VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Role-playing gender [electronic resource] : effects of avatar sexuality on self-perception of gender identity

The use of digital avatars to represent individuals in virtual worlds and social media has rapidly become commonplace. Highly vivid animated avatars are no longer restricted to elite video gaming. As avatar use increases, the effects of human avatar interaction become increasingly important to explore and understand. One unexpected phenomenon of widespread avatar use is the large number of individuals who choose to use exclusively opposite gender avatars as self-representations, a choice to "bend" their virtual gender when online. Up to 80% of players participate in virtual gender-bending at some point while gaming. There is ample evidence that the behavior occurs but little research has been conducted exploring potential effects of gender-opposite avatar play. This paper describes an empirical effort to identify and quantify effects of cross-gender avatar play on self-perception of gender identity. The study described herein 1) outlines and defines what masculinity and femininity mean in the context of fantasy avatars, and 2) measures and analyzes effects of opposite gender avatars on self-perception of gender identity. The observed outcome provides initial evidence that cross-gender avatar play affects self-perception of gender for a significant number of individuals. Both males and females respond to playing opposite gender avatars by adjusting their self-perception of gender role toward their natural gender. Implications for avatar design, entertainment media development, and future research are discussed.

Keywords: Communication.
Advisor: Reeves Byron
Bailenson Jeremy advisor. Thesis advisor
Turner Fred advisor. Thesis advisor
Walton Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti) advisor. Thesis advisor
The roles of competition, behavioral plasticity and sensory perception in the foraging behavior of an intertidal limpet [electronic resource]

All animals move during some part of their life cycle, for reasons ranging from finding food, shelter and mates, to avoiding predation, overpopulation and disease. Understanding these movements and their causes is key to understanding the biology, ecology and behavior of animals, and provides critical information to conservationists and managers. However, the simultaneous collection of detailed, small-scale animal movement and environmental data remains a challenge, in part due to the relatively large size of most animals and their habitats. In this thesis, I circumvent this challenge by exploring the movement ecology of a limpet, Lottia austrodigitalis, which is approximately 1 cm in size and utilizes approximately 1 m² of rocky, upper intertidal habitat. L. austrodigitalis forages for microscopic algae, or microalgae, twice a day during high tides. I ask: How does L. austrodigitalis grazing and temperature affect microalgae, and does L. austrodigitalis compete for food with another overlapping spieces, Lottia scabra? Do time of day, tidal height, temperature and significant wave height play a role in L. austrodigitalis foraging activity, and does L. austrodigitalis adapt its movement behaviors in response to changes in microalgal abundance and distribution? Does L. austrodigitalis exhibit personality traits that limit its ability to adapt? How might sensory perception play a role? I found that L. austrodigitalis grazing and high temperatures negatively affect microalgae, and that L. austrodigitalis does not partition its food resources with L. scabra. In addition, I found that L. austrodigitalis activity does correlate with abiotic factors, but that it does not change its movement behaviors in response to food in the field, which is relatively uniform. In the lab, however, L. austrodigitalis exhibits behavioral plasticity as it forages across patchy food landscapes that differ in microalgal distribution and availability, and that plasticity appears to be limited by animal personality. Finally, I found that sensory perception may play a large role in L. austrodigitalis foraging success, although further research is required to better understand limpet sensory capabilities. These results suggest that limpets and other intertidal animals can serve as model organisms for movement ecology, and help us understand the possible roles of competition, abiotic environmental factors, behavioral plasticity, animal personality and sensory perception in animal movement.

Keywords: Biology.
Advisor: Denny Mark W.
De Leo Giulio A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Micheli Fiorenza advisor. Thesis advisor
Roopnarine Peter
Watanabe James Minoru
Roles of the cellular protein, PACT, in hepatitis C virus infection [electronic resource]

PACT, a cellular double-stranded RNA binding protein, was observed to support HCV infection. It was found to specifically support HCV RNA replication in a manner which was independent of its known roles in microRNA biogenesis, PKR activation and sumoylation.

Keywords: Microbiology and Immunology.
Advisor: Sarnow P. (Peter) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Arvin Ann M. advisor. Thesis advisor
Carette Jan
Kay Mark Allan advisor. Thesis advisor
The sages and the world [electronic resource] : categorizing culture in early rabbinic law

This study treats two closely related interests in the early rabbinic legal canon: the practice of ethnography and the theory of culture. It argues that both were central to the early rabbis' own project as they defined and questioned the limits of their legal self-consciousness. It shows how they used legal categories to engage in ethnographic inquiry and to generate theories of culture by integrating descriptions with traditional norms, and, in the process, debating the relationship between law and culture as such. Further, this study identifies specific parallels and broad congruences between rabbis' uses of these categories and those of contemporary Greek and Latin sources; arguing not for influence but for similar kinds of curiosity, reflected in diverse genres of ancient knowledge-production, including exegesis, philosophy, and jurisprudence. Finally, this study analyzes how cultural inquiry shaped what it was like to be an early rabbi and a subject for whom this law was a formative worldview. Responding to recent arguments for the early rabbis' political marginality, this study asks what sense and use they made of that very marginality, reframing their role not only as authoritative experts but also as cultural observers and interpreters----including in the medium of law itself. Whereas past work on each category that this study examines--translated "magic", "manners", "the customary" and "local custom"--has applied interpretive dichotomies between accommodation and resistance, this study argues that their worldview is much better characterized as dialectical. It has both tendencies, but integrates them into a new orientation. In order to capture that orientation, this study articulates a widely applicable, fine-grained, context-sensitive theory of how rabbis integrated curiosity and traditional norms through law by creating discourses which mark, challenge, and theorize the fundamental tension between what people really do and what they should.

Keywords: Religious Studies.
Advisor: Fonrobert Charlotte Elisheva primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Bashir Shahzad
Deutsch Nathaniel
Safran Gabriella
Scalable estimation and inference for massive linear mixed models with crossed random effects [electronic resource]

With modern electronic activity, large crossed data sets are increasingly common, with factors such as users and items. It is often appropriate to model them with crossed random effects, since specific levels are temporary. Their size provides challenges for statistical analysis. For such large data sets, the computational costs of estimation and inference (time, space, and communication) should grow at most linearly with the sample size and the algorithms should be parallelizable. Both traditional maximum likelihood estimation and numerous Markov chain Monte Carlo Bayesian algorithms take superlinear time in order to obtain good parameter estimates in the simple two-factor crossed random effects model and linear mixed model with two crossed random effects. We propose moment based, parallelizable algorithms that, with at most linear cost, estimate regression coefficients and variance components and measure the uncertainties of those estimates. These estimates are consistent and asymptotically Gaussian. When run on simulated normally distributed data, our algorithms perform competitively with maximum likelihood methods. We apply the algorithms to some real-world data from Stitch Fix where the crossed random effects correspond to clients and items. The random effects analysis is able to account for the increased variance due to intra-client and intra-item correlations in the data, but ignoring the correlation structure can lead to standard error underestimates of over 10-fold.

Keywords: Statistics.
Advisor: Owen Art B. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Mackey Lester
Tibshirani Robert advisor. Thesis advisor
Scalable low-latency indexes for a key-value store [electronic resource]

Many large-scale key-value storage systems sacrifice features like secondary indexing and/or strong consistency in favor of scalability or performance. This limits the ease and efficiency of application development on such systems. Implementing secondary indexing in a large-scale memory based system is challenging because the goals for low latency, high scalability, strong consistency and high availability often conflict with each other. This dissertation shows how a large-scale key-value storage system can be extended to provide secondary indexes while meeting those goals. The resulting architecture is called Scalable Low-Latency Indexes for a Key-Value Store, or SLIK. It extends a standard key-value store to enable multiple secondary keys for each object and allows lookups and range queries on these keys via secondary indexes. SLIK allows indexes to be partitioned and distributed independently of the data in tables in order to ensure scalability. Locating objects and corresponding index entries on different servers can lead to potential consistency issues. However, SLIK provides strong consistency guarantees using a lightweight ordered write approach. While SLIK stores indexes in DRAM to enable low latency, it ensures that the index information is durable and quickly recovered using backups in case of crashes. This design was implemented in RAMCloud, a distributed in-memory key-value storage system. This implementation performs indexed reads in 11--13 μs and writes in 30--37 μs, which is approximately twice the latency of basic non-indexed reads and writes in RAMCloud. It supports indexes spanning thousands of nodes, and yields linear scalability for throughput.

Advisor: Ousterhout John K. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Garcia-Molina Hector advisor. Thesis advisor
Winstein Keith advisor. Thesis advisor
Scanning SQUID Microscopy of a Lanthanum Barium Copper Oxide Superconducting Thin Film

In this thesis we design, perform, and report the results of a scanning SQUID experiment that studies light’s effect on thin films of Lanthanum Barium Copper Oxide (LBCO), the first discovered high temperature superconductor. This work builds off of the research of previous scientists who studied photo-enhanced superconductivity in Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide, another cuprate like LBCO. With scanning SQUID, we are able to not only measure, but spatially resolve changes in LBCO’s diamagnetic response due to illumination. This research could help us understand the mechanism behind photo-induced effects in certain superconductors as well as offer an insight into the microscopic origin of high temperature superconductivity.

Keywords: High Temperature Superconductivity
SQUID
Scanning SQUID
LBCO
Lanthanum Barium Copper Oxide
Susceptibility
Thin Film
Illumination
LED
Low Temperature
Thesis
Advisor: Moler Kathryn A.
Goldhaber-Gordon David
A Scarlet letter? [electronic resource] : institutional messages about academic probation can, but need not, elicit shame and stigma

An important institutional and societal dilemma is how to notify people when they are not meeting performance standards, such as in placing people on a probationary status at school or work. A critical and underappreciated aspect of this dilemma, this dissertation suggests, is that people commonly understand themselves to be in relation with valued institutions that structure their lives. Notification that one is not meeting standards, especially when the notification comes from a valued institution itself, may place this relationship at risk. Insofar as the relationship is valued and experienced as a sense of belonging, notification may lead people to feel ashamed, be concerned that they are stigmatized, and ultimately withdraw from the context, even when that is not adaptive and not what institutional actors intend. Across nine studies, I examine these processes within the context of college students being placed on academic probation. College administrators overwhelmingly reported that they intend probation to both inform students of unsatisfactory performance and support them in remedying it. Students readily identified the first intention from typical probation notification letters but not the second. Consistent with the theory that placement on probation functions a threat to a valued relationship, students who had previously been placed on probation described the probation process as characterized by feelings of shame and stigma. They articulated experiencing worries about belonging and devaluation and identified the probation notification letter as a salient aspect of their experience. Is it inevitable that probation notification letters elicit high levels of shame and stigma? No. Across diverse student samples, "psychologically attuned" probation notification letters designed to explicitly address concerns about belonging and devaluation reduced students' feelings of shame, concerns about stigmatization, and intentions to withdraw from college relative to typical probation notification letters. Can psychologically attuned probation letters to also improve students' academic outcomes in addition to their psychological outcomes? A randomized field intervention with five cohorts of students being placed on probation yielded some, but inconsistent, evidence that they may. A design process to develop contextually specific psychologically attuned probation letters is discussed.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Cohen Geoffrey L. (Geoffrey Lawrence) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Obradović Jelena (Education professor) advisor. Thesis advisor
Walton Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti) advisor. Thesis advisor
Schools of fiction [electronic resource]

This dissertation argues that American literature played a central role in the development of the modern school system at the turn of the twentieth century. Modern education is often associated with the rise of the technosciences and the marginalization of literary studies. Even within English departments feelings of crisis have predominated since the founding of the discipline more than a century ago. "Schools of Fiction" examines the work of writers and educators side by side to demonstrate how American literature became an animating force in scholastic life after the Civil War, when the modern program for formal education, extending from kindergarten to graduate school, was first coming into existence. If writers compelled educators to reexamine the school and its function in American society during this period, educators also pressured writers to reimagine their relationship to the growing audience of twentieth-century readers. It was the reciprocal, often combative exchanges between literary discourse and its institutional context, this dissertation argues, that produced what we now think of as modern American literature and enabled the school to become, in John Dewey's words, "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.".

Advisor: Jones Gavin Roger
McGurl Mark
Ruttenburg Nancy advisor. Thesis advisor
The scramble for political order [electronic resource] : state breakdown and armed group proliferation in civil war

What explains the proliferation of armed groups during civil wars? Why do some civil wars become more fragmented than others? Many explanations for armed group fragmentation focus on characteristics of populations or armed groups themselves. In this dissertation I argue for the central importance of another variable: the strength of the state. All civil wars entail the loss of a state's monopoly on violence, but states can lose that monopoly in various ways. Variation in state strength across these different pathways into civil war largely determines the opportunity structure within which armed groups mobilize, and ultimately shapes the degree of fragmentation. State breakdowns—which encompass political paralysis and the collapse of security—are engines of fragmentation, and have a distinct logic from insurgency or conventional separatist wars. I develop and test aspects of the theory in three empirical sections. First, I explore the dynamics of state breakdown in Syria, leveraging a novel dataset compiled by The Carter Center of more than 3,000 YouTube videos announcing Syrian armed group formations. Second, I study the relationship between autocratic regime failures and armed group appearances in the universe of civil wars from 1946-2016 using the PRIO/UCDP Armed Conflict Dataset (ACD). Third, through a medium-N study of conflict episodes in modern Iraq, I contrast cases of state breakdown with cases of insurgency and conventional war.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Fearon James D. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Crenshaw Martha
Weingast Barry R. advisor. Thesis advisor
Weinstein Jeremy M. advisor. Thesis advisor
Search of new physics with boosted higgs boson in hadronic final states with ATLAS detector [electronic resource]

The discovery of a Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) confirms the validity of the Standard Model (SM) in the description of particle interactions at electroweak scale. However, radioactive corrections to the Higgs mass drives its value to the model's validity limit, indicating either extreme fine-tuning or the presence of new physics at higher energy scale. Since 2015, the LHC starts its Run 2 journey with unprecedented center of mass energy of 13 TeV. Along with increase in luminosity, this greatly extends the sensitivity of ATLAS experiment to heavy new particles at TeV scale. In particular, many new physics models beyond the Standard Model manifest themselves through significant coupling to the Higgs boson in decays of new particles to a Higgs boson and other SM particles. In this work, two searches for resonances decaying to either pair of Higgs bosons or a Higgs boson associated with another SM vector boson in all hadronic final states are presented using data collected by ATLAS during Run 2. Due to the heavy mass of new resonance, Higgs boson and W/Z boson can be boosted to large momentum, causing their decay products to be collimated. The dominant H-> bb decay mode also provides a clear signature through displaced vertices. A powerful boosted boson identification technique fully exploiting such jet substructure and heavy flavor information is therefore developed and used in both searches to suppress the dominant multijet backgrounds and largely enhance search sensitivity in particular for very high resonance mass. In the absence of significant excess, new exclusion limits are set on benchmark new physics models.

Keywords: Physics.
Advisor: Su Dong
Graham Peter (Peter Wickelgren) advisor. Thesis advisor
Schwartzman Ariel G.
Tompkins Lauren Alexandra
Seismic rotational data [electronic resource] : acquisition, processing and applications

Ground rotations as a result of seismic energy propagation are one of the least studied phenomena in seismology, despite the fact that medium rotations are inherent to elastic continuum theory, and have been known to exist for as long as seismic measurements have been made. However, the industry acquisition standard is to measure three components of translation on land, pressure in water, or both translations and pressure on the ocean bottom. There is no industry standard sensor that records seismic rotations. In this thesis I show how to add rotational data to the traditional seismic processing workflow. I conduct a field survey to show that rotations can be recorded using magnetometers. I combine translational and rotational land data and show that the integrated data can be used to separate wave modes, and thus attenuate strong surface wave modes that obscure reflection data. I also use a machine learning algorithm to automatically identify particular wave modes in combined translational and rotational data, and show that the rotations provide added features to the data which facilitate wavemode determination.

Keywords: Geophysics.
Advisor: Biondi Biondo
Mavko Gary
Ronen Joshua
Seismotectonics of the central United States and probabilistic assessment of injection induced earthquakes [electronic resource]

I explore geomechanics of faults and fractures in the central United States. In chapter 2 I show the significant increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma, and it's relationship with saltwater disposal operations. I hypothesize that increased fluid pressure from injection unclamps Oklahoma faults. In chapter 3, I probabilistically explore the known faults in Oklahoma and assuming a pressure perturbation on each, I evaluate the probability of induced fault slip, given uncertainties in mechanics constrained from moment tensor inversion and confirmed with wellbore stress indicators. The result is a traffic light colored fault map. In chapter 4, this hypothesis is generalized into a graphical user interface and probabilistic geomechanics are combined with a radial flow hydrologic model to evaluate the probability that a known fault might exceed coulomb slip criteria. Chapter 5 moves away from induced seismicity to constrain stresses and look at natural fractures in the Piceance Basin, Colorado, exploring the potential for deviated drilling in the Mesaverde section, but fails to add to the case that this is warranted. Chapter 6 applies ambient noise tomography to the central and eastern US, exploring velocity and attenuation around the New Madrid fault zone.

Keywords: Geophysics.
Advisor: Zoback Mark D. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Beroza Gregory C. (Gregory Christian) advisor. Thesis advisor
Mavko Gary
Sense of motion [electronic resource] : tactile sensing for robotic locomotion

This thesis explores the design and use of tactile sensors to enable small mobile robots to better understand the world on which they are walking, running, and climbing. Our goal is to extend the capabilities of small, mobile robotic systems through the development and application of low-cost, light-weight, robust tactile sensors capable of measuring dynamic contact events and forces associated with locomotion. Specifically, we explore capacitive tactile sensor designs that enable the measurement of shear and normal forces with near equal sensitivity and dynamic performance. We demonstrate the use of these sensors on two robotic platforms. The first is a small hexapedal robot with hybrid wheel-legs that interface with a variety of rough outdoor terrains. The second is a miniature robot that uses bio-inspired controllable adhesives to maintain sustained and forceful contact with the world. In both cases we show that feedback from integrated tactile sensors enables these robots to identify key features of the surfaces on which they are traveling, leading to improved mobility and robust behavior.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Cutkosky Mark R. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Kenny Thomas William advisor. Thesis advisor
Okamura Allison advisor. Thesis advisor