VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The use of virtual self models to promote self-efficacy and physical activity performance [electronic resource]

Five pretests and two experiments were conducted in a fully immersive virtual environment to test the utility of virtual representations of the self (VRSs), i.e., photorealistic virtual humans made to resemble the self, in promoting health behaviors. Using social cognitive theory as a framework, these studies manipulated identification with and vicarious reinforcement of virtual selves and virtual others to encourage exercise behavioral modeling and promote self-efficacy. The pretests indicated that virtual selves were more effective than virtual others in promoting behavioral modeling both at the time of the experiment and 24 hours following. The pretests also indicated that vicarious reinforcement of the VRS led to greater behavioral modeling than reinforcement of a virtual other. Study 1 revealed that virtual representations of the self are more effective than similar or dissimilar representations in promoting exercise behaviors; however, self-efficacy did not vary among groups. Study 2 compared virtual environments to the process of mental practice (i.e., visualization or mental imagery) in promoting exercise performance among low and high self-efficacy participants. Participants across conditions demonstrated greater performance over time. Finally, the dissertation considers future directions for research conducted with virtual representations of the self as both avatars and agents in health contexts.

Keywords: Communication.
Advisor: Bailenson Jeremy primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Koltun Vladlen
Reeves Byron
Turner Fred advisor. Thesis advisor
User Privacy and the Evolution of Third-party Tracking Mechanisms on the World Wide Web

Third-party tracking refers to tracking done by websites that a user never navigates to explicitly. Many Internet users are vaguely aware that their information may be collected online. However, data suggests there is relatively little knowledge about third-party tracking and its associated privacy risks. The FoxTracks software tool attempts to address this lack of knowledge about third-party online tracking for the benefit of interested users with varying levels of technical knowledge. FoxTracks is a Firefox add-on program that browses the web along with the user and collects information about three types of trackers that may be monitoring the user: HTTP cookies, Local Shared Flash Objects, and DOM Storage entries. The interface to FoxTracks displays the user's information as it has been collected by the trackers; the highly personalized view of third-party tracking is uniquely accessible and informative for end-users. Beyond the development of FoxTracks, the analysis presented in this thesis discusses the history, key players, and motivations of third-party tracking, and how each influenced the design choices made in the software. In particular, the motivations of third-party entities, who are frequently online advertisers, are examined in at length. A computer security rubric is then applied to the behavior and tracking methodologies of third parties in order to show their adversarial qualities in matters of user privacy.

Keywords: Computer Science.
Data protection
Internet searching
Personal information management
Thesis
Advisor: Mitchell John
Using semaphorins to assemble an olfactory circuit [electronic resource]

The Drosophila olfactory system is an excellent model to study how neural circuits develop their complex structure and precise connectivity. Olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) expressing the same odorant receptor, and thus sensing the same odorants, are scattered in the peripheral antenna and maxillary palp. Remarkably, these distributed ORNs expressing the same receptor converge their axons onto one discrete structural unit in the central brain termed a glomerulus. In each glomerulus, ORNs synapse with a single class of central projection neurons (PNs) that send their dendrites into one glomerulus and their axons to higher brain centers. Demonstrating this striking axonal specificity, the 1300 ORNs in the antenna expressing approximately 50 different odorant receptors segregate their axons into discrete 50 discrete glomeruli in the antennal lobe. This highly ordered olfactory circuit begs the question: how do ORN axons and PN dendrites achieve this remarkable level of convergence onto one of fifty glomeruli? My study of the Semaphorin protein family has revealed new cellular strategies for precise ORN axon and PN dendrite targeting. Semaphorins are highly conserved cell surface proteins that have been shown to function as neuronal "semaphores" to guide developing neurons. In ORNs, the transmembrane Sema-1a promotes axon-axon repulsion between two populations of ORNs to spatially restrict their targeting in the antennal lobe (Sweeney et al., 2007). In PNs, Sema-1a functions as a receptor to control PN dendrite targeting in a continuous molecular gradient (Komiyama et al., 2007). The secreted and highly homologous Sema-2a and Sema-2b produced by the ventromedial degenerating larval antennal lobe function in a countergradient as the Sema-1a ligand to repel dorsolateral PN dendrites (In preparation). Semaphorin function in Drosophila olfactory wiring demonstrates two novel strategies for neural circuit assembly: spatial cues from surrounding axons and from degenerating structures instruct precise targeting.

Advisor: Luo Liqun
Clandinin Thomas R. (Thomas Robert)
Nelson W. J. (W. James) advisor. Thesis advisor
Shen Kang
Using synthetic small molecules to probe the structure and function of voltage-gated ion channels [electronic resource]

Several methods of examining the structure and function of voltage-gated ion channels are described. The first part of this work involves synthetic small molecules based on the structure of (+)-saxitoxin, a marine neurotoxin. (+)-saxitoxin interacts with the pore of the voltage-gated sodium (NaV ) channel to prevent the passage of ions. A scaffold was designed to be modular, synthetically facile, and contain the functionality that had been implicated in the previous literature. Several members of this family of molecules were produced, and they were assayed for occlusion of sodium current (INa). The second part of this work examines the gating kinetics of voltage-gated potassium (KV) channels. 6-bromo-mercaptotryptamine (BrMT) is a marine neurotoxin that has been shown to alter the gating kinetics of KV channels. Specifically, BrMT affects the early, typically independent steps of KV gating by stabilizing the resting state of some number of the subunits. A family of small molecules was designed and synthesized that would examine the functional effects of different parts of the BrMT molecule. BrMT is a dimer containing three key functional groups: a halogenated indole, a pendant ethyl-amine, and a disulfide linker. Variance at all these positions was examined, and each had different effects. Notably, one of the variants, in which the disulfide linker was substituted for an oxy-bismethyl ether linker, affects KV gating in a different way from BrMT. Alternate models of gating in the presence of this novel analog are discussed.

Keywords: Chemistry
Advisor: Aldrich Richard
Du Bois Justin primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Brauman J. I. (John I.)
Valuation of fleeting opportunities [electronic resource]

This dissertation is concerned with the study of problems that involve fleeting opportunities. These are situations with limited capacity and a stream of opportunities on which the decision maker must decide whether to capitalize as they occur. One example is the evaluation of business proposals by Venture Capitalists (VC). I have developed a process to help decision makers in such situations set their policies and answer valuation questions. In the VC context, this process helps evaluate the firm itself or the value of a partner in hiring/firing situations. It can also help the organization's decision makers determine the value of information-gathering activities for different deals at different situations. Our solution is based on three steps. In the first, we assess the frame and decision basis. In the second, we build the valuation funnel. In the third, we apply the results of the valuation funnel to decisions regarding the deal flow and specifically to deals as they arrive. We assume that the risk preference of the decision maker follows a linear or an exponential utility function. We formulate the generic problem in the valuation funnel as a dynamic program wherein the decision maker can either accept a given deal directly, reject it directly, or seek further information on its potential and then decide whether to accept it or not. This approach is illustrated in this dissertation through several examples. Our results show well-behaved characteristics of the optimal policy, deal flow value, and the value of information and other alternatives over time and capacity. To enable these results, we developed the power u-function further and defined a u-value multiplier and certain equivalent multipliers. We also studied different approximations for the power u-curve based on few moments of the underlying distribution. The system we created gives a valuation template for the fleeting opportunities problem. This template allows decision makers to address single opportunities as they occur and guides their approach to the deal flow as a whole. We believe this template will help to extend the application of Decision Analysis and spur more research within the fleeting opportunities problem and, more generally, valuation problems. Our process allows us a valuation template for problems fitting the fleeting opportunities description. This, we hope, will extend the use of Decision Analysis into new fields.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering
Advisor: Howard Ronald A. (Ronald Arthur)
Abbas Ali E. (Ali El-Sayed) advisor. Thesis advisor
Chiu Samuel S. advisor. Thesis advisor
The value of vision in radical technological innovation [electronic resource]

Is a technological vision needed to drive radical or disruptive innovations? Few studies have discussed a possible relationship between the formation of a technological vision and the sustained creation of radical innovation. Even fewer have analyzed a relationship systematically, and finding a suitable data set has proven to be a challenge to scholars. Since 1958, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sponsored high risk, high reward research and development that bridge the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military uses. The agency's sole charter has been radical innovation, providing 52 years of sustained practice. This study draws on 59 interviews with DARPA personnel and funding recipients, whose time at the agency spans 45 of those years. Historical interviews and agency documents further validated the data set. Using grounded theory methodology, this study identifies the importance of vision in radical technological innovation, synthesizing prior studies from organizational innovation, technology management, visionary leadership, and industrial research and development. Four major findings are discussed, which address the timing and criteria for innovation visions, specific mechanisms for the formation of visions, the role of socialization on envisioning, and the corresponding governance model. These findings, supported by empirical evidence, add to the current understanding of technological visions and radical innovation research.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering
Advisor: Leifer Larry J. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
House Charles H.
Katila Riitta advisor. Thesis advisor
Varying IL-6 concentration initiates qualitatively distinct signaling responses and genetic programs [electronic resource]

IL-6 is a pleiotropic cytokine with roles in many areas of biology; it is also implicated in diseases associated with inflammation. To understand how a molecule is capable of diverse effects, one must understand how cells respond to it. In most published studies, the mechanism of IL-6 signaling has been evaluated in cell lines with limited biological relevance. In this study, phospho-specific flow cytometry and other techniques were used to look closely at IL-6 signaling in primary murine lymphocytes. Splenic T cells, but not B cells, exhibited a strong phospho-STAT1 response to IL-6 in addition to the universally observed STAT3 activation. Interestingly, when IL-6 dose was reduced, T cells exhibited a B cell-like signaling phenotype; they had no phospho-STAT1 response to IL-6. STAT3 had a greater affinity than STAT1 for gp130, the IL-6 signal transducer, which allows STAT3 to become activated when IL-6 is scarce. In our system, STAT1 played a dual role in gene transcription downstream of IL-6. In contrast with previous reports, phospho-STAT1 was required for expression of a subset of genes, which indicates that nature has the ability to create a STAT1 knockout-like condition by stimulating cells with a low level of IL-6. A novel inhibitory function of STAT1, which indicates a modality used to influence TH biasing capability of IL-6, was also discovered. This work gives insight as to how a single molecule, IL-6, affects the immune system, the central nervous system, and metabolism in such complex ways.

Advisor: Nolan Garry P. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Davis Mark M. advisor. Thesis advisor
Levy Ronald
Utz Paul advisor. Thesis advisor
Visualizing and modeling joint behavior of categorical variables with a large number of levels [electronic resource]

Large social, internet, or biological networks frequently have a long tailed degree distribution. Often there are two long tail phenomena. For bipartite networks two different entity types may each have a power law degree distribution, and for directed networks both in-degree and out-degree may have power law distributions. We present a graphical display to visualize the affinities. The display also exposes some interpretable anomalies in network data. Our graphic is based on ordering the entities by size. We show in a Zipf--Poisson model that the largest entities accounting for the majority of data are correctly ordered with probability near one. A saturation model produces head to tail affinities similar to those seen in the data, though a bipartite preferential attachment model gives a better fit to the marginal distributions. Sharp bounds are obtained on the behavior of the margins in both of these cases. Extensions of these models are also considered. As our graphical display has a close connection to copulas, we explore the utility of parametric and nonparametric copula models for our data and we present two new ways of generating smooth valid copula-density estimates. We also develop a new class of discrete-choice models in which the choice set grows with time. By exploiting the structure that arises when the covariate vector takes a special form, we are able to fit a rich model via maximum-likelihood to a data set with over fifty million observations. Interesting issues arise when attempting to simulate from the fitted model, which leads to a proposal for how to sample from discrete distributions with a very large number of possible outcomes and with probabilities that evolve over time.

Keywords: Statistics
Advisor: Owen Art B. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Cover T. M.
Walther Guenther advisor. Thesis advisor
Visualizing individual neurons and their synaptic distributions in the mouse brain [electronic resource]

The mammalian nervous system consists of billions of neurons arranged into complicated networks (neuronal circuits) that mediate all aspects of brain function and behavior. A fundamental goal of neuroscience is to describe the structure of neural circuits at the level of single cells and to understand how this structure enables information acquisition, processing, storage, and ultimately the control of behavior. Over the past hundred years, the cumulative efforts of many individuals have led to the development of a wide array of neuronal labeling tools. First, in this thesis, with the ultimate goal of further expanding genetically coded labeling tools to visualize the presynaptic distribution in single neurons within the mouse brain in vivo, I developed a new genetic synaptic labeling method and used it to analyze the spatial patterning of synapses in developing and mature cerebellar granule. Second, taking the advantage of the MADM system that allows gene knockout in single cells and simultaneously labeling the cells for morphology characterization, I also utilized MADM to study the function of the Rai1 gene, heterozygosity of which results in Smith-Magenis Syndrome in human.

Keywords: Biology.
Advisor: Luo Liqun
McConnell Susan K. advisor. Thesis advisor
Raymond Jennifer L. advisor. Thesis advisor
Shen Kang
Voting and historical games [electronic resource]

For a group of agents to make a good decision, we must be able to choose a good decision making method. In this thesis, we first study the problem of choosing decision making methods by taking social choice functions and providing quantitative measures on how well they might perform against a population distribution. Then we study a common, possibly the most common, decision making method online: voting to rate products. In this domain, we provide a new class of models and prove that certain convergence results hold. Finally we prove a connection between this new model and traditional voting methods. In the first half of the thesis, we develop a means of comparing various social choice functions with regards to a desired axiom by quantifying how often the axiom is violated. To this end, we offer a new framework for measuring the quality of social choice functions that builds from and provides a unifying framework for previous research. This framework takes the form of what we call a "violation graph." Graph properties have natural interpretations as metrics for comparing social choice functions. Using the violation graph we present new metrics, such as the minimal domain restriction, for assessing social choice functions and provide exact and probabilistic results for voting rules including plurality, Borda, and Copeland. Motivated by the empirical results, we also prove asymptotic results for scoring voting rules. These results suggest that voting rules based on pairwise comparison (ex: Copeland) are better than scoring rules (ex: Borda count). They also suggest that although we can never fulfill our desired set of axioms, the frequency of violation is so small that with even a modest number of voters we can expect to never violate our axioms. In the second half of the thesis, we define a new class of games called historical influence games (HIGs). HIGs are infinite games in which agents take turns round-robin style iv choosing a value for a single-dimensional variable. The payoff at each stage to each agent is a monotonically decreasing function of the distance between two quantities: a weighted average of past values chosen by all agents, and some fixed ideal value personal to that agent. The overall payoff to the agent is the limit average of the stage payoffs. We show that myopic strategies form a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in HIGs. Then we introduce certain smoothness constraints on how the impact of a given action changes over time, constraints which define the class of valid HIGs. We prove that for valid HIGs, under myopic play the limit average value converges to what we call the central value, which is the median of the agents' ideal values jointly with certain societal focal points. As a side effect, we show a polarization theorem: after a finite period, almost all agents settle on one of the extreme values. Finally, we show a tight connection between valid HIGs and the class of Moulin strategy-proof voting rules in single-peaked domains.

Advisor: Shoham Yoav primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Leskovec Jurij advisor. Thesis advisor
Segal Ilya advisor. Thesis advisor
Wave equations on asymptotically de Sitter spaces [electronic resource]

Asymptotically de Sitter spaces are Lorentzian manifolds modeled on the de Sitter space of general relativity. In this dissertation, we construct the forward fundamental solution for the wave and Klein-Gordon equations on asymptotically de Sitter spaces. We adapt classes of conormal and paired Lagrangian distributions to this setting and show that the lift of the kernel of the forward fundamental solution to a blown-up space is a sum of distributions in these classes. We use the structure of the kernel of the fundamental solution to study its mapping properties. We show that Strichartz estimates with loss hold for the positive mass Klein-Gordon equation on asymptotically de Sitter spaces. When the mass parameter is the conformal value, Strichartz estimates hold without loss. As an application of these estimates, we prove a small-data global existence result for a defocusing Klein-Gordon equation.

Keywords: Mathematics
Advisor: Mazzeo Rafe primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Brendle Simon
Schoen Richard (Richard M.) advisor. Thesis advisor
Vasy András advisor. Thesis advisor
"What every student should know and be able to do" [electronic resource] : the making of California's framework, standards, and tests for history-social science

"What every student should know and be able to do": the making of California's framework, standards, and tests for history-social science abstract: This study explores California's standards-based reforms for history-social science education over the past twenty-five years. It focuses, in particular, on the development and interaction of the state's three primary history-social science policy documents: the History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools, the History-Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools, and the California Standards Tests for History-Social Science. The California Department of Education intends for the framework, standards, and tests to work in concert and promote the teaching and learning of history-social science. The standards define the content and skills that all students should learn across grade levels. The framework provides guidance for educators to implement the standards. The tests generate information about student achievement and hold schools accountable for implementing the standards. Through examining how these documents developed over the past two decades, this study argues that, rather than working together symbiotically to promote history education, California's history-social science framework, standards, and tests present educators with inconsistent, even antagonistic, strategies and materials to teach and assess history-social science.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Wineburg Samuel S. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Labaree David F.
McLaughlin Milbrey Wallin advisor. Thesis advisor