VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Grid-level valuation and impact of large-scale energy storage deployments

Electric power systems are currently facing substantial changes in their operating frameworks on a wide variety of fronts. With increasing deployment of grid-connected wind and solar generators, power system operators are concerned that the challenge of following variable generator outputs may degrade system reliability. Additionally, as temperature changes associated with climate change increase, the magnitudes and frequencies of peak loads will correspondingly grow, thus compounding the variability problems introduced by intermittent generation. The fossil fuels that are currently used to run most of the system are changing in cost as new methods are developed to extract them, even as new policies are being proposed that restrict or tax carbon emissions. Additionally, much of the current electricity system infrastructure is nearing the end of its life, and will soon need to be decommissioned or replaced./nEnergy storage has been proposed in several different venues as a solution to many of these problems. If energy storage can be deployed appropriately, it is possible that variability could be reduced, fossil fuel dependency could be lessened, and additional investments in new plants to handle increased demand could be avoided. Though these benefits could be large, the benefits to adding storage to the current grid have not been fully characterized./nWe seek to better characterize the potential for storage to change overall grid operations. To do this, we use a 240-bus model based on the US Western Interconnection. In this model, we first optimally locate storage devices in the network and then dispatch them along with conventional power generation units by using a unit commitment model with DC load flow. Storage in the model can provide frequency regulation, load following, and arbitrage for each hour of a study year, and we investigate a range of scenarios for fuel price and renewables penetration. We use this model to investigate the demand curves for added storage and added TCL aggregations that function as thermal storage, as well as the extent to which carbon taxes may have an effect on the overall benefits that storage may provide. We find that storage and demand response are most valuable operationally and economically when they are providing high power services like frequency regulation and demand response. We also show that the relationship between carbon taxes and the benefits that energy storage resources could provide is not linear.

Advisor: Callaway, Duncan S
Patterns of Exchange: Translation, Periodicals and the Poetry Reading in Contemporary French and American Poetry

This work offers a transnational perspective on the lively dialogue between French and American poetry since the 1970s. Focusing on the institutions and practices that mediate this exchange, I show how American and French poets take up, challenge or respond to shifts in the poetic field tied to new cross-cultural networks of circulation. In so doing, I also demonstrate how poets imagine and realize a diverse set of competing publics./nThe work is divided into three chapters. After analyzing in my introduction the web of poets and institutions that have enabled and sustained this exchange, I show in my first chapter how collaborations between writers and translators have greatly impacted recent poetry in a case study of two American works: Andrew Zawack’s Georgia (2009) and Bill Luoma’s My Trip to New York City (1994). Following the trajectory of these works as they move through different contexts and languages, I investigate the shifting meanings of poetry as it circulates through various spaces. I also move outside the traditional paradigm of translation studies: rather than a comparative textual analysis, I examine how these poets respond to the new set of circumstances created by the institutionalization of translation./nIn my second chapter I draw on two influential periodicals— La revue de littérature générale (1995-1996) in France and Chain (1994-2006) in the U.S.— to show how the periodical at once facilitates and troubles transnational exchange in contemporary poetry. I demonstrate that these two reviews redefine their respective poetic fields by working both within and against larger cultural institutions and technologies. I argue that each journal creates a new context for its poetry by defying larger structures of power, such as Jack Lang’s cultural policies in the case of RLG and the institutional forms of capital tied to the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo and its use of the listserv with Chain./nIn my final chapter I examine the influence of the American poetry reading in France. I argue that the reception of the poetry reading in France has given rise to new “oral-centered” writing practices. In particular, I show how Jacques Roubaud’s experiments with “improvised prose” and oral performance developed as a response to the professionalized, American-style poetry reading. Through my reading of Roubaud, I complicate the myth of the poetry reading as a more authentic experience of poetry and call into question established notions of orality./nThe specific case studies of my dissertation open onto a field of larger questions concerning how modes of circulation in our globalized world are transforming poetry. These questions are further explored in a coda that closes my dissertation.

Advisor: Lucey, Michael
Trajectories of Form in Modern Japanese Poetry

Form is central to poetry, if not all artistic endeavor. The Japanese literary tradition contains an array of poetic forms since its earliest extant texts, though some, like waka and kanshi, dominated poetic production for centuries. With Japan’s increased exposure to Western literary forms after the start of the Meiji era in 1868, the variety of new forms expanded rapidly. For many of Japan’s readers and poets, exposure to European and American literature was initially mediated by translation anthologies. As this dissertation seeks to show, many of the translators grafted new poetic practice onto pre-existing techniques, resulting in new forms and styles of poetry. Vernacular poets, often working with keen awareness of the translations, further adapted and altered those forms in their own work./nEach chapter that follows documents and analyzes key aspects of form in modern Japanese poetry, including meter and rhyme. My primary tool of analysis is close reading, down to the phonemes, as rhyme and meter require, together with textual comparisons. Such close readings, often informed by linguistic research, reveal both the richness of form practiced in Japanese poetry, as well as its possibilities. They also trace the trajectory of these forms and their permutations over time. Ultimately, these analyses show that form is anything but static.

Advisor: O'Neill, Daniel
Characterizing the role of bacterial actin proteins, MamK and MamK-like, in the organization of magnetosome organelles in Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1

Cellular organization is critical for life to flourish. Historically, this area of research has focused on eukaryotic systems, but recent advances have resulted in bacteria as model organisms to study cell biology. This research is aimed to elucidate how bacteria organize their internal structures. To address this question, the bacterial model organism, Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1 (AMB-1) was used and the role of two bacterial actin proteins, MamK and MamK-like, were studied./nThe first chapter of this dissertation, a published review article (Cornejo-Warner et al., Current Opinion in Cell Biology 2014) written in collaboration with fellow Komeili lab member Elias Cornejo-Warner, introduces the topic of bacterial cell compartmentalization, highlighting examples from Bacillus subtilis and Caulobacter crescentus. Additionally, the organization of bacterial organelles is discussed with examples of two model systems, the magnetosomes of magnetotactic bacteria and the carboxysomes of cyanobacteria./nThe second chapter of this dissertation, a combination of a published primary research article (Abreu et al., Journal of Bacteriology 2014) and unpublished supporting data, focuses on a bacterial actin protein, MamK-like. MamK-like is encoded in the magnetosome islet, a region of DNA distinct from the more heavily studied magnetosome island in AMB-1. The work described in this chapter, with assistance in molecular biology from Ertan Ozyamak and in vitro work from Soumaya Mannoubi, resulted in determining that this protein does indeed play a role in AMB-1 organelle alignment./nThe third chapter of this dissertation (unpublished work) focuses on the efforts that were taken to further understand the mechanism of MamK turnover by Flourescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP) studies, a continuation of previous work published by Olga Draper (Draper et al. Molecular Microbiology 2011)./nThe fourth chapter of this dissertation (unpublished work) focuses on the experiments developed (ex vivo: Bacterial two hybrid and in vitro: MamK affinity tagged pulldowns and Mass Spectrometry) to identify MamK and MamJ interacting proteins./nThe fifth chapter of this dissertation is a conclusion of the work as it stands and proposals for future directions that could lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the organelle organization phenotype and bacterial actin behavior.

Advisor: Komeili, Arash
Kenosis and Immanence: Self-Emptying in Eckhart, Hegel and Bataille

My dissertation challenges the strict boundaries separating medieval mysticism and modern philosophy in order to recover a tradition of thought that is concerned neither with securing the transcendence of God nor establishing an autonomous subject. Rather, it ascribes theoretical primacy to movements of self-emptying (kenosis) that reveal an impersonal immanence of life that precedes the very difference between subject and transcendence. The first chapter centers on the 14th-century mystical theologian Meister Eckhart, who I argue elaborates self-emptying not as a moment that opens the soul to an experience of a transcendent God or to a beatific vision of the celestial after-life (as could be expected of a medieval mystic), but rather in order to articulate a dispossessed and immanent life "without a why." The second chapter argues that Eckhart articulates immanence as absolute, as a process unrestrained by anything outside of itself, through his interpretations of key Christian theological topoi, most centrally those of the divine self-expression in the Word and the birth of the Son. By offering a novel interpretation of Hegel's speculative thought as centering on the movements of self-emptying and externalization (Entäußerung, the rendition of the Greek kenosis), chapters 3 and 4 show how the critique of self-standing subjects no less than the theoretical primacy of transcendence are reactivated in modern philosophical thought. This reading of Hegel's thought mounts a critique of modern philosophy's drive to establish subjects that can labor for and seek to achieve self-certainty and self-transparency. By speculatively re-writing religious language and concepts, I argue, Hegel's thought theorizes the ways in which transcendent ideals are nothing but unachievable abstractions that only maim life lived under them. The final chapter argues that Georges Bataille, in formulating the spiritual and methodological imperative of abandoning all hope, untethers the process of self-emptying from any possibility of recuperation or salvation, and articulates a particularly bleak variant of an ungrounded life. Taken together, I argue, these thinkers provide the theoretical tools for the articulation of a new paradigm for ethics - not an ethics of relation to the Other as formulated by Emmanuel Levinas, nor an ethics centered on the cultivation of the self as proposed by Michel Foucault - but an ethics of self-emptying and dispossession, which affirms the anonymous and impersonal life coursing through all selves, all others, and all disciplines.

Advisor: Largier, Niklaus
Butler, Judith
Reliability-Based Optimization for Maintenance Management in Bridge Networks

This dissertation addresses the problem of optimizing maintenance, repair and reconstruction decisions for bridge networks. Incorporating network topologies into bridge management problems is computationally difficult. Because of the interdependencies among networked bridges, they have to be analyzed together. Simulation-based numerical optimization techniques adopted in past research are limited to networks of moderate sizes./nIn this dissertation, novel approaches are developed to determine the maintenance policies that best balance network performance and agency cost. For two different types of networks, two performance metrics are adopted, and the research is divided into two parts accordingly./nThe first part focuses on moderate-size networks with limited redundancy. The network performance is quantified by a graph-theoretic indicator of network connectivity, since connectivity is the fundamental service function of a network. The objective is to ensure an adequate level of network connectivity at the lowest possible life-cycle maintenance cost. A novel two-stage approach is developed, which makes it possible to solve the problem by using standard optimization tools (with guaranteed convergence to optimality), as opposed to the heuristic algorithms used in related literature./nThe second part studies large and redundant networks, and the network performance is quantified by the total user costs due to potential bridge failures. The objective is to minimize the total user costs, specifically, the extra travel distance over a planning horizon and under a budget constraint. It is conjectured and then verified that the expected increase in vehicle-miles travelled due to failures can be approximated by the sum of expected increases due to individual failures. This allows the network-level problem to be decomposed into single-bridge problems and tackled efficiently. The computational effort increases linearly with the number of bridges.

Advisor: Madanat, Samer
Daganzo, Carlos
Bandgap Engineering and Doping of CdO

The unique properties of metal-oxide semiconductors make them well suited to a variety of optoelectronic applications. Metal oxides comprise all industrially-relevant transparent conductors (TCs), and there is significant interest in their development as photovoltaic (PV) absorbers, light-emitting diodes, and electrodes in photoelectrochemical (PEC) devices. TCs are heavily-doped, wide-bandgap semiconductors that must simultaneously exhibit high conductivity and high optical transparency across (and beyond) the visible spectral range, but such materials face severe fundamental tradeoffs between transparency and conductivity that preclude the use of TCs in a number of applications that require infrared and near-infrared transparency. High-mobility TC materials such as CdO can acheive a better balance of transparency and conductivity, but their short-wavelength transparency is limited by a low intrinsic direct bandgap of 2.2 eV./nThis dissertation explores how the properties of CdO can be tuned by bandgap engineering and doping and discusses their use in TC and photoelectrochemical applications. Alloys of the structurally-mismatched endpoint compounds CdO--ZnO have attracted considerable interest within the field of oxide bandgap engineering as they allow the bandgap of ZnO (3.3 eV) to be tuned across the visible range with the incorporation of Cd into hexagonal ZnO. Little is known about the properties of cubic alloys based on Zn in CdO, however./nThe correlated structural, optical, and electrical properties of CdxZn1-x thin film alloys (0xZn1-x alloys are determined by three complementary techniques: ion-irradiation-induced pinning of the Fermi level at the Fermi-level stabilization energy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and soft X-ray absorption and emission spectroscopy. The three techniques find consensus in explaining the origin of compositional trends in the optical-bandgap narrowing upon Cd incorporation in wurtzite ZnO and widening upon Zn incorporation in rocksalt CdO. The conduction band minimum is found to be stationary for both wurtzite and rocksalt alloys, and a significant upward rise of the valence band maximum accounts for the majority of these observed bandgap changes. These band alignment details, combined with the unique optical and electrical properties of the two phase regimes, make CdxZn1-x alloys attractive candidates for PEC water splitting applications. A proposed device structure of a CdxZn1-xO-Si tandem PEC is presented./nFinally, the unique electrical properties and doping behavior of CdO are examined using simulations based on the amphoteric defect model. The calculated doping and mobility limits are compared with experimental values for Ga-doped CdO.

Advisor: Dubon, Oscar D
Walukiewicz, Wladyslaw
Toward an Analytic Sociology: Reconciling Structural and Individualistic Explanations of Social Phenomena via a Theory of Embodied Practice

Social theory explanations commonly take one of two forms. Accounts couched in terms of macroscopic entities such as institutions, culture, class, structure and tradition tend to privilege stability and regularity. Individualistic explanations, on the other hand, take these entities to be ultimately reducible to free actions of individuals and are most adept at explaining transformation and volatility in the social realm. These two forms of explanation are rooted in radically different ontological and normative assumptions, and no attempt to connect them has garnered wide acceptance to date. This dissertation once re-examines the tension between them, which has become known as the "structure vs. agency" debate, by drawing on and extending the insights of "theories of practice", a literature that locates the junction of structure and agency in the routines of ordinary daily activities./nThe dissertation begins by critically examining two extant theories of practice. One originates in Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell's responses to structuralism; the other is articulated by Theodore Schatzki, who draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein to characterize practice as a semantic lens through which social actors make sense of the world. An alternative theory of practice is then developed, inspired by Charles Taylor's Heideggerian conception of embodied agency. This theory of "embodied practice" advances a novel formulation of the structure-agent relationship. Through a fine-grained analysis of the cognitive and informational processes by which practices project a semantic dimension onto the world, embodied practice theory renders robust forms of personal agency compatible with certain forms of semantic macrostructures. The dissertation goes on to describe how embodied practices can account for both change and stability in society and how the concept of an embodied practice may be profitably employed in applied social analysis and political theory.

Advisor: Bevir, Mark
Functional Characterization of the DEAD-box ATPase Dhh1 - a regulator of cytoplasmic mRNA fate

Rapid modulation of gene expression is critical for cells to respond to environmental challenges and initiate developmental programs. Cells employ a variety of mechanisms to achieve tight regulation of gene expression, including post-transcriptional control of active messenger RNA (mRNA) levels by inhibition of translation or by mRNA degradation. While mRNA production via transcription has been extensively characterized, our understanding of how mRNAs are partitioned between an actively translating state and an inactive state is limited. In this thesis I examine the role of a highly evolutionarily conserved protein, the DEAD-box ATPase Dhh1, in mRNA inactivation and turnover in S. cerevisiae./nPrevious work from our lab puts Dhh1 at the crossroads of mRNA fate. For example, artificially tethering Dhh1 to an mRNA is sufficient to trigger its degradation. In contrast, in cells compromised in the 5'-3' decay pathway, tethered Dhh1 can no longer direct degradation of the message, yet still possesses the ability to repress its translation. Moreover, ATPase activity of Dhh1 is critical for mRNA localization in the cell, as ATPase-deficient mutants of Dhh1 induce the constitutive formation of mRNA-protein (mRNP) foci known as Processing Bodies (PBs) - enigmatic cellular structures that can direct storage or degradation of mRNAs. However, mechanistically how Dhh1 functions in translation repression and mRNA decay, as well as its role in PB assembly has remained elusive./nIn the following dissertation, I further characterize Dhh1 activities in translation repression, mRNA degradation, and PB formation. Using the previously established tethering assay, I identified protein factors that are distinctly required for translational repression or mRNA decay by Dhh1. Furthermore, I discovered that a mutant of Dhh1 that cannot bind to ATP is unable to interact with the Ccr4-NOT deadenylase complex - a major intracellular machine involved in transcriptional regulation and mRNA turnover. Finally, I show that Not1, the major scaffold of the Ccr4-NOT complex, controls Dhh1 localization to PB foci. In summary, my work suggests that the ATPase activity of Dhh1 is regulated in vivo, and this regulation may ultimately determine the fate of an mRNA - whether it is actively translated in the cytoplasm, or delivered to Processing Bodies for degradation or storage.

Advisor: Weis, Karsten
'A Most Splendid Tree': Hákon Hákonarson and the Norwegian Royal Court as a Site of Literary Production

This dissertation explores the development of the concept of the royal court in medieval Norway through an analysis of thirteenth-century literary portrayals of courts. The thirteenth century was a period of great change in Norway, characterized by centralization and increasing royal authority. There has been a great deal of discussion as to how shifting ideas of kingship factored into social change during this period, but less about how new royal ideologies were spread to and adopted by the populace. I contend that the royal court was a crucial vector for the spread of new ideas, and that an examination of literature produced for and consumed at the Norwegian royal court will help explain how new ideologies were internalized. My argument consists of case studies of three of the most important literary genres at the court of Hákon IV Hákonarson (r. 1217-1263): skaldic poetry, the translated romance, and didactic literature. Chapter One examines skaldic poetry composed for Hákon, comparing the strategies used by Snorri Sturluson and his nephews, Óláfr and Sturla Þórðarsynir, to maintain the relevance of their craft for thirteenth-century audiences, whose world was quite different from the masculine, martial culture depicted in skaldic verse. Chapter Two examines the translated romances whose origins can be most firmly located at Hákon's court. It links romance themes with many important issues of Hákon's day, including the nature of kingship, the place of women at court, and the increasing importance of education for the courtier. Chapter Three looks at Konungs skuggsjá as an example of didactic literature and a witness of original Norwegian thinking about kingship and the royal court. Not only does it serve as a corrective to the dysfunctional kingship portrayed in the romances, it links the king's authority to God, and thus the court to heaven. Finally, I examine the impact of these ideas through a brief discussion of a late thirteenth-century courtier's manual, Hirðskrá.

Advisor: Lindow, John