VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Borrowing a Boat to Go Out to Sea: Chinese State Media Partnerships in East Asia and the Pacific

How do Chinese state media partnerships impact perceptions of China in East Asia and the Pacific? Content sharing partnerships allow Chinese state media to reach foreign audiences through local, trusted sources. Previous scholars identify media partnerships as the most impactful form of Beijing’s public diplomacy, but do not investigate variance in influence among partnerships. This thesis analyzes the relationship between partnerships and perceptions of China in 12 countries using an original dataset of 98 partnerships from 2006-2020. Partnerships are associated with an increase in favorable perceptions of China among foreign audiences. Unlike previous studies, this investigation records the size of partner groups, strength of ties, and language of publication. Surprisingly, the most influential partnerships are those with small, Chinese language media groups. These results contradict the conventional logic that partnerships with larger, multilingual media would have greater impact on perceptions of China. An interview with a Xinhua journalist and a case study of partner content during the Covid-19 pandemic suggest that small, Chinese language platforms are uniquely vulnerable to influence from PRC state media. Policymakers must support independent publishers to prevent the consolidation of the Chinese language media ecosystem.

Keywords:  Center for International Security and Cooperation
CISAC
China
East Asia
Pacific
Mass media
Thesis
Advisor: Schultz Kenneth
Tiffert Glenn
Boys feel black : race and the erotics of minor migrant governance in Sicily

Known officially as MSNA (minori stranieri non accompagnati), over 80,000 'unaccompanied foreign minors' have entered Italy since January 2014. Italy immediately assumes guardianship of migrants under 18 and legally must act in their 'best interests.' Policymakers perceive young migrants as 'future Italians' and instruct them to embrace mandatory language courses and cultural competency lessons in migrant centers. Officially, care and integration programs make no reference to racial difference and aim to slowly transform young (ages 14- 17) migrants into Italians. In practice, however, such programs foster exploration of racial categories meanings. Young West African (Senegalese, Nigerian, and others) males develop understandings of blackness in Italy that are affective, bodily, and intellectual at once. These understandings often cast doubt for migrants over the benevolence of state care and the possibility of integration. My research examines 'unaccompanied foreign minor' as a remarkable category of governance alongside the emergence of novel racial subjectivities that complicate such governance. I ultimately demonstrate that youth migrant centers are affectively thick institutions where state-mandated care and integration policies entangle with the bodies and passions of young West Africans in unforeseen ways. In these centers, migrants forge notions of ethnoracial difference in the ambiguous and generative zones between feeling and knowing. Italian migrant centers are thus 'erotic' spaces where the interplay of bodies and affect produce racial understandings and practices that complicate African life-making and trouble the state ordering of foreign subjects

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Yanagisako Sylvia Junko
Fullwiley Duana
Thiranagama Sharika
Brain mapping and plasticity induction using non-invasive brain stimulation

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a form of non-invasive brain stimulation, which can be paired with concurrent electroencephalography (EEG). Low frequency (~0.5 Hz) stimulation, commonly called single-pulse TMS (spTMS), has been used as a measurement of cortical responsivity (i.e., stimulus-response mapping). Higher frequen-cy (1 -- 20 Hz) repetitive TMS (rTMS) has been used as a therapeutic tool, producing longer lasting effects that have been shown to reduce symptoms especially in major de-pressive disorder. However, there are major limitations to our efficient use of TMS. Re-sponse to TMS is highly variable both within and between subjects, and there is little un-derstanding about the source of this variance. In the following projects, we characterized changes in the TMS-EEG response across key dimensions: In Chapter 2, we used spTMS to probe the entirety of the accessible cortex, mapping changes in the evoked response as a function of spatial location. Additionally, we linked these changes in TMS evoked response to anatomical and resting state connectivity properties of each target brain region. In Chapter 3, we varied stimulation burst frequency, intensity, and burst length, evaluat-ing the input parameter space of rTMS considered safe in healthy humans and clinical populations. Using a series of common TMS-EEG output measures, we tracked how these three parameters could be selected for to maximize each unique output metric. Chapter 4 describes a custom fully-automated data processing pipeline developed for the aforementioned studies, each of which used TMS-EEG in analytically challenging ways. Overall, our hope is to better understand what drives TMS-induced changes in the brain such that future work can capitalize on these properties for more optimal results

Advisor: Poldrack Russell A.
Etkin Amit
Malenka Robert C.
Newsome William T.
Bringing to light the magic of photochemistry via AB initio nonadiabatic molecular dynamics

Controlling multistep chemical reactions triggered by internal conversion via a conical intersection is a challenging task that emphasizes limitations in theoretical and experimental techniques. Hypothesis-driven methodologies (e.g. characterization of critical points and biased molecular dynamics) are commonly employed to explore the chemical space and simulate reaction events. In this dissertation, I present a discovery-based, hypothesis-free computational approach based on first principles molecular dynamics to elucidate photochemical reaction pathways in organic chemistry. Using state-of-the-art graphical processing units-enabled electronic structure calculations we performed in total ~2ns of adiabatic and nonadiabatic ab initio molecular dynamics to describe the natural evolution of both the nuclear and electronic degrees of freedom that govern the interconversion between Donor-Acceptor Stenhouse Adducts' ground state intermediates. Additionally, we present direct and unambiguous observation of the ring-opening reaction path in 1,3-cyclohexadiene (CHD) and a-phellandrene (aPH) on the femtosecond timescale and sub-Ångström length scale by megaelectronvolt ultrafast electron diffraction and ab initio Multiple Spawning. We follow the carbon-carbon bond dissociation and the structural opening of the rings in CHD and aPH by direct measurement of time-dependent changes in the distribution of interatomic distances. Our work provides unprecedented and significant elements for the future design strategies of molecular photoswitches

Keywords: Chemistry.
Advisor: Martinez Todd J. (Todd Joseph)
Markland Thomas E.
Zare Richard N.
Building an Effective Smart Traffic Demand Management System in a Constrained Environment: A Design Thinking Approach

This study aims to assess the feasibility of building a smart cost-effective traffic management system using commercially available components. The benefits of these systems are not limited to traffic congestion reduction but also the employment of economic incentives that may change commuters’ patterns and behaviors. Based on the literature, the existing traffic management systems require costly roadside infrastructure changes. Therefore, a need has surfaced to create a cost-effective solution based on the intersection between technical feasibility, business viability, and public policy initiatives. The current study presents a prototype testing of the proposed system applied in Stanford Campus. These smart traffic demand management (TDM) systems can be applied in both private and public sectors through policy changes that foster efficient use of the existing infrastructure while creating an opportunity for revenue stream. The use of bidding and tradable token systems will allow ride-sharing, shipping companies, and individuals to access certain roads during times with high traffic demands. Finally, the study lists a set of recommendations, best practices, and a novel passenger routing scheme to adopt for the Los Angeles City council in order to address the anticipated traffic congestion associated with AVs when hosting the summer Olympic games in 2028.

Keywords: Congestion pricing
Automatic License Plate Recognition
Road virtual currency
Auction-based road access
Autonomous vehicles
Text
Thesis
Advisor: Ostrovsky Michael
Rosston Greg
Building robot intelligence by scaling human supervision

Large-scale human supervision has been at the heart of some of the most significant recent advances in domains such as computer vision and natural language processing, enabling near-human or even super-human performance on decades-old problems such as image recognition and question answering. However, robotics has not witnessed such success - the manipulation capabilities of today's robots pale in comparison to the wide range of tasks that we perform effortlessly on a daily basis. Developing systems and algorithms to collect and learn from large-scale human supervision could help bridge this gap in robot and human abilities. In this dissertation, I discuss my work, which aims to make human supervision a viable path towards developing intelligent and capable robots. I first discuss RoboTurk, a system we developed to collect large datasets filled with rich interactions that embody human-like manipulation abilities. Next, I discuss how robots can make use of these rich datasets to learn physical manipulation skills such as picking, placing, inserting, and assembling various objects. Together, these form a general paradigm for building capable robots through the use of large human datasets. Finally, I discuss how this paradigm can enable us to tackle a wider range of problem settings by collecting and leveraging these datasets in new ways

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Li Fei Fei
Savarese Silvio
Finn Chelsea
Sadigh Dorsa
Bulliciosos y gritones: The Labor of Ecuadorian Recognizability and Respectability in Minnesota

This project explores the various ways in which Ecuadorians come to experience and navigate life in Minnesota. Specifically, through individual interviews and online database research, I look at how class, labor, and conceptions of worthiness and deservingness are essential in understanding Ecuadorian experiences in the Minneapolis Twin Cities of Minnesota. Ecuadorian migrants engage with different politics of worthiness that shape the structural position they inhabit. Whereas Minneapolis Ecuadorianness could be framed as a self-evident set of characteristics associated with a particular demographic group, I show how this category is constructed in relation to ethnoracial and class dynamics that alternately reproduce Ecuadorian societal inclusion and exclusion as part of broader structures of racial capitalism. Notions of Ecuadorianness and the racio-social political context of Minneapolis and Minnesota simultaneously co-construct and transform each other. The long-standing history of Ecuadorian in/exclusion in the cities and racial and ethnic tensions in Minneapolis have shaped understandings of Ecuadorianness and racio-ethnic constructs.

Keywords: Anthropology
Ecuadorians
Minnesota
racialization
capitalism
labor
migrant worthiness
Thesis
C. elegans DSB-3 reveals conservation and divergence among protein complexes promoting meiotic double-strand breaks

Meiotic recombination plays dual roles in the evolution and stable inheritance of genomes: recombination promotes genetic diversity by reassorting variants, and it establishes temporary connections between pairs of homologous chromosomes that ensure their future segregation. Meiotic recombination is initiated by generation of double-strand DNA breaks (DSBs) by the conserved topoisomerase-like protein Spo11. Despite strong conservation of Spo11 across kingdoms, auxiliary complexes that interact with Spo11 complexes to promote DSB formation are very poorly conserved. Here, I identify DSB-3 as a DSB promoting protein in C. elegans. Mutants lacking DSB-3 are proficient for homolog pairing and synapsis but fail to form meiotic crossovers. Lack of crossovers in dsb-3 mutants reflects a requirement for DSB-3 in meiotic DSB formation. DSB-3 concentrates in meiotic nuclei with timing similar to DSB-1 and DSB-2 (putative homologs of yeast/mammalian Rec114/REC114), and DSB-1, -2, and -3 are interdependent for this localization. Bioinformatics analysis and interactions among the DSB proteins support the identity of DSB-3 as a homolog of MEI4 in conserved DSB-promoting complexes. This identification is reinforced by colocalization of pairwise combinations of DSB-1, -2, and -3 foci in structured illumination microscopy images of spread nuclei. However, unlike their counterparts in mouse and yeast, DSB-1 can interact directly with SPO-11, and C. elegans DSB protein complexes are not concentrated at meiotic chromosome axes. I suggest that rapid divergence of protein complexes that serve essential, yet auxiliary, roles in meiotic recombination may reflect an immediate impact of changes in such proteins on processes that directly affect reproductive success

Keywords: Genetics.
Advisor: Villeneuve Anne
Boettiger Alistair 
Fire Andrew Zachary
Lipsick Joseph Steven
Stearns Tim
Can four equal five? Essays on the four-day school week

Four-day school weeks have proliferated across the United States in recent years, affecting over 650 public school districts in 24 states as of 2019, but very little is known about their implementation or their effects on students. The three chapters comprising this dissertation provide novel evidence regarding the implementation and effects of the four-day school week. The first two chapters employ difference-in-differences research designs and estimate causal impacts of the schedule on school finance, achievement, attendance, and student behavior. Results indicate that four-day school weeks reduce school spending by about 2%, have no detectable effect on achievement or attendance, and decrease school bullying and fighting incidents by 27-31%. The third chapter leverages a mixed-methods approach to describe the implementation of the four-day week in terms of the differences in students' experiences and time use on four- and five-day week schedules. Findings indicate that four-day week students spend less time at school per year, but differences in instructional time are unknown. Furthermore, four-day week students spend their fifth day primarily at home with adult supervision, and they spend more time per week outside of school on chores, non-school sports or exercise, hobbies, jobs, and homework relative to five-day week students. Taken together, the three chapters provide insights for policymakers and practitioners regarding the potential advantages and disadvantages of adopting a four-day week

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Damon William
Bettinger Eric
Dee Thomas S. (Thomas Sean)
Reardon Sean F.
Capitalism, resistance, and environment in Tunisia's Gafsa phosphate mining region, 1880s-1960s

This dissertation combines archival and oral historical sources to narrate the social and environmental history of Tunisia's Gafsa phosphate mining basin, from the industry's 1880s beginnings under French colonialism to its 1960s post-independence nationalization. In the early twentieth century, Gafsa was the world's single largest phosphate exporter, one of France's most important colonial interests in Tunisia, and Europe's primary supplier of an ingredient essential for industrially produced fertilizers. This dissertation argues that Gafsa's integration into global capitalist markets cannot be understood from the top down. Mineworkers, their families, local merchants, and small farmers shaped the trajectory of capitalism in Gafsa and the spatial interconnections - local, regional, imperial, and global - that emerged around it. By centering Gafsa's residents, this dissertation pushes for a capacious understanding of capitalism that encompasses not only the exploitation of wage labor but also the techniques of expropriation - raced, gendered, environmentally grounded, and enforced by state power - that kept production costs low, molded by resistance and contestation. Dynamics that do not fit conventional definitions of capitalism nonetheless structured the commercial networks sustaining modern heavy-input agriculture, drove ongoing processes of environmental degradation, and situated Tunisia within transnational resistance movements across the Global South. In short, putatively "peripheral" sites have shaped capitalism's trajectory much more than the term "peripheral" implies. To illuminate the face of capitalism in Gafsa, this dissertation traces how expropriation, exploitation, and resistance developed in ways both locally grounded in Gafsa and interwoven within regional and global circuits of capital, commodities, biomedical knowledge, and people. Not only does this address Tunisia's relative absence from global histories, but it also challenges dominant conceptions of the Tunisian nation. The persistent trope of Tunisian exceptionalism, emboldened by Tunisia's status as the only post-"Arab spring" procedural democracy, sequesters the country within its national frame. In contrast, this dissertation traces how modern Tunisia developed out of regional and global connections, shaped by the actions of non-elite Tunisians who are typically marginalized within exceptionalist accounts

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Beinin Joel
Satia Priya
Clancy-Smith Julia Ann 
Hecht Gabrielle
Wigen Kären
Capitalizing on addiction : the United States, China, and the transpacific opium economy, 1804-1909

"Capitalizing on Addiction" offers a new interpretation of the Opium War as an event that had surprising connections to and consequences for Americans in the nineteenth century. It follows the arc of when Americans first sold opium in China to when the Chinese first sold opium in America following the mass emigration of Chinese across the Pacific Ocean. At the heart of "Capitalizing on Addiction" is a novel account of capital formation, detailing how opium transmuted the body's debts into a supple form of currency that could traverse oceans, penetrate borders, and dissolve racial allegiances with both Chinese and Americans collaborating to profit from its exchange. Using records from 16 different archives, this study draws on the methods of economic, business, legal and social history to revise our understanding of the relationship between capitalism and opium. Its central contention that the trade in opium did not occur in the extralegal peripheries of the transpacific economy; through embodying a form of capital itself, the production, consumption and exchange of the drug contributed directly to the flourishing of the transpacific economy, and that Americans were instrumental in promoting its expansion

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Burns Jennifer
Chang Gordon H.
White Richard
Wright Gavin
Capturing and understanding people's experiences in cars : design research methods for real roads

This thesis develops and evaluates three primary methods for capturing and understanding in-context car experiences. A deeper, more nuanced understanding of the in-car driving experience will enable designers to generate user-centered concepts to improve the in-vehicle experience. Understanding the qualitative nature of the driving experience is not only useful for the effective design of vehicles, but also for the development of novel transportation technologies and infrastructure improvements. Critically, this work has implications for the design of self-driving technologies being developed and deployed today. This thesis asks: How we might enable researchers and designers to gain a novel perspective of the driving experience centered on naturalistic driving events and environments? To answer this question, I developed a platform, a method, and a dataset aimed at understanding driver's on-road experiences. The work presents novel insights attained by examining drivers in experimental as well as prosaic scenarios. It also positions the work relative to other approaches for understanding, eliciting, and tagging driver states. This thesis has three major components: Part One presents the Real Road Driving Simulator, a platform that can be used to safely simulate an autonomous vehicle on real roads in order to enable designers to evaluate prototypes and interaction principles intended to be deployed in autonomous driving scenarios. Part Two presents a method to safely and reliably elicit a state of distress in drivers of single-occupancy vehicles. This methodology can be used to test novel approaches for identifying driver states, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of interventions intended to address such a state of distress. Part Three develops an open-source dataset and tagging methodology using 50 real-world commutes. I discuss a novel approach for tagging data to leverage both qualitative and quantitative data to understand driver experience within the context of the urban commute

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Ju Wendy
Leifer Larry J.
Gerdes J. Christian
Carceral logics : family, race, and responsibility in a San Francisco county jail

The city of San Francisco is widely recognized as one of the most progressive in the US, if not the world. However, with a Black population of just 5%, its' jail population is 60-70% Black, marking one of the greatest racial disparities of any US city. Drawing from three years of ethnographic field work with men incarcerated in a San Francisco County jail and with their family members in the outside world, this dissertation explores the nature of race in the everyday encounters, rhythms, and operations of the criminal justice system. It asks, how is it that race can be at once so prevalent in the effects and in the causes of mass incarceration and yet disavowed in its daily operations? This dissertation is the first US-based 'prison ethnography' with broad access to a cohort of incarcerated people in nearly 50 years. It is also the first in the US to have every examined incarceration from the perspective of incarcerated people and their families simultaneously. With this perspective it reveals the intersecting dynamics of family, race, and responsibility in which provide the ongoing justification for American mass incarceration. It outlines a number of operative 'carceral' logics within the jail which displaced the discourses of race and racism with the discourses of family failure, individual responsibility, and heritable criminality. I argue that the US criminal justice apparatus maintains a social distinction which is much wider than who is, or has been, incarcerated -- maps race onto criminalization and impoverishment

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Garcia Angela
Davé Naisargi N. (Naisargi Nitin)
Hansen Thomas Blom
Rosa Jonathan