VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A Life-cycle Assessment of Canadian-produced Liquefied Natural Gas for Consumption in China

Natural gas consumption has increased in recent decades due to low prices and emissions benefits over coal. The greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits of natural gas over coal require a low upstream emissions profile, in particular with low fugitive emissions of methane. Furthermore, natural gas is unlike oil in that it is highly transport-constrained. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) allows for overseas shipping but comes at significant economic and energetic costs. We worked with a Canadian liquids-rich gas producer to better understand upstream fugitive emissions and assess their efficacy of leak detection and repair (LDAR) programs. We model emissions from their operations and perform life-cycle assessment (LCA) of a hypothetical scenario where they produce 1 billion cubic feet per day of LNG in coastal British Columbia, for consumption in Shenzhen, China. We determine the life- cycle GHG and criteria air pollutant emissions associated with such a project.
We find that the LDAR surveys have resulted in decreased number of emissions points and decreased site-wide emissions. Leaks that were fixed from LDAR surveys tended to remain fixed and did not reappear. Likewise, leaks that were not fixed tended to persist and did not go away on their own, indicating that leak persistence is very high. Consequently, LDAR surveys are resulting in emissions reductions, as long as detected leaks are fixed. Repeat LDAR surveys regularly found new emission sources, even without significant site changes occurring, supporting the idea that LDAR surveys must be done regularly to find and fix new emission sources that arise from equipment failure or breakdown.
We find that Canada-to-China LNG will result in fewer life-cycle GHG emissions than the same power generated using coal in Asian markets. Studies have estimated Chinese coal power emissions to be anywhere from 868 to 975 g CO2e/kWh, nearly double our results of 408.2 to 547.9 g CO2e/kWh. Our results are lower than prior studies due to low upstream emissions and more efficient LNG production assumptions. LCA studies of LNG have focused on upstream and liquefaction stages, but our work makes it clear that total emissions are dominated by end-use emissions. When considering the climate benefits and drawbacks of LNG, it is critical to understand how the gas will be used.

Keywords:  Department of Energy Resources Engineering
School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
Energy Resources Engineering
Liquefied Natural Gas
Leak Detection and Repair
Life-cycle Assessment
LNG
LCA
LDAR
Seven Generations
Canada
China
Thesis
Advisor: Brandt Adam R.
Ravikumar Arvind P.
A Literature Review Promoting Counterinsurgency Cultural Training in Virtual Reality

Counterinsurgency cultural training (COIN-CT) could be augmented by adapting existing 3D desktop educational modules to virtual reality (VR). The following literature review synthesizes research on VR as a medium for training, VR as a medium for perspective taking, and current COIN-CT offerings to promote future empirical studies on VR COIN-CT solutions. This paper examines how VR features such as social presence, body transfer, and embodied cognition can lead to improved learning transfer. This paper also reviews current COIN-CT offerings in depth, identifies how VR could enhance existing options, and addresses potential challenges facing widespread adoption of VR COIN-CT.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
Department of Communication
Coterminal MA in Communication
Media Studies Track
virtual reality
social presence
learning transfer
counterinsurgency cultural training
Thesis
Advisor: Bailenson Jeremy
Christin Angèle
A New Era of Personalized Politics: The 2016 Twitter Campaign

This study looked at personalization during the 2016 presidential election. The ubiquity of social media and the unique features of Twitter enable new forms of personalization to emerge during political campaigns. This research added to the growing body of literature in political communication by taking a multifaceted approach to personalized politics in assessing content, interactivity, and language. The findings in this study confirmed trends from previous research in that politicians are posting more content relating to traditional campaign strategies (agenda setting, mobilization, and criticism) rather than revealing personal information about themselves. However, findings also suggest that personalized communicative practices are indeed emerging on Twitter through use of interactive features and language. This multifaceted analysis allows one to draw inferences to how personalization takes form, to give insights on how political campaigning will continue to evolve on Twitter, and to discuss its implications on the democratic process.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
Personalized
politics
presidential elections
twitter
social media
Stanford Department of Communication
Media studies
Elections United States
Thesis
Advisor: Christin Angèle
A new era of profitability? Exploring the effects of four recent US airline mergers on prices, competition, capacity, and quality

Significant financial turmoil in the 2000s prompted a series of large-scale US airline mergers between 2008 and 2013: Delta-Northwest, United-Continental, Southwest-AirTran, and American-US Airways. This recent period of industry consolidation has led to an increase in the domestic market share of the four largest US carriers from around 55% in 2008 to nearly 80% in 2015. Along with other factors, this has contributed to a period of record profits in the US airline industry. Using a difference-in-differences approach, this paper estimates the effects of each of the four mergers on prices, competition, capacity, and quality. The results suggest that in large air travel markets, three out of the four mergers led to price increases and reductions in levels of competition. In small air travel markets, the Southwest-AirTran merger had the largest impact, producing a 21% increase in its fares. The effects of mergers on seat capacity were mixed, while impacts on quality were limited.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford University
Department of Economics
industrial organization
airlines
mergers
market power
competition
United States
Thesis
Advisor: Larsen Brad
A sequence-to-sequence regression of genome-wide chromatin data through adversarial training

An Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq) reveals information about open chromatin regions, individual nucleosomes, and chromatin compaction at nucleotide resolution using only 500 to 50,000 cells. In contrast, Chromatin Immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq) requires much more biological samples, typically millions of cells, to detect DNA regions with histone modifications. In this sense, regressing histone ChIP-seq data from less costly ATAC-seq data will help us map missing histone marks and understand epigenomic activity in a more efficient way. This paper investigates how our modified deep adversarial training approach can be used to predict ChIP-seq signal based on ATAC-seq signal. We begin by setting the performance of convolutional neural network (CNN) model as a baseline. We then introduce three modifications to the widely used adversarial network architecture. First, we modify the generator component of the adversarial network so that it takes ATAC-seq signal as input instead of random noise and generates ChIP-seq signal from the ATAC-seq signal. Second, we suggest composite objective function based on two different losses - mean squared error and adversarial loss. Third, we apply one-sided label smoothing, which is essential in stabilizing the adversarial training. The generator trained through our new adversarial training approach reports Pearson correlation of 0.562 with respect to the actual ChIP-seq signal, outperforming the CNN baseline. We also conduct qualitative analysis on how the adversarial training based on the composite objective function helps the model predict ChIP-seq peaks using ATAC-seq signal. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle epigenomic signal imputation task using deep adversarial training.

Keywords: Kundaje, Anshul
Stanford School of Engineering
Department of Computer Science
computational biology
deep learning
genomics
ATAC-seq
ChIP-seq
generative adversarial network
Thesis
Advisor: Israeli Johnny
A Smoke Removing DC-DC Converter Composed of a Seven Stage Class DE Rectifier and a Class Phi 2 Inverter

This thesis presents the design methodology of a miniaturized, portable, and low power electrostatic precipitator (ESP) to reduce indoor air pollution (IAP) from rural cook-stoves. Decreasing the concentration of aerosol particles helps reduce the incidence of respiratory tract infections that can lead to disease and even death. We trace existing technologies and standards to combat IAP in cookstoves, design an ESP that allows precipitation at lower voltages via an electrode design that utilizes sub 5 kV voltages, and explore how rapidly pulsed converters decrease the power consumption of the circuit and increase smoke collection.

Keywords:  Department of Electrical Engineering
Electrostatic Precipitator
Converter
Rectifier
Inverter
Electrode
Indoor Air Pollution
Low Power
Respiratory Diseases
Stanford University
Department of Electrical Engineering
Thesis
Advisor: Rivas-Davila Juan
Dutton Robert
A Space Away from Race: White Racial Innocence and the Rural Vermont Landscape

Over ninety percent of Vermonters are white, which makes Vermont a place where white people have almost accomplished segregation on the scale of an entire state. Although this segregation was neither inevitable nor accidental, Vermonters make claims to an exceptional form of progressivism that is held in contrast to the imagined white racism of low-income rural Southerners. How is it that the work of white Vermonters to maintain segregation has been made invisible? This thesis explores the processes through which the “Vermont character” has become associated with Anglo whiteness through tourist marketing and through violent, state-sponsored projects like the Eugenics movement in the 1930s or state complicity in racist violence in the 1960s. Simultaneously, the “Vermont character” has become associated with moral virtue through the figure of the “typical Vermonter,” a Yankee farmer imagined as epitomizing the traits of the ideal American citizen, which, since the Civil Rights Era, have included anti-racism. Middle-class white liberals in America consume the innocent brand of whiteness that the “Vermont character” represents through means as diverse as purchasing vacation homes or eating Ben and Jerry’s, and, in doing so, perform anti-racism without disrupting the benefits of whiteness that they continue to enjoy.

Keywords: ace
ethnicity
rural
Stanford University Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
white innocence
Thesis
Advisor: Anderson Michelle
Carlisle Liz
A Spectral View of Adversarially Robust Features

While great progress has been made in image classification using machine learning, often achieving near-human or even superhuman accuracy on image classification tasks, recent studies have found that image classification models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: special images crafted to fool the models into mislabeling the picture. In this work, we investigate the problem of creating an adversarially robust feature: a feature f whose value at any point x cannot be changed much by perturbing x slightly. We establish strong connections between adversarially robust features and a natural spectral property of the geometry of the dataset and metric of interest. This connection can be leveraged both to provide robust features and to provide a lower bound on the robustness of any function that has significant variance across the dataset. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that the adversarially robust features yielded via this spectral approach can be fruitfully leveraged to learn a robust (and accurate) model.

Keywords:  Department of Computer Science
Department of Computer Science
machine learning
image classification
Thesis
Advisor: Gregory Valiant
"A Stain on Our Souls:" The Darfur Genocide During the Obama Presidency

Since 2003, the Sudanese government and its Arab militia proxies have conducted a genocide against Africans in Darfur, killing roughly 500,000 people and displacing 2.7 million. Public outcry compelled President George W. Bush to take diplomatic measures to end the atrocities, though they achieved little success. In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama included Darfur on his presidential platform and denounced the genocide as a “stain on our souls.” Nevertheless, during his presidency, Obama not only failed to address the genocide, but also lifted sanctions that had been imposed on Khartoum for its criminal activities in Darfur. This thesis examines why the Obama Administration’s foreign policies in relation to Darfur were so weak. In particular, I focus on four main factors that constrained U.S. action in the region: lack of political salience, South Sudan's creation and subsequent implosion, humanitarian crises elsewhere, and China's and Russia's economic interests in Sudan. By understanding these policy constraints, we might learn how to end this long and violent genocide, as well as other humanitarian conflicts in areas with little national strategic import.

Keywords:  Program in International Relations
Sudan
Darfur
genocide
human rights
international law
humanitarian intervention
Obama
U.S. foreign policy
Stanford Department of International Relations
Honors Program in International Relations
Stanford University
Thesis
Advisor: Patenaude Bertrand
A Transnational Encounter of Cosmopolitan Fantasies: Directing The World of Extreme Happiness at Stanford University

This dramaturgical thesis interrogates the transnational dimension of staging Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's play 'The World of Extreme Happiness,' a play about a factory girl in Shenzhen China, at Stanford University, an elite neoliberal university down the road from Silicon Valley. Specifically, we argue that, as Western cosmopolitan subjects, the audience encounter with the play is that of cultural consumption, projecting a fantasized timeline of modernity onto the protagonist's journey, with her rural home seen as 'backwards' and 'local' and the Western city as 'progressive' and 'cosmopolitan.' Consequently, this thesis examines how a production of this play can disrupt such an imagination by invoking the ways the protagonist is 'modern' and cosmopolitan, while still confronting the transnational power dynamics present in the relationship between audience and protagonist. We propose theatrical devices, particularly in and around 'gazing,' to performatively subvert these imagined global hierarchies among a Western cosmopolitan audience.

Keywords:  Department of Theater and Performance Studies
theater and performance studies
cosmopolitanism
neoliberal theater
western gaze
cultural consumption
asian american theater project
the world of extreme happiness
frances ya-chu cowhig
Thesis
Advisor: Menon Jisha
Lee Haiyan
Absorbing optical antennas [electronic resource] : applications in nanophotonics and combustion

The promise of optical antennas is the ability to tame the light to behave in ways not achievable using traditional optical components. For example, our results here demonstrate that a careful engineering of optical antennas allow the strong, even perfect, absorption of light in ultra-thin geometries, i.e., geometries much thinner than the wavelength of light. Enabled by geometry-sensitive antenna resonances, this absorption behavior can also be realized for a broad selection of colors. A detailed theoretical analysis of the observed perfect absorption phenomenon reveals the role of incoherently interacting degenerate electric and magnetic resonances in overcoming the well-known absorption limit for infinitesimally thin films. With another set of experiments, we show that strongly absorbed optical energy in aluminum nanoantennas can be used to heat them efficiently above their melting temperature and stimulate an explosive exothermic oxidation reaction called melt-dispersion mechanism. Importantly, we see that engineering the specific geometry of the constituent particles allows an unprecedented control of aluminum ignition, both spectrally and spatially, through the fine tuning of the optical antenna resonances.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Brongersma Mark L. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Fan Shanhui
Miller D. A. B. advisor. Thesis advisor
Accelerating oil-water subsurface flow simulation through reduced-order modeling and advances in nonlinear analysis

Reservoir simulation is an important tool for understanding and predicting subsurface flow and reservoir performance. In applications such as production optimization and history matching, thousands of simulation runs may be required. Therefore, proxy methods that can provide approximate solutions in much shorter times can be very useful. Reduced-order modeling (ROM) methods are a particular type of proxy procedure that entail a reduction of the number of unknown variables in the nonlinear equations. This dissertation focuses on two of the most promising proper orthogonal decomposition (POD)-based ROM methods, POD-TPWL and POD-DEIM. A separate (non-ROM) technique to accelerate nonlinear convergence for oil-water problems is presented in the appendix.

Keywords: Energy Resources Engineering.
Advisor: Durlofsky Louis 
Tchelepi Hamdi 
Volkov Oleg
Achieving Greater Greenhouse Gas Reductions with Alternative Compliance to California's Renewables Portfolio Standard

California’s Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS) acts as one of the State’s keystone climate
change policies as it dictates the percentage of renewable energy that electricity providers must
provide their ratepayers. In this paper, I outline the difficulties and high incremental costs
associated with continuing to increase the level of the RPS. In response to these high costs, I
propose a policy that would lead to significantly greater GHG emissions at a lower cost. This
paper describes how the policy would work and how it could be implemented by the State of
California to reduce the State’s impact on climate change.

Keywords: Renewables Portfolio Standard
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Climate Change
Utilities
Text
Thesis
Advisor: Sweeney James
Achieving Greater Greenhouse Gas Reductions with Alternative Compliance to California’s Renewables Portfolio Standard

California’s Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS) acts as one of the State’s keystone climate change policies as it dictates the percentage of renewable energy that electricity providers must provide their ratepayers. In this paper, I outline the difficulties and high incremental costs associated with continuing to increase the level of the RPS. In response to these high costs, I propose a policy that would lead to significantly greater GHG emissions at a lower cost. This paper describes how the policy would work and how it could be implemented by the State of California to reduce the State’s impact on climate change.

Keywords: Renewables Portfolio Standard
greenhouse gas emissions
climate change
utilities
Thesis
Advisor: James Sweeney
Activation of Cell Cycle Re-entry in the Mammalian Inner Ear

Hearing loss is the most common sensory deficit in the U.S. The adult mammalian cochlea, specifically the sensory hair cells located in the organ of Corti, lack regenerative capacity, which is the main reason for permanent hearing loss. Broadly, this research considers potential ways to restore hearing through hair cell regeneration, which occurs naturally in lower vertebrates, such as chicken and fish, but not in mammals and humans. More specifically, it tests the hypothesis that forced overexpression of positive cell cycle regulators Cyclin B, Cyclin D, CDK1, and CDK4 is sufficient to induce cell cycle re-entry and will enable proliferative hair cell regeneration in postnatal supporting cells of the organ of Corti. To do this, we virally infected organ of Corti explants from Pou4f3DTR/Fgfr3-iCreERT2/Ai14/Atoh1-nGFP mice. In these mice, DTR (Human Diphtheria Toxin Receptor) is expressed under the hair cell specific Pou4f3 promotor and allows for induced hair cell death upon injection of the toxin. In addition to enabling Pou4f3-mediated hair cell death, the mouse model allows fate tracking of a supporting cell subpopulation by Fgfr3-tdTomato-expression and direct identification of hair cells by Atoh1-nGFP signals. After viral infection, explants were exposed to the thymidine analog EdU, which was used to trace supporting cells that re-entered S-phase and divided in response to viral induction. We found that cochlear supporting cells re-entered the cell cycle, subsequently proceeded to mitosis and successfully completed division. The strategy reported in this study is novel and contributes to the field of induced hair cell regeneration in the organ of Corti.

Keywords:  Department of Biology
Biology
Hair Cells
Organ of Corti
Hearing
Regenerative Medicine
Stanford University
Thesis
Advisor: Heller Stefan
Red-Horse Kristy
Activist Responsibility and Social Platforms: Analyzing Billie Jean King's Furtherance of Women's Athletics Through Liberal Feminism

This thesis addresses whether members of disadvantaged social groups who have access to an influential platform bear an activist responsibly for their respective community. In answering this overarching question, this thesis focuses on athletics as the platform in discussion and feminism as the mode of advocacy. Through analysis of hegemonic gender ideology in the American public sphere, brief history of women's athletics to the 1970s, and contention between second-wave feminism and women's athletics in the early years of Title IX, research supports the need for prominent female athletes to further feminist causes. Billie Jean King's relationship with both movements sheds light on the struggles faced by each, and an interview conducted for this thesis reaffirms athletes' unique social affordances and consequent social responsibility.

Keywords:  Department of Communication.
feminism
second-wave feminism
women's athletics
activist responsibility
disadvantaged social groups
Title IX
Billie Jean King
Stanford University Department of Communication
Thesis
Advisor: Hanlon-Baker Patti
Turner Fred