VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Cities in action : city climate action, civil society, and the organization of cities

Some cities are at the forefront of finding and enforcing solutions to social and environmental problems; others remain stuck on the back benches. This dissertation examines the case of city climate action-strategic attempts to mitigate and adapt to climate change by local means---to understand the profound variation in cities' capacities to act. I bring together theories from organizational, political, and urban sociology to develop a framework of city action that shows the interplay of a place-based organizational ecosystem and a shared institutional environment. Comparative analyses of and expert interviews in cities in the United States and around the world show how public officials have shaped cities' responses to the changing climate. Three empirical chapters illuminate the global rise and stagnation of strategic commitments to tackling climate change, the political and institutional contexts of urban sustainability efforts in city administrations, and the public--private interactions in the origins and spread of green construction. Across these studies, civil society emerges as an anchor of urban innovation that leads by example, guides the actions of public administrations, and knits an emergent professional network of cities. This research contributes to sociological theory by inserting contemporaries Max Weber and Robert Park into a long due conversation that explains disparities in urban innovation. It also reveals durable differences in the organizational infrastructure of cities, which are shown to catalyze or curb city action by shaping civic and state capacities. Lastly, this research contributes to our understanding of organizational society in the urban age by its comparative study of meso-level mechanisms through which organizations influence their urban environment. In closing, I recall Charles Tilly's last book to caution against a bifurcation into isolated and networked cities.

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: Powell Walter W. 
Soule Sarah Anne
Zhou Xueguang
Citizens of the future, subjects of the past : civic identity and aesthetic deviance in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

This dissertation explores normative and deviant representations of citizenship in Russia, tracing continuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in state-produced models of the proper citizen and deviations therefrom in artistic works. I contend that citizenship in Russia, beyond simply a legal definition, has historically been entangled within an array of state symbols and national myths, with both politics and culture at play. This argument hinges upon the notion of citizenship in the Russian context as an embodied practice, and one that entails a particular relationship to time as an instrument of ideology or propaganda—the radiant future in socialist times and the victorious past under Putin. To trace the evolving role of Russian citizenship, I first consider the symbolic New Soviet Man and Lenin's body in the early Soviet era. Next, in the context of rigidified policy, law, and rhetoric under Brezhnev, I examine disillusionment and deviance in fictional texts by Venedikt Erofeev, Eduard Limonov, and Vladimir Voinovich. The third section examines Putin's rule, marked by legal and biopolitical regulations on citizens' bodies and a mythic construction of history, while in the artistic sphere, corporeal deviance, often involving gender non-normativity and pain or immobilization, has emerged as a means of reclaiming agency and voice, as illustrated in the cases of Petr Pavlensky and Seroe Fioletovoe. Through these examinations of political and aesthetic interpretations of civic identity, this study claims that both Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have used citizenship as a tool for maintaining power, while artistic works that engage an aesthetic of deviance attempt to reclaim civic and cultural belonging through artistic resistance to autocratic practices.

Keywords: Comparative Literature.
Advisor: Gumbrecht Hans Ulrich 
Skakov Nariman
McFaul Michael
Stoner Kathryn
The classics, revised edition : readers, authors, and editors in sixteenth-century France

If we take sixteenth-century poets by their word, then the labor of reading and the practice of imitation that go into becoming an author of classical stature require nothing more than personal diligence and access to ancient texts. Like a bee flying from flower to flower and culling nectar, the Renaissance poet, we are led to believe, gathers what he can from his readings and transfroms the harvest into his own blend of literary honey. Modern literary critics have in part adopted this famous trope as their frame of reference to account for Renaissance practices of reading, writing, and authoring. As a critical shorthand, however, this account glosses over the complexities of sixteenth-century textual practices and misleadingly implies that the only constraints the poet faces stem from the availability and nature of ancient texts. This dissertation shows how, from the first steps of reading to the final publication of an authorized work, sixteenth-century humanists and poets both depend on and are constrained by their audiences, their competitors, and their editors. Mapping out these contemporary networks means revising fundamental conceptions about the Renaissance. The period does not revolve around an exclusive relationship to antiquity; rather, its engagement with the classics is sustained in the present, mediated by contemporaries, and oriented towards the future.

Keywords: French & Italian.
Advisor: Alduy Cécile 
Greene Roland
Martin Richard P. 
Nightingale Andrea Wilson
Classification and testing under robust model assumptions

In this thesis, we develop methodologies for two well-known problems under more realistic and robust model assumptions. First, we consider the target gene identification problem using gene perturbation data. We propose a simple data-adaptive model by incorporating information across the genome as an alternative to the traditional two-group model testing for differential gene expression. The data-adaptive model is more robust than the traditional two-group model without assuming zero-effect for the null model. Second, we consider a multi-class classification problem where the training and the out-of-sample test data may have different distributions. We propose a method that simultaneously makes good predictions for samples similar to the training data and makes rejections otherwise, as well as methods for performance evaluation in this mismatched setting. The proposed method is robust to distributional changes in the data distribution and has good performance in high dimension.

Keywords: Statistics.
Advisor: Tibshirani Robert 
Wong Wing Ho
Efron Bradley
Classification of Electrophysiologic Responses to Speech Processed Through an Acoustic Simulation of a Cochlear Implant

Hearing-impaired individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) often face difficulty accurately reporting what they hear. Consequently, clinicians require objective tools to differentiate whether auditory deficits in CI patients arise from inadequate signal delivery from their implants or from difficulty with assigning perceptual labels. One objective tool to evaluate speech perception involves applying classification—a machine-learning technique—to the frequency following response (FFR), an evoked potential of the auditory brainstem recorded with electroencephalography. While classification has been successful evaluating FFRs to normal sounds, it is unknown if this approach is valid in conditions where signals are degraded in a way that simulates CIs. We assessed perception of 13 normal hearing participants to six vowel stimuli in two conditions: 1) intact condition with unaltered stimuli, and 2) vocoded condition, where stimuli were processed through an acoustic simulation of a CI. Participants completed a vowel identification task, achieving an average accuracy of 92.81 % in the intact condition. As expected, participants performed worse in the vocoded condition, achieving an accuracy of 77.25 %. FFR data was classified to reveal high accuracy (73.08 %, p < 0.001) in the intact condition. Notably, classification was more accurate (85.13 %, p < 0.001) in the vocoded condition, suggesting that CI simulations may enhance features of the vowels that contribute to accurate classification. These findings imply that classification is feasible for objectively assessing perception of degraded signals. Thus, classification remains a potentially useful tool for directly evaluating speech perception of CI patients. Further investigation is required to determine how perceptual responses relate to neural features relevant to the classification model.

Keywords:  Department of Biology
Biology
Auditory Neuroscience
Speech Perception
Auditory Processing of Speech
Vowel Classification
Cochlear Implants
Cochlear Implant Simulation
Electroencephalography
Frequency Following Response
Thesis
Advisor: Fitzgerald Matthew B.
Heller H. Craig
Cheng Alan G.
Classified : the effects of English learner status on high school and college opportunities

Every one in ten students in US public K-12 schools today is an English Learner (EL). Educators are becoming increasingly concerned over their low achievement and high school graduation rate. Qualitative research shows that EL underachievement can be attributed to limited access to a rigorous curriculum. This dissertation compares the level of access ELs and non-ELs have to secondary and postsecondary educational opportunities. The first study uses regression analysis to compare the high school course-taking and credit-earning patterns of non-ELs and ELs with various lengths of EL status. The second study identifies the causal relationship between summer credit recovery and newcomer ELs' academic outcomes using a difference-in-differences-in-differences design. The third study applies a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal impact of EL classification on high school graduation and college attendance. I find that academic course-taking vary substantially not only between ELs and non-ELs but also within the EL population. Summer credit recovery significantly increases course access for recent immigrants. Initial EL classification has no significant effects on graduation and college enrollment, but reclassification just before school transition (5th and 8th grade) may impact graduation and, conditional on college attendance, college choice and enrollment intensity. This dissertation extends our understanding of ELs' academic access in high school, improving upon previous studies with detailed analyses on a much larger sample. The findings also inform policymakers of inequities in educational opportunities by EL status and provide evidence for the efficacy of targeted interventions.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Bettinger Eric 
Dee Thomas S. (Thomas Sean) 
Goldenberg Claude
Cleanliness: The Impact of Moral Foundations Theory’s Sanctity/Degradation on Decision Making

How is our desire to behave morally influenced by cleaning the body, specifically tested by washing hands?
Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory is grounded in psychology and argues that, despite the differences in moral systems, every person shares the same five moral foundations regardless of culture or group: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Within economics, we gain positive utility by adhering or appearing to adhere to our own moral matrix comprised of these foundations. However, sometimes we either do not pay attention to or we ignore our moral code, allowing us to make immoral actions. Previous research has shown that certain outside forces, such as being watching or acting in a group, can lead people to behave more morally. My thesis outlines an experiment used to determine if the state of being clean might change our decision making and lead us to behave more morally by increasing the cost of behaving immorally and the benefit of behaving morally. The experiment asked participants to rank moral issues and play the die-under-the-cup paradigm after washing their hands and "cleaning" themselves. The results revealed no significant difference between any combination of groups, suggesting cleanliness does not change decision making. However, several external factors might have impacted the results and more research could be done to ensure accuracy.

Keywords: Department of Economics
moral judgment
sanctity
deception
ethical decision making
moral foundations theory
die-under-the-cup paradigm
behavioral economics
experimental economics
Thesis
Advisor: Roth Alvin
Clerici-Arias Marcelo
Closing the Data Gap: Case Studies on Gender Biases in Global Health Surveys

Global surveys are critical to conducting global health research on a variety of topics, which are directly responsible for shaping national health policies and informing monitoring and evaluation programs internationally. In recent years, various organizations including the United Nations and Gates Foundation have called attention to gender gaps in knowledge for key public health data. Although, we now have a strong understanding of where gender data is completely missing, we have a ways to go to understand how existing data may hold gender biases. In this thesis we assess how questionnaire formation can carry gender biases that may impact data collected and in turn future analyses. First, we studied gender-nonspecific questionnaires to understand the forms of gender bias and domains of interest targeted. Second, we studied the evolution of a gender-specific questionnaire over time to track changes in the focus of men’s and women’s versions of the survey. We utilized the results from both case studies to develop a series of general guidelines for future questionnaire design to minimize the amount of gender bias.

Keywords: center on democracy development and the rule of law
global health
gender equality
demographic and health survey
world value survey
gallup world poll
Thesis
Advisor: Darmstadt Gary
Closing the Floodgates: The Origins of U.S. Immigration Policy Towards Latin America in the 1965 Hart-Celler Act

In the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the US Congress placed a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time. Previously, the number of Latin American immigrants who entered per year was not restricted by a quota. Why did Congress enact this policy at this time?
Previous scholars have dismissed it as a hazy compromise behind closed doors that the Johnson Administration made in order to pass this landmark piece of legislation. Yet given that this policy is one of the founding blocks of our immigration policy toward Latin America today, it is important to study it further: what exactly drove members of Congress to curb immigration from Latin America? My thesis contributes a new statistical analysis on the breakdown of the Western Hemisphere vote in the House and in the Senate. I then apply my statistical findings to a historical analysis in order to provide a more comprehensive narrative on the inclusion of this provision.
In my regression analysis, I find that the economic ideology of congress members and the number of Mexican immigrants in their district were the most predictive variables. This is interesting given that most of the literature on the Hart-Celler Act ignores the economic debate and focuses on the issue of race. Therefore, in my historical analysis, I highlight the economic debate over immigration from Latin America with quotes from the House and Senate floor.
This paper contributes to the current literature on the Hart-Celler Act by creating a more robust picture of the Western Hemisphere amendment: the economic debate was more determinative than previously thought. Arriving to a more complete understanding of the roots of our immigration policies toward Latin America is especially important today, at a time when the debate over immigration from the region is front and center in our national politics.

Keywords:  Program in International Relations
immigration
Hart-Celler Act
Latin America
History
Stanford University Program in International Relations Thesis
Thesis
Advisor: Frank Zephyr
Closing the perception-action loop : towards general-purpose robot autonomy

Robots and autonomous systems have been playing a significant role in the modern economy. Custom-built robots have remarkably improved productivity, operational safety, and product quality. However, these robots are usually programmed for specific tasks in narrow domains, unable to quickly adapt to new tasks and novel situations. The advent of affordable, lightweight, and flexible robot hardware has opened up opportunities for scaling up robot autonomy to an unprecedented level. A major challenge for the new robot hardware to operate in everyday settings is to handle the constant variability and uncertainty of the real world. To tackle this challenge, we have to address the synergy between perception and action: on the one hand, the robot's perception guides its action adaptively, and on the other hand, its action gives rise to new perceptual information for decision making. I argue that a vital step towards a general-purpose robot autonomy is to integrate perception and action in a tight loop. Emerging computational tools in artificial intelligence have demonstrated promising successes and constitute ideal candidates to enhance robots' perception and control in unstructured environments. The embodied nature of robotics compels us to move beyond the existing paradigm of learning from disembodied datasets and inspires us to develop novel algorithms that take into account the physical hardware and the complex system dynamics. This dissertation demonstrates our research that builds methods and mechanisms for generalizable robot perception and control. Our work illustrates that the tight coupling of perception and action facilitates robots to interact with the unstructured world through their senses, to flexibly perform a wide range of tasks, and to adaptively learn new tasks. Our findings show that dissecting the perception-action loop at three levels of abstraction, from the low-level motor skills to high-level task understanding, effectively prompts the robustness and generalization of robot behaviors. Laying out our research work that attends to tasks with growing complexity unfolds our roadmap towards the holy-grail goal: building long-term, general-purpose robot autonomy in the real world.

Advisor: Li Fei Fei
Bohg Jeannette
Brunskill Emma
CMOS image sensor design for always-on object detection

Object detection is an important vision task in embedded systems like smartphones, real-time monitoring devices, and augmented reality. A standard approach is to embed a CMOS image sensor with a backend detection algorithm. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are currently the best-performing algorithms for such applications and there has been extensive work on improving the efficiency of algorithms and hardware. Despite these efforts, customized DNN ASICs are relatively energy-hungry due their large computational footprint. Therefore, to achieve efficient object detection in an embedded device, it is attractive to consider less complex, prior-art algorithms that use low-complexity hand-crafted features as a wakeup for a more powerful DNN. For instance, histograms of oriented gradients (HOGs) present a good tradeoff between computational requirements and detection accuracy. To optimize the wakeup detector for always-on functionality, we can build the feature-extraction directly into the CMOS image sensor. Towards this end, this dissertation presents an application-optimized QVGA image sensor for low-power, always-on object detection using HOGs. In contrast to conventional CMOS imagers that feature linear and high-resolution ADCs, this readout scheme extracts logarithmic intensity gradients at 1.5 or 2.75 bits of resolution. This eliminates unnecessary illumination-related data and allows the HOG feature descriptors to be compressed by up to 25x relative to a conventional 8-bit readout. As a result, the digital backend detector, which typically limits system efficiency, incurs less data movement and computation, leading to an estimated 3.3x energy reduction. The imager employs a column-parallel readout with analog cyclic-row buffers that also perform arbitrary-sized pixel-binning for multi-scale object detection. The log-digitization of pixel gradients is realized by using a ratio-to-digital converter, which performs successive capacitive divisions to its input voltages. The prototype IC was fabricated in a 0.13 um CIS process with standard 4-T, 5 um pixels and consumes 99 pJ/pixel. The power consumption is comparable to conventional low-power designs showing there is little energy overhead in the novel readout. Experiments using a deformable parts model detector for three object classes (persons, bicycles and cars) indicate detection accuracies that are on par with conventional systems.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Murmann Boris 
Arbabian Amin 
Raina Priyanka (Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering)
Coastal Ocean Microclimates: Temperature Dynamics in Nearshore Kelp Forests of Isla Natividad, Baja California, Mexico

Kelp forests are resource-rich coastal ecosystems that provide livelihoods to coastal communities. Climate change is negatively impacting these ecosystems through heat waves, acidification and hypoxia. Nearshore transport and mixing, combined with coastline morphology, can result in refuges from these stressors in kelp forests. Such refuges have been identified in Isla Natividad, B. C., Mexico but their characterization is still in progress. This study focuses on 4 locations transected with a linear configuration of 3 moorings perpendicular to the coast, with 3-7 temperature sensors cabled to each mooring line. Local oceanographic variability was analyzed using spectral methods on temperature and pressure data, satellite imagery of synoptic events, and linear interpolation of binned current data in the vertical axis. The high spatial resolution of this study shows that tidal frequencies are stronger near the seafloor, although not necessarily attributed to tidal wave forcing, and surface heat forcing is stronger near the surface. Greater distance from the shore reduces the role of kelp in current dampening, where stronger surface currents result in lower coherence between surface and bottom of the water column at moorings further from shore. Frequencies of temperature oscillation drive the residence time of some water masses, affecting the length of exposure of organisms to extreme temperature ranges, and tend to fall in lower frequencies at the west side compared to the east side. However, weather events such as hurricanes can impact both sides of the island and the resilience of existing climate refuges to such events is uncertain. Increased frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change might decrease the effectiveness of climate refuges in coastal ecosystems, reducing survival and resilience of organisms that inhabit them. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these coastal microclimates as climate refuges is critical to their consideration and use in marine spatial planning and conservation.

Keywords:  Earth Systems Program
School of Earth Energy and Environmental Sciences
Earth Systems Program
coastal oceanography
marine refuges
Thesis
Advisor: Dunbar Rob
Monismith Stephen