VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Empirical Study of Patent Infringement and Validity Cases in China

After the Chinese government enacted new policies to stimulate domestic innovation and patent activities, China has become a world leader in both patent applications and patent litigation. These major developments, together with the escalated U.S.-China trade tensions, have made China an integral but controversial venue of international patent protection. However, due to the lack of judicial transparency in China prior to 2014, there had been virtually no access to case data. Before 2014, all public knowledge about Chinese patent cases was obtained from either interpreting the plain text of Chinese law and regulations or analyzing a limited number of published cases that the Supreme People’s Court considered having significant social impact./nPatent cases in China are in need of a comprehensive empirical study. Taking advantage of the 2014 judicial reform and the public release of court documents in China, this article fills this gap by analyzing all publicly available patent infringement lawsuits and post-grant invalidity cases decided between 2014 and 2016 in China. Surprisingly, part of its findings disprove some long-standing beliefs about the Chinese patent system. One prominent example is that foreign parties fared much better than their Chinese counterparts. In infringement cases, foreign patentees were more likely to win than Chinese patent owners and received much higher damages. Moreover, foreign requesters succeeded more often in post-grant invalidation process than Chinese requesters./nThis Article also collects statistics on a number of other characteristics of patent cases in China. It provides comprehensive data on several different aspects of the Chinese patent system. Some of the key findings include that the overwhelming majority of patent infringement lawsuits in China involved mechanical patents instead of electrical and chemical patents; that on average, patent owners had waited quite a long time before enforcement; that at most, only about 0.6% of all issued patents are ever subject to invalidity challenges; etc./nIn addition to providing descriptive statistics, this article also conducts hypothesis testing, in an effort to identify potential predictors of the outcomes of patent cases in China. It finds that most variables tested in this article revealed significant predictive value. However, there are several exceptions. For infringement lawsuits, only one factor, economic regions, demonstrated no relationship with the amount of damages granted. Two factors, including plaintiffs’ residency and appeals, were not predictors of injunctions. For invalidity cases, prosecution length was not related to a patent’s validity.

Advisor: Merges, Robert P
Legacy Institutions and Political Order in Weak States: Evidence from Chad

This dissertation investigates variation in the ability of non-state institutions to produce political order in weak states. In countries with weak central governments, non-state institutions, such as chieftaincies, are often seen performing many of the functions of a state: enforcing legal codes, collecting taxes, guaranteeing property rights, and ensuring security. However, while some chieftaincies demonstrate an impressive command over their followers, in other places, residents feel free to disobey their chief's edicts. I ask: Why do people in some places comply with their local chief, while in other places they do not?/nSuch chieftaincy institutions are often referred to as "traditional," "customary," or "informal," institutions. However these conceptual labels are inappropriate for the full range of institutions to which they are applied. Some of which have nothing to do with local traditions or customs, while some have written legal codes and official state recognition. Accordingly I consider them to be legacy institutions, based upon the historical legacy of their community./nI develop a theory of institutional time-dependent reputation and how it affects individuals' compliance decisions. I explain how centuries-old institutions can command greater compliance than newer institutions, because people grow up knowing the institution's reputation, believing they will be punished if they disobey its leader. In contrast, people are still formulating their beliefs about newer institutions, because they are unsure whether newer institutions are capable of following through with consequences./nI corroborate this theoretical argument with new evidence collected via immersive research in Chad. Using in-depth interviews with chiefs and a survey of 2,300 Chadian villagers across peripheral regions of Chad, I find that residents have higher expectations of compliance in areas where there are older institutions with established reputations. This finding that is robust to a variety of analytical approaches and statistical models.

Advisor: Arriola, Leonardo
When the Empire Was a Colony: Roman Hispania and the Origins of Spanish Renaissance Culture

This dissertation offers a new account of how late medieval and early modern Spain revived the Iberian Peninsula’s classical-colonial past as the Roman province of Hispania with an eye toward the challenges it faced as an emerging nation. Hispania was one of the earliest non-Italian colonies of the Roman Empire, and as such lays claim to its own veritable canon of Latin authors (figures such as Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian and Martial) as well as the first non-Italian emperors (Trajan and Hadrian). Attuned to this layered legacy, the dissertation examines how the Hispano-Roman communal imaginary arose as an alternative to the dominant model of Gothicism, with its aristocratic and militaristic ethos. Instead, Hispania enabled an image of pan-peninsular wholeness, shared cultural heritage and ethno-racial pluralism that was especially molded by the intellectual contributions of Sephardic Jews and later Judeoconversos, Iberia’s marginalized minority community whom other national narratives sought to exclude by equating Spanishness with genealogical bloodlines and blood purity./nAs its title suggests, this dissertation fundamentally reconsiders our notions of a Spanish Renaissance by proposing ways by which we can expand the literary and cultural archive of hispanism with previously unexamined works from various Iberian and Mediterranean languages and literary traditions, including texts in Spanish, both canonical and less studied, as well as writings in Latin, Hebrew, Ladino and Portuguese. By taking a broad temporal scope that spans twelfth-century Hebrew writings by Sephardic rabbis to more canonical literature of the Spanish ‘Siglo de Oro,’ the discussion not only bridges the medieval and the early modern but does so with the aim of challenging our categories of periodization. Within this temporal span, the core of its analysis rests in the century of Iberian experience between the mass forced conversions of Judeoconversos in 1391 and the expulsion of the remaining Sephardic Jews in 1492. From the writings of the Judeoconverso father-and-son Pablo de Burgos and Alonso de Cartagena to those of the Letrado Humanist and converso-descended Antonio de Nebrija, the cultural project of reviving Hispania is constructed, this project argues, in response to the breakdown of the so-called ‘convivencia’ between medieval Iberia’s Christians and Jews. This Judeoconverso re-imagining of Spain as Hispania sets the stage for Miguel de Cervantes in his Numancia to fashion through literature new possibilities for how art and culture construct categories of communal belonging.

Advisor: Cascardi, Anthony
Manipulating Materials: Electronic and Topological Properties of Chemically and Structurally Complex Materials

Electronic structure theory enables fundamental understanding of material properties. Using first-principles based methods, several different classes of complex materials are studied including perovskite oxide heterostructures, halide perovskites, alkali metals under pressure, and high-throughput screening of multiferroic materials./n• In Chapter 2 we discuss the basis of electronic structure methods used in this thesis and introduce the calculation of topological properties from first-principles./n• In Chapter 3 the properties of lithium, an ostensibly simple metal, under pressure are introduced and our explorations into the emergence of nontrivial topological features at high pressures are shown./n• Halide perovskites have emerged as a promising material class for solar energy con- version due to their optoelectronic properties. We explore three different halide per- ovskite materials and, in collaboration with experiment, develop an understanding of how their properties change through chemical substitutions and structural manipula- tions. This includes the optoelectronic properties of Sn–alloyed Cs2AgBiBr6 (Chapter 4) and Cs8Au4XCl23 (X = In; Bi) (Chapter 6); and the increase in conductivity of (EA)2CuBr4 through pressure (Chapter 5)./n• Similarly, perovskite oxides are a highly tunable class of materials which display a wide range of interesting phenomena. Here we exploit the fact that experimentalists can control the synthesis of perovskite oxide heterostructures at the precision of single atomic layers. Given this level of control, we use first-principles calculations to de- sign monolayers and bilayers that would tune the work function of bulk SrRuO3 for thermionic applications in Chapter 7/n• In Chapter 8, we discuss our work developing a high throughput workflow based on symmetry and first-principles calculations to screen tens of thousands of materials for candidates which are both magnetic and ferroelectric./n• Finally, Chapter 9 presents an overview of the work.

Advisor: Neaton, Jeffrey B
Experiencing the Novel: The Tender Conscience in Early Modern England

"Experiencing the Novel: The Genre of Tender Conscience" argues that a seismic shift in perceptions of sensitivity reshaped the political realm and gave to literary history a new aesthetic form. Scholars of the eighteenth century have long distinguished the novel from earlier prose fiction by the verisimilitude of its circumstantial details. This scholarly tradition has yielded an unexpected critical silence on the extraordinary character at the novel’s center: a hyperconscious narrator who instantaneously and perpetually transforms perceptions into ordered, written narrative. This project traces the origins of this endlessly impressionable figure to the English Revolution, when the “tender conscience” was invented. Initially conceived of as a spiritual sensitivity to sin, this ideal soon became a shared political principle. For those who publicly self-identified as “tender consciences,” even minor episcopal revisions to liturgical practice induced excruciating pain. Through their declarations of sensitivity, these citizens appealed to a Pauline theory of community formation and its vision of a collective body that reforms for the sake of the most vulnerable within it. By discovering their own tenderness, the subjects of Charles I discovered political voices. Indeed, the tender conscience, as an affective logic and moral language of resistance, ultimately justified regicide. A forceful, community-binding complex of cognition, feeling, and ethics, the tender conscience persists well into the eighteenth century: it is the affective epistemology that drives Enlightenment thought from Lockean empiricism to Smithean sentimentalism. The tender conscience posited the public privilege of sensitivity; John Locke redirected and extended its reach. As it unfolds a vision of the long seventeenth century, this project reveals an enduring culture of dissent whose powerful recalibrations of affective norms shape popular politics, philosophy—and the culture of sensibility itself—from the margins.

Advisor: Picciotto, Joanna
Nucleosomes as carriers of epigenetic memory

A core assumption in chromatin biology is that nucleosomes store and transmit epigenetic memory of gene regulation through cell division. A requirement of this model is that nucleosomes – modified in place in one generation – continue to occupy the same DNA locus in the subsequent generation. In my graduate work, I asked whether nucleosomes remember their position through cell division. To execute my experiments, I developed a synthetic chromatin modifying enzyme that deposited high affinity covalent chromatin modification at a defined locus. The chromatin-modifying enzyme could be delocalized within minutes by the addition of a small molecule antibiotic, and the synthetic chromatin modification could be tracked for several hours after preventing new label deposition. Using this synthetic enzyme, I labeled nucleosomes at the GAL10 locus in S cerevisiae and tracked their position through DNA replication. I found that nucleosomes remained localized through DNA replication, suggesting that nucleosomes can transmit epigenetic. Furthermore, I found that in the absence of the fork associated nucleosome chaperones Mcm2 and Dpb3, nucleosomes did not remain localized, suggesting that mcm2 dpb3 mutants cannot transmit epigenetic memory through chromatin. In addition to exploring the fate of nucleosomes during DNA replication, I tracked nucleosomes through transcription and discovered that contrary to published models, nucleosomes are not translated linearly along an open reading frame during transcription./nIn the thesis that follows, I discuss the context for our collective intuition about the role of chromatin in transmitting epigenetic memory, and I identify the points at which our collective understanding rests on thin or contradictory data. I then discuss my attempts to develop and apply technology to reach a satisfactory resolution of one of the central unanswered questions in chromatin biology: do nucleosomes remember their position? Lastly I discuss side projects adjacent to chromatin biology that occupied my attention during the slower moments of my core thesis research.

Advisor: Rine, Jasper D
Influence of radiation damage on He diffusivity in apatite: implications and applications to low-temperature thermochronology

The radiogenic production and subsequent temperature-dependent diffusion of 4He in natural apatites provides means of constraining the thermal history of samples in the upper few kilometers of Earth’s crust. This technique, known as apatite (U–Th)/He thermochronology, has come into wide use in the past twenty years to quantify both rates and patterns of erosion in terrestrial settings. Critically important to the interpretation of these data, however, is the understanding of the diffusion of He and the effects of radiation damage over geologic time. Chapter 1 of this dissertation provides the background and basic concepts underlying the apatite (U–Th)/He thermochronology technique and describes the fundamental challenge of accounting for radiation damage when applying this technique. Chapter 2 describes one application of apatite (U–Th)/He thermochronology to a novel detrital study of glacially- transported cobbles in central Patagonia. This chapter provides evidence of a transient fast pulse of glacial incision with the onset of periodic glaciation in the region after ∼6 million years ago. As with all geochemical techniques used to study Earth science, the necessary assumptions made when interpreting data can have a consequential effect on the conclusions. Chapter 3 of this dissertation revisits a critical assumption—one regarding the role of radiation damage—that is made in the most often-used data interpretation models and then develops and proposes an alternate model (the alpha damage annealing model, or ADAM). In certain cases, but not all, the comparison between the ADAM and other radiation damage models shows that the radiation damage assumption can greatly affect the conclusions drawn from a data set. Additional experimental work aimed at improving the ADAM is described in Chapter 4, which finds that sample-dependent diffusion kinetics may be the key to interpreting challenging apatite (U–Th)/He thermochronologic data sets.

Advisor: Shuster, David L
The Microstrip SQUID Amplier in the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX)

We present the development and performance of low noise tunable Microstrip SQUID Amplifiers (MSAs) operating at frequencies near 1 GHz for use in ADMX. The MSA has been used in ADMX to produce published exclusions to the axion mass and density in our galactic dark matter halo./nThe exclusions published by ADMX and achieved with an MSA are the most stringent exclusions to date./nHypotheses on the nature of dark matter vary, so that the designs and operating principles of experimental dark matter searches vary as well. Every search is similar in that it is an endeavor to discover some very small signal--if the signal were not currently beyond perception we would not call our quarry ``dark matter". In ADMX the principle of operation is to convert axions into photons in a strong magnetic field, enhance that conversion rate with a resonant cavity tuned to the photon frequency, and record the presence of those converted photons. The trick in any direct detection experiment is to increase signal and decrease noise. In ADMX, the signal is increased by using a strong magnetic field, a high-Q cavity, and as large a volume as possible. The noise is reduced by operating at a low physical temperature and using a low-noise amplifier. That amplifier is the titular MSA. The MSA operates as a DC-Superconducting QUantum Interference Device (DC-SQUID) coupled to a RF microstrip resonator such that the magnetic field component of a standing wave on the microstrip couples to the SQUID, generating an amplified voltage signal across the SQUID terminals, which is transmitted to the rest of the detection chain. The MSA has a noise temperature of 50 to 200 mK, enabling a search rate about 56 times faster than would be possible using the best available commercial microwave amplifiers./nWe present background motivations and theoretical underpinnings to the axion dark matter search at a level appropriate for the graduate student first entering the field. We also include a substantial discussion of practical considerations and methods intended as a ``quick-start" guide for experimentalists. Our guiding principle is to provide the handbook we wish we had owned as a graduate student in physics first approaching the dark matter search, axion physics, and MSA design./nWe demonstrate MSAs operating at frequencies as low as 350 MHz and as high as 1,160 MHz with a typical Q of 60, typical gain of 20 dB, and typical tunability range of about about 20% of the center frequency. We use GaAs varactor diodes to tune the MSAs, and demonstrate a surprising transition in varactor capacitance between about 2 K and 200 mK, which we believe has not been reported to date and may shed light on the theory of shallow negative U centers in semiconductors.

Advisor: Clarke, John
What Makes Reading Difficult? An Investigation of the Contribution of Passage, Task, and Reader Characteristics on Item Difficulty, Using Explanatory Item Response Models

Reading comprehension (RC) is often viewed as a multi-faceted, multi-layered construct (Broek & Espin, 2012; Duke, 2005; Graesser & McNamara, 2011; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014), which manifests through complex interactions among three broad factors: the reader, the passage, and the task, all residing in a particular socio-cultural context (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). Drawing on the item difficulty modeling paradigm, this study examined how these three factors as well as their interactions affected comprehension difficulty. Specifically, the study used explanatory item response models (De Boeck & Wilson, 2004) to analyze a vertically-scaled item response matrix from an operational online assessment, which included a wide range of readers (n=10,547) as well as of passages (n=48), covering grades 1 through 12+. Analyses indicated that it is text features, as measured by computational text analyzers, rather than task features as coded by human raters, that explained over half the variance in item difficulty, after controlling for student general vocabulary knowledge. Specifically, sentence length, word frequency, syntactic simplicity, and temporality (i.e., the extent to which the text has time markers) were found to significantly affect comprehension difficulty in both model building and cross validation analyses. Further, small but significant interaction effects were found, indicating that these textual effects were moderated by student general vocabulary knowledge as well as task demands as captured by item types. In general, readers with higher vocabulary knowledge benefitted more from traditional textual affordances (e.g., shorter sentences, familiar words) than their peers with lower vocabulary knowledge, especially when questions asked them to recall specific localized information without accessing the source passage. However, a reverse effect was found with temporality: passages with more time markers helped low vocabulary readers, while it was low temporality passages that helped high vocabulary readers. The implications of these findings as well as their limitations are discussed as they relate to the measurement of RC and to instructional practice.

Advisor: Wilson, Mark