VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Time for Well-Being

Time for Well-Being is a sociological examination of how socioeconomic status and the social experience of time jointly influence well-being in formative life course conjuncture periods. It is based on qualitative and quantitative analyses examining the relationships between the social experience of time and sociodemographic characteristics. I draw on Interaction Ritual Theory, the Theory of Conjunctural Action, theorizing from the sociology of emotions, the sociology of the life course, and from the interdisciplinary literature focusing on the individual and social experience of time to show how the temporal characteristics of a particular context are instantiated by the intersections of socioeconomic and gendered inequalities, shaping individual and community well-being. Chapter 2 honors the perspectives of first-time fathers, showing that both SES and the sociocultural experience of time are salient when it comes to family structure change, with ramifications for inequalities in well-being. Through the lens of Interaction Ritual Theory, Chapter 3 examines how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped the socioemotional experience of time, aggregating up to community well-being. Chapter 4 incorporates both qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine how socioeconomic and neighborhood characteristics influence the experience and ramifications of time scarcity in early retirement. Through this mixed-methods approach, my dissertation contributes to the sociology of everyday life, the sociology of the life course, and to the sociology of time by providing a rare case study on the relationship between sociotemporal disparities and well-being.

Advisor: Bloemraad, Irene
Schneider, Daniel
Synthetic Approaches to the Pupukeanane Natural Products and the Integration of Computer-Assisted Synthesis

This dissertation describes our synthesis of the pupukeanane natural products and our application of emerging computer-assisted synthesis techniques to the synthesis of these compounds. In Chapter 1, I review the biosynthesis, biological activities, and previous syntheses of natural products bearing the pupukeanane and allopupukeanane skeleton. Eighteen syntheses are detailed and analyzed according to the key C–C bond forming steps that allow for the synthesis of these complex, tricyclic cores./nChapter 2, details our efforts to develop a Pd(II)-mediated cascade to form the key bicycles that represent the core of the pupukeanane skeleton and the allopupukeanane skeleton. This approach has culminated in a 10-step formal synthesis of 2-isocyanoallopupukeanane and is the first to provide a strategy toward enantioenriched material. Additionally, a late-stage intermediate bearing the allopupukeanane skeleton is leveraged to allow unified access to the pupukeanane core./nIn Chapter 3, an overview of the state-of-the-art in retrosynthetic planning programs is provided. The advent of retrosynthesis occurred nearly 50 years ago, along with the dream of realizing fully automated synthetic planning. In this review, I classify types of planners that are used and the algorithms and computational systems that underlie them. Additionally, I provide analyses of the types of compounds that these programs are equipped to analyze and the limitations in applying them more generally./nFollowing this review, Chapter 4 details the results of SynthiaTM, an expert-coded synthetic planner that I used to provide synthetic routes to the pupukeanane family. The merits of this program are explored from the lens of academic synthetic chemists and the computer-designed and computer-inspired synthetic strategies are compared and contrasted with previous syntheses of these compounds on which the program has not been explicitly trained.

Advisor: Sarpong, Richmond
Punitive Protection: Child Welfare and Perinatal Regulation in the United States, 1935-2000

Child protective services are the primary agencies authorized by federal law and state policies to intervene with substance using pregnant women and new mothers. This dissertation argues that growing public acceptance of child welfare authority over American families (1950-1980) enabled legislators to expand professional surveillance of substance-using pregnant women (1980-2000). Drawing on archival, survey, legal, and professional journal data, the dissertation demonstrates how administrative shifts in the 1950s-1970s transformed child welfare from a sparsely staffed system broadly focused on a wide range of children’s issues into a sprawling multi-billion-dollar network of agencies narrowly focused on child maltreatment. As their focus narrowed, child welfare workers became increasingly concerned with assessing and preventing risk of child maltreatment. Combined with mandated reporting requirements and funding incentives that favored child removal over family preservation and poverty relief, a focus on risk functioned as a funnel effect, drawing multiple issues into the jurisdictionally contracted purview of child welfare over child maltreatment. As reports of substance-exposed infants grew in the late 1980s, an emphasis on risk assessment and maltreatment prevention enabled a professional framing of the substance-exposed infant as the paradigmatic case of a child at risk. Existing scholarship links regulation of prenatal substance use to the criminalization of poverty or to conservative anti-abortion efforts. These findings confound this narrative, showing that by the 1990s, public and professional opposition had doomed criminalization efforts to failure. Instead, both liberal and conservative legislators harnessed child welfare’s legitimation as a protective authority, committed to reducing maltreatment risks, with substance-exposed infants a paradigmatic example of a child at risk. Building on this bipartisan framing, legislators expanded child welfare authority in substance-exposed infant cases, while reframing family surveillance and child removal as supportive social service interventions.

Advisor: Fox, Cybelle
Bimorph Pinned Dual-Electrode Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (PMUTs) for Sensing and Actuation

Piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs) have advantages to those of traditional ultrasonic transducers in small form factor, low cost, low power consumption, large bandwidth, and good acoustic impedance matching. A bimorph pinned dual-electrode PMUT is developed for improved vibrational displacement, output sound pressure, and electro-mechanical coupling for several demonstration examples, including 3D space imaging, directional loudspeaker, and non-contact temperature sensing. Analytically, an equivalent circuit model has been built for bimorph, pinned dual-electrode PMUTs and finite element simulation result has shown a 380% boost for the sound pressure per volt per area and increased center displacement at the resonant frequency as compared to those of conventional unimorph PMUTs. Experimentally, prototype devices have been designed, fabricated, and tested with a 58% measured increase in the electromechanical coupling factor and pulse-echo tests have shown a 4-meter traveling distance in air under a 133 kHz driving frequency. As a proof-of-concept, a long-distance (>1.5 meters) ultrasound imaging is demonstrated using a 4×4 array prototype system based on the transmit beamforming scheme in air. A small form factor (6×6 mm2) design and a more than 135o field of view have display the capability of real time 3D object detection with up to 125 fps (frames per second) based on the scheme of ultrasound receive beamforming toward applications such as drone navigation, machine vision and so on. A highly directional air-coupled parametric loudspeaker using a single PMUT chip has been validated based on a parametric array design to generate highly directional audible sound with a half power beam width of less than 5 degrees. The multiple audible frequency sound has been generated by using a single chip with 246 PMUT elements in a footprint of 13 × 13 mm toward low-power and portable directional loudspeakers for private communications. In another example, non-contact surface temperature measurements via a single PMUTs array have been established based on the time-of-flight (ToF) changes. The key advantages of this scheme include the independence of surface material properties, e.g. emissivity; the possible integration with an ultrasonic analog front-end circuitry for both transmitting and receiving. A recorded sensitivity of 143 ns/oC has been achieved in non-contact temperature sensing in various media such as air, liquid, and tissue for broad applications.

Advisor: Lin, Liwei
Guatemalan Exiles in Cold War North America, 1954-1996

“Guatemalan Exiles in Cold War North America” relates the history of Guatemala’s Cold War by examining the stories of people who fled the country amid civil war and genocide, and the policymakers in the United States and Mexico who sought to both facilitate and obstruct this movement across borders. In the dissertation, I argue that during the Cold War, Guatemalans’ geographic mobility became an important feature of Guatemala’s domestic politics, and simultaneously played a major role in structuring Guatemala’s position in the international system, particularly its relationships with the United States and Mexico. Significantly for Guatemala’s domestic political development, the ability to move across borders allowed dissident political movements to survive in the short term and continue to influence events in Guatemala. But exile also contributed to these same movements’ decline over time, as exiled politicians and activists struggled to maintain their relevance to a country they had left behind many years earlier. Guatemalans’ movement across borders also created problems for state actors in Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. Policymakers in the United States sought to avoid acknowledgement of human rights abuses carried out by the Guatemalan government, while also accommodating anti-immigrant sentiment in US public opinion. Officials in Mexico sought to maintain traditional policies of nonintervention and liberal asylum rights without alienating their neighbors to the north and south. And in Guatemala, political and military elites sought to limit the damage to their international reputation as people fled state repression.

Advisor: Herman, Rebecca
Positivity Assumption Violations and Longitudinal Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Complex Longitudinal Data Structures

This dissertation addresses positivity assumption violations in observational longitudinal studies with a large number of time-varying covariates by using the data adaptive parameter estimation techniques of Longitudinal Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation (LTMLE) and simulation-based analysis for causal inference in complex longitudinal data settings. The positivity assumption violation poses a problem of identifiability from observed data. It often goes undiagnosed and can threaten valid inference. We develop a new semiparametric bootstrap simulation tool, simreal, for longitudinal data structures designed to simulate data that ”matches” the original, real data in its characteristics. We introduce a variance estimator based approach for detecting positivity assumption violations in complex longitudinal data settings and a roadmap for implementing mitigation options using an extensive simreal simulation analysis. We also introduce a practical positivity violation detection test that can be readily conducted in the ltmle package and can be used to alert users to severe positivity violations causing unreliable statistical inference. Furthermore, in the case of severe positivity assumption violations, we introduce a set of longitudinal realistic rules defined so that if the estimated conditional probability of receiving a treatment, given past treatments and covariates, falls under some user-supplied probability threshold level α, the rule assigns an alternative, viable, and well supported choice. Causal effect models under realistic treatment rules are fully identifiable from the observed data. These results were applied to the longitudinal study of around 3000 hypotensive patients in intensive care units at the onset of septic shock. The goal was to improve the current protocol and determine the optimal time to start the vasopressor treatment. Our results show that introducing vasopressors in the third hour of the critical six hour time period reduces hospital mortality. This result is statistically significant.

Advisor: Hubbard, Alan
van der Laan, Mark
The Judicial Evaluation of Gay Male and Lesbian Parental Fitness in Custody Matters

Abstract: As we reach the end of this decade the current fight for orientation equality appears to be at a crossroads. Formal grants of orientation equality have been numerous over the last few decades, but inequality on the ground, de facto inequality, appears to linger. This dissertation fills holes in the existing scholarship by exploring real-world discrimination in the adjudication of custody disputes against parents labelled by the courts as gay, lesbian or homosexual./nI examine real-world, de facto bias against gay parents in custody adjudications through the use of three separate methodologies: semi-structured interviews of gay parents (and their attorneys), a textual analysis of judicial decisions available through Lexis and Westlaw, and a randomized, controlled experiment. I find that gay parents and their attorneys report significant anti-homosexual bias in the custody adjudication process and on the fringes of that process, a significant difference in bias across both parental gender and gender of the child at issue, and a belief that these biases are moderated by judicial religiosity and disgust sensitivity. Through a textual analysis of judicial decisions available on Westlaw and Lexis I find that gay parents have suffered a significant disadvantage in terms of custody outcomes when compared to their heterosexual peers, and continue to face a significant outcome disadvantage in terms of visitation restrictions. I further find that the evaluation of their parental fitness is routinely marred by judicially held homophobic stereotypes, the majority of which appear to violate legal side constraints, and that the intersectional impact of gender bias creates unique burdens across both parental gender and gender of the child at issue. Through experimental analysis, I find that individual disgust sensitivity predicts custody denial for gay male fathers, but not for lesbian mothers or heterosexual parent of either gender. Moreover, this finding remains even after controlling for normative beliefs that might also explain an orientation or gender bias: traditional gender role beliefs, moral traditionalism and sexual prejudice. I further find that political ideology moderates custody outcomes, but only for gay male fathers. Conservative political ideology interacted with sexual orientation to predict the imposition of visitation restrictions when the parental fitness of fathers was at issue, but this interaction did not produce significant results when the parental fitness of mothers was at issue.

Advisor: Plaut, Victoria
Albiston, Catherine
Specialization maps for Scholze’s category of diamonds

The purpose of this thesis is to introduce and study the specialization map in the context of Scholze’s category of diamonds and to prove some basic results on its behavior. Our specialization map generalizes the classical specialization map that appears in the theory of formal schemes. Afterwards, as an example of interest, we study the specialization map for p-adic Beilinson-Drinfeld Grassmanians and moduli spaces of mixed-characteristic shtukas associated to reductive groups over Zp . Finally, as an application of our theory, we describe the geometric connected components of some moduli spaces of mixed-characteristic shtukas and local Shimura varieties at infinite level. This confirms and generalizes conjecture 4.26 of [46] in the unramified case.

Advisor: Shin, Sug Woo
Party Placement Knowledge and the Nature of Mass Belief Systems

This dissertation examines the consequences, measurement, and evolution over time ofcitizen knowledge of the Democratic and Republican parties’ positions on major policy issues. In the dissertation’s first paper (co-authored), we resolve a longstanding and central puzzle in the public opinion literature concerning the over-time instability of citizen issue attitudes—namely, is this instability the result of measurement error in surveys or is it in the opinions themselves? By leveraging for the first time the strong relationship between citizen knowledge of party issue positions and citizen issue opinion stability, the paper reveals that the erratic nature of policy attitudes through time reflects not measurement error but turnover in the opinions themselves. In the project’s second paper I experimentally test an alternative survey instrument for measuring citizen knowledge of the party’s issue positions. I find that the traditional measurement approach used in the U.S. context likely understates this knowledge among lower education survey respondents, indicating that this cohort’s democratic competence is somewhat higher than has heretofore been believed. In the project’s third paper I explore the evolution of party position knowledge in the U.S. mass public over time, and present evidence that this knowledge has spread a good deal since the 1970s. My findings indicate that, contrary to one prominent school of thought in the public opinion literature, the American public’s political belief systems have on average become better organized over the past fifty years, likely as a result of party elite polarization. Taken together, these papers demonstrate the key conceptual importance of placement knowledge in the study of public opinion, a status that has heretofore been largely unrecognized. The findings show that party placement knowledge should be placed center stage by public opinion scholars, alongside general political knowledge, if the field is to accurately grasp a host of central phenomenon such as the nature of issue attitudes, polarization, and the evolution of belief system organization over time.

Advisor: Lenz, Gabriel
Designing Algorithms for Learning and Decision-Making in Societal Systems

The ability to learn from data and make decisions in real-time has led to the rapid deployment of machine learning algorithms across many aspects of everyday life. Despite their potential to enable new services and address persistent societal issues, the widespread use of these algorithms has led to unintended consequences like flash crashes in financial markets or price collusion on e-commerce platforms. These consequences are the inevitable result of deploying algorithms--- that were designed to operate in isolation--- in uncertain dynamic environments in which they interact with other autonomous agents, algorithms, and human decision makers./nTo address these issues, it is necessary to develop an understanding of the fundamental limits of learning algorithms in societal-scale systems. The work in this thesis is divided into three parts, each addressing a different aspect of learning and decision-making in societal-scale systems: (i) learning in the presence of strategic agents, (ii) learning and decision-making in uncertain and dynamic environments, and (iii) learning models of human decision-making from data./nIn the first part, we blend ideas from game theory and optimization to demonstrate both theoretically and empirically how current machine learning approaches fail in multi-agent settings. We then leverage our understanding of the underlying structure of competitive settings to design efficient algorithms with provable guarantees of performance./nIn the second part of this thesis, we combine ideas from statistics--- namely the analysis of Langevin Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms (MCMC)--- and machine learning to design a versatile and computationally efficient model-based algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem that has guarantees of optimal performance. In, particular, we develop new characterizations of posteriors in log-concave families of likelihoods and priors and finite-time convergence rates for Langevin MCMC algorithms and use these theoretical results to show that approximate sampling algorithms like Langevin MCMC can be integrated into Thompson Sampling (the original multi-armed bandit algorithm) without sacrificing performance./nIn the final part of this thesis we bring together ideas from behavioral economics and reinforcement learning to develop a method for inverse risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. We first develop a forward model that combines ideas from prospect theory with reinforcement learning to capture the nuances of risk-sensitive decision-making in dynamic environments. We then propose an algorithm for solving the inverse problem of learning a model of an agents' decision-making process from observations of their sequential decisions in dynamic environments./nAltogether, this thesis represents a small step in an emerging research area at the intersection of economics, statistics, machine learning, and control. We conclude with a short discussion of emerging problems and themes in this wider area.

Advisor: Jordan, Michael I
Sastry, S. Shankar