VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Before and After 'The Great Work': The Evolution of National Themes in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

This thesis examines the contemporary relevance of Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’ twenty-five years after its original premiere on Broadway in 1993, when critics referred to it as “the most thrilling play in years” and “an enormously impressive work of the imagination and intellect, a towering example of what theater stretched to its full potential can achieve.” With the play’s return to the Royal National Theatre in London in 2017 and its transfer to Broadway the following year, ‘Angels in America’ has taken flight once again in an era and society that is different, yet hauntingly similar to its post-Reagan predecessor. Despite its age, ‘Angels in America’ acquired two new titles within the 2017-18 season: the fastest selling show in National Theatre history, and the most Tony Award-nominated production of a play in Broadway history. This thesis studies the staging of both the original 1993 Broadway production and the 2017/18 National Theatre-Broadway revival as case studies to approach the question “Why ‘Angels in America’ today?”, and focuses primarily on the subtitle of the play: ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.’ Of the many themes contained within the play’s two-part eight-hour structure that help contribute to its contemporary relevance, I highlight themes that portray intimacy and connection, the family and the home, and the body and mind as microcosms of the larger nation. Many themes described here may not be the first to come to mind when one thinks of the nation or of ‘Angels in America’, and these themes do not come easy in the play—they are portrayed in betrayal, life-threatening situations, political corruption, drug addiction, and urban decay. By placing the themes against the backdrop of New York City in the 1980s, Kushner puts the nation to the test by means of the audience who live in it, and through the evolution of these themes over time, he pushes the nation to question and redefine itself.

Keywords:  Department of Theater and Performance Studies
theater and performance studies
national themes
contemporary theater
political theater
Tony Kushner
Angels in America
American drama
contemporary relevance
Broadway revivals
Thesis
Advisor: Jakovljević Branislav
Phelan Peggy
Behind Closed Doors: How Domestic Violence Among Pacific Islanders Remains in the Shadows

Domestic violence among U.S. Pacific Islanders is not well-studied. In the wake of noteworthy sexual assault allegations in the government and in Hollywood, the nation is being forced to reckon with the pervasiveness of gender-based violence. But for Pacific Islanders, a population that is small in the U.S. even for a minority group, the prevalence of assault and abuse is easily overlooked by agencies that serve entire cities or counties.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
Pacific Islanders
domestic violence
data
census
Polynesia
gender violence
police
island culture
Stanford University Department of Communication Program in Journalism
San Francisco Bay Area Pacific Islander Populations
American Community Survey
Police responses to domestic violence
Thesis
Behind the Drop in Initial Public Offerings in the United States

Initial public offering (IPO) activity has drastically declined in the United States since the beginning of the 21st century. This paper proposes four explanations: the rise of alternative capital and exit opportunities, high regulatory burdens for disclosure, bearish investor sentiment, and poor macroeconomic conditions. Although the dot-com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis have both temporarily depressed market conditions, regressions will examine all aforementioned factors and their impact on IPO volume. Controlling for the impact of market valuations and business dynamism, this paper investigates IPO activity in a quarterly time-series setting and unveils the potential factors behind the significant downward trend of U.S. IPOs over time since the 2000’s. This paper finds that alternative capital, specifically venture capital deal volume and index returns, is the strongest determinant of IPO volume.

Keywords: Department of Economics
initial public offering (IPO)
listing
delisting
alternative capital
exit opportunity
venture capital (VC)
mergers and acquisitions (M&amp;A)
regulation
SOX
JOBS
investor sentiment
business dynamism
macroeconomic conditions
US markets
Thesis
Advisor: Shoven John
Between present and future : on the temporality of educational goals

Contemporary educational practice and policy are dominated by certain assumptions about how time, children's learning and their good are connected. These assumptions are rarely questioned, and it seems that we often lose any sense of how practice and policy could be grounded in different and better ones. Specifically, learning time is unreflectively assumed to be a limited resource, usually a scarce one, to be used as effectively and efficiently as possible by teachers in order to promote particular educational goals, and the realization of these goals - e.g., skills, knowledge, mental dispositions, moral attitudes - is assumed to take place only in the more or less remote future. Following these assumptions, children's present experience, their here-and-now, is treated as meaningful only in so far as it serves a future achievement. In other words, educational time tends to become almost exclusively a "time on-task" and the child is commonly viewed as a deficient version of the educated adult he is supposed to become. Ultimately, teaching and learning on these assumptions is liable to turn into a form of training, losing what is uniquely "educational" about them. Further, children and youth cease to be respected as persons in their own right: they become mere means to the pursuit of rigidly predetermined future-ends. My dissertation asks how can education be conducted so that the present of the child, his here-and-now, is given attention, thought meaningfully about, and ultimately respected while his future is not neglected or predetermined but viewed with genuine and open-ended hope. The dissertation is composed of four papers. The main concern of the first two papers is the possibility and challenge of educationally appreciating the present and in a way it is a critique or at least a call for a reexamination of goal setting in schools and elsewhere. I show that a focus on children's interests and on the ephemeral characteristic of education have the potential to free learning and teaching from reductive instrumentalism. The next two papers add to this critique, but from another perspective, that of hope for a favorable future. The main questions asked in these papers are -- how can we teach without letting our hope harm or disrespect the child? And how can we educate in a way that inspires hope without determining in advance the hoped-for future? Here, I draw on Gabriel Marcel's and Jonathan Lear's analysis of the phenomenon of hope. Ultimately, I hope to show that appreciation for the present is compatible with a hopeful future-orientation as long as the educator views this future as truly open. Then, education can become a genuine alternative to an exclusive instrumental training and socializing.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Callan Eamonn 
Labaree David F.
McDermott Ray (Raymond Patrick)
Beyond minority : ethnicity, modernity, and the invention of the Qiang identity in China

This dissertation examines how ethnic minority groups and minority cultures figure into the Chinese experience of modernity. It expands the scholarly understanding of the ethnic diversity of Chinese literature and culture. The dissertation systematically studies the "invention" of the identity of one of China's longest-standing ethnic entities, the Qiang. Ethnic minorities like the Qiang are not only integral to modern China's national imagination, but they also embody the dilemmas of reform-era China's (1980s-present) cultural anxieties. Using a dialogical approach, the dissertation probes how ethnic minorities are imagined into modern China's national narratives and how minorities in turn experience and critique modernity. The dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary methodology and traces the evolution of the Qiang identity in various historiographical, literary, and visual forms. It investigates how the concept of the "Qiang" as a pre-modern signifier of ethnic and racial otherness has been turned into symbols of cultural endurance and inter-ethnic solidarity in modern China. The dissertation also analyzes how minority intellectuals mobilize national cultural memories to narrate themselves into the core of Chinese cultural history, upsetting the entrenched hierarchy between a cultural "center" and its "peripheries." Furthermore, I examine how national and popular cinema portrays the Qiang native village and unveil how ethnic Qiang and Yi writers from southwest China engage in a unique "ethnographic poetics" to document their cultures, express minority spiritual world-views, and combat the secularizing tendencies of a fast developing China. This dissertation contributes to the growing scholarship on indigenous cultures on an international level by joining the debate on how the global neoliberal economy has both undermined minority groups' traditional lifestyles and provided them with a fertile ground to re-make their past.

Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Advisor: Wang Ban
Egan Ronald
Kohrman Matthew
Mullaney Thomas S. (Thomas Shawn) 
Palumbo-Liu David
Beyond the frictionless machine : economic analysis of energy policy in an imperfect world

Better understanding energy, how to harness and utilise it effectively, and what the implications of its use in these ways means from an individual to a more aggregate level are important topics for business, policy making, and research. Growing evidence pointing to the serious global consequences of society's energy usage further increases the importance of these goals. Furthermore it is increasingly clear that the costs and benefits of energy use are experienced disproportionately across the population. The changing nature of individual decision-making and how the actions of individuals affect an entire economic system also play important roles in our effort to implement effective energy and environmental policy. Both on the demand-side and the supply-side, trends of decentralisation and the increased adoption of more granular technologies are making it increasingly important to understand the role of the individual and their behaviour within the broader energy-economic-environmental system. This dissertation contributes to the intersection of the energy, environmental, and behavioural economics literatures with an emphasis on policy efficacy. It considers questions of efficient retail electricity pricing, externality-correcting policies, the role of behavioural bias in consumer decision making, and the implications of such bias for policy efficacy. Its approach is grounded in neoclassical economics, but it brings the newer field of behavioural economics into the fold where its inclusion strengthens the ability to answer the question at hand. There are two main projects in this dissertation. The first is an in-depth evaluation of the rooftop solar pricing policy of Net Energy Metering (NEM) from both an economic efficiency and distributional equity approach. Treatment of this topic is approached first theoretically and then complemented with a suite of numerical simulations. The second project represents an attempt to codify and unify considerations of behavioural bias in individual decision making and what implications they have for optimal policy efficacy. In this way it showcases behavioural economics as an extension of, rather than a challenge to, neoclassical theory.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Sweeney James L. 
Kolstad Charles D. 
Weyant John P. (John Peter)
Beyond the Runner's High: How Female Collegiate Distance Runners Develop Athletic Identity to Find Purpose and Place in the World

This thesis provides a window into the unique ways in which distance runners experience the world. After conducting extensive interviews with competitive collegiate female distance runners, I identified central themes and common experiences that richly convey these runners’ athletic narratives. The questions these athletes address include: Why wake up an extra hour early before class or work to complete the daily run? Why complete a grueling workout when no one is watching? Why is injury such a big deal? Why race if it’s so painful and stressful? I interweave athletes’ personal anecdotes with key concepts from two theoretical frameworks – Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus and Michel Foucault’s biopower – to illustrate the myriad ways in which distance runners construct and maintain athletic identity. I explore the ways in which distance runners develop unique relationships with their bodies; in particular, how their place on an elite team causes them to become cogs within a machine. These stories illustrate how an athlete derives self-worth from her body’s ability to function efficiently within the training system and to represent the discipline, sacrifice, and restriction so integral to the elite athlete lifestyle. Most of all, these athletic narratives show how distance running provides the space for the relentless pursuit of self-betterment, which gives athletes a sense of belonging, purpose, and control over their bodies and minds. Put simply, this thesis explores how athletes use the sport of distance running as way to transcend their ordinary selves.

Keywords: Stanford
Thesis
Honors
Science Technology and Society
Athletics
Runners
Sports
Anecdotal
Interviews
Habitus
Biopower
Body Awareness
Body Image
Injury
Purpose
Belonging
Relationship with Body
Eating Disorders
Food choices
Body Dysmorphia
Identity
Team
Social Community
Thesis
Advisor: Luhrmann Tanya
Sato Kyoko
Big data as a governance mechanism

This study empirically investigates two effects of the availability of alternative data: stock price informativeness and its disciplining effect on managers' actions. Recent advancements in cloud computing, data collection, and machine learning have enabled technology companies to collect real-time, granular indicators of fundamentals to be sold to investment professionals. These data include consumer transactions and satellite images. I find that the introduction of these data increases price informativeness through decreased information acquisition costs, and these results are stronger in firms where sophisticated investors have the highest incentives to uncover information. In addition, the increased information content about future earnings contained in price affects managerial actions: I find that when alternative data become available, managers reduce their rent extraction through personal trading. These results are consistent with managers having less of an opportunity to trade profitably on their private information about future earnings because this information is reflected in prices sooner and to a greater extent. Furthermore, I find that investment efficiency, measured in various ways, increases after alternative data become available, consistent with price informativeness improving managers' incentives to invest and divest efficiently. My study informs academics, practitioners, and regulators about the impacts of reduced information acquisition costs for a group of sophisticated investors.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Larcker David F. 
Hodrick L. S. (Laurie Simon)
Lee Charles M.
Piotroski Joseph D. (Joseph David)
Big data for small earthquakes : detecting earthquakes over a seismic network with waveform similarity search

Earthquake detection, the problem of extracting weak earthquake signals from continuous waveform data recorded by networks of seismic sensors, is a critical and challenging task in seismology. To overcome the limitations of traditional energy-based detectors, waveform cross-correlation is now widely used to detect weak earthquake signals with waveforms similar to those of known events. Earthquake catalogs are often limited or incomplete, so we require a more general detector capable of finding events with unknown sources. Because earthquakes occur infrequently, detection algorithms must be capable of processing months to years of continuous data dominated by noise. To address these challenges, we have introduced Fingerprint and Similarity Thresholding (FAST), a new detection method that uses locality-sensitive hashing to perform a computationally efficient similarity search to identify all similar waveforms in the continuous data. FAST is the first detector based on waveform similarity that is capable of identifying events with unknown sources in long-duration data sets. In this work, I introduce three new extensions to the FAST earthquake detection method that help FAST achieve both high sensitivity and a low false detection rate when applied to years of continuous data. First, I present an improved feature extraction process that produces discriminative features ("waveform fingerprints") for earthquake waveforms. The proposed fingerprinting scheme is designed to detect low signal-to-noise earthquake waveforms using similarity search in imbalanced data sets dominated by noise. Next, I introduce a new analysis pipeline that extends a single-station FAST detector over a seismic network. The method leverages the pairwise event detection model of FAST to formulate network detection as a constraint on inter-event times of single-station detections. This approach is robust to missing data, effective in sparse networks with large station spacing, and scalable to large data sets while maintaining a low false detection rate. Finally, I present a partially informed variant of FAST that prioritizes data more likely to contain earthquake signals in similarity search. This approach makes more efficient use of available computational resources, including reducing runtime and memory usage, with a negligible effect on detection performance. I demonstrate the performance of these methods on real waveform data from northern California and Iquique, Chile.

Advisor: Beroza Gregory C. (Gregory Christian) 
Biondi Biondo
Ellsworth William L.
Biomechanical behavior of human stratum corneum : impact of treatments on SC components

The stratum corneum (SC) is a remarkable biocomposite thin-film material. As the outermost layer of human skin, it serves as our primary protection against environmental insults such as bacterial infection, UV damage, temperature changes, and chemical exposure. To accomplish this task, it must be mechanically robust yet flexible; provide a barrier to water loss while maintaining its own moisture balance; and act as an interface through which we can perceive the outside world while not exposing any living tissue to harm. The SC fulfills these daunting duties thanks to its complex structure, which takes advantage of several structural elements operating at various scales to provide the wide array of biomechanical properties and behaviors necessary for its function. Among the most important of these are the keratin structural fibers which make up the bulk of the SC and provide rigidity and strength to the tissue; the intercellular lipid bilayers which comprise the primary barrier to water transport through the skin; and finally the corneodesmosome binding protein complexes, which physically hold the individual corneocyte skin cells together and which are critical for both the mechanical integrity and proper shedding of human skin. In this work the impact of various topical treatments on each of these three SC components is examined using biomechanical thin-film testing methodologies. First, the impact of lipid and natural moisturizing factors (NMFs) on the barrier function of the SC is studied. By extracting these components from the tissue, changes to the drying behavior of the SC is induced. In particular, lipid damage is found to increase both the magnitude and rate at which mechanical stresses develop in the tissue during drying. These changes are found to be linear with the fraction of lipids extracted from the skin. Next, two keratin dispersing compounds, namely ectoine and HEG, are applied to the tissue. The degree of keratin dispersion is measured, and improvements to water transport kinetics through the tissue are observed. These effects also lead to better skin hydration in ambient humidities; however, extreme drying conditions can reverse this trend, suggesting that the efficacy of these treatments may be dependent on the environment in which they will be used. Finally, aqueous and organic solvents, as well as the aforementioned keratin dispersing compounds, are applied to the SC in order to change the cohesive properties of the tissue. In this way, interactions of the corneodesmosomes with various treatments can be probed. These experiments reveal the sensitivity of these structures to a variety of treatment types, and highlight the importance of maintaining a proper balance of cohesion in the tissue.

Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Dauskardt R. H. (Reinhold H.) 
Appel Eric (Eric Andrew) 
Salleo Alberto
Biomechanical differences between rearfoot striking and forefoot striking in running

Running is a popular and beneficial form of exercise, but has notoriously high injury rates. One modification that has been suggested for reducing injury is changing foot strike pattern. The majority of recreational runners land on their heels when running, which is known as rearfoot striking. However, converting to forefoot striking and landing on the ball of the foot rather than the heel may be useful for reducing overuse injuries. Understanding the differences between rearfoot striking and forefoot striking during running and how these differences affect injury risk is necessary before promoting one foot strike pattern as protective. The goal of this dissertation was to improve the understanding of biomechanical differences between rearfoot striking and forefoot striking. Initially, I gained an understanding of how these running patterns differ by comparing muscle activity between habitual rearfoot striking runners and habitual forefoot striking runners in ten major lower limb muscles. Next, I used acute gait retraining on habitual rearfoot striking runners, asking them to perform two different running adaptations: converting to a forefoot striking pattern and increasing their cadence by 10%. I compared how these adaptations affected biomechanical parameters associated with a history of tibial stress fractures. From this study, I found that converting to forefoot striking and increasing cadence reduced different injury risk parameters. Both of these adaptations appear to potentially reduce the risk of tibial stress fractures, but they do so in different ways. Finally, I analyzed the effect of converting to forefoot striking on plantar flexor muscle-tendon dynamics using simulations driven by measured kinematics and electromyography. With these simulations, I evaluated acute adaptation to forefoot striking on elastic energy storage in the Achilles tendon and plantar flexor muscle mechanics. Based on increased activation, increased negative work, and eccentric contraction during early stance, runners interested in converting to forefoot striking should be mindful of the increased demands on the gastrocnemius. The experimental results and simulations from this thesis are publicly available, allowing others to build upon this work and continue to probe the differences between habitual rearfoot striking and converted forefoot striking.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Delp Scott 
Fredericson Michael 
Kuhl Ellen