VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Implementing Innovation in Planning Practice: The Case of Travel Demand Forecasting

Travel demand modeling is a core technology of transportation planning and has been so for half a century. This technology refers to the structured use of mathematical formulae and spatial data to forecast the likely travel impacts of possible transportation, land use, and demographic scenarios. Although this planning practice is pervasive, critics have long argued that is has been resistant to innovation. As the policy scenarios explored through modeling become increasingly complex, particularly in the face of climate change, the question arises of whether regional planning agencies will be able to change their practices through implementing innovation. This research addresses this question by examining the history of travel demand modeling as practiced at regional planning agencies, interviewing travel demand modeling experts, conducting detailed case studies of model practice evolution at two metropolitan planning organizations, the San Francisco Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the capital region's Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), and analyzing the early impacts of California's groundbreaking climate change legislation on the modeling practiced in the Golden State. The findings suggest that far from being a static practice, travel demand modeling at regional agencies has advanced, particularly with public interest in exploring the impacts of major policy interventions. The nature of travel demand models does not naturally foster changes in practice; however, government action can structure the innovation process by establishing clear expectations of agency modeling capabilities to meet legislative mandates, providing resources for investments in new approaches, and creating forums for interagency interaction and information dissemination.

Advisor: Deakin, Elizabeth A
Listen how the wise one begins construction of a house for Visnu: Chapters 1-14 of the Hayasirsa Pancaratra

This dissertation consists of a translation of the first fourteen chapters of Hayasirsa Pancaratra and a detailed analysis aiming at its contextualization in historical, cultural, and theological milieus. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra is a Sanskrit text from approximately the ninth century A.D. primarily dealing with rituals concerning the construction of a temple to the god Visnu. The text is probably from Eastern India, most likely Bengal or Orissa. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra belongs to the Pancaratra tradition, a Visnu centered movement within what we today call Hinduism. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra has incorporated older texts, most of which are no longer extant, and has also been a source-text for later works, most notably the Agni Purâṇa and the Hari Bhakta Vilasa. The text is named after Hayasirsa, the horse-headed incarnation of Visnu, who represents Visnu's divine character as revealer of úruti. This is the first time that the Hayasirsa Pancaratra has been translated. The text is important for Sanskrit textual history, art history, cultural history, religious history of the subcontinent, but unavailable to even most Sanskrit scholars because of a lack of access to the Sanskrit text. The translated chapters deal with preliminary work including choosing the participants for the undertaking. They list, therefore, prerequisites and qualifications, particularly of the acarya, the specific qualities required of the site, and for digging the foundation. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra situates the temple at the center of the universe by means of the vastupurusamandala. The vastupurusamandala is, I argue, both a ritual and a practical diagram: it is used ritually to locate the temple at the center of the universe; and it is used practically to plan the layout of the temple. The rituals marking the beginning of temple construction, like ritual plowing, can be traced to Vedic ceremonial practice, including, but not limited to, ritual plowing in the Vedic fire altar. The text focuses on certain moments within the construction because of the ritual function of these moments. The text is primarily a ritual text, possibly written for the acarya. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra is central to the understanding of temple construction and the rituals around it making the view of these more complete.

Advisor: Goldman, Robert
Numerical Simulation of Equilibrium Liquid Configurations On and Between Rough Surfaces

A numerical model of the interaction between liquids and rough solids is presented in this work. Partial-Transient-Liquid Phase (PTLP) bonding has proven an effective method of joining ceramic materials. The joining process is facilitated through the development of a thin-liquid layer between ceramic and metallic solids. Successful joining requires a liquid that will spread to fill interfacial voids, which can act as critical flaws that decrease the strength of the joined assembly. A full understanding of this method requires a model of the liquid behavior between dissimilar, rough solids. This work discusses the effect of wetting angle and surface roughness on the behavior of the liquid layer./nNumerical simulations are presented that test possible liquid configurations on rough surfaces, determining the preferred geometry based upon the total interfacial energy. Use of computational methods allows independent control of surface roughness, liquid volume, and interfacial energies. In this way, the effect of the liquid contact angle and the amplitude and wavelength of surface-roughness features on the liquid behavior is examined. Emphasis is placed upon surface-roughness parameters and the correlation with preferred liquid configurations. Models are presented and discussed for liquids in contact with one rough surface and for a liquid entrapped between two dissimilar surfaces. Comparison of the one-surface simulation to previous studies of liquid/roughness behavior is provided./nIn liquid-based joining methods, the ability of the liquid layer to fill interfacial voids is strongly affected by surface roughness. Numerical simulations of a liquid flowing to fill an inter-solid gap are presented. The importance of dissimilar surface roughness, dissimilar contact angles, and inter-solid distance is discussed. It is found that increasing surface roughness can act to aid liquid-based joining in certain systems.

Advisor: Glaeser, Andreas M.
Times of the Event: On the Aesthetico-Political in West Germany and Austria circa 1968

In what ways do the cultural fields of aesthetics and politics transform each other, and how does this relation change under specific historical circumstances? How is it possible to evaluate the history of activities that occur at the intersection of aesthetics and politics? How can we account for the way in which such practices are able to alter the very criteria by which they might be recognized or judged?/nThis dissertation responds to such questions by tracing the emergence of a distinct field of cultural production in West Germany and Austria in the years leading up to and through 1968, designating this field as "aesthetico-political." It seeks to determine the various conditions of possibility for these emergent forms of activity, and to examine the different models of political agency, aesthetic experience, and subjectivation they proposed. The analysis focusses on four distinct transformations: politicizations of the aesthetic (a term including but not limited to the arts); aestheticizations of politics, especially through the mediatization of the public sphere; the reorientation of artistic practices away from modernist models; and the ascendance of New Left movements. The dissertation's test cases primarily concern activities that I term "events": durational occurrences taking place in the space between aesthetics and politics.

Advisor: Silverman, Kaja
History's Unmentionables: Reference and Interiority in the Contemporary American Historical Novel

My dissertation, History's Unmentionables: Reference and Interiority in the Contemporary American Historical Novel, analyzes what I argue are traces of historical referents, specifically the minds of historical figures, in the works of Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. The project critiques postmodern theories of narrative that, citing their equivalence as texts, attempt to undo the distinction between histories and fictions. While such claims are predicated on the assumed irrecoverability of historical referents, I argue that we can only account for a network of stylistic peculiarities in these authors' works as disruptions created by such referents./nMy first chapter, "`Strange Even to Himself': History, Characterization, and the Absence of Interiority in Libra," accounts for a self-alienation unique to the historical figures in DeLillo's novel. I argue that DeLillo skirts the epistemological limit posed by the minds of historical figures by folding that limit into his characterizations; that is, unlike the novel's purely fictional creations, his versions of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby lack access to their own interiorities. Failing to identify with a text that does not correspond to their referential selves, they register their own fictionality as a result. My second chapter, "The Devil's in the Details: The Mundane Symbols of The Executioner's Song," combines theories of description with recent work in thing theory to show how the recalcitrant materiality of the story's details undercuts any symbolic reading of the text. Mailer's presentation of his material certainly begs for such readings at moments; even Hugh Kenner has, somewhat ghoulishly, linked the coroner's initial inability to recognize Gilmore's heart (the actual organ) to "the truth that...the heart of man is very often desperately wicked." The resistance of Gilmore's corpse to this distasteful metaphorization marks, I claim, an ethical limit to fictionalization. My third chapter, "The Abstracted Ladder: Mason & Dixon's Model of History," examines the purpose underlying the multiple returns to literal meanings and material objects staged over the course of the novel. As the text reveals the arbitrariness of the organizing principles governing historical narrative, it frees up areas of the past such narratives have obscured and suggests their recuperation depends on a multiplicity of imperfect frames.

Advisor: Hale, Dorothy
Quantification of sediment bed - water column exchange processes in the South San Francisco Bay estuary

The salinity gradient formed by the mixing of saline ocean waters and fresh river waters within estuaries forms diverse habitats and creates the conditions for highly dynamic sediment behavior. Sediments which enter the estuarine system may pass multiple times through the water column and sediment bed before finally being carried out to sea or deposited as a more permanent part of the sediment bed. The exchange of sediments between the water column and sediment bed is affected not only by physical forcing such as tides and winds but also be properties inherent to estuarine sediments including flocculation and consolidation. Like many others, the San Francisco Bay estuary has been highly impacted by human activities over the last 150 years. Faced with an ever changing environment, understanding how the estuary will be impacted in the future depends in part upon understanding how sediments move between the bed and water column./nTwo instrument deployments were carried out in the spring and fall of 2009 which measured suspended sediment concentrations, sediment bed properties and water column physical properties in the South San Francisco Bay. Analysis of the in situ measurements from the instrument deployments, sediment cores collected at the study site and results from a coupled sediment bed - water column numerical model of the instrument deployment period were used to estimate several important properties of sediments in the estuary. The depth of the layer of sediments readily resuspended from the bed was found to be less than 1 cm, an order of magnitude smaller than had been previously assumed. Acoustic Doppler velocimeters positioned near the bed were used to make collocated measurements of water velocity and suspended sediment concentrations (SSC). Turbulence data extracted from the velocity time series was used to develop sediment erosion relationships as a function of bed shear stress. Settling velocities were also estimated from the suspended sediment time series data. Upward looking acoustic Doppler current profilers were also deployed to measure water column velocities and collocated SSC. An error analysis showed that, with the proper information, the SSC calibrations produced reliable values. Results from the coupled sediment bed - water column model corroborated many of the results estimated from the experimental data. The results from this study provide several important estuary specific values for sediment exchange processes and demonstrate the need to use in situ measurements to test our mechanistic understanding of these processes.

Advisor: Hunt, James R
Contribution of Oxidative Enzymes to the Degradation of Cellulose by Filamentous Fungi

The cost of cellulose degrading enzymes is still a major barrier to the economical production of liquid fuels from lignocellulose. Fungi play a central role in the degradation of plant biomass in terrestrial environments. They use a wide variety of secreted enzymes to break down biopolymers present in the plant cell wall. Here I report on the mechanisms of cellulose degradation used by Neurospora crassa, a model genetic organism, and Myceliopthora thermophila, a thermophilic fungus. Enzymes important for the degradation process were identified using a combination of transcriptomics, proteomics, genetics, and biochemistry. A key result from this work is that, in N. crassa and many other fungi, oxidative enzymes play a critical role in the depolymerization of cellulose. In contrast to the accepted models of oxidative cellulose degradation, via non-specific hydroxyl radical species, I found that in N. crassa, an oxidoreductase and several copper oxidases bind to cellulose and hydroxylate the substrate at specific positions leading to cleavage of the glycosidic bonds. This mode of action is orthogonal to that of traditional hydrolases and if used optimally in conjunction with other cellulases, could reduce the required enzyme loading for lignocellulose saccharification by 2-4 fold.

Advisor: Marletta, Michael A.
Cate, Jamie H.D.
The Dialectics of Virtuosity: Dance in the People's Republic of China, 1949-2009

Under state socialism in the People's Republic of China, dancers' bodies became important sites for the ongoing negotiation of two paradoxes at the heart of the socialist project, both in China and globally. The first is the valorization of physical labor as a path to positive social reform and personal enlightenment. The second is a dialectical approach to epistemology, in which world-knowing is connected to world-making. In both cases, dancers in China found themselves, their bodies, and their work at the center of conflicting ideals, often in which the state upheld, through its policies and standards, what seemed to be conflicting points of view and directions of action. Since they occupy the unusual position of being cultural workers who labor with their bodies, dancers were successively the heroes and the victims in an ever unresolved national debate over the value of mental versus physical labor. In the case of socialist realist epistemology, dancers were called upon to use their bodies and their experiences to generate realistic depictions of a world that was, according to official ideology, always in a process of being formed. In their embodied expressions of regional, cultural, and national identities in the making of new "Chinese" dance forms, dancers contributed to the affective and aesthetic strength of state-supported worldviews, even while recognizing that these views were often "real" and "true" only because they were politically correct. The understanding of "Chinese traditional culture" applied by dance practitioners in the making of Chinese dance forms in the People's Republic of China applies a dialectical epistemology drawn from Chinese socialist realism, Chinese postcolonial nationalism, and indigenous Chinese aesthetic theory. In this dialectical epistemology, Chinese traditional culture is understood as something that can be investigated, inherited, and remade through dance practice envisioned as a form of cultural research.

Advisor: Liu, Xin
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria & Health Systems Strengthening: An Organizational and Policy Analysis

Background: Over the last twenty years, despite unprecedented new resources to global health, there has been insufficient progress to achieve the health-related 2015 Millennium Development Goals. Health systems have been perceived as the binding constraint. Major global health agencies have expanded their funding priorities from disease specific programs to include support for health systems strengthening. Strengthening health systems broadly is beyond the mandate of agencies such as the Global Fund. Nonetheless, since its inception, the Global Fund has supported health systems; however, it has had a long-running organizational struggle with how to do it. Mechanisms for health systems support have varied, and proposals for health systems support consistently have been of a lower quality than disease proposals. The Technical Review Panel of the Fund has criticized it for lack of clarity about what it means by health systems strengthening and called into question the Fund's ability to support effective responses to health systems constraints. Purpose: The purpose of this dissertation is to present a case study of the Global Fund's policies and strategy on health systems strengthening using the lens of neo-institutional theory. This dissertation explores the role legitimacy and the cognitive beliefs about health systems strengthening held by stakeholders in the Global Fund's environment have played in shaping the Fund's policies on health systems strengthening. Methods: Qualitative research methods are used to examine the beliefs about health systems strengthening held by members of Board delegations and the role these beliefs played in shaping the Global Fund's strategy on health systems strengthening. Official Global Fund documents were reviewed and primary data was gathered through 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews with members of the Board delegations, Secretariat, Technical Partner organizations and other relevant stakeholders in the Global Fund's environment to complement the document review. Findings: (1) Health system strengthening is a vague concept. (2) Depending on the context, there are two meanings - a technical one and a political one. (3) There is dispute over what constitutes acceptable health systems strengthening work. (4) Health system strengthening is essential for the success of the Global Fund, but there is disagreement over whether the Global Fund should engage in health system strengthening; if it does, how, and to what extent. (5) Linking funding to measurable health outcomes is essential for legitimacy. Health systems strengthening is beyond the scope of the Fund's mandate, current technical capacity and organizational design. The Fund ought to focus on what it does well, which is financing scale up of essential inputs. The Health Systems Funding Platform provides an opportunity for the Fund to support public health system strengthening in a way that will appease key stakeholders but still allow it to stay within the bounds of its disease-specific mission.

Advisor: Scheffler, Richard
Global Analysis of Murine Cytomegalovirus Open Reading Frames Using Yeast Two-Hybrid and Growth Phenotype Analysis

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a beta-herpesvirus, is an important opportunistic pathogen that primarily affects individuals with compromised or immature immune systems. It is of great significance in AIDS patients where it can cause serious morbidity through retinitis-associated blindness, and other complications, such as pneumonia and enteritis. In developed nations, it is a leading viral cause of congenital disease, where in-utero infection manifests in mental and behavioral disorders. In order to control infection and HCMV associated disease, new compounds and novel strategies must be developed. Understanding the role viral proteins play during the course of infection will help elucidate the mechanisms of HCMV pathogenesis and provide important information on potential targets for new treatments./nHowever, the strict species specificity of HCMV prevents any studies into the pathogenesis of the virus in an animal host. This limitation can be overcome through the use of murine cytomegalovirus (MCMV). MCMV, like HCMV, is a betaherpesvirus that exhibits similar pathogenesis in mice to HCMV infection in the human host. The genetic structure of MCMV contains significant sequence homology to HCMV AD169 in at least 78 ORFs and can thereby be used as an important tool in elucidating the functions of these ORFs in a complete in vivo system./nIn our study, we have conducted a comprehensive YTH screen to identify potential interactions between approximately 170 MCMV ORFs. Growth phenotype analysis were also conducted using five different cell lines potentially involved in various aspects of CMV infection. Between these 170 predicted proteins we have identified 94 potential interactions that exhibit varying levels of essentiality depending on the type of cell infected./nWe aim to understand the nature of the interactions between the viral particle and proteins encoded by the virus in order to elucidate potential mechanisms by which these proteins help to assemble and create new progeny viruses. The interactions that we have identified in this study provide a framework to predict the functions of uncharacterized viral proteins. And understanding the importance of each protein in the context of infection can further help to determine the nature of these unknown viral proteins. Together using information about known viral proteins that interact with these unknown elements, we can develop a better understanding of how all of these components contribute to viral infection which can be used to determine more effective methods to treat or prevent CMV associated diseases.

Advisor: Liu, Fenyong