VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The politicization of faith : settler colonialism, education, and political identity in Tunisia

My dissertation addresses the puzzle of why some people adopt secular rather than religious political orientations. Examining the case of Tunisia, this dissertation first locates the historical origins of Islamist and secularist political ideologies in the localized experience of colonization and colonial education. In the first half of the dissertation, I show that Tunisians across localities had differential access to French and traditional Islamic primary education due to variation in settler land acquisition and settler educational institutions. Importantly, colonial expansion in Tunisia coincided with the secularization of public education and the subordination of religious institutions to secular political authority in the French Metropole. The differential provision and ideational content of French secular and Islamic education led, in turn, to the development of distinct secular and Islamist political orientations among the Tunisian population. This has important implications for the study of religion and secularism in the Middle East, as well as highlights the role that individual-level attitudes play in shaping the elite ideological factions of national political movements. The second half of the dissertation demonstrates the persistence of the Islamist-secular divide, both in terms of the ideological debates and divisions between the members and supporters of the country's Islamist and secularist parties, as well as in terms of Tunisia's political geography. I show that the leaders of the Islamist and secularist factions of Tunisia's nationalist movement, the Neo-Destour, held distinct views about the independence of religious institutions and the appropriate relationship between religious and political authority. I then demonstrate that Tunisian politics continues to be organized around the Islamist-secular political cleavage, with many of the same ideological debates centered around questions of the independence of religious institutions re-emerging, particularly in the recent period of democratic consolidation.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Blaydes Lisa
Scheve Kenneth F. 
Grzymała-Busse Anna Maria
Postsecular community : religion as literary form and political theory in post-1959 Mexican fiction

'Postsecular Community' examines the construction of social and political community in three Mexican novels of the 20th and 21st centuries. I show that where the national community is seen to be in crisis, these novels by Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Fuentes, and Yuri Herrera mobilize religious concepts to present alternative models for social connection: each depicts a being-in-common based on subjective interdependence. In this way, concepts from the Maya, Christian, and Nahua traditions shed light on uniquely modern conflicts, yielding what I call a postsecular perspective. The dissertation shows a new role for religion in Mexico's secularizing 20th century: not simply a political agenda or folkloric tradition, religion is a vital conceptual resource for theorizing new forms of collectivity.

Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.
Advisor: Hoyos Ayala Héctor
Surwillo Lisa 
Valle Ivonne del
Pray you catch me : a critical feminist and ethnographic study of love as pedagogy and politics for social justice

This dissertation is a critical feminist and ethnographic study of love as pedagogy and politics for social justice at a public charter high school ("Bay Grove High School") in a small working-class city in the California Bay Area ("Bay Grove"). This study is based on approximately four years of fieldwork as an educator-researcher from the fall of 2014 to the spring of 2018. The youth in this study identified with the African, Latinx, and Polynesian diasporas. In each chapter, I engaged in ethnographic, grounded theory building based on over 1,000 hours of teaching, participant observation, and sociolinguistic data collection. Operating from a critical feminist approach to research, I examined what love looks like empirically and in practice, while advancing current, state of the art theory on love in the tradition of critical and asset-based pedagogies, Black and Chicanx/Latinx Feminism, Black theology, and affect theory. I argue that this study reveals how we need to further consider how movements for social justice are built, sustained, and revitalized by the deep bonds, relationships, and mutual understandings forged through love in our pedagogies.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Alim H. Samy 
Banks Adam J. (Adam Joel) 
Lindsey Treva B.
Martínez Ramón
Rosa Jonathan
Precaution in the private interest

What determines how the regulation of risk changes over time? This dissertation develops and tests a theory to explain regulatory change at both national and international levels of governance. Beginning with the observation that the regulation of risk centers on a problem of asymmetric information between the regulator and the party being regulated, I proceed to elucidate how this informational asymmetry informs the regulatory institutions that are implemented, as well as the regulatory outcomes that result. In particular, I show how producers of potentially dangerous products leverage their informational advantages in order to acquire regulations that push their less profitable products off the market in favor of more profitable alternatives. Surprisingly, precautionary institutions intended to make regulatory standards more responsive to science and new information end up helping these producers use information to their advantage. Notably, because producers' ability to win favorable regulations results from their informational, as opposed to their political, influence, producers have been as successful at winning preferential regulatory outcomes at the international level as they have at the national one. My findings have implications for global welfare as well as for scholars' theoretical understanding of the conditions under which national and international bodies do and do not produce divergent outcomes.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Goldstein Judith 
Haber Stephen H.
Moe Terry
Tomz Michael
Preminger's doubt : close analysis and film aesthetics in the aftermath of old Hollywood

I find something quietly unsettling in three unloved works by the aging (read "declining") Hollywood filmmaker Otto Preminger. In Harm's Way (1965), Skidoo (1968), and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970). These three films may at once appear somewhat unremarkable. They do not announce their strangeness with the kind of disjunctive experimentation like so many late 60s-early 70s films of the America's "New" Hollywood. But in them, Old Hollywood persisted, perhaps beyond the reach of its moment. In this project, I bring an art historical attentiveness and responsiveness to the study of film, and I find the doubts of the late 60s-early 70s quietly lurking in this rather unexpected place. "Preminger's Doubt: Close Analysis and Film Aesthetics in the Aftermath of Old Hollywood" is a project about the strangeness and inexhaustibility of the single work of art within and against its historical and aesthetic context. I show how three films forcefully probe a felt uncertainty in the aftermath of the Hollywood studio system, when the look and feel of American films—and American culture at large—were rapidly changing. Each work, in its own way, is attuned to a sense of vast institutional collapse, sensitive not only to Hollywood's fading memory of itself but also to the uncertain aftermaths of their contemporary moment—how Junie Moon's failure to follow relates to a waning of interest in NASA after the Apollo moon landing, how In Harm's Way's delayed credits sequence figures an uncertain world after the explosion of the atomic bomb, how Skidoo's widescreen aesthetics suggests a strange continuity between the older medium of film and the younger medium of television in the late 60s. But more than this, my dissertation finds an affinity between these films and the demands of close analysis. These films challenge us to connect—or meaningfully detach—certain moments, gestures, and images across the unfolding texture of the single work. At other times, they suggest parallels only to leave them open to doubt rather than neatly resolved.

Keywords: Art and Art History.
Advisor: Bukatman Scott
Keathley Christian
Nemerov Alexander 
Oeler Karla
Preschool enrollment and mothers' labor market outcomes in Brazil

I analyze the increase in financing early childhood education in Brazil by FUNDEB in 2006 and the establishment of compulsory preschool enrollment by Constitutional Amendment #59 in 2009 to understand its effects on preschool enrollment and mothers’ labor outcomes measured by their probability of working, hours worked and earnings. I provide empirical evidence of mothers’ responsiveness to changes in compulsory preschool enrollment and financing preschool. I hypothesize that FUNDEB and the establishment of Amendment #59 positively affected preschool enrollment. Then I hypothesize that this increase thus positively affected mothers' labor market outcomes. Through a difference-in-differences analysis, I exploit geographic variation across time and states in preschool enrollment. I compare the labor outcome of mothers of preschoolers with those of mothers with older children. Individual-level data (mothers and children) and aggregate data (families) come from the Brazilian National Household Survey (PNAD). Results indicate that the establishment of both FUNDEB and Amendment #59 positively increased preschool enrollment of 4 and 5 year old children compared to 6 and 7 year olds enrolling in primary education. Results also indicate that higher preschool enrollment positively affected mothers of preschoolers’ probability to work. However, that increase did not affect mothers’ earnings and hours worked, as these effects are not statistically significant.

Keywords: Mothers Employment
Mothers Earnings
Mothers Work Hours
Preschool
Public Policy
Work and Family
Gender-Gaps in the Labor Market
Stanford Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education
Thesis
Prescription Drug Expenditures, New Drug Launches, and Disease-specific Mortality

This paper explores the relationship between disease-level prescription drug expenditures, the availability of FDA-approved prescription drugs, disease-level scientific R&D expenses, and disease-specific mortality. Leveraging prescription drug data from the national Medical Expenditures Panel Survey, mortality data from the Center for Disease Control, research expenditures data from the NIH, and drug launch data from the FDA, I develop a number of fixed effects regression models to assess how movements in drug launches, disease-level research, and disease-level expenditures impact mortality as a health endpoint. This research elucidates how various movements in pharmaceutical innovation can predict changes in mortality rates. This paper also aims to understand the impact of new drug launches across time and resolve whether mortality trends are more significantly related to drug launches in a previous year than in a current year – the former of which suggests that drug launches drive movements in mortality rather than the reverse. Analysis of a time lagged innovation variable estimates that a 1% increase in the cumulative available prescription drugs on the market yields a 0.25% decrease in mortality rates for individuals above the age of 65 and a 0.37% decrease in mortality rate for individuals below the age of 65. Analysis of disease-level NIH R&D data shows that a 1% increase in research spending yields a 0.59% decrease in mortality rate for individuals older than 65.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Department of Economics
pharmaceutical innovation
healthcare
drug expenditures
R&amp;D
mortality
prescription drugs
drug prices
Thesis
Advisor: Duggan Mark
Pricing, spending, and shortages in US biopharmaceutical markets

In this era of national concern about the availability and affordability of prescription drugs, policymaking is moving quickly, although critical gaps persist in the supporting evidence base. This dissertation is a collection of three essays written on economic and policy issues related to biopharmaceutical markets in the United States. The first chapter, "Price Elasticity of Demand for Prescription Drugs: Evidence from Medicare Part D's Low-Income Subsidy Program, " measures consumers' behavioral response to changes in the out-of-pocket price of prescription drugs by tracking Medicare Part D beneficiaries as they change Low-Income Subsidy status. In my second chapter, titled "Spending on Unapproved Drugs and Impact of the FDA Unapproved Drugs Initiative on Drug Utilization in the US, " I quantify spending on and utilization of certain marketed, unapproved prescription drugs for Medicare patients in the US and estimate how utilization changes when previously unapproved drugs gain FDA approval. In my third chapter, titled "Biopharmaceutical Market Shortages: Causes and Cures, " I explore primary causes of shortages in the biopharmaceutical space, with a particular focus on how forces at work in common generic sterile injectable drug shortages may be applicable to biologics; I also evaluate potential avenues for strategic regulatory reforms to prevent or mitigate shortages, examining proposed policy and non-policy solutions that could help address the factors contributing to biopharmaceutical shortages in the US.

Keywords: Health Research and Policy.
Advisor: Mello Michelle M. 
Baker Laurence Claude
Polyakova Maria A. (Maria Alexandrovna)
Principled algorithms for finding local minima

Convex optimization is the cornerstone of continuous optimization, but many real problems arising in machine learning and operations research are nonconvex. This two part thesis explores my work developing principled algorithms for finding local minima of nonconvex functions. Part I: The complexity of finding stationary points of nonconvex functions. For a long time, it was known that gradient descent achieved an $\epsilon^{-2}$ rate for finding stationary points of unconstrained nonconvex functions, but better rates for first-order methods were unknown. We show that, using an algorithm that judiciously utilizes Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent, it is possible to improve this rate to $\epsilon^{-7/4}$ rate for functions with Lipschitz first and second derivatives. Adding Lipschitz third derivatives improves this rate to $\epsilon^{-5/3}$. Moreover, we provide almost matching lower bounds to prove that (i) finding a stationary point is easier for convex functions and (ii) acceleration in nonconvex optimization requires assumptions beyond smoothness. Part II: Interior point methods for nonconvex optimization. The second part of this thesis focuses on an interior point method (IPM) for optimization problems with nonconvex constraints. The work of Wachter and Biegler suggests that infeasible-start interior point methods (IPMs) developed for linear programming cannot be adapted to nonlinear optimization without significant modification, i.e., using a two-phase or penalty method. We propose an IPM that, by careful initialization and updates of the slack variables, is guaranteed to find a first-order certificate of local infeasibility, local optimality or unboundedness of the (shifted) feasible region. Our proposed algorithm differs from other IPM methods for nonconvex programming because we reduce primal feasibility at the same rate as the barrier parameter. This gives an algorithm with more robust convergence properties and closely resembles successful algorithms from linear programming. Comparisons with IPOPT on a subset of CUTEst problems indicate less frequent failures and superior performance for detecting infeasibility. Finally, we develop a highly simplified version of our IPM method with nonconvex constraints that obtains an $\epsilon$-scaled KKT point in $\epsilon^{-7/4}$ iterations. This provides the first proof that IPMs with nonconvex constraints have a polynomial runtime in

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Ye Yinyu 
Saunders Michael A. 
Sidford Aaron
Proactive congestion control

Most congestion control algorithms rely on a reactive control system that detects congestion and then marches carefully toward a desired operating point (e.g., by modifying the window size or picking a rate). These algorithms often take hundreds of RTTs to converge—an increasing problem in networks with short-lived flows. Motivated by the need for fast congestion control, this thesis focuses on a different class of congestion control algorithms, called proactive explicit rate-control (PERC) algorithms, which decouple the rate calculation from congestion signals in the network. The switches and NICs exchange control messages to run a distributed algorithm to pick explicit rates for each flow. PERC algorithms proactively schedule flows to be sent at certain explicit rates. They take as input the set of flows and the network link speeds and topology, but not a congestion signal. As a result, they converge faster and their convergence time depends only on fundamental "dependency chains, " essentially couplings between links that carry common flows, that are a property of the traffic matrix and the network topology. We argue that congestion control should converge in a time limited only by fundamental dependency chains. Our main contribution is s-PERC: a new practical distributed proactive scheduling algorithm. It is the first PERC algorithm to provably converge in bounded time without requiring per-flow state or network synchronization. It converges to the exact max-min fair allocation in 6N rounds (where N is the number of links in the longest dependency chain). In simulation and on a P4-programmed FPGA hardware test bed, s-PERC converges an order of magnitude faster than reactive schemes such as TCP, DCTCP, and RCP. Long flows complete in close to the ideal time, while while short-lived flows are prioritized, making it relevant for data centers and wide-area networks (WANs).

Advisor: McKeown Nick 
Alizadeh Mohammad (Professor)
Katti Sachin
Probing the groove epitope on HIV-1 GP41 for sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) has been a public health scourge since its appearance in the early 1980s. Having spread its way from sub-Saharan Africa across the world, now 1 in 200 people living on earth is infected with the virus. Because there is currently no cure, everyone infected with HIV will progress to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDs), where they will succumb to an AIDs-related illness. Our growing understanding of the molecular mechanisms of the HIV virus has greatly aided the development of new therapeutics. HIV is a membrane virus containing only one viral protein on its surface, the envelope glycoprotein (Env). Env is responsible for mediating the fusion of the viral membrane with the membrane of the target cell. Antibodies towards Env block membrane fusion and prevent infection. Because HIV mutates rapidly resulting in a diverse array of clinical isolates, strategies aimed at eliciting neutralizing antibodies have failed. This is due to these antibodies being strain-specific and unable to provide protection against the many clinical isolates. The recent discovery of broadly neutralizing antibodies has re-invigorated the search for a vaccine. These antibodies target conserved regions on Env and thus are able to provide protection against a diverse range of clinical isolates. This dissertation focuses on our findings characterizing the most conserved region of Env, the groove region of the gp41 N-heptad repeat. We first design and validate new mimetics of the N-heptad repeat. Second, we use these mimetics to select for monoclonal antibodies. Third, we immunize guinea pigs to test whether these mimetics are capable of eliciting neutralizing antibodies. Finally, we investigate strategies for improving the potency of N-heptad repeat antibodies through the use of drug combinations. Together, these finding suggest that antibodies towards the groove epitope, though weakly neutralizing, may be a viable vaccine strategy.

Keywords: Biochemistry.
Advisor: Kim Peter
Harbury Pehr 
Khosla Chaitan
Pfeffer Suzanne
Probing the physics of AGN feedback with high resolution X-ray spectroscopy

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) significantly impact the evolution of their host galaxies, as they can prevent star formation by either expelling large fractions of gas with wide-angle outflows, or by heating up the halo gas with jets. However, how the AGN energy is transferred to the galaxy in either of these feedback modes is still not known. My dissertation research involves novel applications of modern inference techniques to high resolution X-ray spectra in order to gain new insights into the physical processes behind AGN feedback. First, our improved Bayesian framework for the self-consistent modelling of deep spectra from nearby AGN with X-ray detected outflows is introduced. For the first time we are able to perform robust model selection, while keeping all of the parameter space open. We applied our approach to a new, deep Chandra High Energy Transmission Grating observation of the Seyfert-1 galaxy NGC 4051, where we successfully mapped multiple absorbing components moving at a few 1000 km/s. We obtained one of the tightest outflow density constraints to date, thereby measuring the wind's impact on the galaxy. Second, our unprecedented measurements of the gas turbulent velocities in the cores of 13 nearby giant elliptical galaxies are presented. These new constraints were obtained by statistically combining resonant scattering and direct line broadening, studied with deep XMM-Newton Reflection Grating Spectrometer observations. This allowed us to explore the precise nature of the hot gas motions in massive galaxies and constrain models of AGN feedback in these objects. Then, a successful application of our resonant scattering analysis to the first X-ray microcalorimeter observation, the Hitomi Perseus Cluster spectrum, is discussed. This analysis allowed us to place constraints on the hot gas turbulence in a galaxy cluster that are independent of direct line width measurements. This technique can also provide unique clues to the three dimensional structure of the gas velocity field when statistical uncertainties are minimized. Both of the presented analyses will naturally extend to new data sets from the upcoming high spectral resolution X-ray missions, such as XRISM, ATHENA, Arcus, and Lynx.

Keywords: Physics.
Advisor: Allen Steven W. (Steven Ward) 
Blandford Roger D.
Kahn Steven M. (Steven Michael)
Probing the Pragmatic Information Encoded in Neural Networks’ Word Embedding Space

It is frequently argued that natural language understanding models relying on deep learning techniques are not likely to admit of analytic understanding, for people cannot explicitly tell which piece of semantics, pragmatics, or other linguistic knowledge these models are able to understand and utilize. In this project, different pre-trained word embeddings as well as different neural network architectures have been explored. We specifically analyze the performance of predicting the implicature strength ratings of some on Switchboard corpus of telephone dialogues. The results provide evidence that multiple hand-mined contextual features previously identified as influencing inference strength become less significant when we include the neural network predictions as the new indicator and that the neural model can capture such qualitative effects, from which we come to the conclusion that at least some of the pragmatic information has already been encoded in the pre-trained word vectors and the neural network is able to learn this knowledge to predict human inference strength judgments for sentences with some.

Keywords:  Symbolic Systems Program
Scalar Implicature
Neural Network Models
Word Embeddings
Pragmatics
Symbolic Systems Program
Thesis
Advisor: Degen Judith
Potts Christopher