VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Exploring Motivational Strategies in the WHISH Trial: An Embedded Substudy

The Women's Health Initiative Strong and Healthy (WHISH) trial is testing the hypothesis that a centralized, public health intervention designed to increase and/or maintain physical activity levels and reduce sedentary behavior will reduce incidence of major CVD clinical events (myocardial infarction, stroke, cardiovascular disease related death) in older women. The efficacy of the trial depends on the ability of the intervention materials to increase physical activity and decrease sedentary behavior in the intervention group compared to the control group. Effectively motivating participants is of great importance.
This sub-study examines motivation in WHISH intervention women through an analysis of participant responses to the question "Think about the last time you didn't feel like being active. How did you get yourself to move or get up?" Analyses of the 4,092 participant responses provides a basis upon which relevant motivational messages will be generated to encourage physical activity in the intervention participants. In addition, findings will contribute to the understanding of how older women motivate themselves to be physically active.

Keywords:  Department of Medicine
Stanford University Department of Medicine
Community Health and Prevention Research
CHPR
Women's Health Initiative Strong and Healthy
WHISH
motivation
physical activity
cardiovascular disease
pragmatic trial
older women
Thesis
Advisor: Stefanick Marcia
Oppezzo Marily
Mackey Sally
Exploring Perceptions of International Philanthropy

This thesis explores the sense of philanthropy by examining the different ways in which students from highly selective universities make sense of international public service and volunteer tourism. This paper explores the implications and effects of volunteer tourism on the student and receiving community. While volunteer tourism is treated skeptically at Stanford University, it remains a popular phenomenon throughout the western world and is a common activity listed on Stanford students’ admission applications. While many schools, especially medical schools, require some sort of volunteer work -- especially devoted, seemingly-well-rounded projects such as international volunteer work -- could schools and students be permitting and contributing to a system promoting more harm than good? Often, these international volunteer endeavors have a program fee restricting their access to those who can pay to “help.” I am not the first to recognize that this notion of volunteer travel is a problem, but there is a great divide between those who view it as a benefit and those who view it as a harm. I find that articles either dismiss or praise this notion of active philanthropy. I seek to entertain both perspectives and negotiate a way in which the altruistic urge to help is not disposed of, but rather the harmful ways in which philanthropy can be conducted are eliminated. This paper collates my personal experience, scholarly research, and original interviews of individuals who have participated in international service work. My research questions are: What are the different ways in which students from highly selective universities make sense of international public service and volunteer tourism? How can we better guide the young person’s desire to help the world? My aims are to promote an awareness of the potential harms in a seemingly benevolent effort to do good and avoid the failure that ensues from misaligned intentions. I seek to provide actionable conclusions in order to fill gaps I found present in the literature. Could international service be promoting more harm than good?

Keywords:  Department of Science
Voluntourism
Philanthropy
Service-learning
Science Technology and Society
Thesis
Advisor: Abrams William
Exploring Solutions for Ocean Sustainability

This study seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of solutions for ocean plastic pollution by addressing the following research questions: 1) How does the perception of plastic ocean pollution vary by geographic region? And further, 2) how can more cognizant attitudes from coastal regions be applied to less cognizant attitudes in landlocked regions? The study has three key objectives. First, it examines existing literature on the issue of ocean plastic pollution. Second, it provides context for the history of plastic. In doing so, this study problematizes the cultural phenomenon of “material consumption,” examining plastic’s journey from being perceived as a design innovation to a destructive influence on the environment. Third and finally, in the data analysis section, this study assesses how a person’s “notion of the ocean” informs their attitudes of accountability towards plastic consumption and pollution. This data, taken from survey and interview responses, uses Bermuda as a case study to compare sentiments and behaviors among citizens of landlocked regions to those in coastal regions. This third component also has far-reaching implications in seeking effective solutions to mitigate the harmful impact of ocean plastic pollution worldwide.

Keywords:  Technology and Society
Ocean Plastic Pollution
Ocean Sustainability
Solutions for Pollution
Experiential Awareness
Attitudes of Accountability
Bermuda
Science Technology and Society
Thesis
Advisor: Kieschnick John
Sato Kyoko
Davis Rose
Facilitating the debugging and understanding of interactive electronic devices

This dissertation describes three systems to help people better understand and debug the behavior of embedded electronic systems. The underlying shared principles across these projects are automatic instrumentation, visualization, and checking. The first, Toastboard, is a system for electronics prototyping that combines an instrumented breadboard with a web-based GUI and checks for common circuit construction mistakes. Bifröst extends this idea to systems that involve both code and circuits by simultaneously instrumenting a user's embedded code and microcontroller pins. Bifröst focuses on tricky to debug errors that can occur at the boundary between software and hardware. Finally, Wifröst addresses difficulties encountered when connecting embedded devices to the Internet. Wifröst instruments and collects data from a user's code as well as network infrastructure in order to guide users to the underlying reasons for and solutions to failures. These systems were evaluated through debugging tasks and user feedback. Taken together, these systems envision a future in which non-experts have a much greater understanding of the behavior of embedded computing devices in order to more effectively build, combine, repair, and audit their functionality.

Advisor: Hartmann Björn 
Levis Philip 
Agrawala Maneesh
Fantastic beasts & ways to probe them : non-linear and collective dynamics in biological systems at population, organism, & cellular scales

The animal kingdom harbours diverse examples of creatures with intriguing behaviours or phenotypes arising from non-linear, emergent, and collective phenomena. In this dissertation, I combine a variety of techniques to develop integrated experimental and analytical frameworks to highlight the role of complexity in the physiology and ecology of some fascinating organisms. At the population level, the prediction and management of mosquito-borne disease outbreaks highlights a critical need for large-scale, high-resolution data on spatio-temporal ecological dynamics, together with the fundamental limiting challenge of collecting reliable, high-throughput observations from the field. I developed novel engineering tools to probe the ecological dynamics of mosquitoes, using basic mobile phones to record wingbeat sounds for species identification and spatio-temporal mapping. I collected the largest database of sounds from various mosquito species and developed estimation algorithms to classify them, subsequently carrying out field trials to detect circadian activity rhythms, hotspots, and species segregation. With this proof-of-concept, I will outline a citizen science platform for crowdsourcing acoustic data on insects, with applications in monitoring biodiversity, invasive species, and disease outbreaks. At the scale of individual organisms, I studied water-lily beetles to show how dynamical phenomena shape behavioural adaptations through interactions within a habitat. These insects demonstrate flapping-wing flight while remaining attached to the surface of water, when moving between the floating lily pads that they eat in their environmental niche on pond surfaces. Using experimental biomechanics combined with fluid and non-linear dynamical analyses, I showed how surface tension alters this interfacial flight mode in comparison to conventional airborne flight, highlighting the emergence of chaos uncertainty at timescales that are too short to be under active neural control. At the cellular and gene level, I studied placozoans -- basal marine invertebrates comprising only a few cell types arranged in flat layers -- which provide an excellent model system for investigating the evolutionary and developmental origins of animal multicellularity. I sequenced the transcriptome of placozoans in various phenotypic states, to uncover how gene expression shapes their unique and unexplored physiology. Taken together, these phenomena highlight the role of dynamics and multi-scale hierarchical organization in biological systems, with diverse approaches at each scale to understanding their complexities.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Dabiri John O. (John Oluseun)
Prakash Manu 
LaBeaud Desiree
Mordecai Erin
Schneider David (David Samuel)
The fantastic natural and the evolutionary imagination in nineteenth-century France

This dissertation argues that naturalism was not literature's only response to evolutionary theory. Instead, I propose that the fantastic natural, a subversive literary mode, challenged cohesive representations of evolutionary nature by paradoxically using scientific discourse to evoke supernatural figures across diverse literary genres. The fantastic natural thereby both naturalizes the supernatural and super-naturalizes the natural world. My research shows how the fantastic natural's blurring of traditional distinctions between human and animal, male and female, and organism and environment reveals anxieties about modern man's de-centered role in evolutionary history and identifies powerful implications for the evolutionary understanding of gender, sexuality, and race. Moreover, these concerns expose a new environmental and anthropocenic consciousness in both canonical and experimental texts that destabilizes traditional generic distinctions between naturalist, decadent, fantastic, and scientific fiction.

Keywords: French & Italian.
Advisor: Gumbrecht Hans Ulrich 
Cohen Margaret
Wittman Laura
Fast, elastic storage for the cloud

Cloud computing promises high performance, cost-efficiency, and elasticity --- three essential goals when processing exponentially growing datasets. To meet these goals, cloud platforms must provide each application with the right amount and balance of compute and fast storage resources (e.g., NVMe Flash storage). However, providing the right resources to applications is challenging today because server machines have a fixed ratio of compute and storage resources, remote access to fast storage leads to significant performance and cost overheads, and storage requirements vary significantly over time and across applications. This dissertation focuses on how to build high performance, cost-effective, and easy-to-use cloud storage systems. First, we discuss how to provide fast access to remote Flash storage so that the balance of compute and storage allocation is not limited by the physical characteristics of server hardware. We present ReFlex, a custom network-storage operating system that provides fast access to modern Flash storage over commodity cloud networks. ReFlex enables storage devices to be shared among multiple tenants with predictable performance. Second, we discuss how to implement intelligent allocation of storage resources. We present Pocket, a distributed storage service that combines the fast remote data access in ReFlex with automatic resource allocation for serverless analytics workloads. Finally, we discuss the potential of using machine learning to automate resource allocation decisions with a system called Selecta that recommends a near-optimal cloud resource configuration for a job based on sparse training data collected across multiple jobs and configurations.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Kozyrakis Christoforos
Horowitz Mark (Mark Alan) 
Zaharia Matei
Fast kernel evaluation in high dimensions : importance sampling and near neighbor search

High-dimensional datasets arise in a multitude of ways: naturally, due to the need to represent complex objects (images, audio), and synthetically, due to the need to represent complex relationships between objects through vector embeddings (e.g. GloVe, ImageNet). At the same time, these datasets are of massive scale on the order of million or billion points and even executing simple computational tasks, like evaluating a predictive model, for all points in the dataset can be time-consuming. These considerations along with the fact that such computational primitives are building blocks for applications that are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life raise the need for efficient and reliable algorithms. We study the problem of fast kernel evaluation that underlies kernel-based predictive models. Given a kernel function k(x, y), that takes as input two vectors and outputs a number in [0,1], we ask the question of how fast we can output an approximation to the average value of the kernel function (kernel density) between a query vector and all points in a dataset. This problem has a long history of study in Scientific Computing but before our work under worst case assumptions all methods either run in time exponential in the dimension (curse of dimensionality) or linear in the number of points in the dataset. In this thesis, we lift the curse of dimensionality from the problem of Kernel Density Evaluation for a wide range of kernels through a variety of new techniques at the core of which lie Randomized Space Partitions. Using randomized space partitions in an increasingly sophisticated manner, we obtain the first data structures that under worst-case assumptions provably approximate the kernel density at arbitrary query points in time polynomial in the dimension and sub-linear in the number of points. In the process, we draw ideas from Approximation Theory, Dimensionality Reduction, and Near Neighbor Search

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Charikar Moses
Lall Sanjay 
Wootters Mary
Fate and danger in the Babylonian Talmud : rabbinic engagements in a Sasanian context

The Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, is a pivotal corpus in the history of Judaism, consolidating centuries of Babylonian -- and Palestinian -- rabbinic culture, law, and hermeneutics; and from the early Islamic period onward, serving as the basis of rabbinic Jewish tradition throughout the world, through to the present day. Expanding on recent scholarly advances in the study of rabbinic literature and related fields, my dissertation highlights the relationship between Babylonian rabbinic literary productions and those of neighboring Sasanian communities of Zoroastrians, Mandaeans, Syriac-speaking Christians, and Manichaeans. I also note the religious syncretism evident in contemporaneous material artifacts like amulets and incantation bowls -- which illustrate how ideas and practices were borrowed, combined, and reconfigured across these religious traditions. Focusing on shared concerns about the myriad forms of danger that Sasanian communities perceived as pervading their world, I describe how the Babylonian rabbis constructed sustained discourses around these subjects, in notable contrast to their Palestinian counterparts in the Roman Empire. And I illustrate how their strategies of identification, avoidance, prevention, and remedy bespeak their engagement with linguistic and conceptual vocabularies prevalent throughout Mesopotamia and the broader Sasanian Empire. I demonstrate how the producers of the Babylonian Talmud balanced the need to offer effective and compelling solutions to urgent problems with the desire to assert their own apotropaic and interpretive prowess. Throughout, I argue that greater attention to these common, quotidian dimensions of Sasanian religious life and literature affords novel insights into this monumental, albeit enigmatic, period of Jewish history.

Keywords: Religious Studies.
Advisor: Fonrobert Charlotte Elisheva 
Mayse Evan 
Penn Michael Philip 
Vevaina Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw
Fear of the disability con : public perceptions of abuse of disability rights

Americans with disabilities nowadays enjoy legal protection and acknowledgment of their status as a discrete and insular minority. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provides for accommodations and rights to allow people with disabilities to navigate civic life and end their historic exclusion from society. As Law & Society scholarship has demonstrated, however, there is a gap between the law on the books and the law in action. Thus, the grant of disability rights comes at a price as they are viewed as "special rights" prone to abuse. People who park in disabled parking spots, use service dogs, move to the front of lines, receive Social Security benefits, or request academic accommodations are often viewed as faking disabilities and abusing the law. I refer to the moral panic about abuse of disability rights as the "fear of the disability con." This disability con stereotype affects the lives of members of the disability community by influencing the ways they negotiate their rights. It also impacts the legitimacy of disability law in the eyes of the public that enforces the policies in everyday situations and decision-making processes by policymakers. Despite its importance, this stereotype has yet to be addressed in legal scholarship, and prior articulations of the issue by members of the disability community have been based on individual anecdotes, making it difficult for policymakers and advocates to understand its scope and the psychological mechanism that drives it. This three-part dissertation comes to fill this gap using a mixed methods approach that includes an observational survey, a series of survey experiments, qualitative interviews, and legal analysis of case law and legislation.

Keywords: Law.
Advisor: MacCoun Robert J. 
Belt Rabia 
Markus Hazel Rose 
Meyler Bernadette 
Schweik Susan M. (Susan Marie)
The fear within : apprehension in 16th-century French literature

This dissertation investigates the relationship between knowledge and fear in 16th century French literature, by studying the semantic and conceptual evolution that the word "appréhension" underwent at that time: from perception to prospective fear, from the realm of cognition to the one of emotion. It argues that this evolution was symptomatic of a conflict between competing epistemological frameworks: the one of institutionalized knowledge and the one of direct experience.

Keywords: French & Italian.
Advisor: Alduy Cécile 
Greene Roland
Hampton Timothy
Fecal indicator bacteria and virus removal in stormwater biofilters : effects of biochar, media saturation, and field conditioning

Stormwater biofilters are used to attenuate the flow and volume of runoff and reduce pollutant loading to aquatic systems. However, the capacity of such biofilters to remove microbial contaminants remains inconsistent and inadequate. While biochar has demonstrated promise as a media amendment to improve microbial removal in biofilters, it is uncertain if the results are generalizable to the field. To assess biochar performance in a simulated field setting, sand and biochar-amended sand biofilters were periodically dosed with natural stormwater over a 61-week period. The impact of media saturation was assessed by maintaining biofilters with and without a saturated zone. Although biochar-amended biofilters demonstrated improved Escherichia coli removal over sand biofilters early during field conditioning, media type was not significantly associated with E. coli removal after approximately 31 weeks. Presence of a saturated zone was not a significant factor influencing E. coli removal across the entire conditioning phase. Following field conditioning, biofilters underwent challenge tests to assess their capacity to remove wastewater-derived E. coli, enterococci, and male-specific (F+) coliphage. Challenge tests demonstrated enhanced removal of all fecal indicators in biochar-amended biofilters relative to sand biofilters. Additionally, saturated biofilters demonstrated greater removal of fecal indicators than unsaturated biofilters for both media types. Discrepant conclusions from the conditioning phase and challenge tests may be due to variable influent chemistry, dissimilar transport of E. coli indigenous to stormwater and those indigenous to wastewater, and differences in E. coli removal mechanisms between tests. Mobilization tests conducted following the challenge tests showed minimal (< 2.5%) to no observable mobilization of all fecal indicators, regardless of media type and presence of a saturated zone. While our results emphasize the challenge of translating biochar's performance from the laboratory to the field, findings of this study inform biofilter design to remove microbial contaminants from urban stormwater.

Advisor: Boehm Alexandria
Female Political Representation and Labor Force Participation in India

Female participation in the labor force in India has been declining since the 1980s despite lower fertility rates, higher female educational attainment, and strong economic growth of the country. The most recent estimates suggest that only 27 percent of women in India are in the labor force, as compared to 56 percent of women in the United States. This study investigates the effect of a government policy of mandated female political representation on female labor force participation in India. I find that an additional year of district-level female chairperson has a small but significant negative effect on female labor force participation. The effect is more pronounced for rural, low-caste women. The decrease may be due to a wealth increase in which women decide to leave the labor force who previously had no choice but to work. I find small but significant increases in household-level monthly consumer expenditure and land owned, which support the hypothesis of a wealth increase. Although the policy’s effect on female labor force participation is concerning, the increase in household wealth makes it difficult to discern the policy’s overall impact on female welfare. Female labor force participation has been shown to be important for women’s empowerment and overall economic growth, but further investigation into the nature of women’s employment and the factors affecting women’s decisions to enter the labor force will provide a clearer understanding of the policy’s effect on women.

Keywords: Department of Economics
female labor supply
political representation
gender equality
gender quotas
female empowerment
labor force participation
Thesis
Advisor: Dupas Pascaline