VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Youth Sexual Risk-Taking in Latin America: Implications for Public Health and Policy in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala

This research investigates the principal factors that influence youth sexuality, exploring the multi-faceted forces that shape young people's sexual knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Seeking to shed light on the diverse social, cultural, and structural forces that contribute to youth sexual risk-taking, I conducted a quantitative study of 1686 high school students between the ages of 18 and 24 who live in the Mesoamerican region of southern Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. My survey includes 95 multiple choice and open-ended questions that explore a broad range of factors, including: personal relationships and plans; knowledge and sources of information about sex, contraception, and HIV prevention; sexual experience and contraceptive use; attitudes and beliefs concerning sexuality; perceived risk and experiences with HIV; and social and demographic variables./nConducted between May 2007 and July 2009, this study is informed by the 2008 Mexico City Ministerial Declaration `Prevenir Con Educacion' (Preventing Through Education), a regional policy initiative that seeks to expand youth access to comprehensive sexuality education and services throughout Latin America. Within this policy context, I explore the ways in which school-based sexuality education influences young people's sexual knowledge, attitudes, and practices, in addition to examining how social norms shape youth sexuality across diverse cultural contexts in Latin America./nTo contextualize this research, I integrate sociological theories of gender and sexuality that are framed within the context of economic development and globalization. Further, I incorporate empirical findings from public health research and programmatic models concerning the connections between knowledge, behavior, risk-taking, and policy interventions. Using multivariate analysis, I begin by separately examining the study results from Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, analyzing the influence of the most salient independent variables within each national context. To best understand the ways in which these influences remain constant or diverge throughout the region, I then compare and contrast the results across the three countries./nThese study findings demonstrate that four principal factors influence youth sexual behavior in Mesoamerica - school-based sexuality education, relationships and communication with parents and peers, church attendance, and ethnicity. My findings validate the efforts of the Mexico City Ministerial Declaration by highlighting the need to provide Mesoamerican youth with comprehensive school-based sexuality education and services in order to reduce high rates of unwanted pregnancy, adolescent childbearing, and HIV/AIDS throughout the region. I conclude with recommendations concerning how the Ministerial Declaration could more effectively achieve its principal goals of improving adolescent sexual and reproductive health outcomes in Latin America.

Advisor: Haveman, Heather
Kant on Freedom, Nature and Normativity

In typical debates about freedom, compatibilists and incompatibilists dispute whether and how one can defuse the threat that a naturalistic worldview seems to pose for our conception of free will. Proponents of both sides standardly take it for granted that natural causality is a potential threat only for practical deliberation, and that no corresponding worries arise for our self-conception as theorizers who make up their mind about what to believe about the world./nI show that Kant rejects this standard dichotomy between practice and theory. He holds that we must both act and believe 'under the idea of freedom': the standpoint of theoretical reasoning, the very source of the naturalistic worldview, must itself rely on the idea of freedom (or spontaneity) and thus cannot expose free will as an illusion. This line of thought, I argue, casts a refreshing new light on debates about what kind of freedom is worth having; and it provides an intriguing defense of our freedom from natural necessity./nI argue that Kant's conception of theoretical freedom is as anti-naturalistic as his conception of practical freedom. This twofold anti-naturalism derives from Kant's conviction that both our practical and our epistemic orientation depend on representations that we cannot attribute to natural causes without losing our grip on their objective validity. These include, in the practical case, the categorical imperative and, in the theoretical case, the principle of sufficient reason, which states that natural events are causally necessitated. Since we do not derive these representations from sense perception, our commitment to them must, within a wholly naturalistic framework, be traced to the influence of contingent psychological processes in the vein of Hume's 'customs'. The concession that our attitudes are the product of such customs challenges our conviction that we form these attitudes on the basis of objective reasons./nAgainst prevailing interpretations, I show that this line of thought plays an indispensable role in Kant's defense of free will against attacks from the theoretical standpoint. Kant's point is that someone occupying this standpoint must rely on her cognitive freedom from natural necessity: that is, she must take her beliefs about the natural causes of actions to be responsive to objective theoretical reasons, and here she cannot concede that the representation of causal necessity is merely the product of the workings of non-rational psychological processes. So the naturalistic perspective cannot expose freedom as an illusion. This provides the idea of free will with a robust invulnerability against an exclusively naturalistic worldview.

Advisor: Ginsborg, Hannah
Wallace, Jay
Gender, Genre, and the Idea of Indian Literature: The Short Story in Hindi and Tamil, 1950-1970

In the wake of Indian Independence, the short story emerged as the most active genre in both Hindi and Tamil literature, establishing new representations of selfhood and citizenship that would shape popular expression across India for decades to come. This genre thus provides an important window into the cultural production of enduring paradigms of Indian modernity and citizenship in the context of national efforts to create an all-Indian identity after decolonization. My dissertation is motivated by an interest in explaining how post-Independence Hindi and Tamil short stories mobilized and constructed representations of the "Indian citizen," locating them within a regionally specific cultural context, as well as the broader imaginings of a modern India. I ask: what was literature's role in establishing universal understandings of the Indian citizen in the postcolonial moment?/nI address this question through an analysis of tropes of the feminine ideal in the state, public, and literary spheres in North and South India to illustrate the relationship between these tropes and popular understandings of the Indian citizen-subject. Focusing on the short stories and critical writing by six canonical post-Independence Hindi and Tamil authors, I juxtapose the tropes of the feminine ideal they invoke with those generated by state discourses on law and the public debates surrounding them. Through this juxtaposition, I show that the same tropes - such as the widow, the virgin, the concubine, and the good wife - carry saliency in all three spheres (state, public, and literary). In this way, tropes of the feminine ideal provide the platform for a cohesive articulation of modern Indian citizenship across these discursive arenas. Despite their similarity in form, however, the manner in which Hindi and Tamil short stories supply these tropes with meaning reveals fundamentally distinct regional articulations between gender, caste, and religious structures, as well as divergent points of alignment and conflict with pan-Indian struggles for equality. This comparison reveals the heterogeneous perceptions of gendered subjectivity comprising postcolonial Indian citizenship, as well as the instability of the category of "Indian Literature."

Advisor: Dalmia, Vasudha
Hart, George
A Less Traveled Path: Meditation and Textual Practice in the Saddharmasmrtyupasthana(sutra)

This dissertation is a study of a third/fourth-century Buddhist Sanskrit text, the Saddharmasmrtyupasthana(sutra), which reveals a unique literary culture at an important transitional moment in the religious and philosophical life of early Northwest Indian Buddhists. The study argues that meditative practice, rhetoric, and philosophy were intimately tied to one another when the Saddharmasmrtyupasthana(sutra) was redacted, and that the text serves as an important yet unnoticed historical touchstone for an understanding of the development of a Buddhist mind-centered metaphysics. The study suggests that such philosophical developments grew organically out of specific meditation practices rooted in the early canonical Buddhist tradition, and that the Saddharmasmrtyupasthana(sutra) offers perhaps the clearest evidence available attesting to this process. Further, the text evidences an emergent historical ideology of cosmic power, one that ties ethical conduct, contemplative knowledge, and literary practice to a spiritual goal of selfless cosmographical sovereignty. This development is historically significant because it marks a major shift in Indian Buddhist religious practice, which conditioned the emergence of fully developed Mahayana path schemes and power-oriented tantric ritual traditions in the centuries that followed the text's compilation. As part of this study, the second chapter of the Saddharmasmrtyupasthana(sutra) is critically edited and translated based on a recently discovered codex unicus.

Advisor: von Rospatt, Alexander
Capital Structure Implications for Corporate Governance

This dissertation consists of two essays that look at the outcome of agency costs of debt on the firm's capital structure and governance decisions. The first essay considers how monitoring of management by a shareholder aligned board of directors may induce an asymmetric information problem between shareholders and creditors. To mitigate this problem, the board may be more lenient with the manager and may have an incentive to be inherently weaker. In the second essay, I consider how creditors and shareholders interact when both actively monitor the manager. I demonstrate that, ex-post to floating debt, active shareholders may unilaterally shirk their monitoring duties to shift the burden of costly monitoring to debt claimants.

Advisor: Leland, Hayne E
The Ring around The Rose

From 1958 to 1966, the San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo (1929-89) worked on one artwork almost exclusively - a monumental oil-on-canvas painting titled The Rose. The painting's protracted production isolated DeFeo from the mainstream art world and encouraged contemporaries to cast her as Romanticism's lonely genius. However, during its creation, The Rose also served as an important matrix for collaboration among artists in DeFeo's bohemian community. Her neighbors - such as Wallace Berman (1926-76) and Bruce Conner (1933-2008) - appropriated the painting in their works, blurring the boundaries of individual authorship and blending production and reception into a single process of exchange. I argue that these simultaneously creative and social interactions opened up the autonomous artwork, cloistered studio, and the concept of the individualistic artist championed in Cold-War America to negotiate more complex relationships between the individual and the collective.

Advisor: Wagner, Anne M.
A Measurement of the Underlying Event Distributions in Proton-Proton Collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV in Events containing Charged Particle Jets using the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider

Underlying Event distributions are studied in events containing at least one charged particle jet produced in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV. Jets are reconstructed from charged particles using the anti-Kt algorithm with radius parameter R = 0.6. The jet with the largest transverse momentum (pT) and | η | ≤ 1.5 defines the azimuthal φ = 0 direction. Distributions of the charged particle multiplicity, the scalar sum of the transverse momenta of charged particles, and the average charged particle are measured as functions of jet pT in the transverse region (π / 3 ≤ | φ | ≤ 2 π / 3) for 4 GeV ≤ pTjet ≤ 100 GeV./nThe data are compared to predictions from the Monte Carlo generators which have been tuned to data from the Large Hadron Collider,/nand are found in to be good agreement.

Advisor: Shapiro, Marjorie D
Interactions of Water and Energy Mediate Responses of High-Latitude Terrestrial Ecosystems to Climate Change

Both biogeophysical and biogeochemical feedbacks to climate change from high-latitude terrestrial ecosystems may be mediated by permafrost thaw. For instance, lakes may expand as relatively intact permafrost begins to thaw but experience drainage with continued permafrost degradation; thawing permafrost also increases the vulnerability of soil carbon to decomposition. In order to quantify these feedbacks, Earth System Models (ESMs) need to adequately represent a number of sub-surface processes./nI improved the lake model in the land-surface component (CLM4) of an ESM by including the physics of snow, ice, and underlying sediment, allowing shallow high-latitude lakes to be adequately simulated. After evaluating the model, I investigated the sensitivity of regional surface fluxes to included lake model processes. The inclusion of snow insulation and lake water phase change each cause 15-30 W m-2 changes in seasonal surface fluxes, altering the forcing of lakes on the atmosphere. With realistic inclusion of these processes, I predict that the presence of high-latitude lakes causes little net change in mean annual air temperature. However, due to increased sub-surface thermal inertia, lakes moderate the seasonal and diurnal cycle in regions of large lake area like the Canadian Shield. Consequently, the loss of lake area in areas of disappearing permafrost could exacerbate increases in summer daily maximum temperatures due to climate warming by up to 1 °C./nSnow insulation has long been recognized as a key control on permafrost soil thermal regime. I show that the snow thermal rectifier can interact with hydrology to cause significant changes in soil temperature associated with non-thermal anthropogenic forcings. Elevated CO2 or increased summer rainfall could increase soil water-filled pore space by 0.1-0.2 in some permafrost areas, associated with 1-2 °C increases in mean soil temperature. This warming results from both the increased thermal conductivity of the soil and the increased latent heat of fusion. Because these mechanisms saturate once soils are relatively saturated, the initial soil moisture state is crucial in determining susceptibility to these warming mechanisms. In this model, these warming mechanisms were not effective in substantially increasing permafrost vulnerability to thaw in a severe 21st century transient warming scenario./nIn summary, I have shown that explicit representation of snow insulation and of freezing and thawing in lakes and soils can alter the predicted responses of soil and air temperatures to changes in climate.

Advisor: Torn, Margaret S
A screen for Listeria monocytogenes hemolytic activity mutants reveals HPF, a homolog of Hibernation Promoting Factor, which is essential for ribosomal hibernation and important for competitive fitness in vitro and in vivo.

Listeria monocytogenes is an opportunistic, potentially deadly, foodborne pathogen of humans and other vertebrates. Resistance to stressful conditions such as low pH, high salt, and refrigeration temperatures makes L. monocytogenes ideally suited to thrive on food sources, promoting transmission. A set of conserved virulence factors promotes establishment of infection once L. monocytogenes enters the host. In this work, we sought to better understand both the pathogenesis and the biology of L. monocytogenes by investigating factors involved both in virulence and in tolerance to sub-optimal growth conditions./nListeriolysin O (LLO) is an essential virulence factor that allows L. monocytogenes to escape from the host phagosome into the cytosol. LLO is regulated on multiple levels to compartmentalize its function and prevent loss of virulence caused by host cell toxicity. To gain new information on the various mechanisms of LLO regulation, we performed a transposon mutagenesis screen for L. monocytogenes mutants in LLO production and activity. This screen identified PrsA2, a peptidyl-prolyl isomerase that we showed was important for L. monocytogenes virulence based on its contribution to re-folding of virulence factors following secretion. PrsA2 was shown to be important for folding and activity of LLO, and its deletion reduced bacterial virulence by 105-fold in a mouse model of infection. This work was published in the Journal of Bacteriology./nA L. monocytogenes homolog of Hibernation Promoting Factor (HPF) was also isolated from this hemolytic activity screen. Ribosomal hibernation is characterized by dimerization of two 70S ribosomes into a 100S complex. These 100S dimers are translationally inactive and important for survival during post-exponential growth in certain bacteria. HPF is conserved in long and short forms, which are present in different sets of bacteria and appear to be functionally distinct. Long HPF, which is present in L. monocytogenes, is also conserved in S. aureus, where it is necessary for 100S formation. In this work, we report the existence of a functional HPF homolog that is necessary for formation of 100S ribosomes in L. monocytogenes. HPF was observed to bind 100S ribosomes based on its co-migration through sucrose density gradients in the 100S fractions. We observed that the hpf transcript was upregulated by glucose starvation in stationary phase media, and that several σB-inducing stresses also stimulated hpf expression. Bacteria lacking HPF showed dramatically reduced survival in stationary phase competitive co-culture with wild-type bacteria. Finally, HPF-deficient bacteria displayed a > 300-fold survival defect in the mesenteric lymph nodes of orally-infected mice. We conclude that the L. monocytogenes HPF is functional for formation of 100S ribosomes and is critical for optimal survival in competitive environments, both in vitro and in vivo.

Advisor: Portnoy, Daniel A
Liars, Lovers, and Thieves: Being Adolescent Readers and Writers in Young Adult Literature and Life

Books written for teenagers portray the lives of young people and frequently include depictions of teenagers as readers and writers. From brief mentions of writing to elaborate descriptions of reading, the representations of literacy practices contained in works of young adult literature (YAL) oftentimes bid readers to take notice. This dissertation examines representations of literacy practices in YAL and investigates the meanings that adolescent readers ascribe to them./nThrough analyzing a set of forty-seven award-winning texts written specifically for adolescents and through convening a book group with high school students, this two-phase research study brings together literacy, literature, and adolescents. In the first phase of the study, each reference to print included in the set of YAL was coded and used to map the range of literacy practices represented in the books. Four types of representations emerged, each functioning differently in the narratives and each providing different information about reading and writing: (a) mentions are short references to literate activities; (b) descriptions are more elaborated and detailed depictions of literacy practices; (c) constitutive events are portrayals of reading and writing that serve as turning points in the narrative and that bring forth literacy as a part of life; and (d) extended articulations are representations of writing and reading that extend across and throughout texts, driving the stories and animating lives that include literacy./nWith these types of representations forming an analytical framework, the study then explored the literate identities of the characters in the books in more depth, attending especially to connections between literacy practices and adolescence. At the transition from childhood to adulthood, the adolescent characters' many identities are in transition and their literate identities are likewise in flux. Further their identities as readers and writers intersect other identity work that they do. In the second phase of the study, eight teenagers read books from the set of YAL used in the first phase, explicitly focusing on the books' representations of literacy practices. Drawing from interviews, surveys, and discussions, the research reveals ways in which the participants understood the reading and writing depicted in the books. As the teenagers interpret the activities of represented readers and writers, they identify with the characters and negotiate and display their own literate identities.

Advisor: Freedman, Sarah W
What Makes a Scientific Research Question Worth Investigating? Students' Epistemic Criteria and Considerations of Contribution

This dissertation introduces the construct of worthwhileness as an important aspect of students' practical epistemologies of science (Sandoval, 2005). Specifically, it examines how students conceptualize what makes a scientific research question worthwhile, through a close analysis of the criteria they use for evaluating scientific research questions. Elementary (n=21) and high school students (n=21) participated in this study. As part of semi-structured interviews, students engaged in three novel tasks designed to elicit the epistemic criteria they use to evaluate scientific research questions in a variety of contexts./nFindings indicate that elementary and high school students alike could engage in the practice of evaluating the worth of scientific questions. The criteria they employed included degree of interest, difficulty, and the contribution of questions to knowledge or to solving a problem. The criteria students considered varied by context. Several key differences emerged between the reasoning of the two grade cohorts. High school students tended to place more weight on the contribution of the research question. Also, the criteria reflected in the high school students' judgments of the scientific value of individual questions more closely accorded with the criteria they identified retrospectively as the basis of their judgments. Furthermore, the older cohort more often rationalized the selection and sequence of research questions within a single domain on the basis of epistemic contingency between questions./nHow students conceptualize what makes a scientific research question worthwhile constitutes a key aspect of students' epistemic reasoning. It is particularly important to understand how students judge the worthwhilness of scientific research questions given the central epistemic role of research questions in scientific inquiry.

Advisor: Metz, Kathleen