VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Practice and Politics of Children's Music Education in the German Democratic Republic, 1949-1976

This dissertation examines the politics of children’s music education in the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. The East German state famously attempted to co-opt music education for propagandistic purposes by mandating songs with patriotic texts. However, as I show, most pedagogues believed that these songs were worthless as political education: children, they argued, learned not through the logic of texts, but through the immediacy of their bodies and their emotions. These educators believed music to be an especially effective site for children’s political education, as music played to children’s strongest suit: their unconscious mind and their emotions. Many pedagogues, composers, and musicologists thus adapted Weimar-era methods that used mostly non-texted music to instill what they held to be socialist values of collectivism, diligence, open-mindedness, and critical thought. I trace the fates of four of these pedagogical practices—solfège, the Orff Schulwerk, lessons in listening, and newly-composed “Brechtian” children’s operas—demonstrating how educators sought to graft the new demands of the socialist society onto inherited German musical and pedagogical traditions./nI argue that this marriage of old ideas and new aims was often fraught, as pedagogues and even state officials proved reluctant to interrogate fully the possible political uses of an art form which, in the Romantic tradition of Hoffmann and Hanslick, was held to be autonomous and stubbornly intractable to worldly purposes. Accordingly, music education in German socialism proceeded from a vision of aesthetic education that privileged the freedom of the individual—an ideal that proved loyal less to the beliefs of Soviet communism than to the fundamental ideologies of German liberalism. More generally, the dissertation shows how even the most fervently socialist didactic ideals and practices often broke down on the issue of music. Children’s music pedagogy represents, then, a moment in which developing human bodies and beliefs can be held up against the “real existing socialism” that the GDR claimed to have achieved: it exposes both the ideological underpinnings of German socialism and the halting practical steps that educators took to build it.

Advisor: Taruskin, Richard
Crafting Words and Wood: Myth, Carving and Húsdrápa

In the poem Húsdrápa, ca. 985, Úlfr Uggason described woodcarvings of mythological scenes adorning an Icelandic hall owned by the chieftain Óláfr pái. The performance, of which some verses have been passed down in writing, was an act of referential intermedia, insofar as the art form of skaldic poetry presented with woven words the content of a wood-carved medium that has long since rotted away. Hence, the composition of the poem combined with the carvings created a link that opens up a union between extant literary sources and material culture which contributes to expanding cultural insight. This study draws from a range of sources in order to answer central research questions regarding the appearance and qualities of the missing woodcarvings. Intermedia becomes interdisciplinary in the quest, as archaeological finds of Viking Age and early medieval woodcarvings and iconography help fill the void of otherwise missing artifacts. Old Norse literature provides clues to the mythic cultural values imbued in the wooden iconography. Anthropological and other theories drawn from the liberal arts also apply as legend, myth and art combine to inform cultural meaning. The study reveals that the appearance and function of the woodcarvings merge as they were understood not only aesthetically but also to possess a certain agency. The dissertation is in two parts. The first portion provides background information regarding woodcarving and iconography found in Northern Europe as it refers to poetry, sagas and legends for contextualization. The second portion continues the investigation with an emphasis on Iceland and a close reading of the poem Húsdrápa. In these sections a synthesis of saga scenes, skaldic poetry, myth and applicable iconography informs analysis and hypothetical prototypes of the carvings./nIn addition to figures such as sketches and photos included in the appendix, there are eight animations available for download labeled Animation 1 - 8. Each of these animations help illustrate the appearance and qualities of both extant and hypothetical wood-carved mythic scenes from the Viking Age.

Advisor: Lindow, John
Essays on Network Games with Incomplete Information, with Applications in Finance

This dissertations includes three (3) chapters, each adding to the growing network games literature that incorporates incomplete information. Financial over-the-counter markets give motivating applications. (1) "Trading Networks and Equilibrium Intermediation" studies the efficiency of trade in networks. A network of intermediaries facilitates exchange between buyers and a seller. Intermediary traders face a private trading cost, a network characterizes the set of feasible transactions, and an auction mechanism sets prices. Stable networks, which are robust to agents' collusive actions, exist when cost uncertainty is acute and multiple, independent trading relationships are valuable. A free-entry process governs the formation of equilibrium networks. Such networks feature too few intermediaries relative to the optimal market organization and they exhibit an asymmetric structure amplifying the shocks experienced by key intermediaries. (2) "Interdealer Trade: Risk, Liquidity, and the role of Market Inventory" further studies traders facing private shocks, placed in a dynamic setting. Trades between ex ante symmetric, inventory carrying intermediaries ("dealers") are motivated by divergent liquidity needs of the counter parties. Market prices and asset flows are pinned by dealers' indifference between providing intermediation services and retaining liquidity to be utilized in subsequent interdealer markets. More active interdealer markets simultaneously increase the value to intermediation and the option-value to providing these services. Under infrequent shocks, interdealer trade boosts the availability of liquidity in the broader market. This boost decays with market inventory, which serves as a constraint on interdealer activity. Through this market mechanism, prices vary inversely with both search frictions between dealers and on their total current holdings. (3) "Information Acquisition and Response in Peer-effects Networks" endogenizes the quality of information that market participants carry in a general peer effects model. When pairwise peer effects are symmetric, asymmetries in acquired information are inefficiently low relative to the utilitarian benchmark. And with information privately acquired, all players face strictly positive gains to overstating their informativeness as to strategically influence the beliefs and behaviors of neighbors. If strategic substitutes in actions are present and significant, low centrality players move against their signals in anticipation of their neighbors' actions. A blueprint for optimal policy design is developed. Applications to market efficiency in financial crises and two-sided markets are discussed.

Advisor: Kariv, Shachar
Patterns of specialization in the deep sea at the individual, ecosystem, and evolutionary level

Most of the deep sea is characterized by low productivity and low biomass, however there is a patchy distribution of unique habitats that support specialist communities and high biomass. These habitats include hydrothermal vents and cold seeps; geological features that provide reduced compounds like sulfide and methane to fuel chemosynthesis, an alternate form of primary production to photosynthesis. Organic falls like whale carcasses and wood support related but distinct communities of scavengers, grazers, filter feeders, and extreme specialists./nThis dissertation examines multiple levels of specialization to deep-sea reducing environments to address the following questions:/n1. Is there a common evolutionary path toward specialization in reducing habitats?/n2. How have lineages modified their anatomy to specialize in deep-sea habitats?/n3. How does variation in sunken wood influence community assembly?/nTo address the first question, I used a supertree of the Gastropoda, one of the most diverse animal groups in reducing habitats, to ask whether lineages followed similar trajectories toward becoming specialists in these ecosystems. For the second question, I focused on a lineage of limpets (Lepetellidae) that has only been found living on empty Hyalinoecia polychaete tubes, and made hypotheses about how they utilize their substrate based on a detailed 3D reconstruction of the anatomy of Lepetella sierra. The third question focuses on how variation in the substrate can influence diversity and community assembly, particularly in wood fall communities colonizing experimental wood fall substrates of ten different types over the course of two years at 3200m near Monterey, CA. Through the course of exploring these three questions, I have developed collaborations, learned new skills, and contributed new data and perspectives on deep-sea reducing environments.

Advisor: Lindberg, David R
The Visible Translator: Language and Identity in Meiji-period Japanese Travel Narratives

In this dissertation I argue that the literary imagination of late nineteenth century Japanese travel narratives fixated on the figure of the translator as a model of success and mastery in the international forum who could bridge linguistic differences with aplomb. The figure of the translator during what I call ‘the moment of the translator’ from roughly the 1850s through the 1870s served a key purpose: he embodied a model of modern Japanese identity that could successfully move through international contexts, on Western terms, by means of his fluency in foreign languages. In chapter 1 I examine the multitude of historical figures who acted as translators in the late nineteenth century to argue that the cumulative force of their public stories created 'the moment of the translator.' In chapter 2 I consider one of the most popular fictional travel narratives to feature a translator figure: Kanagaki Robun's Seiyôdôchû hizakurige. Next, I consider the non-fictional travel writings and primers of Fukuzawa Yukichi to demonstrate how he implicitly models himself as a translator and successful participant in the international forum. I then turn to the travel writings of Nagai Kafû who wrote a generation later, and whose translator figure transforms into the figure of the wandering artist. Finally, I turn to the contemporary author Tawada Yôko to consider the subverted legacies of the translator figure, who comes into view again in Tawada's transnational, multilingual fiction.

Advisor: Tansman, Alan
Visual Representations for Fine-grained Categorization

In contrast to basic-level object recognition, fine-grained categorization aims to distinguish/nbetween subordinate categories, such as different animal breeds or species, plant species or man-made product models. The problem can be extremely challenging due to the subtle differences in the appearance of certain parts across related categories and often requires distinctions that must be conditioned on the object pose for reliable identification. Discriminative markings are often highly localized, leading traditional object recognition approaches to struggle with the large pose variations often present in these domains. Face recognition is the classic case of fine-grained recognition, and it is noteworthy that the best face recognition methods jointly discover facial landmarks and extract features from those locations. We propose pose-normalized representations, which align training exemplars, either piecewise by part or globally for the whole object, effectively factoring out differences in pose and in camera viewing angle./nI first present the methods of using the idea of pose-normalization for two related applications: human attribute classification and person recognition beyond frontal face. Following the recent success of deep learning, we use deep convolutional features as feature representations. Next, I will introduce the part-based RCNN method as an extension of state-of-art object detection method RCNN for fine-grained categorization. The model learns both whole-object and part detectors, and enforces learned geometric constraints between them. I will also show the results of using the recent compact bilinear features to generate the pose-normalized representations. However, bottom-up region proposals is limited by handengineered features and in the final work, I will present a fully convolution deep network, trained end-to-end for part localization and fine-grained classification.

Advisor: Darrell, Trevor
Planning for water efficient cities: Landscape, microclimate, and heterogeneity in residential water demand

California is confronting its largest drought in recorded history, which may signal the onset of a megadrought. An executive order mandates reduction in residential water consumption. At the same time, the state's population continues to grow. Reducing residential outdoor water use is a critical management objective to adapt to scarce water resources. This dissertation asks, to what degree can land planning contribute to outdoor water demand management? Can principles of compact development and strategic growth mitigate use? First, the dissertation reviews the literature of water demand models that incorporate landscape variables, thematically characterizing the variables and examining model spatiotemporal resolution. Next, the dissertation examines methods of quantitatively characterizing the urban environment using land cover, weather, and landform variables. It develops variables by parcel, and then defines microclimate zones of similar parcels by clustering on each parcel's microclimate signature. In the fourth chapter, it examines the contributions of landscape and microclimate to household water consumption in the East Bay Municipal Utility District of California. It evaluates 26 million observations of monthly water use data from 2005-2011 recorded at over 300,000 single family residences. It analyzes the data as a whole, and then subsets the full population by quantile of water user and by microclimate zone. Results reveal heterogeneous water demand profiles, but all models indicate that landscape type and the presence of a pool are important predictors of consumption. Less important are lot size and microclimate variables. With both high and low water users spatially distributed throughout the study area and across microclimate zones, there is evidence that many different development styles in many different locations can be water efficient.

Advisor: Radke, John
Body of Knowledge: Practicing Mathematics in Instrumented Fields of Promoted Action

A central issue in education in general, and mathematics education in particular, is the relationship between skills and concepts, between performing procedures and understanding content. This dissertation draws on recent research on the embodiment of cognition to cast doubt on the accepted separation of bodily practice and mental understanding. What are the implications of embodiment perspectives for designing mathematics learning environments? Can conceptual understanding sprout from procedural fluency? To answer these questions, I partook in two interrelated strands of research: (1) investigating pedagogical traditions of explicitly embodied disciplines; and (2) implementing and analyzing embodied-interaction mathematics designs. The first strand involves immersive ethnographic investigations of pedagogical practices in surfing and martial arts, corroborated via interviews and archival research. It focuses on enactive artifacts, or disciplinary routines through which students develops a felt sense as grounding for disciplinary concepts. This felt sense, I argue, cannot be taught directly via demonstration or verbal instruction. Instead, it must be personally experienced via practice. The second strand involves video analysis of task-based interviews situated in technology-enabled motion-sensitive learning environments. In the focal design, students who have not formally studied the mathematical concept of proportion first learn to enact a dynamical bimanual coordination, in which they move their hands proportionally, and only later signify this felt sense mathematically using symbolic artifacts interpolated into the problem space. I claim that conceptual understandings can sprout from practicing mathematics in instrumented fields of promoted action. Therein, practice serves as a form of exploration rather than drill. Ultimately, I argue for an account of learning across disciplines as explorative problem solving, where students find themselves moving in new ways and, upon appropriating available disciplinary frames of reference, recognize in their own actions its disciplinary significance. Regardless of the discipline, one’s body of knowledge is built through the labor of practice.

Advisor: Abrahamson, Dor
The Jump Splice for Elliptic Interface Problems and the Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations

We present a general framework for accurately evaluating finite difference operators in the presence of known discontinuities across an interface. Using these techniques, we develop simple-to-implement, second-order accurate methods for elliptic problems with interfacial discontinuities and for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with singular forces. To do so, we first establish an expression relating the derivatives being evaluated, the finite difference stencil, and a compact extrapolation of the jump conditions. By representing the interface with a level set function, we show that this extrapolation can be constructed using dimension- and coordinate-independent normal Taylor expansions with arbitrary order of accuracy. Our method is robust to non-smooth geometry, permits the use of symmetric positive-definite solvers for elliptic equations, and also works in 3D with only a change in finite difference stencil. We rigorously establish the convergence properties of the method and present extensive numerical results. In particular, we show that our method is second-order accurate for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with surface tension.

Advisor: Sethian, James A
Statistical Methods for Predicting Dengue Diagnosis using Clinical and LC-MS Data

Dengue virus is the most widespread arthropod-borne virus affecting humans, with as many as 528 million annual infections each year. Of particular concern are the subset of cases which develop into life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever, and those which further progress into dengue shock syndrome. Non-invasive tools that accurately differentiate dengue and its subtypes from other viral infections early in the disease progression are vital for timely therapeutic intervention and supportive care. Unfortunately, such tools are sorely lacking. Using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), we detect tens of thousands of molecular features in serum, saliva, and urine of suspected dengue patients in Nicaragua. We then use machine-learning methods to help identify candidate small molecule biomarkers which, along with easily obtainable clinical data, predict dengue diagnosis and prognosis. Our findings should aid in developing a low-cost diagnostic tool for use in the field.

Advisor: Hubbard, Alan E.
Learning by thinking and the development of abstract reasoning

As adults, we have coherent, abstract, and highly structured causal representations of the world. We also learn those representations, as children, from the fragmented, concrete and particular evidence of our senses. How do young children learn so much about the world so quickly and accurately? One classic answer points to the similarities between children’s learning and scientific learning. In particular, researchers have proposed that children, like scientists, implicitly formulate hypotheses about the world and then use evidence to test and rationally revise those hypotheses. In testing these claims, the vast majority of research in this area has investigated children’s developing abilities to draw causal inferences from observed data. However, we know much less about the human ability to build abstract knowledge that extends beyond their observations, simply by thinking. In the current dissertation, I examine a suite of activities that involve learning by thinking in the causal domain, and consider how these activities impose unique, top-down constraints on the processes underlying causal learning and inductive inference. First, in chapter 1, I situate this work within the theoretical context of rational constructivism that has recently emerged in the field of cognitive development. Chapter 2 then presents a series of experiments demonstrating very young children’s ability to infer the abstract relations “same” and “different” in a novel causal reasoning task. I conclude this chapter by considering the implications of these findings for our understanding of the nature of relational and causal reasoning, and their evolutionary origins. Chapter 3 extends this paradigm to describe a surprising developmental pattern: younger children outperform older children in inferring these abstract relations. I provide evidence that this failure may be explained by appealing to the role of learned biases in constraining causal judgments. The second part of this chapter explores how prompts to explain during learning facilitate children’s ability to override a preference to attend to object properties, and instead reason about abstract relations. Chapter 4 presents empirical findings further examining the particular effects of explanation on the mechanisms underlying causal inference in preschool-aged children. In particular, results demonstrate that explanation prompts children to ignore salient superficial properties and consider inductively rich properties that are likely to generalize to novel cases. Finally, in Chapter 5, I discuss the implications for this body of work as a whole, and suggest a variety of future directions. Taken together, this research contributes to our understanding of the cognitive processes that influence early learning and inference in early childhood.

Advisor: Gopnik, Alison
Lombrozo, Tania