VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Technology as Knowledge: Cuneiform Technical Recipes and the Material World

The human activity of making things has a long intellectual history, well predating the Industrial Revolution or even the term “technology” itself. This dissertation examines cuneiform sources written between the second and first millennium BCE in order to determine how technology interacted with and shaped scribal knowledge. With no clear boundary—between genuine and artificial, between the natural and human-made, between theory and practice, episteme and techne, knowing-that and knowing-how—with no term to distinguish between scribe and craftsman, cuneiform texts challenge how we think about both technology and knowledge. The case studies presented herein derive from cuneiform tablets written between the late second and mid first millennia BCE in what is today Iraq. These ancient clay tablets preserve technical recipes, explanatory lists of materials, and rituals bearing the hallmarks of scholarship. For the intellectual historian, they exemplify a discerning interest in the construction and proliferation of technical knowledge at an early stage of Middle Eastern textual history./nThe work argues that notions of technology constitute an essential element of cuneiform scribal knowledge. Ignoring the technological component of cuneiform scholarship renders an incomplete portrait of nēmequ—the Akkadian term we translate as “knowledge,” or “wisdom.” Neo-Assyrian glassmaking recipes can function as literary or ritual texts focused on purity, Middle Assyrian perfume recipes can be read as cultural windows into the roles of female experts during the rise of the Assyrian territorial state, and even a solitary tablet containing wool dyeing recipes can expand our knowledge of the cultural role of garments in first millennium Babylonia. Technical recipes, in sum, constitute textual sources that inform and interact with the construction of knowledge at the local level. This work offers close, contextualized readings of Akkadian technical recipes, and utilizes frameworks derived from the history and philosophy of science and technology, in order to generate new methods for investigating the relationship between technology and cuneiform scribal knowledge.

Advisor: Rochberg, Francesca
Abroad: Law, Migration, and Capitalism in an Age of Globalization

John Locke’s famous triad of inalienable rights included life, liberty, and property. Historians of human rights, however, have neglected property in favor of the more heroic categories of life and liberty. This dissertation asks what the relationship between life, liberty, and property has been in international law by studying the protection of nationals abroad in the nineteenth century and the various attempts to internationalize that protection in the twentieth./nThe late nineteenth century was a global age. People, goods, and money moved around the world at unprecedented speeds and in unprecedented scales. At the same time, jurists mobilized old principles of allegiance and protection to justify intervention on behalf nationals who were far outside the territorial boundaries of their state. States, they argued, had a right to protect the person and property of their nationals abroad (a principle known as "diplomatic protection"). Such a right, however, was difficult to reconcile with the principle of territorial sovereignty. Importantly, just who was a national? Nationalism and migration tested the traditional bonds between states and their subjects and strained the stability of the international system./nThe end of the First World War brought with it new potential for international legal innovation. Among the most persistent reimaginings of international law was expanding just what, or even who, could be a subject of international law. Would nations and national minorities become subjects? How would the system deal with millions of refugees? Would they gain international protection and rights to bring claims before international courts and tribunals? Would refugees be classified as a group, as members of a nation, or would individuals themselves become subjects of international law? In this moment of legal change, business interests worked with the League to craft legal instruments to smooth out the frictions of international trade and to arbitrate disputes between investors and sovereign states./nWhereas the protection of minorities and the principle of national self-determination had been central to the conception of the interwar legal order, the sovereignty of states was confirmed in the postwar world and, if there were any other subjects of international law, they were individuals, not nations or minorities. The international system was increasingly suspicious of nationality and of intervention for the protection of nationals. The response was a shift toward the individual, with human rights, the refugee protocol, and modern investor-state dispute settlement, among others.

Advisor: Sargent, Daniel J
The dynamics of transforming charges into chemical bonds at the solid-liquid interface

How charges transform chemical bonds at the solid-liquid interface is at the heart of energy storage technologies today. In these technologies, electrical charges transform into an energy-dense product. At this interface, the transformation process happens by localizing photogenerated charges in radical forms at ultrafast time scales. Later in the microsecond time scale, the generated radicals react with liquid to form new chemical bonds and complete the catalytic cycle. Our goal is to dynamically deconstruct the mechanism of this process. To do that, several areas of chemistry such as electrochemistry, inorganic chemistry and spectroscopy have to be combined./nIn this dissertation, I focus on studying charge (hole) dynamics in a heterogenous water oxidation reaction, which is crucial in renewable energy applications, at the n-SrTiO3/aqueous interface. Several methods, including ultrafast optical spectroscopy, ultrafast infrared spectroscopy and microsecond optical spectroscopy, are applied to investigate how photogenerated holes transform water into oxygen gas./nBy applying an ultrafast near infrared probe (800 nm) to isolate intra-band transitions, the dynamics of hole transfer from valance band to surface is revealed. By applying an ultrafast infrared probe to isolate interfacial vibrations and a sub band-gap probe (400 nm and white light) to isolate the mid-gap transitions, the initial formation dynamics of radicals are identified. Together with theoretical calculations, the initial formation dynamics, with a 1.3 ± 0.2 ps time constant, are assigned to two radical classes: the titanium oxyl (Ti-O•), which has been assigned through a sub-surface vibration at 800 cm-1 and the in-plane bridge radical (Ti-O•-Ti), which has been assigned through its in-plane optical transition dipole. Interestingly, the time constants of 1.3 ps is characteristic of hydroxyl stretch relaxation in an H-bonded water network, indicating stabilization of radicals by hydrogen bonding./nOn microsecond time scales, by applying a sub-band gap probe (400 nm) to isolate the mid-gap transitions, the dynamics of radicals transforming into new chemical bond are found to involve two distinct processes: the fast process is mainly affected by solution ionic strength. The slower process also has an H/D isotope effect with D lengthening the reaction rate./nTogether, these studies provide vital information towards understanding how charges transform chemical bonds at the solid-liquid interface.

Advisor: Cuk, Tanja
Noise sensing and quantum simulation with trapped atomic ions

In this work, we present a novel method to couple any two vibrational modes of a single trapped ion, allowing energy to be swapped between the two modes. We use the scheme to perform ground state cooling and heating rate measurements of vibrational modes without direct optical access. This lessens experimental design constraints in trapped ion experi- ments, particularly in surface trap apparatus where optical access can be difficult./nWe use a single ion as an electric-field noise sensor to study noise processes originating on the metallic surfaces of microfabricated ion traps. We show that realistic models of surface noise predict a specific polarization of the electric-field fluctuations relative to the trap geometry. In contrast, technical noise sources predict a different polarization direction and magnitude which can be inferred by electrostatic simulation of the trapping electrodes. We show that, by comparing heating rates of the two radial modes of a single trapped ion, one can determine whether technical noise sources are a significant contribution to heating. This is an important test for experiments aimed at studying surface noise effects. We also study dephasing due to surface noise, in which the electric potential curvature due to surface noise sources disturbs the phase of the ion motion. We measure the dephasing time for trapped ion motion. Using a noise model featuring dipolar noise sources, we probe the power spectrum of surface noise effects. These measurements, especially if repeated in a trap with smaller ion-electrode distances, may yield new insights as to the physical origin of surface noise effects./nWe demonstrate a two-ion quantum simulation of vibrationally-assisted energy transfer, an important phenomenon in biochemical energy transfer. We show that the quantum simulator performs well when benchmarked against exact numerical simulation. We believe that our approach can be scaled to more complicated systems beyond the reach of classical simulation, and discuss several methods for extending the simulation.

Advisor: Haeffner, Hartmut
Carrying Over: Poetry as Translation in Early Romantic Poetics

Carrying Over reconsiders the widely held Romantic-era belief in poetry as a universal form by arguing for the centrality of linguistic and cultural translation within early Romantic poetics. It traces Romantic encounters with Eastern genres alongside an emerging imperial sense of the world in eighteenth-century British systems of knowledge, including philology, pedagogy, and biblical criticism. Expanding recent postcolonial accounts of world literature’s colonial origins, I show how Romantic works responded to a mounting scholarly effort to codify literature within England and its colonial peripheries. While Orientalist philologists like William Jones claimed to demonstrate “what true poetry ought to be” through their translations of Oriental works into familiar genres like the lyric and the romance, Romantic adaptations of non-Western forms (such as the Arabian Nights tale and the proverb) suggested what poetry could be once detached from these dominant modes. Indeed, I claim that these engagements with Oriental forms transfer, or “carry over,” problems of translation into issues of interpretation—moments of unintelligibility in which the poem appears as an agent of translation rather than its object. In doing so, these poets revise the world-literary assumption that locates poetry in European modes of expression, suggesting instead that poetry’s displaced origin precedes and lies outside of national forms./n/nAfter an introduction that explores the early Romantic revision of translatio studii, the first chapter considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fascination with the Arabian Nights against the backdrop of eighteenth-century empiricist pedagogical literature by John Locke, Anna Barbauld, and Maria Edgeworth. I show how the opaque and supernatural tales of the Nights precipitated a shift in early Romantic reading practice—from reading as a self-possessed act to a recursive and involuntary process—and offered a model for the enigmatic form of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. In chapter two, I read William Blake’s use of proverb form in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell alongside an empiricist insistence on knowledge’s demonstrability, as articulated through eighteenth-century biblical criticism and colonial pedagogy. I argue that Blake’s resuscitation of the proverb form in the “Proverbs of Hell” posits a mode of unfinished knowledge, in which incompletion is converted from a mark of error into a sign of knowledge’s deferred but eventual recognition. My third chapter looks at the dream of the Arab in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a vision of an itinerant Arab-knight saving poetry from destruction, to trace how this split figure embodies and unsettles the eighteenth-century belief in the primitive origin of poetry. I claim that the Arab-knight shows how poetry’s inheritance depends on its translation—its literal movement across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The dissertation concludes with a coda that explores the relationship between cultural translation and poetics in Walter Benjamin’s and Édouard Glissant’s different writings on translation.

Advisor: Goodman, Kevis
Respiratory Mechanics and Gas Exchange: The Effect of Surfactants

The purpose of the lung is to exchange gases, primarily oxygen and carbon dioxide, between the atmosphere and the circulatory system. To enable this exchange, the airways in the lungs terminate in some 300 million alveoli that provide adequate surface area for transport. A common lung defect is the dysfunction of a complex mixture called pulmonary surfactant that is found in a thin layer of fluid coating the alveoli. This is a leading cause of respiratory distress syndrome (RDS), a well-known condition that affects premature infants and adults, and results in mortality rates ranging from 10% to 60% depending on patient age. The main goal of this work is to further the understanding of pulmonary surfactants to improve treatments and consequently decrease the high morbidity that accompanies RDS. To do so, we develop a mathematical model to study the action of pulmonary surfactant and its determinative contributions to breathing. The model is used to explore the influence of surfactants on alveolar mechanics, gas exchange and microscale work of breathing. Using the model, we can also examine the role that individual surfactant components such as phospholipids, proteins and cholesterol play during breathing. This provides insight into the design of exogenous pulmonary surfactants for clinical applications to treat RDS.

Advisor: Szeri, Andrew J
Demographic Inference from Large Samples: Theory and Methods

The emergence of next-generation sequencing has revolutionized our ability to interrogate the genome, leading to fascinating new insights into the nature of humans and many other species. At the same time it has created theoretical and computational challenges associated with the need to perform robust and efficient inference on increasingly massive genetic data sets./nIn this thesis I focus on those challenges in the context of demographic inference, which estimates the past history of a population on the basis of genetic data sampled at the present. I derive the basic theoretical models which enable such inferences. I then refine them to formulate a new inference procedure for reconstructing size history using hundreds of whole genomes at a time, a significant increase over existing methods. I complement this algorithmic advance with some theoretical results on the accuracy of demographic inference as sample sizes grow large.

Advisor: Song, Yun S
The drying of the Arkavathy river: understanding hydrological change in a human-dominated watershed

Human interventions in the hydrologic cycle have intensified to the extent that water resources cannot be managed and understood in isolation from anthropogenic influences. New approaches are needed to understand the effects of humans on hydrology, especially in regions of the world with limited hydrologic records. This dissertation focuses on a case study of the Arkavathy watershed adjacent to Bangalore, India, which has been transformed by rapid urbanization, intensification of agriculture, and over-exploitation of water resources over the last 50 years. During this time, the disappearance of streamflow in the watershed was largely overlooked as Bangalore shifted from Arkavathy-sourced water supply to imported water and farmers from surface water to groundwater irrigation. With Bangalore continuing to expand its water footprint and local groundwater resources drying up, moving towards sustainable water resources management in the Arkavathy requires overcoming the general absence of local hydrological records to develop an understanding of the changing hydrology of the watershed. To this end, a multifaceted research approach is developed and applied to the Arkavathy watershed to identify the dominant hydrologic dynamics within the watershed and understand the conditions under which hydrologic change occurred. This research reveals a number of important findings. First, humans are the primary drivers of change in this watershed, as neither precipitation variability nor increases in temperature can explain the observed changes in hydrology. Second, hydrologic change within the watershed is spatially heterogeneous, with drying occurring in the northern part of the watershed and increased surface water availability downstream of Bangalore. Third, streamflow decline in the northern Arkavathy has most likely been caused by extensive groundwater depletion driven by groundwater irrigated agriculture. And finally, management strategies designed to reverse groundwater depletion by constructing check dams within the surface water network are unlikely to succeed on the scales pertinent to watershed management. In addition to understanding water resources within the Arkavathy, this work serves as a foundation for understanding the trajectory of water resources in the region. This research also presents an approach for investigating historical hydrologic change in a poorly monitored watershed, understanding human-water interactions, and supporting long-term predictions for sustainable water management.

Advisor: Thompson, Sally E
High-Performance Systems for Crowdsourced Data Analysis

In spite of the dramatic recent progress in automated techniques for computer vision and natural language understanding, human effort, often in the form of crowd workers recruited on marketplaces such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, remains a necessary part of data analysis workflows for machine learning and data cleaning. However, embedding manual steps in automated workflows comes with a performance cost, since humans seldom process data at the speed of computers. In order to rapidly iterate between hypotheses and evidence, data analysts need tools that can provide human processing at close to machine latencies./nIn this dissertation, I describe the design, theory, and implementation of performant crowd-powered systems. After discussing the performance implications of involving humans in data analysis workflows, I present an example of a data cleaning system that requires low-latency crowd input. Then, I describe CLAMShell, a system that accurately labels large-scale datasets in one to two minutes, and its evaluation on over a thousand workers processing nearly a quarter million tasks. Next, I consider the design of multi-tenant crowd systems running many heterogeneous applications at once. I describe Cioppino, a system designed to improve throughput and reduce cost in this setting, while taking into account worker preferences. Finally, I explore the theory of identifying fast individuals in an unknown population of workers, which can be modeled as an instance of the infinite-armed bandit problem. The analysis results in novel near-optimal algorithms with applications to broader statistical theory. Together, these components provide for the implementation of human computation systems that are cost-efficient, scalable, and fast enough to integrate into existing data analysis workflows without compromising performance.

Advisor: Franklin, Michael J
Facilitating Sustainable Material Decisions: A Case Study of 3D Printing Materials

The rapid increase in material use and goods produced in the global market is leading to harmful consequences for the environment and for human health. As consumption continues to increase, it is crucial to address the impacts associated with decisions about choices of materials used. Integrating safer material decisions during the product design and development process will lead to less harmful environmental and human health effects. Moreover, the sustainable performance of products depends on the choices of materials that go into those products./nThis research seeks ways in which sustainable performance might become a more integral part of the materials choice process and aims to facilitate sustainable material choices during the product development process. Initially, the goal of the research was to create a tool that maps the trade-offs between material costs, performance and environmental impact, using 3D printing materials as a case study. Thirty-six 3D printing material filaments were examined for this research. For each filament, it’s description, base composition, mechanical properties, printing guidelines and hazards were collected. As empirical research progressed, however, it became clear that there are significant barriers to integrating sustainable material choices into the product development process that must be overcome in order to do so. This dissertation aims to clearly identify those barriers, including the significant complexity associated with gathering accurate data to feed a tool. /nThe tool created here is presented as a set of specifications for how a tool should work, with representations of outputs that have been tested with the potential audience for the tool.  The dissertation thus addresses not only what a tool would have to do, but the changes needed in the system that surrounds such a tool to allow it to truly address material sustainability.

Advisor: Beckman, Sara L
Global well-posedness and parametrices for critical Maxwell-Dirac and massive Maxwell-Klein-Gordon equations with small Sobolev data

In this thesis we prove global well-posedness and modified scattering for the massive Maxwell-Klein-Gordon (MKG) and for the massless Maxwell-Dirac (MD) equations, in the Coulomb gauge on $\bbR^{1+d}$ $(d \geq 4)$ for data with small critical Sobolev norm./nFor MKG, this work extends to the general case $ m^2 > 0 $ the results of Krieger-Sterbenz-Tataru ($d=4,5 $) and Rodnianski-Tao ($ d \geq 6 $), who considered the case $ m=0$. We proceed by generalizing the global parametrix construction for the covariant wave operator and the functional framework from the massless case to the Klein-Gordon setting. The equation exhibits a trilinear cancelation structure identified by Machedon-Sterbenz. To treat it one needs sharp $ L^2 $ null form bounds, which we prove by estimating renormalized solutions in null frames spaces similar to the ones considered by Bejenaru-Herr./nTo overcome logarithmic divergences we rely on an embedding property of $ \Box^{-1} $ in conjunction with endpoint Strichartz estimates in Lorentz spaces./nFor MD, the main components of the proof consist of A) uncovering of the null structure of Maxwell-Dirac in the Coulomb gauge, and B) proving solvability of the underlying covariant Dirac equation. A key step for achieving both is to exploit and justify a deep analogy between MD and MKG, which says that the most difficult part of MD takes essentially the same form as parts of the Maxwell-Klein-Gordon structure. As a result, the aforementioned functional framework and parametrix construction become applicable.

Advisor: Tataru, Daniel