VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Modernism and Miracles: Architecture, Housing, and the State in Mexico 1930-1970

Mexico City has suffered from a housing crisis since the 1930s. This dissertation looks at efforts to solve this problem: debates about housing policy and plans to build housing for Mexico’s urban residents, especially industrial laborers and federal workers. The 1917 Constitution made large businesses responsible for housing urban workers, but this promise was not enforced until 1970. I follow the trajectory of state efforts to design and build urban housing up to this moment, from the earliest municipal projects in the 1930s to the massive federally built multifamily high-rises in the late 1940s, and a mixed approach to building urban residential complexes that emerged in the 1960s. I pay particular attention to the shifting ideas and practices of architects and planners, developing innovative projects in dialogue with international discourses of architectural modernism./nThe state used housing for various purposes: to fulfill the revolutionary promise to workers, as a stimulus for industry, as an aspect of social welfare, and as a way to catalyze the growth of the urban middle class. Throughout this period building and design strategies were pursued with economic purposes in mind. Three of Mexico’s major federal agencies—the social security agency, the federal pension fund, and the urban infrastructure development bank—used housing policy to contribute to the pursuit of social welfare and economic development, the larger goals of the postrevolutionary state. I demonstrate that housing policies that were initially inspired by the ideal of radical social transformation gave way to efforts to increase the availability of credit and incorporate citizens into the financial market. But, while this ideological shift appears to confirm the prevailing wisdom about the government’s abandonment of revolutionary goals after 1940, in the arena of worker housing, the government actually did more for workers after 1960 than before. By the late 1960s, the ideals and aesthetic vigor of architectural modernism had largely been abandoned, though not the pragmatic efficiency it promoted. The most radical projects provided but a small number of homes for workers, and over the period that the radical architectural and social ideology faded, the state actually increased its investment in housing and broadened it attempt to improve urban conditions. In housing, the state was actually more interventionist after 1964.

Advisor: Chowning, Margaret
Single Molecule Observations of Receptor:Ligand Binding at Live T Cell-Supported Membrane Interfaces

Recognition of antigen by T cells occurs at the junction between a T cell and an antigen-presenting cell. Within this highly constrained interface, the T cell receptor (TCR) interacts with its cognate antigen peptide major histocompatibility complex (pMHC). Additional signaling and adhesion molecules present in this intercellular environment influence its overall topography and geometry, which can significantly impact receptor:ligand binding events. The work presented in this dissertation describes three studies aimed at making direct, in situ measurements of molecular interactions during T cell signal transduction. For all of these studies, I use a hybrid live T cell-supported membrane system to mimic the physiological juxtacrine signaling environment and single molecule fluorescence microscopy to monitor individual receptor:ligand binding events. The supported membrane is functionalized with fluorescently-tagged pMHC and the formation of individual pMHC:TCR complexes is observed via time-resolved single molecule techniques. Using these approaches, I report live cell, two-dimensional pMHC:TCR kinetics and affinity measurements in self-reactive human T cell clones and discuss discrepancies between my results and those determined via mechanical assays. I also describe a novel method for simultaneously monitoring pMHC:TCR binding and downstream cellular response in a single cell. This strategy allows the measurement of all pMHC:TCR interactions leading to T cell activation and reveals a cumulative dwell time threshold required for activation. In order to better understand the molecular interactions of the costimulatory protein CD80, I have developed a novel CD80-SNAP-tag reagent suitable for single molecule receptor:ligand binding studies. I discuss the design, characterization, and application of this reagent, which has been used to demonstrate global environmental changes in the membrane-membrane interface during T cell triggering. Together, these studies emphasize the importance of investigating ligand binding in a physiologically relevant context and will contribute to a better understanding of the early stages of T cell signaling.

Advisor: Groves, Jay T
Essays in Innovation, Past and Present

This dissertation studies the economics of historical and modern innovation. The first chapter makes inroads into understanding how competition and incentives shape the creative process which lies at the heart of all technological progress. The creative act is a classic example of a black box in academic research: we can see the inputs and outputs, but we know little about what happens in between. This paper uses new tools for measuring the content of digital media to see how commercial graphic designers’ work evolves in winner-take-all competition. In this chapter, I show that competition both creates and destroys incentives for innovation: some competition is necessary to motivate high-performers to experiment with novel, untested ideas over tweaking tried-and-true approaches, but heavy competition will drive them out of the market./nIn the second chapter, I study the effects of performance feedback on innovation in competitive settings. Feedback typically serves two functions: it informs agents of their relative performance, and it also helps them improve the quality of their product. The presence of these effects suggests a tradeoff between participation and improvement, as the revelation of asymmetries discourages effort. Using data from the same setting as chapter one, I first show that this tradeoff is real. I then develop a structural model of the setting -- the first of its kind in the literature -- and use the results to evaluate counterfactual feedback policies. The results suggest that feedback is on net a desirable mechanism for a principal seeking high-quality innovation./nIn the third chapter, I use the farm tractor as a case study to demonstrate that technologies diffuse along two distinct margins: scale and scope. Although tractors are now used in nearly every field operation and with nearly all crops, early models were far more limited in their capabilities, and only in the late 1920s did the technology begin to generalize for broader use with row crops such as corn. Diffusion prior to 1930 was accordingly heavily concentrated in the Wheat Belt, while growth in diffusion from 1930-1940 was concentrated in the Corn Belt. Other historically important innovations in agriculture and manufacturing share similar histories of expanding scope. The key to understanding the pace and path of technology diffusion is thus not only in explaining the number of different users, but also in explaining the number of different uses./nA common theme across all three chapters is the focus on developing tools or strategies to study innovation that are less dependent on patent data than the extant literature, since the majority of innovation is not patented (and often not patentable), and doing so while advancing the empirical literature on innovation in new directions.

Advisor: Handel, Benjamin R.
Searches for new phenomena using events with three or more charged leptons in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=8$~TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

This dissertation presents two searches for phenomena beyond the Standard Model using events with three or more charged leptons. The searches are based on 20.3 fb−1 of proton- proton collision data with a center-of-mass energy of √s = 8 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The first is a model-independent search for excesses beyond Standard Model expectations in many signal regions. The events are required to have least three charged leptons, of which at least two are electrons or muons, and at most one is a hadronically decaying τ lepton. The selected events are categorized based on the flavor and charge of the leptons, and the signal regions are defined using several kinematic variables sensitive to beyond the Standard Model phenomena. The second search looks for new heavy leptons decaying resonantly to three electrons or muons, two of which are produced through an intermediate Z boson. The resonant decay produces a narrowly- peaked excess in the trilepton mass spectrum. In both cases, no significant excess beyond Standard Model expectations is observed, and the data are used to set limits on models of new physics. The model-independent trilepton search is used to confront a model of doubly charged scalar particles decaying to eτ or μτ, excluding masses below 400 GeV at 95% confidence level. The trilepton resonance search is used to test models of vector-like leptons and the type III neutrino seesaw mechanism. The vector-like lepton model is excluded for most of the mass range 114 GeV − 176 GeV, while the type III seesaw model is excluded for most the mass range 100 GeV − 468 GeV. Both searches also present tools to facilitate reinterpretations in the context of other models predicting the production of three or more charged leptons.

Advisor: Heinemann, Beate E
Axis-aligned Filtering for Interactive Physically-based Rendering

Computer graphics rendering is undergoing a renaissance, with physically-based rendering methods based on accurate Monte-Carlo image synthesis replacing ad-hoc techniques in a variety of applications including movie production. In interactive applications like product visualization or video games, physically-based lighting effects are increasingly popular. However, producing photo-realistic images at interactive speeds still remains a challenge. In Monte-Carlo rendering, a pixel’s color is computed by sampling and integrating over a high dimensional space. This includes effects like (1) motion blur, due to objects moving during the time the camera shutter is open; (2) defocus blur, due to camera lens optics; (3) area and environment map lighting, which is direct illumination coming from many directions; (4) global illumination, due to light reflected from one surface to another. The color is sampled through ray- or path-tracing. With insufficient rays, the image looks noisy because the integrand has high variance, and 1000s of rays are needed (per pixel) for a pleasing image. Previous work has showed a Fourier analysis for some of these effects, deriving a compact double-wedge spectrum, and a sheared filter that aligns with the slope of the spectrum. This filter can remove noise from a very sparsely sampled Monte-Carlo image, but is very slow. In this thesis, we will extend the Fourier analysis for more general cases, and propose a less compact axis-aligned filter, that aligns with the frequency axes. The resulting spatial bandwidths are then used for image-space filtering, that is orders of magnitude faster than sheared filtering. The packing of the Fourier spectra also provides adaptive sampling rates that minimize noise in conjunction with the adaptive filter. These algorithms improve speed relative to converged ground-truth by about 30x-60x, and we are able to demonstrate interactive speed with a GPU ray-tracer. We also demonstrate an application of our method to mixed reality with a Kinect camera.

Advisor: Ramamoorthi, Ravi
Business Cycles: Race, Gentrification, and the Production of Bicycle Space in the San Francisco Bay Area

This dissertation examines the politics of urban transformation in the San Francisco Bay Area, using the bicycle as a lens into the processes by which social movements engage in the production of urban space. It analyzes how, over the past two decades, urban bicycling has gone from a practice of diverse countercultural and subaltern fringes to an accepted and valued mode of mobility in many cities. Cycling remains regionally marginal but locally hegemonic. In San Francisco and Oakland, bicycle advocates now play key roles in the politics of urban development and the planning of changes to urban streets. Through their participation in these endeavors, they have framed livable urban space as a necessary material base for economic growth, amid the acceleration of gentrification and the displacement of working class people of color. Self-identified progressives, with bicycle advocates in the lead, work tirelessly to make the city more livable, just as livability becomes a key source of value in the urban space economy. Because of this, bicycling now symbolizes the white, middle-class retaking of the city./nThrough archival research, ethnography, participant observation, and GIS, this dissertation uncovers how this came to be, and its contemporary implications. It examines the politicization of bicycling, from the early 1990s onward, as a specifically urban phenomenon with aspirations to change the city itself. In San Francisco, the political tumult of Critical Mass created an opening for bicycle advocacy organizations to claim a role in the planning process. For strategic reasons, they appealed to the economic interests of business interests and claimed the economic contribution of cyclists. This argument has become normative in the growing networks of bicycle policy. A decade later, it is taken up by advocates pushing for a new wave of infrastructural development in Oakland, amid a new cycle of gentrification. In this context, bicycle infrastructure represents an urban future within which Oakland’s working class African-American population has no obvious place, revealing the social divisions of Oakland’s “renaissance.” The dissertation concludes with an argument for learning from subaltern cycling voices and for broader coalitions with a vision for more equitable urban development.

Advisor: Walker, Richard A
The Development and Validation of the Memory Support Rating Scale (MSRS)

Patient memory for treatment information is poor, and worse memory for treatment information is associated with poorer clinical outcomes. Memory support techniques have been harnessed to improve patient memory for treatment. However, a measure of treatment provider use of memory support during treatment sessions has yet to be established. The present study reports on the development and psychometric properties of the Memory Support Rating Scale (MSRS) – an observer-rated scale designed to measure memory support. Forty-two adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) were randomized to either cognitive therapy plus memory support (CS+MS; n = 22) or cognitive therapy as-usual (CT-as-usual; n = 20). At post-treatment, patients freely recalled treatment points via the Patient Recall Task. Sessions (n = 171) were coded for memory support using the MSRS, 65% of which were also assessed for the quality of cognitive therapy via the Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale (CTRS). A unidimensional scale composed of 8 items was developed using exploratory factor analysis on a random half of the sessions (n = 86), and supported with confirmatory factor analysis on the remaining half (n = 85). Seven trained MSRS coders exhibited high inter-rater and test-retest reliabilities. MSRS scores were higher in the CT+MS condition compared to CT-as-usual, demonstrating group differentiation ability. MSRS scores were positively associated with Patient Recall Task scores but not associated with CTRS scores, demonstrating convergent and discriminant validity, respectively. Results indicate that the MSRS yields reliable and valid scores for measuring treatment providers’ use of memory support while delivering cognitive therapy.

Advisor: Harvey, Allison G
On the Power of Lasserre SDP Hierarchy

Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) are a class of fundamental combinatorial optimization problems that have been extensively studied in the field of approximation algorithms and hardness of approximation. In a ground breaking result, Raghavendra showed that assuming Unique Games Conjecture, the best polynomial time approximation algorithm for all Max CSPs are given by a family of basic standard SDP relaxations. With Unique Games Conjecture remains as one of the most important open question in the field of Theoretical Computer Science, it is natural to ask whether hypothetically stronger SDP relaxations would be able to achieve better approximation ratio for Max CSPs and their variants./nIn this work, we study the power of Lasserre/Sum-of-Squares SDP Hierarchy. First part of this work focuses on using Lasserre/Sum-of-Squares SDP Hierarchy to achieve better approximation ratio for certain CSPs with global cardinality constraints. We present a general framework to obtain Sum-of-Squares SDP relaxation, round SDP solution and analyze the rounding algorithm for CSPs with global cardinality constraints. To demonstrate the approach, we show that one could use Sum-of-Squares SDP to achieve a 0.85-approximation algorithm for Max Bisection problem, improving on the previously best known 0.70 ratio./nIn the second part of this work, we study the computational power of general symmetric relaxations. Specifically, we show that Lasserre/Sum-of-Squares SDP solution achieves the best possible approximation ratio for all Max CSPs among all symmetric SDP relaxations of similar size. This result gives the first lower bounds for symmetric SDP relaxations of Max CSPs, and/nindicates that the Sum-of-Squares SDP is indeed the "right" SDP relaxation for this class of problems.

Advisor: Raghavendra, Prasad
Selection and scaling of ground motions for nonlinear response history analysis of buildings in performance-based earthquake engineering

This dissertation investigates the issue of selecting and scaling ground motions as input/nexcitations for response history analyses of buildings in performance-based earthquake engineering. Many ground motion selection and modication (GMSM) procedures have been developed to select ground motions for a wide variety of objectives. In this research, we focus on the selection and scaling of single, horizontal components of ground motion for estimating seismic demand hazard curves (SDHCs) of multistory frames at a given site./nIn Chapter 2, a framework is developed for evaluating GMSM procedures in their ability to provide accurate estimates of the SDHC. The notion of a benchmark SDHC is introduced, enabling biases caused by GMSM procedures to be isolated from other sources of bias. More importantly, the ability to quantify bias facilitates the identication of intensity measures (IMs) that are sufficient. However, this approach is limited by the availability of recorded ground motions and of prediction models for engineering demand parameters (EDPs) of structures./nThe framework developed in Chapter 2 is applied to synthetic ground motions in Chapter/n3, where biases in estimates of SDHCs caused by GMSM procedures can be estimated for any structural system and any EDP. However, the use of synthetic ground motions gives rise to the issue of developing benchmark-consistent ground motion prediction models. Based on the results from Chapters 2-3, it is hypothesised that the potential bias in any SDHC estimate is caused directly by two important properties of the particular selection of ground motions: (i) hazard consistency, and (ii) IM sufficiency./nA novel ground motion selection procedure, rooted in the theory of Importance Sampling,/nis developed in Chapter 4 that allows: (i) hazard consistency of the selected motions to be directly enforced for a user-specified collection of IMs, and (ii) SDHCs of a structure to/nbe estimated from a single ensemble of ground motions, with the option of avoiding record scaling altogether. This procedure, together with two other contemporary GMSM procedures -- (i) "exact" Conditional Spectrum and (ii) Generalized Conditional Intensity Measure -- are evaluated in Chapters 5-6 for a variety of structural systems and EDPs at a specified site. In these chapters, the amount of effort involved in implementing these procedures for estimating SDHCs is summarized in a step-by-step form, and the magnitude of biases caused by these procedures are documented.

Advisor: Chopra, Anil K.
Mechanistic Studies of Biomimetic Reactions by Synthetic Enzyme Mimics

Abstract/nMechanistic Studies of Biomimetic Reactions by Synthetic Enzyme Mimics/nBy/nWilliam Michael Hart-Cooper/nDoctor of Philosophy in Chemistry/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Kenneth N. Raymond, Co-chair/nProfessor Robert G. Bergman, Co-chair/nChapter 1. A brief introduction to common synthetic host structures and justification for the work described herein is provided./nChapter 2. The development of 1 and related hosts as a new class terpene synthase mimics that catalyze intramolecular Prins cyclizations. The property of water exclusion is observed. Host 1 is also shown to compensate for the gem-disubstituent effect./nChapter 3. The development of new terephthalamide hosts enabled an investigation of the effect of host structure on the enantio- and diastereoselectivity of these reactions, as well as a simple kinetic analysis. Rate accelerations and turnover numbers are notably high./nChapter 4. The mechanism of proton transfer in an archetypal enzyme mimic is studied using amide hydrogen deuterium exchange (HDX) kinetics. Collectively, these data shed light on the role of acid, base and water-mediated proton transfer in a synthetic active site with relevance to proton-mediated catalysis. Moreover, the emergent mechanism of solvent-occupied proton transfer raises the prospect of designable hosts with properties that are unique to the integration of their parts/nChapter 5. A short overview is provided, which places the results of chapters 2-4 in context with some broader goals of biomimetic supramolecular chemistry.

Advisor: Raymond, Kenneth N
Bergman, Robert G
Production Planning and Inventory Control in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Process

Motivated by a specific type of semi-batch biotechnology manufacturing, perfusion, we develop insights into biopharmaceutical production planning and inventory control in two areas. First, at the production site, we consider a continuous time infinite horizon lot-sizing model where a single product is manufactured on a single machine. Each time manufacturing restarts, a random production rate is realized, and production continues at this rate until the machine is shut down. Although the rate is random and chosen from an arbitrary set of random rates, it is known as soon as production starts, so this information could be used to determine when to stop production. Based on the production planning models, we show that given the objective of minimizing either average cost per unit time or total discounted cost, it is optimal to produce up to the same inventory level regardless of the realized production rate; even when backorder allowed, it is optimal to keep the same maximum backorder position. We also develop heuristics for the multi-product version of this production model. Next, for two-stage manufacturing supply chains, we extend this model to consider a specific characteristic of biopharmaceutical inventory planning -- both intermediates and finished goods expire, but the expiration "clock" is restarted at each stage. We propose a two-stage production-inventory integrated model for this setting and develop two heuristics for this model -- fixed size and fixed ratio shipment policies.

Advisor: Kaminsky, Philip M