VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Spell of the Barricade: Art and Politics in France, 1830-1852

This dissertation is about barricades and image production in the 1830s and `40s. It comprises three chapters, each of which centers on a single work of art: Auguste Préault's Tuerie (1834), Ernest Meissonier's Souvenir de guerre civile (1849-1850), and Honoré Daumier's L'Émeute (c. 1848-1852). Together, the three chapters describe how the barricade oriented the period's multiple, often contradictory conceptions of class, revolution, history, and art. A new grammar of democratic politics took shape in the `30s and `40s, and it was one in which the street figured as both the site and medium of social transformation. Some would say, as I do, that the barricade was the 19th century's most poignant and meaningful "symbolic form." It was also the most enchanting./nTriumph is rare in these pages; tragedy sets their key. They turn on Préault's bas-relief, the political re-entrenchments of 1833-1834, horror, defeat, and disillusion rather than, say, the affirmative image of the barricade Eugène Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple is often thought to have engendered; the uncertainties, ambivalences, and violence of artistic production in times of radical disintegration anchor their pivot. Not infrequently, they emphasize paintings, lithographs, and sculptures that evoke the barricade only in its absence. Yet while this dissertation reconfigures the image-map formerly in place, it does so not in pursuit of greater comprehensiveness - with the hope, as it were, of producing a total picture - but to capture something of the dividedness and fragmentariness that the barricade asserts even as it prefigures a world in which reconciliation is possible. Much was at stake in the `30s and `40s, and this dissertation aims to sharpen our sense of the true diversity and depth of the contemporary response, both to the limbo of the July Monarchy and the "dark times" (Brecht's phrase) after June 1848.

Advisor: Clark, Timothy J
Frontier Boomtown Urbanism: City Building in Ordos Municipality, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2001-2011

This dissertation examines urban transformation in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, between 2001 and 2011. The study is situated in the context of research into urbanization in China as the country moved from a mostly rural population to a mostly urban one in the 2000s and as urbanization emerged as a primary objective of the state at various levels. To date, the preponderance of research on Chinese urbanization has produced theory and empirical work through observation of a narrow selection of metropolitan regions of the eastern seaboard. This study is instead a single-city case study of an emergent center for energy resource mining in a frontier region of China. Intensification of coalmining in Ordos coincided with coal-sector reforms and burgeoning demand in the 2000s, which fueled rapid growth in the local economy during the study period. Urban development in a setting of rapid resource-based growth sets the frame in this study in terms of "frontier boomtown urbanism." Urban transformation is considered in its physical, political, cultural, and environmental dimensions. Research for this study is based on six months of on-site fieldwork in Ordos, historical research, and reviews of English-language and Chinese-language scholarship./nChapter One of the dissertation provides a discussion of theoretical issues pertaining to historical and current-day frontiers and boomtowns. The idea of the frontier as a space of cultural encounter is discussed in relation to China's relations with societies inhabiting its borderlands. The frontier is also elucidated in the context of economic-geographical literatures that posit the peculiar economic functions of marginal spaces. The notion of the "commodity frontier" is elaborated in order to position Ordos as a frontier boomtown. Chapter Two of the dissertation examines the processes and mechanisms by which Ordos became a frontier for coalmining in the 2000s. Chapter Three and Chapter Four discuss urban growth amidst a resource boom. Chapter Three considers urban growth through modular land development schemes. Chapter Four employs the idea of gigantism to elucidate the cultural logic of city building. The focus in both chapters is on the production of spectacular new built environments and how these manifest struggles to achieve broader-based and sustainable urban development. Chapter Five examines the phenomenon of private finance as a key driver of urbanization in the frontier boomtown. Unregulated speculative property development is shown to be a key mitigating factor in the local state's effort to enhance social control through the production of new urban space and reveals an unexamined source of non-state development activity./nFrontier boomtown urbanism shows how city building has become the ubiquitous and basic activity of the local state in China. The frontier setting is distinguished by the intensity, pace, and scale of growth and by the highly disorganized course that urbanization takes.

Advisor: Hsing, You-tien
Novel Structures, Reactivity, and Mechanisms Resulting from Multiple Ru-H-Si 3c-2e Bonds Between a Single Silicon Center and a Ruthenium Center Supported by the Tris(diphenylphopshinomethyl)phenylborate Ligand

The chemistry of hydrodosilanes in the coordination sphere of [PhBP3]Ru complexes was examined. Unusual modes of bridging Ru-H-Si interactions were found to activate the silanes for a variety of stoichiometric and catalytic reactions with unsaturated organic substrates.

Advisor: Tilley, T. Don
The archaeology of Cueva Santa Rita: A late Holocene rockshelter in the Sierra de la Giganta of Baja California Sur, Mexico

This dissertation is a contribution to the scientific study of prehistory in Baja California Sur, Mexico. In 2008, test excavations at Cueva Santa Rita resulted in the recovery of a rich and diverse artifact assemblage. The large, dry rockshelter is located in the southern Sierra de la Giganta of Baja California Sur, Mexico. The shelter formed in the volcanic breccias of the Comondú Group, part of a larger volcanic arc and forearc basin formed during the Oligocene to Middle Miocene. Drawing from geoarchaeological methods and ethnohistoric accounts, I combine analysis of both the cultural and non-cultural to discuss regional prehistory. Artifact analysis includes an examination of Olivella shell bead and textiles recovered during excavations. The findings of the project indicate that the site has been occupied for at least the late Holocene.

Advisor: Shackley, Steven M
Representing Sato-Levine Invariants by Whitney Tower Intersections

In this thesis we explore connections between the (mod 2 reduction of the) first nonvanishing Milnor invariants of links in the 3-sphere and the spin-bordism groups over certain appropriately defined nilpotent groups. We focus our attention on the generalized Sato-Levine invariants of Conant, Schneiderman, and Teichner, and using their lens of twisted Whitney towers. Though we use very different tools, our results extend results of Igusa and Orr relating Milnor invariants to the homology of nilpotent groups.

Advisor: Teichner, Peter
"Monstrueuse guerre!" Literature and Warfare in Late Sixteenth-Century France

The end of the French Renaissance was marked by a period of violent civil conflict, often referred to as the Wars of Religion, which lasted from 1562 to 1598. While substantial work has been done on structures of violence during this period, literary scholarship has yet to engage fully with the implications of war in the development of literary discourse. Moving beyond readings in which war is relevant only as context, I recuperate both major and minor texts of this period as a corpus that offers a sustained reflection on the problem of how to represent violence in language. Because representing war requires writers to grapple with how to use language to represent violence inflicted on physical bodies, formal literary choices become part of a broader cultural discourse of how to think about and judge war. Looking at four different genres--essays, tragedy, epic, and memoir--my analysis highlights how, in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, literary form develops in part as a discursive response to a larger problem of how to represent war. Montaigne's Essais offers a hermeneutic of war based upon the assumption that choices about representation are also ethical choices. In humanist tragedy, language becomes an expressive vehicle for shaping our understanding of virtue, heroism, and community in the context of warfare. D'Aubigné's Les Tragiques reinvigorates epic and recuperates its potential for critiquing the excesses of warfare, while Monluc's Commentaires gives voice to a new kind of war hero who is neither glorified nor martyred but who epitomizes the professional. By exploring the diverse characteristics of war writing during this period, I contribute to our understanding of the complex relationship between the activity of war and related literary production, which can be traced and studied comparatively over different periods and literary traditions to help us better understand how we shape and are shaped by our experience with war.

Advisor: Hampton, Timothy
Extensions and Applications of Multilevel and Multidimensional Item Response Models

Multilevel and multidimensional item response models are two commonly used examples as extensions of the conventional item response models. In this dissertation, I investigate extensions and applications of multilevel and multidimensional item response models, with a primary focus on longitudinal item response data that include students' school switching, classification of examinees into latent classes based on multidimensional aspects, and measurement models for complicated learning progressions. In the first paper, multilevel item response models for longitudinal data are extended to the crossed-classified models (Rasbash & Goldstein, 1994; Raudenbush, 1993) and multiple membership models (Hill & Goldstein, 1998; Rasbash & Browne, 2001) to incorporate students' school mobility. If students switch school over time in longitudinal studies, the data structure is not strictly hierarchical; therefore, conventional multilevel models are not applicable. In this study, two types of school mobility and corresponding models are specified. Furthermore, this study investigates the impacts of misspecification of school membership in the analysis of longitudinal data. In the second and third paper, mixture models and measurement models based on multidimensional item response models are presented respectively. The second paper investigates possible usefulness of the mixture random weights linear logistic test model (MixRWLLTM) as a means to identify subgroups of examinees as well as to improve interpretations of differences between latent classes. In the proposed MixRWLLTM, examinees are classified with respect to their multidimensional aspects, a general propensity (intercept) and random coefficients of the item properties. In the third paper, a structured constructs model (SCM) for the continuous latent trait is developed to deal with complicated learning progressions, in which relations between levels across multiple constructs are assumed in advance. Based on the multidimensional Rasch model, discontinuity parameters are incorporated to model the hypothesized relations as the advantage or disadvantage for respondents belonging into a certain level in one construct to reach a level in another construct.

Advisor: Wilson, Mark
Supernova Ia Spectra and Spectrophotometric Time Series: Recognizing Twins and the Consequences for Cosmological Distance Measurements

In Part I we introduce the method and results of the Twin Supernova analysis./nThis novel approach to Type Ia supernova standardization is currently only possible with/nspectrophotometric timeseries observations from the Nearby Supernova Factory. As Chapters/n1 through 4 will explore, we select an ideal subset of supernovae, find pairs whose features/nmatch well in flux at all wavelengths and times, and test their dispersion in brightness./nThe analysis is completed in a blinded fashion, ensuring that we are not tuning our results./nWhat we find is that twin supernovae do indeed have a small brightness dispersion./nPart II shows two additional analyses related to the standardization of Type Ia supernovae./nIn Chapter 5 we present a check on the results of Bailey et al. [2009]. Literature supernovae/nwith spectra near maximum light were tested to see how well their magnitudes could be standardized/nusing the flux ratio method of Bailey et al [2009]./nChapter 6 shows a study with data from the Nearby Supernova Factory. Using only the/nspectrophotometric observations near maximum light, we calculate monochromatic Hubble Diagram/nresiduals for each supernova. Those residuals are then corrected using a flux ratio, similar/nto Bailey et al. [2009] to test the standardization possibilities using only near-maximum observations.

Advisor: Perlmutter, Saul
Human Echolocation

The use of active natural echolocation as a mobility aid for blind humans has received increased scientific and popular attention in recent years (Engber, 2006; Kreiser, 2006; NPR, 2011), in part due to a focus on several blind individuals who have developed remarkable expertise. However, perhaps surprisingly, the history of empirical human echolocation research is not much younger than the era of echolocation research (cf. Griffin, 1958). Nevertheless, compared to its bat and cetacean counterparts (Thomas et al., 2004), the field today remains in a state of comparative infancy. Until quite recently, nearly the entire body of human echolocation research has been behavioral in nature, with little insight into perceptual and neural mechanisms./nThus, the goal of this manuscript is to broadly integrate research findings in human echolocation across time, levels of analysis, and methodology. We will define human echolocation as it has been operationalized in research and practice, review behavioral goals served by echolocation, and identify putative auditory cues and neural mechanisms underpinning human echolocation. We examine some individual differences in echolocation performance, particularly involving blind compared to sighted persons. We present two studies in detail, addressing the spatial acuity of echolocation skills in sighted volunteers and blind experts. Throughout, we identify outstanding theoretical and applied questions that may form the basis for ongoing and future research. Taken together, we conclude that echolocation can serve behaviorally relevant perceptual goals; that spatial echolocation tasks such as size discrimination can be learned by sighted subjects, not just the blind; that the spatial resolution of echolocation can rival that of peripheral vision; that the variegated cues driving echolocation performance are processed at multiple levels of the auditory system; and that blindness likely plays an important role in shaping individual differences in echo processing.

Advisor: Whitney, David V.
MEMS Materials and Temperature Sensors for Down Hole Geothermal System Monitoring

The advancement of renewable energy technologies is critical due to the unsustainable nature of currently used energy sources and the need to meet increasing energy demands. A broad and diverse energy plan is important for long term energy independence and stability. Geothermal energy sources including hydrothermal systems and enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) should play a key role in this energy plan. Geothermal energy is the most reliable, currently developed, schedulable alternative energy source. It is estimated that improvements in these systems have the potential to provide at least 200,000 exajoules of energy to the U.S. in as little as 50 years [1]. The progress in developing this field is challenging in part due to the complex geochemical and geophysical properties of the subsurface environment. This dissertation reviews geothermal energy system limitations due to current well monitoring technologies and introduces microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors as a means of optimizing well performance. Harsh environment MEMS offer an ideal alternative to macro-scale sensors due to their harsh environment material compatibility, the ability to couple MEMS with wireless RF transmission systems, and their small footprint./nIn this work, harsh environment MEMS encapsulation materials are tested in simulated geothermal environments to determine their survivability. The sensors must be encapsulated to provide protection from oxidation, erosion, surface roughening, and other chemical attacks. Encapsulation materials such as silicon carbide, sapphire, vitreous carbon, and poly-crystalline diamond were tested in multiple simulated geothermal environments to determine a suitable protective layer for these MEMS devices. Once appropriate materials are determined, two temperature sensors are designed, optimized, fabricated, and tested. The first sensor improves upon existing out-of-plane MEMS capacitive temperature sensor devices by utilizing harsh environment materials. The second sensor is a novel in-plane design optimized to linearize capacitive output. These sensors are tested up to over 650 °C./n[1] Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The future of geothermal energy: Impact of enhanced geothermal systems (egs) on the united states in the 21st century. 2006

Advisor: Pisano, Albert P
Essays on Economic Development in South Asia

This dissertation consists of three essays on economic development in the context of South Asia. In the first essay, I study how power outages impact large scale manufacturing firms. First, I use monthly electricity billing data from large scale manufacturing firms in Pakistan to characterize how these firms respond to interruptions in electricity supply. I show that firms differentially adjust on-grid capacity utilization based on their sensitivities to increases in fuel costs. Next, I incorporate the empirical results into a dynamic model of utilization adjustment and self-generation in response to power outages and estimate structural cost parameters. Finally, I use my estimates to determine the magnitude of cost increases that firms incur. My results suggest that between January 2010 to March 2012, no firm in my sample had a cost increase above 1%. During quarters of high numbers of outages, the cost increases for most firms is below 3%. In my sample, firms in the chemical and textile industries are impacted by power outages more than firms, of similar size, in other industries./nIn the second essay, I examine the impact of power outages on the likelihood of manu- facturing firm exit. Again, I use proprietary electricity billing data for manufacturing firms in Pakistan to determine the month of exit and merge this with monthly outage data during the period 2009-2012. I find that power outages disproportionately increase the exit proba- bility of small firms (both in the formal and informal sector). For each 100 hours of power outages, the probability of small firm exit increases by over 6%. This result is consistent with existing evidence on the impact of power disruption on various measures of firm health as well as research on the cost impact of outages on large scale manufacturing and suggests that policies which target small firms are more likely to alleviate the detrimental effects of power disruption./nIn the third essay, I study how religious holidays impact the incidence of violence between Hindus and Muslims in India and I analyze how violence impacts vote share. By exploiting variation in the timing of religious holidays - because Hindu and Muslim holidays follow Sanskrit and Lunar calendars, respectively - I show that religious holidays and the interaction of Hindu and Muslim holidays positively affect the incidence of violence. Next, I consider the usefulness of violence by studying the electoral effects of violence on vote share. I find that violence before an election is associated with electoral gains.

Advisor: Roland, Gerard
Courting the Nation Abroad: Diaspora Political Incorporation Policies After Communism

This dissertation investigates policies implemented by governments in emigration states to incorporate their diasporas into the homeland political community. While some governments enact expansive policies that enable their diasporas to easily acquire citizenship, vote overseas, and access the policymaking process, others try to insulate homeland politics from diaspora influence. I refer to these three interlocking policies as diaspora political incorporation policies because they define the diaspora's relationship to the homeland political community. To explain variation in diaspora political incorporation policies, I pair data on global trends in citizenship, external voting rights, and diaspora representation with analysis of policy variation in Armenia, Croatia, and Serbia. These three countries have among the world's largest emigrant populations relative to domestic population. Moreover, they grappled with devastating wars and steep economic decline in the 1990s. Nevertheless, diaspora political incorporation policies sharply varied across these three cases as well as within each case over time./nWhile most scholars emphasize the homeland government's need for economic aid or foreign policy support from the diaspora, I argue that diaspora political incorporation policies are firmly anchored in electoral competition. Homeland politicians support expansive diaspora incorporation policies when said policies increase their parties' electoral resources, and reject them when their opponents benefit. The challenge for policymakers, who have limited knowledge of the diaspora's political contours, is to gauge the political impact of an expanded electorate and citizenry prior to enacting reforms. Lacking reliable data on diaspora political orientations, Armenian, Croatian, and Serbian politicians' perceptions of the diaspora as a political force were instead shaped by the manner of diaspora involvement in homeland affairs during communism's collapse. Two factors were particularly important: 1) whether the diaspora supported the anticommunist opposition in the homeland or competed independently, and 2) whether the diaspora's support was concentrated in one homeland party or was diffuse.

Advisor: Wittenberg, Jason
Low-Complexity Message-Passing Algorithms for Distributed Computation

Central to many statistical inference problems is the computation of/nsome quantities defined over variables that can be fruitfully modeled/nin terms of graphs. Examples of such quantities include marginal/ndistributions over graphical models and empirical average of/nobservations over sensor networks. For practical purposes, distributed/nmessage-passing algorithms are well suited to deal with such/nproblems. In particular, the computation is broken down into pieces/nand distributed among different nodes. Following some local/ncomputations, the intermediate results are shared among neighboring/nnodes via the so called messages. The process is repeated until the/ndesired quantity is obtained. These distributed inference algorithms/nhave two primary aspects: statistical properties, in which/ncharacterize how mathematically sound an algorithm is, and/ncomputational complexity that describes the efficiency of a particular/nalgorithm. In this thesis, we propose low-complexity (efficient),/nmessage-passing algorithms as alternatives to some well known/ninference problems while providing rigorous mathematical analysis of/ntheir performances. These problems include the computation of the/nmarginal distribution via belief propagation for discrete as well as/ncontinuous random variables, and the computation of the average of/ndistributed observations in a noisy sensor network via gossip-type/nalgorithms.

Advisor: Wainwright, Martin J.