VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Beyond narratives of victim and villain: Characteristics and service needs of domestic minor victims of sex trafficking, and the challenges of service delivery

Young people involved in the sex trade have existed throughout history. Following passage of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) by the U.S. Congress, 22 U.S.C. 7102(8), U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who are under the age of 18 and trading sex in any capacity are now considered domestic minor victims of human trafficking. With the TVPA's passage, public awareness and services for victims of human trafficking increased. However, strategies to meet the needs of these young people are in the early stages of development. Knowledge gaps exist about the characteristics of young people who trade sex, what services these young people would like to receive, and the challenges of service provision. This study focused on three agencies that received funding to work with domestic minor victims of sex trafficking: the SAGE Project, Inc. in San Francisco, the Streetwork Project at Safe Horizon in New York, and the STOP-IT Program at Salvation Army in Chicago. This study addressed the following questions through a secondary analysis of quantitative and qualitative data: (1) What are the characteristics of young people who trade sex?; (2) What services do the young people request and what do they receive?; and (3) What are the challenges case managers experience in their work with this population?

Advisor: Gambrill, Eileen
Reasons for Attrition Among Public Adoption Seekers

The purpose of this study is to identify the main reasons public adoption seekers do not complete the adoption process. I conduct interviews with public adoption seekers from two California counties who dropped out of the process. I find that the most common reasons given for dropping out of the process are/n-changes in personal circumstance (for reasons such as losing a job or becoming ill);/n-dissatisfaction with agencies (for reasons such as poor customer service, the process being too lengthy, or perceived discrimination);/n-being too busy; and/n-having an insufficient income or being unable to meet the housing requirements./nIn examining the relationship between the socioeconomic characteristics of prospective adoptive parents and attrition, I find that lower-income adoption seekers most often drop out because they experience instability in their personal circumstances, have insufficient income, or do not meet agency housing requirements. I find that middle- and upper-income adoption seekers most often drop out due to insufficient time to complete the steps in the process or dissatisfaction with foster care adoption agencies./nAlthough many reasons for dropping out may seem to be beyond the influence of agencies, I argue that if the foster care adoption process were more efficient, prospective parents would be less likely to drop out due to life-changing events or due to being too busy to complete the process. Agencies appear to have room for improvement in terms of providing better customer service, making the process more clear and efficient, and complying with federal legislation.

Advisor: Mauldon, Jane
Gathering Kinds: Radical Faerie Practices of Sexuality and Kinship

Though they began as a gay male counterpart to the lesbian separatisms of the 1970s, the radical faeries are now a growing movement with thousands of participants in the United States and Europe. This dissertation argues that they are also a kinship phenomenon, a form of extended family. Faeries' polymorphous sexual ethics and economic collaboration entail consequences and constitutive exclu-sions divergent in some ways (but not others) from those of the United States' dominant homonormativity. While some faerie practices are also reminiscent of a new religious movement, others are not, and a careful consideration of the phenomenon in fact destabilizes the distinctions between sexuality, religion and kinship. The case of the radical faeries suggests that religiosity be seen as an erotic orientation and the coming out experience as a religious conversion. Although faeries articulate in many ways the anarchist and ecological themes of modern Euroamerican homosexuality, their own normative philosophies can be rooted in deistic and ultimately authoritarian totalizing ethics, and might be productively re-thought via greater attention to issues of difference and mindfulness. Moreover, while some faeries have achieved remarkable success in establishing rural collective property and new pat-terns of migration, their consensus-based governance processes can be rife with conflicts that might bely claims of filiality. In the conclusion, I argue that same-sex marriage does not go far enough and that advocates for progressive family law reform would be wise to take the example of the faeries into account.

Advisor: Cohen, Lawrence
Choreographing 'Productive' Citizenship: On the Cultural Work of Music in NGOs in Uganda.

This project seeks to examine the cultural work of music in two Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Kampala, Uganda: Watoto Child Care Ministries and Uganda Heritage Roots (UHR). By `cultural work' I mean the ways in which music is connected to the historical, social, political and economic forces that constitute lived experience and relations between people. Over a period of twenty years (1966 - 1986), Uganda experienced several turbulent political regimes and violent confrontations causing numerous arrests and deaths, as well as poor economic conditions throughout the country. More recently, the AIDS epidemic, the recently ended war in the northern part of Uganda, as well as the issue of poverty throughout the country have escalated the humanitarian problem./nNumerous NGOs are currently in Uganda providing assistance to individuals who have been traumatized by these catastrophes. These NGOs aim to engage in development activities that address the quality of life of the aid recipients. The two organizations that are central to my project feature musical practices in their intervention. They teach musical practices to some of their aid recipients as part of the process of creating possibilities for the improvement of their living conditions by raising them into becoming self-sufficient and `productive' citizens. The project is guided by a twofold inquiry: 1) in what ways are musical practices conceived by the NGOs to be crucial in their efforts to create possibilities to improve the living conditions of their aid recipients and to raise them into `productive' citizens, and 2) and in what ways does the learning, practicing, and performance of featured musical practices actually impact the aid recipients' living conditions?

Advisor: Guilbault, Jocelyne
Data Exchange Problems: Algorithms and Complexity

In this thesis we study the data exchange problem where a set of users is interested in gaining access to a common file, but where each has only partial knowledge about it as side- information. Assuming that the file is broken into packets, the side-information considered is in the form of linear combinations of the file packets. Given that the collective information of all the users is sufficient to allow recovery of the entire file, the goal is for each user to gain access to the file while minimizing some communication cost. We assume that users can communicate over a noiseless broadcast channel, and that the communication cost is a sum of each user's cost function over the number of bits it transmits. For instance, the communication cost could simply be the total number of bits that needs to be transmitted. In the most general case studied in this thesis, each user can have any arbitrary convex cost function. We provide a polynomial time deterministic algorithm (in the number of users and packets) that finds an optimal communication scheme that minimizes the communication cost. To further lower the complexity, we also propose a simple randomized algorithm inspired by our deterministic algorithm which is based on a random linear network coding scheme. In the later chapters we consider a general form of side-information, where each user observes independent realizations of some joint random process. For such scenario, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm (in the number of users and packets) that finds an optimal communication rate allocations for all the users. Next, we study two extensions to the original data exchange problem. First, we consider the problem where not all users in the system are interested in obtaining the file, but they are willing to help users who are. Also, we explore the problem where each user can communicate only to its immediate neighbors through a wireline network. For both the problems, we provide a polynomial time algorithm that is inspired by the original data exchange problem.

Advisor: Ramchandran, Kannan
Gastpar, Michael
Open Innovation Ecosystem: Chez Panisse Case Study

The concept of open innovation has been highly popularized both in academia and industry for the last decade. Various types of firms have been studied from high tech to service. Yet, there has been limited academic review of open innovation as a collective business ecosystem. In particular, little research exists on how a business ecosystem is generated, how it adopts concepts associated with open innovation in its business practice, and what sustains an ecosystem over time./nMy dissertation demonstrates how one business entity - Chez Panisse - started its business journey and how it practiced what is popularly called open innovation within its community for over 42 years. In order to do so, I closely observed and participated in understanding the California Cuisine ecosystem to collect data. I employed a single-case study method by incorporating in-depth interviews, participatory observation, as well as a thorough collection of publically available data. The research findings indicate that (1) knowledge spillover was a conduit to expand and grow the Chez Panisse ecosystem, (2) co-creation of products and services with ecosystem participants contributed to collective ecosystem innovation, and (3) social innovation and learning were key factors in strengthening the bond among stakeholders and enabled the ecosystem's expansion to the nation, and global level./nI introduce the concept of an Open Innovation Ecosystem as a business ecosystem that co-creates innovations with its stakeholders and captures co-created values collectively within the ecosystem. The Chez Panisse case illustrates how what is popularly referred to as open innovation can be practiced at the level of a business ecosystem and become an important factor in its growth and expansion. The research outcomes suggest that business practitioners should consider employing the approaches identified in this thesis if they are interested in designing, creating and growing or maintaining a business ecosystem. These results additionally indicate that participants of the Chez Panisse open innovation ecosystem stayed engaged because of the educational and social innovation aspects; therefore businesses may want to consider the role that education and social innovation can play in sustaining a healthy business ecosystem.

Advisor: Agogino, Alice M.
Queueing Systems with Customer Abandonments and Retrials

In queueing theory, the phenomenon that customers get impatient and renege from the system when the waiting time exceeds their tolerance is called customer abandonments. For those abandoning customers, they may go back to the service system after some time. This is called customer retrials. In the modern design of service systems, the impact of customer abandonments and retrials on the system performance and queueing dynamics has been realized. In this thesis, we aim to characterize the stationary properties for queueing systems with both customer abandonments and retrials. We also apply some of those properties in a revenue management problem for queueing systems with customer abandonments./nFirst, we study a multi-server queueing system with both customer abandonments and retrials. By using RTA (retrials see time average) approximation, we characterize the stationary properties of such a queueing system. We also justify the appropriateness of RTA approximation in this model both theoretically and numerically./nThen, we extend the study to incorporate negative customers and unreliable servers. Two different models are considered. One is a multi-server retrial queueing system with both regular customers and negative customers. The other is a single-server retrial queue/nwith negative customers and server interruptions. Closed-form expressions of some relevant performance measurements for both models are obtained./nFor the last, we apply some of our findings in queues with abandonments and retrials to a revenue management problem for a queueing system with customer abandonments. By using a mechanism design framework, we identify the optimal price-lead time manus and scheduling policies for different scenarios.

Advisor: Chen, Ying-Ju
Shen, Zuo-Jun (Max)
Vagal Reactivity and Compassionate Responses to the Suffering of Others

Theoretical and empirical work suggest that the vagus nerve supports social behavior, promoting communication, social engagement, coping or self-soothing in social situations, and the initiation of socially supportive behavior (e.g. Porges, 2003). Guided by this thinking, I predict that the experience of compassion in response to the suffering of others is associated with greater vagus nerve activation. I test this hypothesis across four studies in which participants witnessed others suffer while I recorded physiological measures including a non-invasive index of vagal activity called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), heart rate, respiration, and skin conductance. Participants exhibited greater RSA activity during the compassion induction compared to a neutral control (Study 1), another positive emotion (Study 2), and a prosocial emotion that lacked the presence of suffering (Study 3). Increases in RSA activity during the experience of compassion were accompanied by decreases in heart rate and occasionally by increases in respiration, but not changes in skin conductance. In Study 4, RSA activity during the compassion induction correlated positively with continuous self-reports of compassion and perceptions of participants' compassion by coders. This work suggests that compassion engages the vagus nerve, facilitating this prosocial response to others' suffering.

Advisor: Keltner, Dacher
Independent Living Service Programs for Foster Youth: How Individual Factors and Program Features Affect Participation and Outcomes

This dissertation examines factors that impact the provision of services and resources for youth during their transition from foster care into adulthood, specifically the support provided through federally funded Independent Living Skills Programs (ILSPs). The population targeted by these programs numbers fewer than 400,000 current and former foster youth between the ages of 16 and 21 at any given time. The review of the ILSP evaluation literature presented here shows little evidence to suggest that ILSPs, as they have operated over the past two decades, have had a positive impact on the young adult outcomes of former foster youth./nA quantitative analysis of ILSP graduation data from one California county is used to examine how need and program access affect ILSP participation, factors not previously addressed in the literature. This case study provides evidence that youth are more likely to graduate from ILSP if they had a higher level of need for transitional supports and greater physical access to an ILSP site. Youth more likely to be referred to ILSP - either because of the nature of their care setting or because they were placed within their county of origin - are also more likely to graduate from the program./nA qualitative examination of CC25, an initiative to improve the supports available to transition-age foster youth, indicates that counties implementing strategies that more effectively engage youth and caregivers in transitional planning and support program delivery, have the potential to increase the reach and relevance of ILSP services. In addition, increased community partnership and investment can create a more comprehensive array of support programming greatly needed by transitioning youth. These findings were consistent with data on transitional outcomes reported by the initiative which showed increased participation of youth in support services, greater satisfaction with the support received and some positive impact on permanency, financial literacy, housing, and education./nThe findings of this research have direct implications for the provision of ILSP services at the local level and can be used by child welfare agencies to better target eligible youth, increase the participation of youth in ILSP and develop ILSP services that more effectively address the needs of foster youth. Promising strategies include greater outreach to kinship and guardian caregivers, increased inter-agency collaboration and outreach to better engage out-of-county youth in ILSP, improved incentives to participate for youth who live further from ILSP sites, and better assessment of transition-age foster care youth to better measure their need for support.

Advisor: Mauldon, Jane
Relaxation in Magnetic Particle Imaging

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) is a novel medical imaging modality that spatially detects a tracer of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIOs) with high sensitivity, contrast, and no tissue penetration limitations. MPI has great potential for safer angiography, in vivo cell tracking, and cancer detection, among other applications. Current MPI theoretical descriptions and reconstruction techniques make an adiabatic assumption that the SPIO tracer instantaneously follows the applied magnetic fields of the MPI scanner. This assumption is not strictly true, and we refer to SPIO magnetization delays as relaxation effects./nWe begin by extending the x-space theory of MPI to include relaxation effects. We choose this MPI theory because it directly converts the temporal MPI signal to the image (spatial) domain, lending itself well to investigating how relaxation time delays translate into spatial effects. Using the non-adiabatic x-space theory and experimentally-measured data, we demonstrate that relaxation blurs the x-space image in the scanning direction./nNext, we study how we may design MPI scanning sequences to minimize relaxation-induced blurring. From the non-adiabatic x-space theory we derive a mathematical description of how this blur can vary with scanning parameters for a given relaxation time. We compare theoretical predictions to experimental data by measuring relaxation times and spatial resolution under various scanning conditions. Despite increased relaxation time delays with slower scanning conditions, we observe that relaxation-induced blurring can be minimized when scanning slower./nFinally, we derive a magnetic field-driven relaxation mechanism called magneto-viscous relaxation. This mechanism describes how the applied magnetic field creates a magnetic torque on the SPIO, inducing physical rotation of the SPIO to align with the field; however viscous resistance of the carrier liquid hinders this movement. We compare predicted relaxation times to measured values for a range of SPIO characteristics and scanning conditions./nIn this dissertation, we show how relaxation can have deleterious effects on the MPI signal and image. We explore how relaxation-induced blurring and relaxation times may be minimized through improved SPIO characteristics and MPI scanning sequence design. In addition to improving MPI image quality, this important area of research can lead to future clinical applications. Using this knowledge and specially-designed MPI pulse sequences, we can exploit variations in relaxation behavior as a source of contrast, which will increase the diagnostic potential of MPI.

Advisor: Conolly, Steven M
Assessment and Methods for Supply-Following Loads in Modern Electricity Grids with Deep Renewables Penetration

Electricity is an indispensable commodity to modern society, yet it is delivered via a grid architecture that remains largely unchanged over the past century. A host of factors are conspiring to topple this dated yet venerated design: developments in renewable electricity generation technology, policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and advances in information technology for managing energy systems. Modern electric grids are emerging as complex distributed systems in which a portfolio of power generation resources, often incorporating fluctuating renewable resources such as wind and solar, must be managed dynamically to meet uncontrolled, time-varying demand. Uncertainty in both supply and demand makes control of modern electric grids fundamentally more challenging, and growing portfolios of renewables exacerbate the challenge./nWe study three electricity grids: the state of California, the province of Ontario, and the country of Germany. To understand the effects of increasing renewables, we develop a methodology to scale renewables penetration. Analyzing these grids yields key insights about rigid limits to renewables penetration and their implications in meeting long-term emissions targets. We argue that to achieve deep penetration of renewables, the operational model of the grid must be inverted, changing the paradigm from load-following supplies to supply-following loads./nTo alleviate the challenge of supply-demand matching on deeply renewable grids, we first examine well-known techniques, including altering management of existing supply resources, employing utility-scale energy storage, targeting energy efficiency improvements, and exercising basic demand-side management. Then, we create several instantiations of supply-following loads -- including refrigerators, heating and cooling systems, and laptop computers -- by employing a combination of sensor networks, advanced control techniques, and enhanced energy storage. We examine the capacity of each load for supply-following and study the behaviors of populations of these loads, assessing their potential at various levels of deployment throughout the California electricity grid. Using combinations of supply-following strategies, we can reduce peak natural gas generation by 19% on a model of the California grid with 60% renewables. We then assess remaining variability on this deeply renewable grid incorporating supply-following loads, characterizing additional capabilities needed to ensure supply-demand matching in future sustainable electricity grids.

Advisor: Culler, David E.
Non-Simplicial Nerves for Two-Dimensional Categorical Structures

The most natural notion of a simplicial nerve for a (weak) bicategory was given by Duskin, who showed that a simplicial set is isomorphic to the nerve of a (2,1)-category (i.e. a bicategory with invertible 2-morphisms) if and only if it is a quasicategory which has unique fillers for inner horns of dimension 3 and greater. Using Duskin's technique, we show how his nerve applies to (2,1)-category functors, making it a fully faithful inclusion of (2,1)-categories into simplicial sets. Then we consider analogues of this extension of Duskin's result for several different two-dimensional categorical structures, defining and analysing nerves valued in presheaf categories based on several combinatorial categories. In each case, our nerves yield exactly those presheaves meeting a certain ``horn-filling'' condition, with unique fillers for high-dimensional horns. Generalizing our definitions to higher dimensions and relaxing this uniqueness condition, we get proposed models for several different kinds higher-categorical structures, with each of these models closely analogous to quasicategories. Of particular interest, we conjecture that our ``inner-Kan Gamma-sets'' are a combinatorial model for symmetric monoidal (infinity, 0)-categories, i.e. E-infinity spaces.

Advisor: Teichner, Peter