to foster gratitude and compassion in youth, more research on the nature of these character strengths in adolescents will bring important theoretical insights and educational implications. With this research objective in mind, I present the following three papers in this dissertation that shed light on the nature of gratitude and compassion in eighth- and ninth- graders, and show the positive associations between these two character strengths, students' affective engagement and sense of belonging at school.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Colby Anne
Damon William
Tsai Jeanne Ling
The Greek face of Roman Egypt

"The Greek Face of Roman Egypt" offers two perspectives on cultural translation between Egypt, Greece, and Rome: one grounded in the Egyptian articulation of Egyptian culture under new forms of Roman imperial control, the other in the alternatively optimistic and world-weary Roman responses to a Principate whose contours were explored and explained through Egypt. The two halves of this dissertation are devoted to the explanatory power of two marginalized literary traditions: first, Egyptians' explanations of Egyptian culture, and, second, those Greek and Roman authors who looked to Egyptian space and Egyptian people to justify the new institutions of the Principate. Both traditions can enrich discussions of Egypt's presence in Roman literature and material culture, which have overemphasized Rome's tendency either to exoticize or marginalize Egypt.

Keywords: Classics.
Advisor: Parker Grant Richard
Stephens Susan A. 
Krebs Christopher B.
Green in-space propellants : ignition chemistry of hypergolic ionic liquids

This thesis focuses on a class of promising green propellants alternatives for bipropellant applications: ionic liquids. Ionic liquids have extremely low vapor pressures and other beneficial properties while reacting hypergolically (spontaneously igniting upon mixing) with select oxidizers. Although ionic liquids show a great amount of promise as future green propellant alternatives, there is still little understood about the chemistry occurring during hypergolic ignition with oxidizers and how ignition properties relate to the chemical structure of the fuel. The work presented here contributes to the understanding of hypergolic ionic liquids by (1) expanding the understanding of the ignition process through various droplet ignition testing, (2) providing valuable data on key thermal decomposition and hypergolic ignition chemical pathways by using in situ infrared spectroscopy coupled with computational quantum chemistry techniques, (3) exploring a novel hypergolic ionic liquid using spectroscopy and computational methods to highlight effects of fuel design and chemical structure on hypergolic reactivity, (4) examining the value of propellant additives through use of one fuel and one oxidizer additive, and (5) contributing high quality data to expand the capabilities of predictive algorithms to include hypergolic molecular liquids, providing ways to predict chemical and performance properties from chemical and electronic structure alone. All together, the contributions of this thesis provide a stronger basis upon which future green propellant development may occur. The experimental portion provides intuition for designing future fuels, using spectroscopy and computational quantum chemistry techniques to help relate fuel structure and composition to reactivity. Once there is an idea for a future fuel, the predictive methods expanded in this thesis may then provide preliminary performance metrics for potential fuel designs prior to synthesis and experimentation, saving time and money associated with trial-and-error experimentation. Utilizing predictive methods for propellant design will help expedite and streamline the implementation of safer, more cost-effective green propellant alternatives and ultimately provide a more accessible future for space exploration.

Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Advisor: Cantwell Brian 
Chambreau Steven 
Close Sigrid
Kochenderfer Mykel J.
Growing Impact: Understanding Evaluation in Youth Programs in Urban Farming & Gardening

Educational programs in an urban farm or garden setting can provide youth with opportunities for personal development, experiential learning, engaging in environmental behaviors and enhancing nutritional literacy. Evaluation tools and processes are used to measure program impact, report to funders, and promote the need for such programs. Therefore, it is important that program evaluations accurately convey the impacts and outcomes. In what ways do evaluations capture or fail to capture the extent of program impacts cited by staff and youth involved in the programs? This question was explored through a qualitative study of two paid summer youth programs in urban farming and gardening in Columbus, Ohio. Theoretical frameworks of place-based education (PBE) and positive youth development (PYD) were used to guide analysis of semi-structured interview data. Staff and youth alike felt that the program played a key role in developing youths’ sense of confidence, nutritional literacy, and vocational skills, but staff and youth perspectives differed in the way they characterized the role of youth in carrying out the program’s social impact goals. Staff tended to describe youth as the primary beneficiaries of the program’s social impact; youth described themselves as actors increasing food access in the community through their work in the program. More holistic evaluation tools and processes that amplify youth voices and take into account sense of ownership, autonomy, and community impact have the potential to demonstrate additional value of such programs in urban agriculture and within the field of youth development.

Keywords: urban agriculture
youth programs
evaluation
high school
experiential education
positive youth development
education
Thesis
HabitLab : in-the-wild behavior change experiments at scale

Behavior change systems help people manage their time online. However, existing productivity systems have tended to assume a one-size-fits all solution, whereas there are many factors - novelty effects, attrition, influences from other apps and devices, and differences in individual motivation - that we must take into account. That said, these effects have been researched mostly in small-scale labs studies in domains other than online behavior change, so there is a large space of opportunities for studying how these effects manifest in real-world online behavior change contexts, and how to design better behavior change systems using these insights. In this thesis we present HabitLab, an in-the-wild experimentation platform we developed for conducting behavior change experiments, as well as a set of studies we ran on the platform. HabitLab is a browser extension and mobile phone app with over 12,000 daily active, voluntary users, that users install to help them reduce time online and on their phones. It works by displaying one of 20+ interventions whenever they open an app or site they wish to spend less time on. We use HabitLab as a large-scale experiment platform to understand behavior change. In our first set of studies, we investigate novelty effects of interventions, finding that compared to always showing the same intervention, a strategy of rotating between different interventions improves intervention effectiveness, but at the cost of increased attrition. This attrition is partly due to users being unfamiliar with rotating interventions, and improving users' mental models with a notice shown whenever a new intervention is shown is able to reduce this attrition. In our second set of studies, we investigate whether reducing time on one site or app by intensifying interventions influences time on other sites, apps, and devices. We find that on the browser, reducing time on one site reduces time spent elsewhere, but we do not observe the effect on mobile devices, and do not observe cross-device effects. In our third set of studies, we investigate users' motivation levels over time as indicated by the difficulty of interventions they select. We find that users initially overestimate how difficult of interventions they want, and their choices of difficulty progressively decline over time. Thus, we have found that online behavior change is a domain where incentives for users and researchers line up such that researchers can run large-scale in-the-wild experiments gaining ecologically valid insights about how behavioral psychology and economics theories play out in the real world, while users benefit from the more effective, scientifically informed behavior change systems that we can develop using these experiments and data.

Advisor: Bernstein Michael S.
Fogg Brian J. 
Landay James A.
Hacking for Good: Leveraging HackerOne Data to Develop an Economic Model of Bug Bounties

I ran an empirical study on bug bounties, cybersecurity programs where ethical hackers are compensated for submitting reports to companies, detailing bugs which might be maliciously exploited. Leveraging instrumental variables, I eliminated many potential sources of endogenity, better establishing causality for what motivates hackers to submit reports to programs. Among other things, I rank industries by the number of reports they receive, find that new programs reduce the number of reports submitted to existing programs, compute a price elasticity between .1 and .2 at the median for hackers, and fail to validate the assumption that programs receive fewer reports as they age. This paper provides a snapshot of a rapidly changing––and increasingly important––industry.

Keywords: bug bounties
cybersecurity
crowdsourced cybersecurity
IT management
HackerOne
Thesis
Advisor: Michael Boskin
Hardware acceleration and algorithms for genomic sequence alignment and its applications

While genome sequencing data continues to rise exponentially (80%/year), transistor performance scaling has considerably slowed down (3%/year). Domain-specific acceleration (DSA), which uses specialized hardware for accelerating a narrow domain of applications, is one of the few remaining approaches in computer architecture to continue to scale compute performance and efficiency to enable the vast potential of genomics data. The entire domain of genomics relies heavily on one fundamental algorithm — genome sequence alignment — with wide-ranging applications in medicine and comparative genomics. The first part of this dissertation presents our work on hardware acceleration of genome sequence alignment, particularly for two emerging, compute-intensive applications in genomics — long read assembly (Darwin co-processor) and whole-genome alignments (Darwin-WGA co-processor). The accelerators are based on hardware-software co-design, which modifies an existing algorithm in a way that provides massive speedup (1,000-10,000x) in specialized hardware without compromising, and sometimes even enhancing, the results for a biologist. The second part of this dissertation focuses on the applications whole-genome alignments to make novel biological discoveries. It presents a novel algorithm (ORCHID) to confidently identify the orthologous region of a reference gene in the query genome. ORCHID is further used to develop a novel screen (hcoErosions) to discover hundreds of genes that are surprisingly lost in different mammals, some of which are considered indispensable in human and mouse. It also presents a novel screen we developed for testing the molecular basis of convergent evolution in mammals that also relied on our ORCHID algorithm.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Dally William J. 
Bejerano Gill
Horowitz Mark (Mark Alan)
Health and loan default risk analytics : prediction models and their evaluation

Risk prediction of future events or other adverse outcomes is widely used in health and medicine, economics and finance, climate change and infrastructure reliability. How to evaluate the risk forecasts and forecasting models/methods and quantify the difference of the predictions from the true risks is an important but challenging problem in using the forecasts to guide regulatory, or policy, or treatment/intervention decisions. Lai et al (2011) review the literature on the evaluation of risk forecasts using scoring rules and associated loss functions in weather forecasting and econometric forecasts, and introduce a new approach that gives valid confidence intervals for the difference in average scores of two forecasts. It provides a martingale approach to analyzing the prediction accuracy for binary outcomes when the outcomes are not independent across time and space. In this thesis, we give some background of score statistics and concordance-type statistics, discuss their limitations and some challenges in the evaluation of risk models, and develop methods, more specifically, the martingale approach, to address these challenges. We also extend our approach to a) subgroup identification using multiple hypotheses testing framework and b) sequential test to find change point of model performance statistics. We demonstrate our methods with simulations and two real-world applications.

Keywords: Statistics.
Advisor: Lai T. L. 
Lu Ying
Walther Guenther
Health Behavior Change in Virtual Worlds: A Systematic Review

Internet and web based interventions have been utilized as effective tools for health behavior changes. Virtual worlds also hold a great deal of promise in the future of behavior change because of the affordances the medium has in supporting many types of health care. This paper provides an overview of literature for virtual worlds as agents of health behavior change in the period 2000-2019. 20 papers were selected for analysis. The findings of the selected literature are summarized according to 2 broad characterizations: health behavior change technique, and intention of virtual world design.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
Health behavior
behavior change
virtual worlds
virtual environments
avatars
Communications
Media Studies
Thesis
Advisor: Jeremy Bailenson
Health Insurance Expansion and Rural Hospital Finances: Evaluating the Impact of the Affordable Care Act in California

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) extended health insurance coverage to previously uninsured individuals, thereby altering reimbursement patterns at the hospital level. Given the historical financial difficulties of rural hospitals, this paper focuses on the effect of this insurance expansion on hospital inpatient payer mix and financial outcomes in rural settings. Using hospital-level data from 2006-2017, this paper utilizes a fixed effects regression and difference-in-differences study design to determine the effect of the ACA on rural hospital financial performance in California. I find a statistically significant decline in Medicaid payer mix and increase in private payer mix for rural inpatient services after the ACA. I also find significant reductions in Medicaid income per bed and uncompensated care cost, particularly in uninsured rural areas. However, overall profitability improved in rural hospitals after the ACA, suggesting the financial importance of private shares of payer mix to cover losses incurred by increased expenses of Medicaid patients.

Keywords:  Public Policy Program
Affordable Care Act
Medicaid expansion
California
rural hospitals
financial distress
payer mix
Stanford University
Public Policy Program
Thesis
Advisor: Mark Duggan
Helioseismic measurements of the sun's meridional circulation and sunquakes

In this thesis, we use helioseismic methods to study two separate topics, the Sun's meridional circulation and sunquake events. The Sun's meridional circulation is a key component of solar dynamo and interior dynamics, playing an important role in transporting magnetic flux and redistributing angular momentum. A profile of the meridional circulation has long been sought, but results from previous studies were not fully consistent, due to a systematic center- to-limb (CtoL) effect in helioseismic measurements that complicates the inference of meridional circulation in the deep interior. In the first part of this thesis, we measure the Sun's meridional circulation and its temporal evolution using 8 years of SDO/HMI Doppler-velocity observations, with a new CtoL-effect-removal method that we have developed in time-distance helioseismology. The long-time-averaged meridional circulation profile is found to have a three-layer flow structure: an equatorward flow is sandwiched between two poleward flow zones above and beneath it, indicating a double-cell circulation in each hemisphere. Moreover, the 3-layer flow pattern is more significant when the Sun's magnetic activity level is low, while significant changes are found in the flow structure during the active phase of the solar cycle. Besides, we also study the observational properties of the CtoL effect in the measured travel time of helioseismic waves. The CtoL effect is found isotropic relative to the azimuthal angle around the solar disk center. It also exhibits a significant frequency dependence -- it reverses sign at a frequency around 5.4 mHz, and is strongest at around 4.0 mHz. The tendency of frequency dependence varies with disk-centric distance but not with the waves' travel distance. In the second part this thesis, we focus on sunquakes. Sunquakes are helioseismic power enhancements initiated by solar flares, but not all flares generate sunquakes. It is curious why some flares cause sunquakes while others do not. Here we propose a hypothesis to explain the disproportionate occurrence of sunquakes: during a flare's impulsive phase when the flare's impact acts upon the photosphere, a sunquake tends to occur if the background oscillation at the flare's footpoint happens to oscillate downward, in the same direction with the impulse from above. To verify this hypothesis, we survey 60 strong flares in Solar Cycle 24 to search for sunquakes, by reconstructing the oscillatory velocity in the flare sites using a helioseismic holography method. A total of 24 flares are found to be sunquake active, giving a total of 41 sunquakes. It is found that in 3 − 5 mHz frequency band, 25 out of 31 (81%) sun- quakes show net downward oscillatory velocities during the flares' impulsive phases, and in 5 − 7 mHz frequency band, 33 out of 38 (87%) sunquakes show net downward velocities. These results support our hypothesis that a sunquake more likely occurs when a flare impacts a photospheric area that happens to have a downward background oscillation.

Keywords: Physics.
Advisor: Scherrer Philip H.
Petrosian Vahe 
Zhao Junwei
Hemodynamic based thrombotic risk stratification in Kawasaki disease patients with coronary artery aneurysms

Thrombosis is a major adverse outcome associated with coronary artery aneurysms resulting from Kawasaki disease, the leading cause of acquired heart disease among children in developed countries. Clinical guidelines recommend initiation of anticoagulation therapy based solely on anatomical measurements. Here, we investigate the role of aneurysm hemodynamics as a superior method for thrombotic risk stratification in Kawasaki disease patients and the use of patient-specific computational modeling to understand the mechanisms underlying coronary artery aneurysm thrombosis. First, we will discuss novel image processing methods that use transluminal attenuation gradient (TAG) to extract functional information from Computer Tomography Angiography. We demonstrate significantly abnormal TAG values in aneurysms caused by Kawasaki disease compared to normal coronary arteries. Second, we will present an image-based computational framework combining a deep understanding of coronary physiology with advanced numerical methods and high performance computing, to obtain fully resolved patient-specific hemodynamic data relevant to thrombotic risk stratification. Simulations are performed with finite element methods incorporating fluid structure interaction and closed loop lumped parameter models to represent vascular boundary conditions. The primary translational goal is to support clinical decisions about when and if a patient needs to start systemic anti-coagulation therapy. Our results demonstrate that hemodynamic variables such as wall shear stress and residence time are significantly more predictive of thrombotic risk than the anatomical measurements currently used in clinical practice. Finally, we focus on the biochemical aspects of thrombus initiation and how these processes can be modeled using a continuum approach. Here we present a model based on scalar transport and incorporating velocity fields from patient-specific simulations to track activation and accumulation of platelets and other blood components, critical to the coagulation cascade. This model provides a new approach to investigate thrombus initiation from a patient-specific perspective, which could help identify regions at higher risk of thrombosis as well as strategies for thrombosis prevention.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Kuhl Ellen
Marsden Alison
Eaton John K.