VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Science fiction's pedagogy : didactic models and experiential simulations

This dissertation proposes a conceptual framework for the following areas of inquiry: 1) understanding science fiction pedagogy at different scales, 2) examining the relationship between model and simulation as one of curriculum, and 3) evaluating the uses of science fictional texts in humanistic and STEM education contexts. It applies that framework in the service of literary criticism, producing readings of science fiction novels using curricular reading as a practice. It then turns to the question of whether slaves and robots are substitutable and the pedagogical implications of that substitution. Using digital humanities methods, the dissertation concludes by examining the substitutability premise in a single text, using text-comparison methods, and in corpora of science fiction and traditional realism, using word embeddings.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Advisor: Algee-Hewitt Mark
Levine Sarah
McGurl Mark
Wolf Jennifer
Screen stutter : lettrism and the disarticulation of the avant-garde

In everyday conversation, sonic excesses of voice, such as hums, lisps, slurs, sighs, and stutters, impede communication, burden interlocutors, and diminish one's sense of self-sovereignty. Yet for a group of artists working in Paris throughout the French Fourth Republic (1946--1958), non-semantic vocalizations were sounds of significant avant-garde aesthetic import. In "Screen Stutter: Lettrism and the Disarticulation of the Avant-Garde, " I draw out the form and function of the disarticulate voice in the production and reception of postwar art and cinema. I explore why artists and filmmakers Isidore Isou (1925--2007), Maurice Lemaître (1926--2018), and Gil J. Wolman (1929--1995), collectively working under the label "Lettrism, " utilized the errors, excesses, and aporias of speech as critical, albeit understudied, materials to cut, project, and perform

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Art and Art History.
Advisor: Levi Pavle
Ma Jean
Phelan Peggy
Tremblay Jean-Thomas
Seamus Heaney: The Poet as Ethnographer

Anthropologist James Clifford describes ethnography as “a state of being in culture while looking at culture, a form of personal and collective self-fashioning.” Many poems of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), particularly his early ones, read like ethnographies of everyday rural life in mid-century Northern Ireland, providing firsthand knowledge of farming, crafts, the Ulster dialect, and the rituals and history of his homeland. Heaney’s work celebrates the Irish values of hard work, family loyalty, personal warmth, humor and perseverance in the face of adversity, but it also highlights the violence and complicity of his culture, particularly in relation to the sectarian strife of the Irish Troubles (1969-1998). As Heaney’s renown as a poet grew, his “halfie” identity as a native-born Irishman who was also a British intellectual with a global readership served to expand his perspective. His myth-based poems, especially those written toward the end of the Troubles, transformed his ethnographic approach into a more universal vision of humanity, while maintaining the connection to his Northern Irish rural background.

Keywords: Poetry, Modern
Ethnography
Northern Ireland
Dinnseanchas
Crafts
Irish Troubles
Sectarian Violence
Archaeology
Anthropology
Heaney, Seamus
Crediting Poetry
Classicism
Culture
Myth
Halfie
Ritual
Complicity
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Thesis
Advisor: Gigante Denise
Security, Governance and Development Beyond the Pavement: A Quantitative Assessment of the Afghan Local Police

The Afghan Local Police (ALP) was the most robust local defense mobilization effort used in the War in Afghanistan. Funded by the United States and under the purview of the Afghan government, The ALP program aimed at fostering self-defense among local communities while reinforcing the authority of traditional governance institutions. Active from 2010-2020, the program amassed a force of 34,000 men, composed over 8% of the Afghan National Security force, cost the US government $1.2 billion, and even gained a reputation as the American “exit strategy”. Still, little quantitative work has been done to assess how the Afghan Local Police lived up to its ambitious goals of establishing sustainable political order in the countryside. Moreover, only anecdotal evidence provides insight into the ALP's impact on the lives of individual villagers. In this thesis, I build a theory integrating the Afghan Local Police with governance, security, and economic development outcomes. To explore this theory, I measure variables such as nightlight radiance, (a proxy for economic development) and survey data on support for the local government and belief in the local government’s ability to maintain security. I find that, despite originally aspiring to be a crucial part of the local governance and security strategy, the Afghan Local Police failed to correlate with any of these outcomes. I conclude by contextualizing these findings in the broader War in Afghanistan, highlighting how the international coalition's disregard for rural areas contributed to the Taliban's eventual takeover.

Keywords: Afghanistan, Local Security, Economic Development, Afghan Local Police, Local Governance
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Thesis
Seeing Like a Citizen: Fragmented Citizenship in Santiago de Chile

This thesis investigates how socioeconomically vulnerable individuals in Santiago de Chile conceptualize and exercise their citizenship in the wake of the 2019 estallido social. Using qualitative analysis of 31 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the study develops a grounded theory of “fragmented citizenship.” Fragmentation refers to the asymmetrical and often contradictory experiences of citizenship at the individual level in contexts where the state is highly visible but uneven in its provision of services, programs, and goods. Beyond the convergence of these structural conditions of the state—wide visibility and irregular presence—the study found that participants’ multidimensional ideals of citizenship exacerbate fragmentation by setting high expectations of state provision. Fragmentation, in turn, shapes citizens’ engagement with the state, with respondents more likely to exercise their citizenship in areas where they perceive the state to be functioning effectively. Conversely, participants described strategic disengagement from the state and their citizenship where they perceived it to be less fully and reliably realized, further contributing to fragmentation. Through a nuanced and timely ground-level analysis, this thesis builds upon prior research on how citizenship plays out in practice in Latin America to provide valuable insight into the crisis of democracy in Chile and beyond, examining the implications of high citizen expectations coupled with uneven state performance for democratic citizenship.

Keywords: Citizenship
Democracy
Inequality
State
Latin America
Chile
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Thesis
Book
Advisor: Weinstein Jeremy
Magaloni Beatriz
Seismic velocity model building with deep convolutional neural networks

This thesis focuses on recovering wave velocity estimates from seismic data with limited recording offsets and band-limited frequency content using Deep Learning (DL), specifically using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). A combined strategy combines a supervised learning framework to recover the low-wavenumber components of velocity models with the traditional Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) to recover high-wavenumbers. We demonstrate the methodology on synthetic industry benchmark problems and a field data application with an open-source Gulf of Mexico seismic dataset.

Keywords: Sustainability.
Geophysics.
Advisor: Biondi Biondo
ArayaMauricio
Beroza Greg
Schroeder Dustin
Selective organocatalytic ring-opening polymerization of cyclic esters and carbonates

Chapter 1 introduces polyesters as sustainable alternatives to traditional petroleum-based plastics, including biorenewable sourcing, degradability, and methods of synthesis and manufacture. It specifically highlights the advantages of polyesters produced by ring-opening polymerization (ROP) and manufactured by additive manufacturing technologies. Chapter 2 describes a catalyst system comprising a hindered base and a primary alcohol initiator which can be utilized for controlled, ultrafast polymerization cyclic monomers when utilized in conjunction with a continuous flow reactor. It highlights the advantages of continuous flow reactors for improving reaction control. Chapter 3 describes a fast, selective organocatalyst for the ROP of cyclic esters and carbonates that functions by simultaneous activation through hydrogen bonding while the monomer is activated by the bound counter ion. Chapter 4 discusses recent developments in the synthesis of polyester resins by ROP, and the mechanical properties of parts generated from them using continuous liquid interface production (CLIP) additive manufacturing. Appendix 1, Appendix 2, and Appendix 3 serve as supplementary information about the materials, methods, and results from Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4, respectively

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Chemistry.
Advisor: Waymouth Robert M.
DeSimone Joseph M.
Xia Yan
Selling snake oil and unicorns : performative standardization in the evaluation of early-stage entrepreneurial ideas

This dissertation investigates the process through which venture capital and angel investors evaluate early-stage entrepreneurial ideas. It draws on three sources of data: an ethnographic study conducted across two years of an annual pitch competition in Silicon Valley, archival data from this competition, and interviews with early-stage investors. Chapter 1 inductively examines how structural and temporal constraints within the startup funding ecosystem set the stage for a heretofore unexamined evaluation process. This chapter introduces this process—performative standardization—as involving the collaborative construction of an idea's value by investors and entrepreneurs, followed by the assessment of this constructed value according to widely-shared investor standards. Building on these findings, Chapter 2 delves into how a startup idea's value is quantified and defined, and develops a process model specifying performative standardization. Paradoxically, this chapter finds that investors both acknowledge an idea's quantified value to be subjective and unknowable, yet place weight on it when making evaluative decisions. Chapter 3 leverages the pitch competition's archival data to analyze the consequences of performative standardization. The results reveal how entrepreneurs predominantly adapt their pitches—specifically, the future financial projections detailing an idea's value in the future—to align with investor expectations following the performative standardization process. Moreover, the results show that investors evaluate ideas more positively when pitches include aspects of performative standardization that meet widely-shared standards. Collectively, these chapters underscore the significance of performative standardization as a cultural process that serves not only to assess ideas at the point of evaluation, but also to coordinate and align stakeholders on a common trajectory toward actualizing an idea into a successful venture

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Goldberg Amir
Sterling Adina
Ranganathan Aruna
Sensing the broadening world : the birth of incense culture in song dynasty China (960-1279)

This dissertation investigates how incense, a once highly exclusive commodity of foreign origins, became widely available since the eleventh century and revolutionized China's sensibility of scents. I examine representations of incense in poetry, tales, treatises, catalogues (pu 譜), and paintings by the scholar-officials, the shaping force of Song society and culture. My analysis uncovers how exquisite scents served as an important medium for Song literati to reconceptualize spirituality, officialdom, private life, knowledge, and cultural others. I demonstrate how the scholar-officials created the xiangpu 香譜 genre to systematically define incense for the first time in Chinese history. The fascination with incense also led to unprecedentedly in-depth explorations of the far south, the main source of domestic incense supply, which reshaped the cultural image of this traditionally stigmatized and underrepresented region. While my research fits with the current "material turn" in sinology, it extends to the growing field of sensory studies. I call attention to scents, one prominent yet neglected topic in China and the global past, establishing the significance of incense in relation to aesthetics, social class, ethnicity, and knowledge production. I argue that the process of knowing and integrating incense into Chinese culture and literature reflected an epistemological change among Song scholar-officials. The invention of incense culture is indicative of the period's growing interest in individual experience, material culture, local distinctiveness, economic incentives, and practical knowledge, all of which were decisive factors in steering China to early modernity

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Advisor: Egan Ronald
Kieschnick John
Vinograd Richard
Sequence-Dependent Self-Assembly of Supramolecular Nanofibers in Periodic Dynamic Block Copolymers

The ability for block copolymers (BCPs) to spontaneously self-assemble into a wide range of nanostructured morphologies has received considerable attention for their technological applications. To expand the range of nanostructures accessible to block copolymers, we design dynamic block copolymers (DBCPs) that combine the phase separation of traditional block copolymers with the supramolecular self-assembly of periodic dynamic polymers to achieve the spontaneous formation of supramolecular nanofibers with well-ordered phase domains. These DBCPs are multiblock copolymers, meaning they consist of multiple oligomers of each block type covalently connected by dynamic hydrogen bonding units. We prepared DBCPs in which the oligomer blocks are either connected in a statistically random sequence or in a periodically alternating sequence. In this work, we investigate how the block sequence affects the supramolecular nanofiber self-assembly, bulk mechanical properties, thermal phase behavior, and ionic conductivity of the DBCPs. We demonstrate that the DBCPs with a periodic block sequence self-assemble into supramolecular nanofibers with well-ordered PEG and PDMS domains, in contrast to those with a random sequence which do not form nanofibers but have disordered morphologies. The periodicity of the block sequence ensures the regularly spaced placement of the dynamic bonds along the polymer chain, which enables the facile stacking of the hydrogen bonding units into ordered 1D supramolecular nanofibers, which delays the onset of terminal flow by up to ~60 °C compared to the random block sequence. The hierarchically assembled supramolecular nanofibers display complex phase behaviors as a result of both block copolymer phase segregation and supramolecular interactions. Despite identical chemical composition, the periodic DBCPs demonstrate bulk ionic conductivity values almost an order of magnitude higher than their random counterparts due to the formation of nanofibers with well-ordered, interconnected, ion-transporting PEG domains.

Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering
Block copolymers
Supramolecular chemistry
Self-assembly (Chemistry)
Polymer electrolytes
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Thesis
Advisor: Bao Zhenan
Chueh William
SET APART: AN EXPLORATION OF IDENTITY, SEXUALITY, AND LOVE FOR BLACK CHRISTIAN WOMEN

Scholars in Black Studies and Religious Studies have developed a wealth of knowledge regarding how Black women have historically and contemporarily navigated Afro-Protestant church environments. They discuss how Black women use these environments to cultivate meanings of womanhood through church work, as well as how the sexual politics of these environments impacted notions of purity, modesty, and sanctification. This study builds on this by drawing on three social media-based content creators who are Black Christian women and target their content at a Black female audience. JC, NR, and KG are all aged 18-24, are currently students, and keep Christianity at the center of their content. Their Black female identities are salient in their content, as is derived from their use of phrases and descriptors specifically related to the Black experiences. Between the three of them, I watched 123 total videos from their publicly available profiles on YouTube and Tik Tok. I extracted themes of sexual conservatism, purity, modesty, abstinence, self-love, and validation to make an argument that they rely on these things to cultivate meanings of Black womanhood in a contemporary landscape. These women overwhelmingly agree that sexual purity and modesty are what sets them apart from general society, also holding that valuing such things is the outcome of first pursuing close communion with God. They also make stern declarations that self-love is a biblically backed command, arguing that in order to love others properly it is required to love themselves. The unique experience of Black womanhood informs their attitudes toward validation. As Black women, they describe pressure to always look put together or present to the world in a certain way, which led them to seek validation from others rather than God and themselves. All these experiences are what they describe as characterizing Black Christian womanhood, and they use their social media platforms to communicate this to their audiences.

Keywords: Black Women
Christian life
Afro-Protestantism
Identity
Sex customs
Validation
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Thesis
Settling and dispersion of inertial non-spherical particles in wavy flow

Motivated by the problem of microplastics in the ocean, we investigated the transport of inertial non-spherical particles by waves and currents. We first experimentally studied the settling of rods, disks, and spheres settling in a flow characterized by linear surface gravity waves. We found that both particle shape and the flow inertia at the length scale of the particle influenced how particles sampled the flow and thereby their settling velocity. We then performed experiments on the dispersion of disks, rods, and cylinders in a wave-current flow and found that the presence waves significantly increased particle dispersion. The magnitude of the increase was a function of particle shape and size. Motivated by these results, we used numerical simulations to examine the impacts of a full set of nondimensional parameters on dispersion in a wave-current flow. We found that no parameters could be discounted, but a time scale ratio between the particle settling velocity and wave transport by Stokes drift had the greatest impact on dispersion. Overall, our results show that both particle and flow properties are important to account for when predicting particle transport in wavy flows

Keywords: Engineering.
Advisor: Koseff Jeffrey Russell
DiBenedetto Michelle 
Ouellette Nicholas (Nicholas Testroet)
Severe Perineal Laceration and Episiotomy Among Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Ethnicities in California, 2007-2018

Background: Asian individuals have an increased risk for episiotomy and severe perineal lacerations during vaginal delivery. The Asian population in the US is diverse yet very few studies disaggregate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) ethnic groups. Objective: This study investigated the variability of risk for episiotomy and severe perineal laceration among 16 disaggregated AANHPI groups, compared to Non-Hispanic White (NH White) individuals, and assessed whether maternal social, maternal health-related, and delivery-related factors explained the variability in risk. Study Design: Birth and fetal death certificate files linked to hospital discharge records were used to identify nulliparous, term, singleton, vertex vaginal deliveries among individuals who self-identified as AANHPI or Non-Hispanic White. Modified Poisson regression models were used to examine risks of episiotomy and severe perineal laceration among AANHPI subgroups compared with Non-Hispanic Whites. A sequential adjustment approach was utilized to assess if maternal social, maternal health-related, and delivery-related factors explain the variability of risk for the outcomes. Results: Among the 568,229 individuals in this study cohort, prevalence of episiotomy was 15.7% (N=89,105) and prevalence of severe perineal laceration was 6.8% (N=38,619). Prevalence of episiotomy ranged from 11% in Other Pacific Islander individuals to 26% in Vietnamese individuals. Prevalence of severe perineal laceration ranged from 3% in Guamanian individuals to 16% in Indian individuals. In a fully adjusted model, 7 of the AANHPI subgroups had a RR > 1.0 for episiotomy and 14 of the AANHPI subgroups had a RR > 1.0 for severe perineal laceration, compared to NH White individuals. After adjustment, Vietnamese individuals were at highest risk of episiotomy (adjusted relative risk 1.75 [95% CI 1.70, 1.80]), and Indian individuals were at highest risk of severe perineal laceration (adjusted relative risk 2.11 [95% CI 2.03, 2.18]). The greatest changes in relative risks for both episiotomy and severe perineal lacerations occurred when adding maternal social factors into the models. Conclusion: Social factors, in contrast to maternal health and clinical factors including episiotomy, had higher impact in the variability of risk of the outcomes among the AANHPI population. This study adds to the growing evidence of the diversity and disparity in health outcomes among AANHPI subgroups. the impact of social factors, including those not assessed in this study, on the risk of the outcomes among AANHPI ethnic groups merits further investigation. Study findings can also help inform health interventions, such as provider discussions with patients, tailored to AANHPI subgroups for preventive measures against severe perineal lacerations and routine episiotomy.

Keywords: Bane, Shalmali
AANHPI
Episiotomy
Severe Perineal Laceration
Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander
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Thesis
Advisor: Main Elliott
Carmichael Suzan
Sex and the interaction with the proteomic signature of depression

Differences in the prevalence and burden of depression among women have been extensively documented, proving stable across culture, age, and time. Towards characterizing sexual dimorphism in the proteomics of depression, this investigation evaluated the serum levels of over 7,500 analytes on the SomaLogic SomaScan proteomic assay in 75 moderately to severely depressed patients enriched for endogenomorphic symptoms and 78 healthy controls. Combining differential expression and pathway enrichment analyses, the distribution of sex-dependent protein expression in depressed males and females was compared, and significantly sex-dependent proteins are explored. Differential protein expression results are used to inform the development of classifiers distinguishing between depressed patients and healthy controls.
An equal number of differentially expressed proteins were found between males and females, with males displaying more proteins with increased expression in cases versus controls and the opposite observed among females. The immune system was the only overrepresented pathway among the proteins with significant sex-dependent expression in depression. Individual examination of immune-identified proteins highlighted multiple proteins not previously associated with depression. Together, these proteins exhibited bidirectional support for alterations of immune and inflammatory protein expression between males and females. Results from classifier development showed that leveraging differentially expressed proteins resulted in improved classifier performance.
These findings have implications for research on therapeutic targets in depression and classifier development. Future investigations should elaborate on these findings through studies with larger sample sizes of phenotypically diverse cohorts.

Keywords: Depression, Mental
Sex differences
Proteomics
Machine learning
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Thesis
Advisor: Henderson Victor
Rasgon Natalie
Schatzberg Alan