VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Francisco Rivero Gil: A Tale of Graphic Othering

This study deploys the Spanish illustrator Francisco Rivero Gil (1899-1972) as a paradigmatic figure of the graphic arts in order to explore the relationships between image and text being played out in representation as expressions of Spain's unique process of modernization. The meanings of these graphico-lexical relationships reveal themselves through Rivero's work, as well as through his praxis, over time, through geographical displacement and changing historical contexts. As a result, the study interweaves biography, history and graphico-lexical textual analysis in a combined diachronic and synchronic approach. Its first chapter, meant to bridge the gap between the graphic arts and Hispanic literary studies, provides an introduction to the graphic arts in the context of Spain's modernization, as well as a review of recent research pertaining to the nexus of these two fields. The main chapters are divided into three time-spaces, which cover Rivero's beginnings in Santander from 1914 to 1923, including a tour of duty in Morocco as a rank-and-file soldier after the Annual Disaster; the mid `20s to the mid `30s in Madrid; and the late `30s during the Spanish Civil War in Valencia and Barcelona./nThe analysis of the various editorial projects included in these chapters shows how a different project of modernity was gestating in the field of the graphic arts, where interactions between image and text enacted a peculiarly Spanish conceptualization of the Other, based on cordiality, that contained radical implications for social change and laid the conceptual groundwork for a non-violent social revolution. This version of modernity, contrary to others advocating a rupture with the past, easily integrated traditional forms by modifying them to suit modern needs. The study shows how the graphic arts may be understood as a site that facilitated a cordial engagement with the Other, containing and channeling the many tensions of Spain's modernization, as it contributed to the formation of new citizens and a vision of modernity firmly rooted in the past. This dissertation is the first part of a book length project covering Rivero's life and work in Spain. Future research will take on the transatlantic dimension of his life and the work he produced as an exile in France, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Mexico.

Advisor: Dougherty, Dru
Fact or friction: Inferring rheology from nonvolcanic tremor and low-frequency earthquakes on the deep San Andreas fault

Here I present results from a collection of three papers that document the response of deep non-volcanic tremor and constituent low-frequency earthquakes to stress perturbations from the Earth tides. Variations in the seismicity rate are used to constrain the rheology of the deep San Andreas fault and to infer \emph{in situ} conditions in the deep crust. I find that effective stresses orders of magnitude smaller than expected can explain observed response of non-volcanic tremor and low-frequency earthquakes to primarily small, tidally-induced shear stresses. Low effective stress also provides a mechanism for frictional slip to occur in environments where elevated temperature and pressure conditions are thought to make ductile creep processes the favored mode of deformation.

Advisor: Burgmann, Roland
Models of Bus Queueing at Isolated Bus Stops

Long bus queues can form at a busy bus stop where multiple routes converge. These queues and the delays that they impart to buses can often be mitigated by altering the stop's design or the manner in which it is operated. Queueing models are formulated to this end. The models estimate the maximum rates that buses can discharge from a stop that is isolated from other stops and from nearby traffic signals, while maintaining targets for service quality. Model inputs include the stop's number of serial berths, and the processes by which buses arrive and dwell at the stop. The models can be used for a variety of purposes that include: choosing a stop's suitable number of berths or determining when it is useful to alter the rules governing how buses are to dwell in those stops. Application of these models indicates that much of the previous literature on the subject of bus queueing at stops is flawed. And because the analytical solutions derived for the present models describe the special operating features of serial bus berths, the models can be applied to other serial queueing systems common in transport. These include taxi queues, Personal Rapid Transit systems and toll plazas with tandem service booths.

Advisor: Cassidy, Michael J
Li, Yuwei
The good, the bad, and the ugly of top-down executive control

Theories of working memory and attention postulate that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) provides top-down signals to other brain regions in order to keep behaviorally relevant sensory information activated and to suppress competing task-irrelevant information. Although there are numerous studies that suggest the PFC is a source of top-down modulation of posterior brain regions, the vast majority of these studies offer only indirect evidence in support of this claim. Additionally, while this executive control is usually thought of as being beneficial to the task at hand, there is reason to believe that there are certain circumstances in which this control is deleterious to performance. Here we provide direct evidence using transcranial magnetic stimulation and neuroimaging that 1) the PFC is a source of top-down control of early visual regions and 2) interfering with PFC function can sometimes lead to paradoxical improvements in task performance.

Advisor: D'Esposito, Mark
American Movement: In the Steps of a National Style of Dance

"American Movement" is an investigation of national identity in dance. "Americanness" may be an impossible conceit, but it's also a way people have made sense of the nation. It's a mantle artists claim for themselves, and a quality audiences recognize. I focus on a cast of performers who have been celebrated for embodying an American style of movement, and who were ambitious enough to try to create one: tap dance virtuoso "Bojangles" Bill Robinson, silver screen idols Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and ballet-to-Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille. What made their claims of Americanness convincing? Sometimes, it was explicit: plots that dealt with national myths, stances these artists and their fans took against Europe, or publicity materials that trumpeted their patriotism. But at other times, a sense of Americanness emerged from their movements. Tracing the hidden histories of particular dance steps and styles across lines of race and class, I show how artists of wildly different cultural milieus have learned from, imitated, admired and parodied one another. Chiefly, this is a project about artists who set out to embody the nation, and about the nation that produced them. But "American Movement" is also an argument, by example, for how we might study dance: as both an artistic creation of its own right, and as an embodiment of histories that are often more varied than a single performance, at surface level, can accommodate.

Advisor: Wagner, Bryan
Providence and Politics: Horace N. Allen and the Early US-Korea Encounter, 1884-1894

This dissertation examines the career of Horace Newton Allen, an American physician who became the first Protestant missionary to reside in Choson Korea. It focuses specifically on the initial decade of his tenure on the peninsula (1884-1894), the period when he transitioned from a participant of the Protestant foreign mission movement to a member of the American diplomatic service. These years also comprised the formative era of relations between the United States and Korea. Through a close look at Allen's work and activities, this study uses his story as window into the broader dynamics of the early American-Korean encounter. In particular, it challenges previous characterizations of Horace Allen as an exemplar of US expansionism, and argues instead that his career was shaped in large part by the divergence in American interests vis-à-vis Korea during the late nineteenth century.

Advisor: Fass, Paula S.
Land use change is a critical influence on the climate effects of climate policies.

Proposed strategies for managing terrestrial carbon in order to mitigate anthropogenic climate change largely ignore the direct effects of land use change on climate via biophysical processes that alter surface energy and water budgets. Subsequent influences on temperature, hydrology, and atmospheric circulation at regional and global scales could potentially help or hinder climate stabilization efforts. However, due to geographic variability, incomplete understanding of the relevant physical processes, and differences in the spatial scale of biophysical influences compared to greenhouse gases, the best strategies for addressing biophysical aspects of land use change are not clear. To provide insight into this problem, I explore the theoretical implications of various metrics for characterizing the full climate effects of land use change. Furthermore, using a state-of-the-art earth system model coupled to an integrated assessment model that generates scenarios of future anthropogenic climate forcing, I address policy-relevant questions regarding the physical climate system response to land use change./nI demonstrate that the biophysical effects of land use change can be large and vary significantly among policies. Thus ignoring these effects in greenhouse gas policies can lead to unintended consequences. Different hypothetical strategies for meeting an identical global greenhouse gas concentration target - either one with modest afforestation or one with large-scale deforestation for biofuel production - yield different global and regional patterns of climate change, particularly when Boreal forests are converted to agriculture. Additional simulations illuminate the forcing and feedbacks processes that drive regional differences between these scenarios./nMany policies and programs rely on a measure of net CO2 emissions to rank the climate damages of different activities or to generate credits within a trading scheme designed to minimize negative climate outcomes. While it is relatively straightforward to include well-mixed non-CO2 greenhouse gases in such schema using metrics based on radiative forcing, the climate system response to biophysical forcing differs from that of greenhouse gases. I examine the size and nature of this theoretical difference by modeling the equilibrium climate response to equivalent levels of radiative forcing from both land use change and elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations, drawing conclusions about the climate consequences of including biophysical forcing in carbon markets using this metric.

Advisor: Torn, Margaret S
Silence and Alterity in Russia after Stalin, 1955-1975

Taking as its theme the unsayable and the unsaid in post-Stalin Russia, this interdisciplinary dissertation pushes scholars to see more of the Soviet experience than the usual `totalitarianism' lens would allow. Its six chapters apply pressure to the cold war repressive hypothesis that casts the whispering citizens of Stalin's Russia as restored to speech during Khrushchev's cultural thaw only to be muted once more in the late sixties by political stagnation. The prevalence of this view in Russian cultural studies and national collective memory has rendered it rather difficult to write about late socialism until recently, when scholars started to take a multisensory approach to the Soviet past--not only listening to the verbal narratives of the era (whether official or dissenting), but also looking at the dynamic tensions between socialist speech and the socialist body. To counter the commonplace of Soviet history that makes quiet consonant with submission or complicity, this study attends instead to the manners in which Soviet subjects opted for silence to speak truth to power, as with the Aesopian gestural language of avant-garde pantomimists. It also pursues the wily ways that subjects presumed or produced as unspeaking or unspeakable--including the deaf-mute, the racial primitive, the sexual deviant, and the illiterate criminal--performed the silences imputed to them to say something else and, so doing, improvised interesting and unexpected scripts for late socialism.

Advisor: Naiman, Eric
Chen, Mel Y.
Rethinking the Role of Decodable Texts in Early Literacy Instruction

Decodable books based on previous classroom instruction are the most frequently used texts for 1st grade reading instruction in public schools, yet no empirical studies exist demonstrating their efficacy or their benefits for beginning readers. This study attempts to address this gap in the research literature by analyzing the reading behaviors of a group of 1st grade students reading the decodable texts included as part of the 1st grade reading curriculum in a large public, urban school district./nStudents read the 24 texts sampled in this study over the course of five months and detailed analysis of their reading behavior demonstrated the differential effects of these texts on high-performing, mid-performing and low-performing readers. High-performing readers began the year reading beyond the level of the decodable texts and interacted with the decodable texts minimally. Mid-performing students clearly benefited from reading the decodable texts even though their accuracy and fluency scores indicated substantial difficulties with the texts. For struggling beginning readers, however, the decodable texts were too difficult and the consistently low accuracy and low fluency scores were coupled with a range of problematic reading behaviors that demonstrated the disproportionate difficulty struggling readers had with the decodable texts.

Advisor: Pearson, David
Structured Codes in Information Theory: MIMO and Network Applications

Though random codes are shown to be optimal for point-to-point channels, codes with algebraic structure are found to be useful in many network scenarios. This thesis demonstrates the role of structured codes in several network and MIMO settings. In MIMO channels, structured codes can be used to improve receiver design. Traditional receiver architectures decorrelate the mixed data streams and recover each of them individually. Although optimal when the channel matrix is orthogonal, this can be highly sub-optimal when the channel is near singular. To overcome this limitation, a new architecture that recovers linear combinations of the data streams instead of the data streams individually is proposed. The proposed integer-forcing receiver outperforms traditional linear architectures and achieves the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. In network information theory, it has been shown that structured codes are useful for computation over multiple-access channels. This thesis considers function computation across general relay networks and proposes a scheme that decouples the physical and network layers. By using lattice codes in the physical layer and network codes in the network layer, the proposed scheme achieves the optimal distortion to within a constant factor. Finally, structured codes can be used to efficiently transmit channel state information when global channel state information is absent in networks. It is shown that sending a function of the channel state information is sufficient and can be much more efficient than sending the full information.

Advisor: Gastpar, Michael C
Mapping a Monastic Network: Peter Damian and Fonte Avellana in the Eleventh Century

Mapping a Monastic Network examines a "grassroots" reform movement in the Italian Marches, the monastic congregation of Fonte Avellana, how it functioned as a communications network, and how interactions between individuals and with the landscape produced a compelling and politically potent vision of personal and institutional change. In a new take on "history from the bottom up," I have used two strategies to rewrite the prehistory of the papal revolution of the late eleventh century usually called the Gregorian Reform and the Investiture Conflict. One is, literally, to look at the ground: by mapping the spread of this monastic network with Geographic Information System (GIS) tools and site surveys, I have reconstructed relations among communities within the congregation and considered the impact of topography on religious ideals and political relations. Second, having discovered and utilized documentation from the daughter houses of Fonte Avellana, I have reconsidered the center from the periphery, recovering the contributions of those who collaborated with the congregation's charismatic prior, the theologian, cardinal, and papal polemicist, (Saint) Peter Damian (1007-1072). The result is a more dynamic and inclusive portrait of how and why ecclesiastical reform convulsed European society at the end of the eleventh century.

Advisor: MIller, Maureen C.
Sparse Models for Sparse Data: Methods, Limitations, Visualizations, and Ensembles

Significant recent advances in many areas of data collection and processing have introduced many challenges for modeling such data. Data sets have exploded in the number of observations and dimensionality. The explosion in dimensionality has led to advances in the modeling of high dimensional data with regularized and sparse models. One of the more interesting and challenging varieties of high dimensional data are sparse data sets. Sparse data sets arise from many important areas involving human-computer interaction, such as text and language processing, and human-human interaction, such as social networks./nOur motivation in this thesis is to explore the use of sparse models for applications involving sparse data. In some cases, we have made improvements over previous methods that fundamentally involved dense models fitted on, and applied to, sparse data. In other cases, we have adapted sparse models developed for dense data sets. Along the way, we have encountered a recurring issue: due to both subsampling and regularization, we are faced with a problem that sparse models may not adequately capture the full dimensionality of such data and may be inadequate for prediction on test data./nThe utility of sparse models have been demonstrated in contexts with very high dimensional dense data. In this dissertation, we shall examine two applications and modeling methods involving sparse linear models and sparse matrix decompositions. Our first application involves natural language processing and ranking, the second involves recommendation systems and matrix factorization./nIn Chapter 2, we developed a novel and powerful visualization system. We named our system Bonsai as it enables a curated process of developing trees that partition the joint space of data and models. By exploring the product space of the space of training data, the space of modeling parameters, and the space of test data, we can explore how our models are developed based on the constraints imposed and the data they attempt to model or predict. More generally, we believe we have introduced a very fruitful means of exploring a multiplicity of models and a multiplicity of data samples./nChapter 3 is based on our work in the Netflix Prize competition. In contrast to others' use of dense models for this sparse data, we sought to introduce modeling methods with tunable sparsity. In this work, we found striking difficulties in modeling the data with sparse models, and identified concerns about the utility of sparse models for sparse data./nIn conclusion, this thesis presents several methods, and limitations of such methods, for modeling sparse data with sparse models. These limitations are suggestive of new directions to pursue. In particular, we are optimistic that future research in modeling methods may find new ways to tune models for density, when applied to sparse data, just as much research on models for dense data has involved tuning models for sparsity.

Advisor: Yu, Bin
Resource Allocation and Scheduling in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments

Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of cloud computing systems that rent computing resources on-demand, bill on a pay-as-you-go basis, and multiplex many users on the same physical infrastructure. These cloud computing environments provide an illusion of infinite computing resources to cloud users so that they can increase or decrease their resource consumption rate according to the demands./nAt the same time, the cloud environment poses a number of challenges. Two players in cloud computing environments, cloud providers and cloud users, pursue different goals; providers want to maximize revenue by achieving high resource utilization, while users want to minimize expenses while meeting their performance requirements. However, it is difficult to allocate resources in a mutually optimal way due to the lack of information sharing between them. Moreover, ever-increasing heterogeneity and variability of the environment poses even harder challenges for both parties./nIn this thesis, we address "the cloud resource management problem", which is to allocate and schedule computing resources in a way that providers achieve high resource utilization and users meet their applications' performance requirements with minimum expenditure./nWe approach the problem from various aspects, using MapReduce as our target application. From provider's perspective, we propose a topology-aware resource placement solution to overcome the lack of information sharing between providers and users. From user's point of view, we present a resource allocation scheme to maintain a pool of leased resources in a cost-effective way and a progress share-based job scheduling algorithm that achieves high performance and fairness simultaneously in a heterogeneous cloud environment. To deal with variability in resource capacity and application performance in the Cloud, we develop a method to predict the job completion time distribution that is applicable to making sophisticated trade-off decisions in resource allocation and scheduling. Our evaluation shows that these methods can improve efficiency and effectiveness of cloud computing systems.

Advisor: Katz, Randy H