VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
How many shades of brown? - Excremental rhetoric in modern Japanese literature

Abstract This dissertation examines excrement as a literary and rhetorical device of imaginative discursive possibilities in modern Japanese literature. Given the ambivalent status of excrement as both stigmatized as well as a source of fascination, excremental rhetoric has the unique potential to illuminate the multiplicity of discourses -- aesthetics, body politics, ideology, and diachronic socio-cultural conditions -- that play out within Japanese literary production over the course of the twentieth century. Challenging the dominant tendency in both Western and Japanese scholarship to read the excremental through a given theoretical perspective, my work proposes a multifocal mode of reading that recognizes the plurality of excremental rhetoric by attending to excremental modalities, or the states in which excrement exists or is experienced and/or expressed. I show that reading for the modalities of the literary excremental within the text shifts emphasis from an "unveiling of truth" to an exploration of various sections of a pluri-discursive "sewage system" in modern Japanese literature, including those examined in these chapters related to toilets, gastrointestinal disorders, and copro-philia and -phagia. Chapter 1, "Toilet and Excrement Collectors: Tanizaki and Other Aesthetes" investigates Tanizaki's prolific literary excremental output against the backdrop of the aesthetic and scientific discourses of his time and in conversation with the literary production of others with comparable interests in the aesthetic excremental. Bringing to the fore the changing configurations of private and shared space, Tanizaki's toilet and excrement collection offers a theoretical model for how a variety of discourses related to modernization and modernity interconnect in the subterranean Japanese literary sewage system. Chapter 2, "Shit(ty) Wars or Battlefield Excrementalism: Hayashi Fumiko, Hino Ashihei, and Others from the Warfront" explores the aesthetics and ideology of what I designate as "battlefield excrementalism" or the excremental rhetoric employed in war narratives. The chapter revolves around Hayashi Fumiko's accounts from the Fifteen Years' War (1931-45). I examine Hayashi's works in conversation with other wartime narratives, most notably those by Hino Ashihei, and show how the constructedness of literary battlefield excrementalism engages with various types of colonizing and colonized bodies. Chapter 3, "Enema Stories and Queer Shit: From Kitan Club to Murakami Ryū" examines narratives dedicated to non-normative sexualities related to anal sexual practices and the predilection toward enema, in particular, in post-World War II and then Bubble/post-Bubble Japan. Enema in these two contexts demonstrates the waste potential of commodity and the commodity potential of waste, revealing itself as (literary) commodity

Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Advisor: Reichert Jim (James Robert)
Bay Alexander R. 
Levy Indra A.
How the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is Advancing Chinese Foreign Policy Goals

The Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was launched in 2016 as a “lean, clean, and green” development bank focused specifically on Asia. In this thesis, I examine the effects of the AIIB on Chinese lending across Asia, specifically through the Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI). Using data from the AIIB and the American Enterprise Institute’s BRI database, I compare and assess AIIB and BRI policy in regional spending, environmental safeguards, and project specifics. Through this analysis, I argue that the AIIB and BRI reflect different patterns lending and serve different goals for China. In particular, while the BRI allows China to spread influence and create access to new markets through bilateral cooperation, the AIIB serves as an effective means for China to reform global development norms in their favor.

Keywords:  Program in International Relations
AIIB
BRI
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
Belt and Road Initiative
China
Stanford
International Relations
Stanford International Relations Honors Program
Thesis
Advisor: Fukuyama Francis
How the internet and online interaction strengthen social movements

In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that the internet and online interaction plays a role in the mobilization of social movement participants and in potential movement success. Social movement scholars have long debated whether such technological affordances enable similar or different mechanisms compared to traditional offline "in person" social movements and what this means for outcomes. These three papers that serve as dissertation chapters broadly seek to understand how the internet strengthens and influences contemporary social movements. Here I show how computer technologies augment and change traditional pathways for social movement emergence, specifically highlighting these key differences: 1. Secrecy and pseudonymity enabled by social computing platforms can increase trust between online activists and serve as a movement resource; 2. Tie formation over the internet widens the potential pool of activists and reach of movement activity; and 3: Activists can use social media to spread visual matter such as photographs and videos that encourage greater bystander support through more effective framing. I use the case of LGBT military inclusion in the United States from research conducted between 2009 and 2019 of social movement tactics and mobilization among LGBT military service members working to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and transgender exclusion laws in the recent social movements for LGBT military inclusion. The contributions provide deeper understanding for how contemporary social movements are created, maintained, and changed in an era of online connectivity, showing the power that new computer technologies can have on society

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: Correll Shelley Joyce
Granovetter Mark S.
Jiménez Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto)
Soule Sarah Anne
The human and environmental dynamics of artisanal small-scale gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon

The idea of the Amazon as a primeval tropical rainforest, undisturbed and stable since the dawn of time, is a myth. While the forest provides a myriad of valuable local and global ecosystem services, such as biodiversity conservation and carbon storage, it is also host to numerous human activities, such as farming, logging, and mining, that impact this system at a continuously expanding rate. Of these human activities, artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is thought to have the most destructive environmental impacts due to the large-scale deforestation, soil disturbance and heavy metal contamination associated with this activity. Understanding how forests respond to and recover from gold mining induced changes is crucial to ensure the future provision of ecosystem services for the future. Due to its illicit nature, little is known about the drivers and dynamics of ASGM in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, an area which is renowned for having both some of the highest levels of biodiversity and gold mining activity in the Amazon. To address this, I first examine the human context in which ASGM occurs in this region. I use qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews with miners and other local stakeholders to learn about the social-environmental drivers, impacts, and the perceived future of ASGM. I then leverage remote-sensing to complement these human stories with an understanding of the dynamics and spread of ASGM over a 36-year time-period. I expand on this data using machine learning to identify which environmental and social factors can predict the intensity of future mining in any given area. Finally, I discuss the results of a field study in which I collect soil samples and conduct vegetation surveys on a 15-year chronosequence of abandoned gold mines. I look at how gold mining impacts vegetation structure, soil biogeochemistry, and soil microbial communities over time to understand the potential for natural recovery in a post-mining ecosystem. I analyze these results in the context of the human and spatial perspectives explored earlier. This combination of on-the-ground, aboveground, and underground perspectives is used to create a holistic understanding of the broad-scale impacts of ASGM and to help inform policy and decision makers working to regulate ASGM to create a brighter ecological future for this region

Advisor: Asner Gregory P.
Peay Kabir
Fendorf Scott
Identification and characterization of neutralizing HIV antibodies targeting the gp41 trimer-of-hairpins structure

Despite the extensive amount of time and resources that have been put into HIV research over the past 40 years, the production of an effective preventative vaccine has remained elusive. More recently, vaccine efforts have been reinvigorated with the identification of more broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) that give hope to the success of B cell focused vaccine approaches. Neutralizing antibodies target the envelope protein (env), which is the only protein expressed on the outside of the HIV membrane. Env is composed of two subunits: gp120, which is responsible for binding to cellular receptors, and gp41, which contains the membrane fusion machinery. Although several broadly neutralizing epitopes have been identified, attempts to generate bNAbs in a vaccine setting have been underwhelming. We therefore set out to characterize new bNAbs against highly conserved regions of the gp41 subunit that are exposed in the pre-hairpin intermediate structure during viral fusion. Since few neutralizing epitopes have previously been characterized for gp41, we first explored HIV patient antibody responses to the N-heptad repeat (NHR) and C-heptad repeat (CHR) regions of gp41. After identifying individuals that produced antibodies against these structures, we single cell sorted their B cells and sequenced the heavy and light chains of their antibody genes, leading to the discovery of three novel anti-CHR neutralizing antibodies. A 3.5 Å crystal structure of the most potent neutralizing antibody, 1CB6, determined that these antibodies targeted the immunodominant cluster II epitope, previously regarded as a non-neutralizing epitope. Similarly to other cluster II antibodies, we observed that the three neutralizing antibodies targeted the CHR as exposed in the gp41 trimer-of-hairpins structure, which is thought to form at the fusion of viral and host membranes. Finally, by utilizing FcγRI on TZM-bl cells and the fusion inhibitor sensitive L565Q env mutation, we demonstrate that cluster II antibodies neutralize during the fusion pathway. These experiments definitively demonstrate that neutralizing antibodies target the cluster II epitope. Additionally, these experiments influence our understanding of gp41 collapse and the fusion process. Exposure of the cluster II epitope on the gp41 trimer-of-hairpins and the high affinity of these antibodies for this structure suggest the formation of a late stage fusion intermediate that can be targeted for the neutralization of HIV

Keywords: Microbiology and Immunology.
Advisor: Kim Peter
Boothroyd John C.
Idoyaga Juliana
Relman David A.
Identification and characterization of two orphan proteins as novel cis-ligands of neurexin complexes

Synapses are the basic units of information processing in the central nervous system (CNS). Synaptic properties are controlled by trans-synaptic adhesion complexes. Neurexins are central components of these complexes and organize both pre- and postsynaptic machinery by binding to a multitude of diverse ligands. However, known neurexin ligands seem to account for only a fraction of neurexin interactions, and identifying and validating novel neurexin ligands remain a challenge. In collaboration with the Fakler laboratory, we performed a proteomic screen for endogenous neurexin ligands enabled, in part, by the generation of a mouse line in which an epitope tag is knocked in to an extracellular region of neurexin 1. Members of two brain-enriched orphan protein families were detected in neurexin complexes immunoisolated from mouse brains: (1) FAM19A1 and FAM19A2, part of the FAM19A/TAFA family; and (2) TMEM178B, a close homologue of TMEM178A. Using protein chemistry and cell biological approaches, we identified FAM19A1-A4 as neuron subtype-specific, activity-regulated proteins that form covalent complexes with neurexins within the secretory pathway via the neurexin cysteine loop. To the best of our knowledge, this is a structurally unprecedented interaction mode that differs from that of other neurexin ligands. Further, FAM19A1-A4 regulate neurexin post-translational modifications, thus shaping neurexin ligand interactions and synapse properties. In a separate series of experiments utilizing mouse genetics, we found that Tmem178a and Tmem178b are necessary for mouse survival and that the Tmem178b deletion results in lower body weights and abnormal behaviors suggestive of brain dysfunction, though no striking changes in synapses were detected. Interestingly, we found that these predicted tetraspanin proteins are endogenously cleaved and the cleavage fragments remain covalently bound at the surface of axons in hippocampal cultures. In summary, our studies deorphanize FAM19A1-A4 and, putatively, TMEM178B as novel, brain-enriched members of the vertebrate neurexin interactome, thus expanding our understanding of synaptic components and laying a foundation for future functional studies. More broadly, the study of vertebrate-specific CNS-enriched orphan proteins will inform our understanding of vertebrate CNS molecular and cellular diversity and complexity and thus shed light on vertebrate-specific CNS functions and adaptations

Advisor: Südhof Thomas C.
Brünger Axel T.
Chen Lu (Professor of neurosurgery)
Luo Liqun
Imaging nematic domains in Barium iron arsenide using a scanning quantum cryogenic atom microscope

The SQCRAMscope is a novel scanning quantum cryogenic atom microscope with a wide scan range and superior magnetic field sensing capabilities. The ultracold-atom-based probe is also sensitive to local electric field and Casimir-Polder potential, making it a versatile multimodal sensor for exploring solid state physics in the mesoscopic regime. In addition, the SQCRAMscope permits easy optical access to the sample, allowing optical excitation and characterization to be tightly integrated with the scanning probe. In this thesis, I will introduce the SQCRAMscope and discuss our efforts in characterizing its scanning capabilities. I will then demonstrate its first use on measuring the spontaneous resistivity anisotropy in the nematic phase of an iron pnictide superconductor. The resistivity anisotropy is often regarded as a proxy of the nematic order parameter, which is critical to the understanding of pairing mechanism in iron-based superconductors. In the nematic phase of BaFe2As2, the formation of twin domains complicates transport measurements of resistivity anisotropy, and often requires the application of an external strain to detwin the crystal. I will show optical polarimetry measurements concurrent with magnetometry on an unstrained crystal that allows identification of magnetic signal with optically-visible twin domains. I will then show that such a spatially-resolved magnetic field measurement is sufficient to extract the spontaneous resistivity anisotropy. We found that the measured resistivity anisotropy is generally smaller than that of the previously reported detwinned bulk crystals, but still within the range of typical sample-to-sample variation

Keywords: Applied Physics.
Advisor: Lev Benjamin L.
Feldman Ben (Benjamin Ezekiel) 
Fisher Ian R. (Ian Randal)
Imaging strategies for quantitative, whole-joint assessment of structure and function related to knee osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative disease of the joints, but treatment options have remained limited largely due to an inability to detect and monitor OA in its earliest stages. Medical imaging is a valuable tool to non-invasively evaluate changes in bone, soft tissues like cartilage, and the synovium in OA onset and progression. However, there is a need for improved methods that can not only detect structural and compositional changes in these tissues, but also changes in joint function early in the course of disease. This work develops and progresses the application of medical imaging tools to assess whole joint health in early OA. First, I focus on a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique called gagCEST which aims to image glycosaminoglycan depletion, thought to be the earliest degenerative cartilage changes in OA, with high specificity. However, technical challenges have limited its translational potential at clinical field strengths like 3 Tesla. Here, I make improvements to the gagCEST technique to enable rapid, 3D imaging of the whole knee with improved dynamic range and good repeatability and apply it to study cartilage in a healthy cohort and a cohort with mild to moderate OA. While MRI is a valuable tool to probe structural changes in soft tissues and bone, imaging of bone function remains a challenge with MRI. Combining MRI with [18F]sodium fluoride positron emission tomography (PET) imaging allows for simultaneous assessment of structure and function. I advance the application of PET-MR imaging in OA by comparing quantitative measures of bone vascularization and mineralization in healthy and OA knees and examining spatial relationships between altered bone metabolism and degenerative changes in bone, cartilage, and the synovium. I further applied hybrid PET-MR imaging to study knee joint function by quantifying the short-term response of bone and cartilage to exercise. Results suggest that this technique has strong potential to detect early joint dysfunction after loading. Overall, this work represents a shift toward whole-joint imaging to assess spatial relationships between structure and function of multiple joint tissues

Keywords: Bioengineering.
Advisor: Kogan Feliks 
Levenston Marc Elliot
Gold Garry E.
Immunometabolic regulation of inflammation in aging and disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the 6th leading cause of death in the United States and over 43 million people have been diagnosed with AD worldwide. Aging is the number one risk factor for AD, with over 1 in 10 individuals above the age of 65 at risk for developing AD. While it was previously hypothesized that misfolded protein aggregates such as amyloid-beta (Aβ) were sufficient to cause symptomatic AD, more recent research suggests myeloid cells play a fundamental role in the progression of age-associated diseases such as AD. Specifically, circulating pro-inflammatory factors can promote cognitive decline and, in the brain, microglia lose the ability to maintain immune homeostasis and clear misfolded proteins that are associated with neurodegeneration. The molecular mechanisms, however, that initiate and sustain maladaptive inflammation with aging are not well understood. Here, we demonstrate that de novo NAD+ synthesis is active in innate immune cells and is required for maintenance of normal immune homeostasis in inflammation and aging. Specifically, there is a downregulation of quinolinate phosphoribosyl transferase (QPRT), the rate-limiting enzyme for de novo NAD+ synthesis, and replenishment of this enzyme results in rejuvenation of aged myeloid cells. In addition, we demonstrate that the myeloid EP2 receptor in the CNS and periphery converges on a metabolic node of glucose regulation in which glucose is sequestered in aged macrophages, preventing substrate access to the electron transport chain and fuel for oxidative phosphorylation. Coupled with increasing evidence that aged macrophages depend heavily on glucose as a fuel source, these findings reveal a breakdown in energy homeostasis within aging immune cells. Finally, by inhibiting the EP2 receptor in myeloid cells, we are able to restore cognitive function and immune homeostasis in a model of aging

Advisor: Long Jonathan Z.
Andreasson Katrin
Mochly-Rosen Daria
Rando Thomas A.
Wang Xinnan
Impact assessment of blockchain-enabled smart contracts on the visibility of construction payments

Construction progress payments constitute a big portion of cash flow on projects. These payments are currently administered using monthly applications prepared by general contractors. These applications provide only an aggregate view of payments and cannot support the wide range of information needs faced by different stakeholders. As a result, firms often have partial visibility into the flow of cash and its interconnection with construction progress. Achieving visibility is particularly challenging when stakeholders need to employ a more granular look into their financial data. Blockchain-enabled smart contracts have a potential to address this visibility problem by enhancing workflows around payment processing and directly conditioning the flow of cash on the progress of work at job sites. This potential, however, has not been validated and has yet to go beyond theory. The dissertation uses comparative empirical experiments (Charrette Test Method) to draw comparisons between the visibility of state-of-practice and blockchain-enabled payment systems in a commercial construction project. The primary findings were threefold: 1) blockchain-enabled smart contracts can enhance the completeness and accuracy of information retrieved from payment systems; these metrics were respectively improved by an average 216% and 261%. The improvements in information latency, however, were not statistically significant; 2) visibility benefits of smart contracts are significantly more pronounced when firms need a more granular look into the physical scopes of work, trades compensated in payments, and the timeline of payments; and 3) in contrast to conventional payment systems, those relying on blockchain-enabled smart contracts are more likely to maintain their information completeness and information accuracy when faced with more granular information queries

Advisor: Fischer Martin
Law K. H. (Kincho H.)
Lepech Michael