VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Doing "accomplished" teaching : discourses and performances of English language arts pedagogy in National Board Certification

Over the past few decades, teaching performance assessments (TPAs) have proliferated in credentialing and evaluating teachers. In contrast to traditional, one-off measures of teacher knowledge and practice, such as standardized tests or standalone classroom observations, TPAs use portfolio-based assessments to capture multiple, complex dimensions of teaching (Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000). The National Board Certification, the focus of this dissertation, is one such TPA. As TPAs have become part of "multiple and often contradictory" discourses of education reform and accountability (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001), they play an increasing role in defining what counts as teacher knowledge and effective practice. In this dissertation, I focus on the National Board Certification process for English Language Arts (ELA). Using sociocultural theory and the lens of figured worlds, I argue that the National Board Standards and assessment are discourses with embedded ideologies, and teachers' representations of teaching within TPAs are situated performances. Through analysis of the National Board ELA Standards, I identify ideological contradictions and inconsistencies within the assessment itself. Drawing on data from teachers' National Board portfolios and interviews, I highlight the range of interpretations of the assessment among teachers as they sought to represent themselves and get recognized as "accomplished" ELA teachers. Finally, I discuss potential implications for this work, including redesigning TPAs to encourage expansive pedagogies and questioning the logic and institutional function of assessments. I also suggest avenues for future research and practice in teacher education

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Levine Sarah L. (Sarah Loewenberg)
Williamson Peter
Glazer Jeremy 
Rosa Jonathan
Donepezil mitigates memory deficits in Siberian hamsters

The purpose of this study was to test the effect of donepezil (Aricept) on cognition in circadian arrhythmic Siberian hamsters, an animal model that mimics the breakdown of circadian rhythms in humans. This is because circadian dysfunction is known to accelerate cognitive impairment in not only Alzheimer’s disease, but adult- onset circadian dysfunction. Male Siberian hamsters were split into circadian-intact and circadian-arrhythmic groups and randomly assigned to either vehicle or donepezil treatment group. Animals in the donepezil treatment group received daily oral administration of 3.0mg/kg of donepezil dissolved in sugar water for 21 days. The vehicle group received the same amount of plain sugar water for the same amount of time. All animals were tested before and after treatment in a spontaneous alternation (SA) T-maze to measure cognition and spatial mapping. Surprisingly, the daily sugar water restored rhythms in all animals (vehicle and donepezil). Animals treated with donepezil performed significantly better in the alternation test than did the vehicle-treated group.

Keywords: Biology
Chronobiology
Circadian rhythms
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Thesis
Advisor: Heller H. Craig
Sapolsky Robert M.
Ruby Norman F.
Double coset Markov chains

Markov chains and random processes are ubiquitous in statistical and scientific applications. The main contribution of this thesis is to introduce the study of Markov chains on double cosets. Given a group and two sub-groups, the double cosets define equivalence classes of the group. A random walk on the group then induces a random processes on the set of equivalence classes. When is this random process also a Markov chain? Surprisingly, some of the examples capture scientifically (and mathematically) interesting special cases. This thesis develops a general theory for double coset Markov chains. Several cases are investigated in detail. Special attention is given to the example in which parabolic subgroups of the permutation group are indexed by contingency tables. In each of the examples the general theory developed here is applied to understand the eigenvalues, eigenfunctions, and the mixing times of the Markov chains. In the second half of this thesis two more new random processes are studied: A Markov chain on a space of coalescent trees (also related to a double coset space) and an urn model with an infinite color space. The long-term behavior of each is analyzed

Keywords: Mathematics.
Advisor: Diaconis Persi
Chatterjee Sourav
Palacios Roman Julia Adela
Down-to-earth dark matter : novel terrestrial mechanisms for dark matter detection

There is overwhelming evidence for the existence of dark matter, a component of our universe which is more than five times as abundant as the visible matter we are familiar with. Yet despite longstanding experimental efforts to search for non-gravitational interactions of dark matter, the detection of any such interactions has thus far eluded us. There has therefore arisen an interest within the field in novel methods to detect dark matter. In this thesis, I will outline two new methods which utilize Earth to detect two different types of dark matter. The first searches for an oscillating magnetic field signal of ultralight bosonic dark matter at the surface of the Earth. In analogy to existing cavity/shielded experiments searching for ultralight dark matter, the signal arises because the ground and ionosphere function as conducting cavity walls between which dark matter can source a magnetic field. Based on this effect, we undertake an analysis of global geomagnetic field data from the SuperMAG collaboration in order to set bounds on dark photon and axionlike dark matter parameter spaces. In the latter part of this thesis, I will discuss a proposal to use ancient rocks, dubbed paleo-detectors, as detectors for WIMP dark matter. Over the past O(100) Myr, WIMPs may have induced nuclear recoils within these minerals that disrupted their crystalline structure, leaving long-lived tracks that can be read out today with precision microscopy techniques. I will show that paleo-detectors can give unique sensitivity to dark matter substructure within the Milky Way. This is because paleo-detectors are not only sensitive to the local dark matter density near the Earth today, but also to the dark matter density along Earth's entire galactic trajectory over the lifetime of a paleo-detector

Keywords: Physics.
Advisor: Graham Peter (Peter Wickelgren)
Dimopoulos Savas
Toro Natalia
Dwelling in displacement : land rights and heritage activism in post-apartheid Johannesburg

Questions of land rights deeply structure post-apartheid life in urban South Africa. This dissertation explores land activism through two heritage museums in Johannesburg, South Africa: The Fietas Museum in Fietas, and the Sophiatown Museum in Sophiatown. Both areas suffered catastrophic forced removals under apartheid, and both former and current residents continue to grapple with the implications of land-based justice in the present day. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Johannesburg, this dissertation first argues that as a result of the restitutional delays of a market-driven land claims process, these heritage museums have emerged to catalyze land restitution both within and outside of the legal system. However, these efforts contribute to new forms of displacement and to new forms of dwelling, both for former and current residents. Moreover, I do not position displacement and dwelling as oppositional: instead, I extend a recent trend in the anthropology of migration to retheorize displacement both as physical mobility and as the psychic condition of being unsettled in place. Relatedly, I find that the Sophiatown and Fietas museums emplace certain groups while simultaneously displacing others; mount certain exhibitions by refusing to mount others; champion certain events in history while simultaneously deemphasizing others; and exist within a geographic footprint while simultaneously engaging in political, economic, social, and digital forms of advocacy that may extend their reach beyond their physically inscribed borders. Far from being exceptional in this way, my research instead points to a more general dynamic between absence and presence within heritage sites: there is value in attending to the often "unmarked" (Phelan 1996) silences that give shape to the commemorative acts, museological spaces, objects, and histories that become 'heritagized' through the practices of collecting and display. This dissertation consequently proposes a new framework for analyzing the heritage site that attends equally to absence as to presence

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Ebron Paulla A.
Meskell Lynn
Hecht Gabrielle
Inoue Miyako
Witz Leslie
Dynamic matching : a queueing perspective

This dissertation focuses on frictions that arise in various dynamic marketplaces such as kidney exchange, labor markets, and logistics. The central question that we ask is how do heterogeneity, network structure, liquidity, and stochasticity, which cause these frictions, affect our ability to perform simple policies that can achieve efficient outcomes? In Chapters 2 and 3, we analyze dynamic matching markets. When agents arrive to the market over time, an inherent trade-off arises between short- and long-term allocative efficiency. For example, kidney exchange platforms, which arrange exchanges between incompatible patient-donor pairs, can form a match as soon as it becomes feasible, or wait for the market to thicken in order to generate exchanges that yield more life years from transplants. This trade-off raises several questions. How to optimally match agents over time? If the market is cleared periodically, how does the period length affect allocative efficiency at different times? How does stochastic demand impact desirable clearing times? We study these questions from a queueing perspective, and we propose simple batching and greedy policies with a strong performance guarantee: these policies (nearly) maximize the total match value simultaneously at all times. This suggests that the tension between short- and long-term allocative efficiency is essentially moot. In Chapter 4, we analyze scrip systems, where such systems serve an alternative to sustain cooperation, improve efficiency, and mitigate free riding in economies without monetary transfers. Agents request and provide service over time, and scrips are used as artificial currency to pay for service provision. We study the possibility of agents sustaining cooperation when the market is thin, in the sense that only few agents are available to provide the requested service. We analyze the stability of the scrip distribution of agents, assuming that among the available agents, the one with the minimum amount of scrips is selected to provide service. The analysis suggests that even with minimal liquidity in the market, cooperation can be sustained by balancing service provisions among agents. Simulations based on kidney exchange data propose that scrip systems can lead to efficient outcomes in kidney exchange by sustaining cooperation between hospitals

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Ashlagi Itai
Gurvich Itai
Lo Irene (Management science professor)
Dynamic navigational coding in an unchanging environment

In order to support complex behavior in a dynamic world, the brain must integrate internal conditions with external context. For example, during navigation an animal must combine its internal goals with sensory information to choose the appropriate actions and delineate con-textual episodes from continuous experience. The medial entorhinal cortex, a key navigational brain region, may support such dynamic integration through activity changes in single neurons, a phenomenon known as remapping. But previous studies have yet to uncover the specific impact of internal factors on remapping. Furthermore, successful integration of different internal and external factors likely relies on the coordination of many neurons, but it is not known how large populations of entorhinal neurons transition between different activity patterns together. I describe our discovery of dynamic, reversible, and population-wide remapping of spatial representations in the medial entorhinal cortex in an unchanging virtual environment. These remapping events were synchronized across hundreds of neurons, differentially impacted navigational cell types, and correlated with changes in running speed. I show that the neural population maintains a stable position estimate—despite widespread changes in spatial coding—through geometric alignment of the neural activity manifolds. I also discuss extensions of my primary work, including an exploration of within versus across environment remapping and preliminary modeling results indicating that geometrically aligned manifolds are a general solution to the challenge of simultaneous navigation and context discrimination. Together my findings reveal the incredible capacity of higher-order cortex to rapidly reconfigure largescale neural representations in response to behavioral state changes, tying into a larger body of emerging studies of dynamic neural coding and laying the groundwork for future research directions

Advisor: Giocomo Lisa
Druckmann Shaul
Hestrin Shaul
Shah Nirao
Dynamic operations over networks : extracting and protecting information

In this dissertation, I investigate the interplay between information and networks in dynamic operations. For this purpose, I study two related settings where a decision maker interacts with information while dynamically operating over a network. In the first setting, this interaction manifests itself as a goal of protecting sensitive information and is the focus of Chapter 1. More specifically, I analyze how a decision maker can efficiently route over a given network without revealing the destination as a result of taking actions over the network. In the second setting, the goal of the decision maker is one of learning, or extracting information, through interactions with a network. In Chapter 2, I study this problem in the context of forensic investigations and address the question of efficiently reconstructing an unobservable network in order to find a target hidden among its vertices. Finally, in Chapter 3, I treat the problems of extracting and protecting information jointly and consider a decision maker who aims to protect sensitive information while conducting a search. In this final chapter, I again analyze the same forensic technique from Chapter 2 and add an additional objective of privacy

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Wein Lawrence
Xu Kuang
Saban Daniela
Dynamic stochastic models for experimentation and matching

The goal of this thesis is to study key questions arising in matching and experimentation in time-varying stochastic models. In the first part, we study optimal design and statistical inference of switchback experiments. In the second part, we focus on an optimal matching policy of a centralized dynamic matching market

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Blanchet Jose H.
Johari Ramesh
Glynn Peter W.
Dynamics of Mode-Switching in Neural Networks: How nonlinear systems generate behaviour via a thermodynamic process

Animals engage in specific motivated actions, such as feeding and drinking, to maintain homeostasis. However, the neural correlates of motivational states--and the mechanisms through which animals transduce internal need into action--remain largely unknown. In this thesis, we study motivational drives by examining what happens when they come into conflict. We begin by developing a simple behavioural task to interrogate the balance of homeostatic needs in mice. While the mouse performs this task, we record activity from a large population of neurons distributed across its brain. We characterize the dynamics of these neurons using dimensionality reduction techniques, with the goal of distilling our dataset into its most informative components. To understand the mechanism underlying behavioural mode-switching, we train a recurrent neural network to capture the salient features of its biological counterpart. We then reverse-engineer this computational model by linearizing in the vicinity of its stable states, demonstrating the existence of two basins of attraction--corresponding, physically, to food-seeking and water-seeking behaviour--joined by a smooth line of intermediate semi-stable states. Finally, we discuss how the system's motion along this continuous manifold can give rise to two robust and distinct actions: cue-driven eating and drinking. In order to do so, we recast our discussion of homeostatic need selection as a thermodynamic process, illustrating this analogy with an out-of-equilibrium Ising model that reproduces the relevant behaviour of our biological system.

Keywords:  Department of Physics
Computational neuroscience
Theoretical neuroscience
Nonlinear dynamical systems
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Thesis
Advisor: Luo Liqun
Deisseroth Karl
Kachru Shamit
The E. coli whole-cell modeling project : growth rate control and environmental responses

Whole-cell modeling is an approach to building fine-grained computational models that accounts for every molecule and the known mechanisms and interactions of gene products in a cell. The E. coli Whole-Cell Modeling Project applies this approach to the model organism E. coli by integrating data and mechanistic understanding of E. coli generated by many labs and has the potential to lead to rapid biological discovery while providing a means of assessing the body of work representing our collective understanding of E. coli physiology. Creating a model of this scale can provide deep biological insights into complex regulatory networks and growth control, identify inconsistencies between datasets used to construct the model, demonstrate emergent behavior to suggest novel behavior arising from complex interactions, and make biological predictions that have been experimentally validated. Growth and environmental responses are essential for living organisms like bacteria to survive and adapt to constantly changing environments and the model can also be used to better understand these processes. With the inclusion of regulation and kinetics rates, the E. coli model exhibits a mechanistic growth rate that is dependent on the environment and internal simulation state and no longer confined to environmental growth conditions used to parameterize the model. Importantly, the model also demonstrates more appropriate responses to environmental limitations and shifts and provides a means to assess the factors that control growth rate in the context of the entire cell. This sets a critical foundation for expanding the model to new environmental conditions and allows for additional predictive capabilities

Keywords: Bioengineering.
Advisor: Covert Markus
Bintu Lacramioara
Spakowitz Andrew James
Early relationship development : a prospective longitudinal study on new online dating relationships

The beginning of a relationship's trajectory, after two partners first meet but before they become an official couple, is a period of uncertain, potentially turbulent, and often exciting growth. All relationships -- successful or not -- go through these early stages and the decisions made during this period could be life-changing. What does this early period of relationship development look like and how do we know whether a new potential relationship will succeed or fail? The present dissertation longitudinally and prospectively followed 82 single online daters across 12 weeks to study real-world early relationship development as it occurs. I tested and found support for the positive association between sociosexuality and the number of potential partners a person is romantically interested in at a given period of time. I then explored a subsample of the data, focusing on new potential relationships (i.e., relationships in which participants met the potential partner within 72 hours of first reporting on them), using descriptive analyses, survival analyses, and growth modeling. I found that there is great variation in relationship trajectories during this early period -- with each trajectory differing in their intercepts, slopes, and shapes -- and this variation made it difficult to capture a systematic effect of time on romantic interest in the growth models. From the survival analyses, I found that most new potential relationships do not last beyond a week, and of the ones that do last, most become romantic after about three weeks of dating. These findings provide insight into early relationship development and future directions for the fields of close relationships and communication

Keywords: Communication.
Advisor: Hancock Jeff
Eastwick Paul W. 
Harari Gabriella
Ram Nilam
Early Warning Signal Detection for Ross River Virus in Queensland, Australia

Over the past few decades, there have been resurgences in vector-borne diseases that may have been driven by factors such as climate change, drug resistance, and urbanization. To predict these changes, forecasting methods and simulation models have been developed, but they are difficult to apply to vector-borne diseases due to limited case data available and the complex dynamics of arthropod vectors. Having the ability to predict imminent outbreaks before cases increase is imperative to mitigate the consequences of early exponential growth. One promising approach applies the theory of critical slowing down, which predicts that as a system approaches a critical transition (for example, from disease elimination to resurgence), its ability to return to stability following minor disturbances diminishes. This phenomenon results in particular patterns in disease incidence that are detectable as characteristic changes in summary statistics prior to the critical transition. Additionally, temperature strongly influences mosquito traits and life cycles, which in turn affect disease transmission. Detection of thermal thresholds, temperature moving from an inhibitory range to a suitable range for transmission, can allow us to take timely preventative actions prior to a potential outbreak. We tested for early warning signals of critical slowing down of Ross River virus in Queensland, Australia, by calculating nine summary statistics across a rolling window. The summary statistics were then compared to the temperature suitability for transmission (defined as relative R0(T) from a previous model) to determine whether the system crossed a thermal threshold. Five of the 15 HHS regions exhibited critical slowing down, primarily in variance, skewness, kurtosis, autocorrelation, and index of dispersion. Gold Coast exhibited the strongest evidence for critical slowing down occurring when temperatures crossed a threshold between 18.2-18.3 degrees Celsius. This shows that early warning signal detection can aid in predicting disease outbreaks and determining possible influential variables such as temperature.

Keywords:  Department of Biology
Ross River Virus
infectious disease
temperature
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Thesis
Advisor: Mordecai Erin
Petrov Dmitri