VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Cross-cultural Differences in Lie-telling and Truth-telling Surrounding Sporting Events

Sporting events receive international recognition and athletes are typically held to higher moral standards. However, when athletes engage in questionable moral behaviour all cultures may not evaluate this behaviour similarly or support their athletes similarly. This study investigated emerging adults’ moral rationalizations of fabricated scenario-based sporting events where an athlete engaged in questionable moral behaviour, such as taking performance-enhancing drugs, and the protagonist either told a lie and helped the athlete or told the truth and harmed the athlete. Scenarios incorporated different collectives where either athletes were representing their country or themselves as individuals. Emerging adults from North America and China were asked to evaluate the protagonist’s actions and indicate what behaviour they themselves would opt to engage in. With the continued increase in immigration to Western countries, acculturation was considered through comparisons between two North American ethnicities, Caucasian and Asian. Cultural trends have been established in previous research where children and adolescents from Eastern cultures evaluate lie-telling more positively when protecting a larger group collective, such as a country, whereas children and adolescents from Western cultures evaluate lie-telling more positively when protecting a smaller collective, such as an individual or themselves (Dmytro, Lo, O’Leary, Fu, Lee, Cameron, 2014; Fu, Evans, Wang, Lee, 2008; Fu, Luo, Heyman, Wang, Cameron, Lee, 2016; Fu, Xu, Cameron, Heyman, Lee, 2007; Xu, Bao, Fu, Talwar, Lee, 2010). These trends are mirrored with regards to engagement in lie-telling. Similar cultural trends were found within the current study’s emerging adult population and when utilizing scenarios with more severe consequences. Emerging adults from China illustrated greater loyalty for the athlete when representing their country, whereas emerging adults from North America illustrated greater loyalty for the athlete when representing themselves. When ethnicity was considered it was surprising to find that North American Asian emerging adults’ moral rationalizations were more similar to North American Caucasian emerging adults’ moral rationalizations rather than to emerging adults from China. These findings support theories of cross-cultural differences and highlight the blending and integration of cultures in North America.

Keywords: Acculturation
Cross-cultural differences
Moral Behaviour
Moral Judgments
Sporting events
Advisor: Lee, Kang
Rising from Below: The Families of Roman Municipal Freedmen and Social Mobility in the Roman Empire

This dissertation provides the first combined analysis of how Roman municipal freedmen and their descendants navigated the social, economic, and political landscape of imperial society. The municipal freedmen (liberti publici) had been owned and manumitted by towns in Italy, where they constituted the familia publica and performed many day-to-day functions for the municipal administration. They are not to be confused with freedmen of private individuals of local origin. Their status is often assumed to have conferred on the freedmen and their descendants a high degree of prestige that helped to advance their careers. The study first addresses two demographic issues in order to estimate the volume of municipal freedmen and descendants one can expect to document in the epigraphic record. A heterogeneous approach is employed to argue that the familia publica in most towns was small. The practice of manumitting slaves in the familia is also reconstructed in light of universal practices observed in other slave households. I propose that towns tended to be cautious in manumitting their slaves, especially those with technical skills. Next, the evidence for the municipal freedmen is analyzed. While some had the opportunity to forge links to the municipal elite and accumulate a large peculium that enhanced their social capital, they also lacked a personal patron whose financial backing and connections would have provided a push up the social ladder after manumission. Only a limited number of the freedmen known to us achieved any meaningful social or economic advancement. It is suggested that the lack of a patron made it difficult for most freedmen to break away from the familia publica and enter into other spheres of the local economy and social hierarchy. The study concludes by analyzing the activities of the municipal freedmen’s descendants across multiple generations. They, too, experienced only marginal success. A small number ascended to the senatorial or equestrian order or the ranks of the municipal elite, and another narrow segment joined local occupational and voluntary associations. Yet the vast majority never advanced socially or economically and are known to us as little more than a name on an epitaph.

Keywords: Municipal freedmen
Municipal slaves
Roman Empire
Roman families
Roman slavery
Social mobility
Advisor: Bruun, Christer
Ebla’s Hegemony and Its Impact on the Archaeology of the Amuq Plain in the Third Millennium BCE

This dissertation investigates the emergence of Ebla as a regional state in northwest Syria during the Early Bronze Age and provides a characterization of Ebla that emphasizes its hegemonic rather than imperial features. The texts recovered from the Royal Palace G archives reveal that Ebla expanded from a small Ciseuphratean kingdom into a major regional power in Upper Mesopotamia over the course of just four or five decades. To consolidate and maintain its rapidly growing periphery, Ebla engaged in intensive diplomatic relations with an array of client states, semi-autonomous polities, and independent kingdoms. Often, political goals were achieved through mutual gift-exchange and interdynastic marriage, but military activity became increasingly common towards the end of the period covered by the texts. However, apart from installing palace officials at some cities, Ebla did not appear to have invested heavily in building infrastructure, such as roads or forts, along its periphery, preferring instead to leave matters of defense up to client and allied states. As a result, the archaeological impact of Ebla’s political hegemony along parts of its periphery was minimal. In re-evaluating the archaeological evidence for Ebla’s growth in the mid-third millennium BCE, this dissertation shows that in only a few instances—for example, in changes to regional settlement patterns in the Amuq Plain, subsistence strategies at Tell es-Sweyhat, and the distribution of ceramic assemblages—can an Eblaite influence on material culture along its periphery be inferred, and even then, only indirectly. While Ebla’s sphere of interaction extended over a considerable territory, this dissertation restricts most of its discussion to Ebla’s northwestern frontier, and particularly to the archaeology of the Amuq Plain. This study demonstrates that even though Ebla had installed an official at Alalaḫu—the major polity in the Amuq Plain—local historical trajectories remained largely intact, and Ebla’s hegemony left only an ephemeral archaeological legacy in the area.

Keywords: Amuq
Archaeology
Bronze Age
Ebla
Hegemony
Syria
Advisor: Harrison, Timothy P.
Essays on International Trade and Industrial Organization

This thesis contains three papers examining topics related to international trade and industrial organization. In Chapter 1, I develop a flexible methodology that uses profit maximization conditions to solve for unobserved input allocations, TFP, and quality across product lines in multi-product plants. I apply this methodology to a panel of plants manufacturing machinery in India from 2000-2007. I find that there is substantial variation in both TFP and quality across product lines within a given plant, and that quality and quantity based TFP (TFPQ) are negatively correlated. Finally, I find that increases in Chinese import competition led plants to reallocate their inputs towards higher quality products and away from their high TFPQ products, thereby generating within plant quality improvements, rather than productivity gains. In Chapter 2, which is based on joint work with Daniel Ershov and Jean-William Lalibert\'{e}, we use consumer level data from Nielsen to look at two products with natural demand complementarities and a history of regulatory activity - potato chips and carbonated soda pop. We estimate a discrete choice model that allows for demand complementarity across pop and chips, using a novel estimator that leverages information on bundle specific purchases from consumer micro data, as well as aggregate scanner data. We then simulate a number of anti-trust counterfactuals in the chips and carbonated soda market. Once demand complementarity is taken into account, a merger between the chips and soda producer PepsiCo/Frito-Lay and the soda producer Dr. Pepper will reduce chip prices. Soda prices will either increase or fall, depending on the market. By contrast, the standard discrete choice model predicts that soda prices would always increase following the merger. In Chapter 3, which is based on joint work with Daniel Trefler and Miaojie Yu, we review some recent methods for estimating productivity. We apply these methods to Chinese manufacturing data for 2000-2006, with the goal of determining the strengths and pitfalls of the various approaches. We find that irrespective of the approach used to estimate productivity, gross output production functions generate more sensible estimates than value added production functions.

Advisor: Trefler, Daniel
Drugs, Pharmacy, Healing Rites, and Ethnobotany: Therapeutic Writing in the Foundational Narratives of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic

Foundational narratives from the Hispanic Caribbean were involved in projects of political modernization and relied on stylistic novelty and political disagreement. Turn-of-the-century Puerto Rican and Dominican intellectuals prioritized three areas of political modernization—decolonization, emancipation of women, and some sort of racial justice. They looked at pharmacy for ways of structuring their literary imagination and proposed psychoactive writing to boost agency. My dissertation relates their approaches to pharmacy to their political goals. Eugenio María de Hostos abandoned the politics of harmonization and invested in narco-analysis to make colonial traumas accessible to the reader on the cognitive and emotional level. Hostos required stimulants to counteract inertia of the colonial subject and to disclose the implication of Creole elites, like himself, in the hegemonic regime. I connect his psychoactive writing and its effects on the body to the post-Hegelian dialectic theorized by Nietzsche and Jean-Luc Nancy. From a comparably elitist perspective, Amelia Francasci sought to legitimize her work by suggesting parallels with the institution of pharmacy, consistently suspect of quackery at the turn of the century. I claim that Francasci opposed the discourse of the sick woman. I frame her pharmaco-writing within global feminist struggles to regain access to pharmacy, for which I build on Larry Duffy’s study of the nineteenth-century institutional transformations of chemistry and pharmacy in France and examine their repercussions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Two other writers I interpret—Francisco Gregorio Billini and Federico García Godoy—were more directly involved in Dominican politics and the state apparatus. They attempted to resolve what they perceived as national problems by assuaging racial tensions while exacerbating ethnic differences with Haiti. Billini and García Godoy incorporated Afro-Dominican healing rites into the national imagery yet misattributed them to European folklore. I suggest that such cultural appropriation of Afro-indigenous ethnobotany devalued Afro-indigenous connections.

Keywords: Afro-Dominican
drugs
ethnobotany
pharmacopoeia
pharmacy and gender
spirituality
Advisor: Rodríguez, Néstor E.
Modeling, Analysis, and Control of Close Formation Flight

Close formation flight is extensively investigated from the perspectives of dynamic modeling, aerodynamic analysis, and control design. A lifting-line based aerodynamic model is presented to describe the aerodynamic coupling between two aircraft in close formation. The introduced aerodynamic model is validated via the comparison with a single horseshoe vortex-based model, a vortex lattice method-based model, and experimental results. Comprehensive analysis is thereafter conducted to investigate the drag reduction variations with respect to different relative positions, angles of attack, sideslip angles, and leader-to-follower wing span ratios. The analysis indicates that the drag reduction performance of close formation flight is sensitive to the formation position accuracy. Additionally, basic requirements are formulated for close formation flight control. In terms of the proposed aerodynamic model, a linear robust adaptive formation controller is developed specifically for close formation at level and straight flight. The proposed robust adaptive controller shows dramatic increase in both transient performance and robustness against model uncertainties and disturbances. The nonlinear robust close formation control problem is thereafter studied under a leader-following architecture. Nonlinear robust close formation controllers with different considerations are proposed based on a command filtered backstepping method and an uncertainty and disturbance estimation technique. The proposed nonlinear robust formation controllers could accommodate more complex flight scenarios, for instance, different flight maneuvers and close formation of more than three aircraft. With the increase of the number of aircraft in close formation, a leader-following formation controller might become less and less efficient. Regarding the efficiency degradation issue of leader-following formation controllers, two cooperative control algorithms are introduced, which exhibit better tracking performance for close formation of a large number of aircraft. Extensive simulations are carried out to validate the effectiveness of all proposed close formation control algorithms.

Keywords: Close formation flight
Cooperative control
Formation control
Robust adaptive control
Robust nonlinear control
Unmanned aerial vehicles
Advisor: Liu, Hugh H.T.
Electroanalytical Techniques for Digital Microfluidics

Digital microfluidics (DMF) is a miniaturised fluid-handling technique used to manipulate nanolitre to millilitre droplets of liquids across arrays of electrodes insulated with a dielectric material. While many analysis techniques have been used in conjunction with DMF, inline analysis techniques, in which droplets can be examined or sampled directly from a DMF device, are of particular interest, reducing complexity and allowing real-time monitoring. Many techniques including optical and mass spectrometric methods were established previously, but until recently there were few reports of electrochemical detection being employed with DMF. Electrochemical analysis techniques have important advantages in sensitivity, selectivity, and instrumental expense and complexity, and are often well-suited to integration with DMF due to their compatibility with miniaturisation. This thesis introduces the first advanced use of electroanalytical techniques with DMF as well as a robust toolkit for the most common electroanaytical techniques, suitable for DMF as well as the general analytical laboratory. Chapter 2 demonstrates the integration of voltammetry within a DMF device and the utility of such a combination by producing an analyte calibration curve from microscale samples with minimal intervention. Chapter 3 describes the DStat, an open-source potentiostat designed for electrochemical measurements at low current and easy integration into other systems. The latter is exploited to couple the DropBot DMF system with the DStat allowing fully automated fluid handling and voltammetric measurements. The DStat's capabilities are further expanded in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 to encompass Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), with the development of an accessory high-frequency impedance module and software and firmware adaptations to allow low-frequency impedance measurements with the existing DStat hardware. As exemplary applications, high-frequency EIS is used to verify the thickness of the hydrophobic layer on DMF devices, and low-frequency impedance measurements are used in the study of DMF device failure as a result of water infiltration into the dielectric layer. This thesis encompasses not only the development of methods for integrating electrochemical detection and DMF, but a versatile instrumental infrastructure for performing the most common electroanalytical techniques for DMF, the analytical lab, and beyond.

Keywords: digital microfluidics
electrochemistry
potentiostat
Advisor: Wheeler, Aaron R
Regulation of Breast Cancer Cells’ Bone-Metastatic Potential by Mechanically Stimulated Osteocytes

Bone metastasis, the migration of cancers to the bone, occurs in 65-75% of patients with advanced breast cancer and significantly increases patients’ morbidity and mortality. The bone-metastatic cancer cells interact with cells in the bone to disrupt the bone remodeling balance, causing reduced bone quality and other complications while facilitating tumor growth. Bone remodeling cells can be regulated by osteocytes, the major population of cells in the bone that are embedded in the bone matrix, in response to dynamic loading on the bone. Osteocytes also signal to blood vessel-lining endothelial cells that interact closely with cancer cells during early metastasis before a secondary tumor is established in the bone. Therefore, we hypothesized that mechanically stimulated osteocytes may regulate cancer cells directly and via other cells. To investigate, we mimicked what osteocytes experience in vivo during bone-loading activities, such as walking, with oscillatory fluid flow. We observed that factors secreted by flow-stimulated osteocytes increase cancer cell migration and survival. Contrastingly, signaling from flow-stimulated osteocytes through bone-resorbing osteoclasts or endothelial cells to cancer cells were anti-metastatic. Specifically, it reduced cancer cell migration, survival, and invasion. Factors secreted by flow-stimulated osteocytes also reduced cancer cells’ trans-endothelial migration and endothelial monolayers’ permeability and ability to be adhered by cancer cells. These demonstrated the capability of mechanically stimulated osteocytes in reducing the bone-metastatic potential of breast cancer cells by signaling through osteoclasts and endothelial cells. Investigating this regulation further can provide novel insights into the potential of bone-loading exercise in preventing bone metastasis.

Keywords: bone metastasis
breast cancer
endothelial cells
mechanical stimulation
osteoclasts
osteocytes
Advisor: You, Lidan
Computational Modelling of Progressive Damage in Viscoelastic-viscoplastic Composite Materials

Current governmental requirements for greater fuel efficiency are pushing automotive manufacturers to find innovative ways of reducing car weight, while still maintaining mechanical performance to ensure passenger safety. Composite materials would allow for significant weight reduction, while still maintaining a safe environment for the passengers. However, composite materials are known to exhibit significant time-dependent behaviour, as well as progressive damage which affect structural performance. Bio-composites in particular are known to undergo complex damage evolution during their lifetime. In this thesis, a multi-scale computational approach has been adopted to take these effects into account. A new modelling approach based on Synergistic Damage Mechanics to understand damage evolution in composite materials undergoing time-dependent deformation is developed. The model is applied to matrix micro-cracking in laminates. Computational micro-damage mechanics is combined with a continuum level description of stiffness degradation to predict the evolution of micro-cracking while requiring minimal experimental calibration. The time-dependent behaviour is modelled using Schapery’s theory of viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity, and the evolution of matrix micro-cracking during creep is predicted. The predictions of the model for different stacking sequences, ply thicknesses and working temperatures show that viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity have a significant effect on the long-term response of laminates undergoing matrix micro-cracking. The multi-scale modelling approach is extended to short fiber bio-composites by constructing a micro-damage model of fiber-matrix debonding using a Cohesive Zone Model. The effect of strain rate on fiber-matrix debonding is analyzed by implementing a non-linear viscoelastic model for the matrix, and it is shown that viscoelastic behaviour leads to a competition between void nucleation and debonding. The effects of fiber stiffness, dimensions and interfacial shear strength are evaluated. Following the micro-damage analyses, the thesis focuses on damage evolution at the structural scale by implementing the damage model in Finite Element Analysis software to analyze the dynamic response of a car bumper. The rate-dependent evolution of damage is predicted for different stacking sequences and material systems.

Keywords: Damage
Finite Element Analysis
Multi-scale modelling
Viscoelasticity
Advisor: Singh, Chandra V
Revisiting the Cambrian Burgess Shale Palaeocommunity in Light of New Field Discoveries from Marble Canyon, Kootenay National Park, British Columbia

The 508-million-year-old Burgess Shale (British Columbia) is among the most important fossil localities in the world as it provides a direct window into the Cambrian Explosion, the phenomenon whereby most metazoan groups appeared rapidly in the fossil record for the first time. For over 100 years, Burgess Shale fossils have provided unique insights into the early evolutionary history of animal life, but a holistic description of the community ecology of the Burgess Shale has remained elusive. This dissertation aims to reinvestigate the Burgess Shale paleocommunity in light of the recently discovered Marble Canyon fossil site in Kootenay National Park, integrating this new dataset with those from the type areas in Yoho National Park, 40km to the northwest (Walcott Quarry, Raymond Quarry, and Tulip Beds). The first three chapters of this dissertation focus on the organismal level. An experimental decay study (Chapter 1) provides a framework for the interpretation of taphonomic bias in community reconstructions. The redescription of three enigmatic Cambrian taxa (Chapters 2 and 3) provide novel phylogenetic and ecological information for understanding the patterns of diversity and niche structure at Marble Canyon. The community analysis (Chapter 4) represents the largest quantitative study of the Burgess Shale to date. Patterns of faunal stasis between most adjacent bedding assemblages followed by periodic variations in abundance and species identity are found at both Marble Canyon and Walcott Quarry, the two best-studied sites with the finest level of stratigraphic/temporal data. Across the entire Burgess Shale paleocommunity, major shifts in representative taxonomic groups and ecological modes occur between major localities. The results of this work suggest that the Burgess Shale as a paleocommunity was highly heterogeneous in both its taxonomic and ecological composition. Shifting abiotic and environmental variables are determined to be more significant in the long-term structuring of Burgess Shale communities than species interactions such as predation, which was previously considered paramount.

Keywords: Burgess Shale
Cambrian
Community ecology
Evolutionary Biology
Paleoecology
Paleontology
Advisor: Caron, Jean-Bernard