VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Fanning the Flames: The Impact of Targeted Sanctions on Foreign Militant Activity

How do US and UN targeted sanctions impact the behavior and strategies of militant groups? Despite several theories on the use of sanctions to punish non-state actors, scholars have largely neglected the impact of targeted sanction application on militant group behavior. This thesis combines an original dataset of 153 US and UN sanction regimes with data on the activity of over 600 militant groups to examine the relationship between sanction imposition and militant activity. The results show mixed impact of sanctions on militant activity. While UN targeted sanctions precipitate falls in militant activity, unilateral US sanctions are associated with a significant increase in violence committed by sanctioned groups. Comparative analysis of two militant groups in India –The National Democratic Front of Bodoland and Hizbul Mujahideen – explores the causality of this finding. US sanctions strip militant groups of international legitimacy but often fail to limit their availability to resources. As there is no obvious way to get sanctions removed for militants, sanctions reduce militant incentives to lower violence to seek international recognition. This thesis illustrates the limited efficacy of targeted sanctions without multilateral support and the humanitarian consequences that may originate from unilateral sanction imposition.

Keywords:  Center for International Security and Cooperation
Center for International Security and Cooperation
CISAC
sanctions
terrorism
multilateral
United Nations
militant group
economic coercion
Thesis
Advisor: Weinstein Jeremy
Fashion changes : the role of the audience in the fashion cycle

Why do we like the things that we like? Why do our tastes change over time, and why are we unable to predict these changes in advance? Despite a long tradition of research into these questions, it remains notoriously difficult to predict which previously unpopular and unfashionable things will become fashionable or popular tomorrow, and even more difficult to anticipate the reverse. Over the course of three separate but thematically connected empirical studies, I deploy a combination of empirical approaches (agent-based simulation models, a survey experiment, analysis of population-level survey data) and work to uncover demand-side mechanisms and processes relevant to understanding macro-level popularity fluctuations and consumption trends. Altogether, the three studies contribute to ongoing debates regarding the mechanisms governing fashion change

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: Granovetter Mark S.
Goldberg Amir
Pedulla David S.
Feed forward : how feedback shapes teachers' beliefs about student potential and student beliefs about teachers

Teachers and their beliefs about student potential are highly consequential for students' academic and life outcomes. In this dissertation, I explore how teachers' beliefs about Black and White student potential are causally influenced by their engagement with student work, and measure how teachers and their behavior are perceived by Black and White students. I do so in the specific context of written feedback interactions between teachers and Black and White students; leveraging feedback as a ubiquitous teaching practice. I show that when teachers meaningfully engage with Black student writing through feedback, they report more positive beliefs in those students' academic potential than when they are simply evaluating the writing (chapter 2). Teachers' positive beliefs in Black student potential are most associated with feedback that is relational and that gives students agency in the revision process (chapter 3). That is, teachers who give students opportunities to revise their own work (agentic feedback) tend to see more academic potential in Black students. What's more, Black and White students both perceive that agentic feedback communicates higher teacher expectations, and they predict it will promote greater learning and improvement (chapter 4). Taken together, these studies provide necessary insight into the process by which teachers' beliefs about Black students are formed and communicated in their daily interactions with students. More work is needed to understand how teachers' various interactions with students inform their beliefs about them, specifically in the context of interracial teaching. The overall goal of this research is to inform teacher training and develop strategies to improve their relationships with and teaching of Black students

Keywords: Psychology.
Advisor: Eberhardt Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lynn)
Steele Claude
Walton Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti)
Fibroblasts Show Attenuated Wound Healing Phenotype in Dermal Melanoma in Mice

Fibroblasts play a critical role in the secretion of the extracellular matrix. As such, they are highly involved in the response to wounding and the wound healing process. Tumors recruit fibroblasts to establish a tumorigenic niche and aid cancer progression, a process in which fibroblasts undergo a phenotypic transition and differentiate into cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs). We examined this phenotype in the setting of dermal melanoma cells in mice (BrafCA, PTENLoxP, Tyr:CreERT2). Mice with endogenous and grafted dermal melanoma were wounded on the site of the tumor and their wound healing ability was then evaluated based on the morphology of the connective tissue using a novel automated connective tissue analysis methodology. Our findings indicate that CAFs are unable to recapitulate normal fibroblast wound healing behavior. The histology of the healed tumors instead closely resembled normal tumor biology, indicating that once recruited and activated by a tumor CAFs terminally differentiate into a distinct phenotype. CAFs may thus offer a cellular target of therapeutic significance in skin oncology.

Keywords:  Department of Biology
Biology
Cancer Biology
Fibroblast
Melanoma
Connective Tissue
Stanford Department of Surgery
Thesis
Advisor: Longaker Michael
Gozani Or
The filtered circle

We characterize two objects by universal property: the derived de Rham complex and Hochschild homology together with its Hochschild--Kostant--Rosenberg filtration. This involves endowing these objects with extra structure, built on notions of "homotopy-coherent cochain complex" and "filtered circle action" that we study here. We use these universal properties to give a conceptual proof of the statements relating Hochschild homology and the derived de Rham complex, in particular giving a new construction of the filtrations on cyclic, negative cyclic, and periodic cyclic homology that relate these invariants to derived de Rham cohomology

Keywords: Mathematics.
Advisor: Conrad Brian
Galatius Søren
Cohen Ralph L.
Finding spin glass phase of cavity cosine Ising Model with Parallel Tempering Markov Chain Monte Carlo

A spin glass is a phase of matter that occurs in various magnetic materials. It's characterized by quenched magnetic disorder and non-ergodic behavior. This phase is significant because finding the ground state of a spin glass can be mapped to NP complete optimization problems, where the ground states represent solutions. Here, we study how a spin glass phase can emerge in cavity QED spin systems. In particular, we study an zero field Ising Hamiltonian with a novel all to all connectivity matrix of cavity mediated interactions [equation in document] where the r_i is the position of the i^(th) spin in the cavity, and it is normally distributed with mean 0 and variance w^2. We use a custom implementation of Parallel Tempering Monte Carlo Markov Chain methods to partially map the (w,T) phase diagram of this model. Finally, we provide the first numerical confirmation that this interaction model gives rise to a spin glass phase.

Keywords:  Department of Physics
spin glass
spin glass phase
Levlab
Thesis
Advisor: Lev Benjamin
Khemani Vedika
Fintech in the Blue Pacific: Opportunities for Collaboration and Competition

Abstract: Triggered by China's increased presence in the region in recent years, the U.S., Australia and their allies have shifted greater focus and resources toward geo-strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific. Unwilling to be manipulated into big power politics, Pacific Island leaders have openly criticized this practice of treating the two oceans as a single strategic space and the frequent denial of the agency of Pacific Island nations. Unified under the Pacific Islands Forum, these nations have together set their strategic vision for the future in the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. Combatting climate change and sustainable development rank highest in priority for these islands on the frontline of sea level rise. Influence in the region will be most determined through careful navigation by the Island nations themselves in leveraging partnerships with new and traditional allies. My research examines the opportunity for fintech to promote sustainable development in the region and as an area for potential collaboration and competition amongst world powers as Sino-US tensions continue to unfold.

Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Stanford Global Studies, East Asian Studies, South Pacific, Pacific, Fintech, Sustainable Development
Text
Thesis
Advisor: Miller Alice
Flood control politics : engineering, urban growth, and disaster in Mexico City

This dissertation challenges the simple yet pervasive notion that engineers "mitigate" disasters. It reveals instead how engineers transform disasters as a form of governing amid increasingly strained infrastructures and environments. The project focuses on engineers' management of the persistent floods of sewage and rainwater that occur every rainy season in Mexico City, which cause infections, triple commute times, and ruin homes for the urban poor. I conducted 24 months of ethnographic and archival research in Mexico City focused on the work and lives of drainage engineers, drainage operations and maintenance workers, and flood victims. The dissertation spans the 1940s to the present, tracing how engineers planned one of the world's largest urban drainage systems in response to devastating floods in the city center and how they operate the decaying system today amid the city's explosive growth, ongoing land subsidence, and the pressures of climate change. Under these constraints, I demonstrate that engineers use a vast system of pumps and floodgates to strategically avoid politically catastrophic floods in wealthy central areas by creating instead a slow-moving and spatially diffuse patchwork of flooding in largely impoverished areas of the urban periphery. These floods are so carefully spread through space and time by engineers that they have become a banal problem of everyday life for the poor that gathers little news coverage and inspires few protests. This spatiotemporal distancing furthermore makes it extraordinarily difficult to understand flooding as a systematic, political problem. I argue that by reconfiguring flooding in these ways, engineers have made the city's endless growth pushed by capitalists and political elites both imaginable and politically tenable. More broadly, this dissertation shows how engineers make the temporality and spatiality of urban disasters into objects of governmental manipulation. Through designs and operations that shift how, when, and where disasters are experienced, engineers have become essential mediators who negotiate between an increasingly strained environment and political demands for endless urban growth. I contend that this mediation is an essential yet understudied element not only in the work of government, but also the intertwined processes of urbanization and capital accumulation more broadly

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Ferguson James
Ebron Paulla A.
Hecht Gabrielle
Inoue Miyako
Wolfe Mikael
Following the Money? The Impact of Educational Spending on Student Achievement in Saskatchewan, Canada

The link between public school funding and student outcomes in the United States has been debated for years. In order to study the causal effects of per-student spending on academic achievement, researchers often study natural experiments caused by changes to school finance policies, which create shocks to individual districts’ funding levels. However, Canadian reforms have rarely been studied using these quasi-experimental methods. I supplement this literature, analyzing the effects of per-student expenditures on high school graduation rates and course completion in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan reformed its school finance laws between 2009 and 2012; I employ a difference-in-differences exposure model to evaluate the effects of these changes on students’ educational attainment. I find that a $1,000 increase in annual per-pupil expenditures leads to a 0.257 percentage-point increase in the share of students graduating high school within 3 years of beginning Grade 10. However, I find null effects on the share of students graduating high school within 5 years of beginning Grade 10, as well as the proportion of students attaining 8 course credits per year.

Keywords: Property tax
Education > Finance
High schools > Graduation requirements
High school graduates > Rating of
Saskatchewan
Canada
Property tax relief
Public schools
Text
Thesis
Forager: An Interactive System for Rapid ML Model Creation

Applying machine learning (ML) in practice on real-world tasks and datasets is a difficult, expensive, and slow process, limiting the widespread adoption of ML. One reason applying ML is so difficult is because it is an iterative process that requires multiple types of expertise -- defining a category of interest, curating training data, labeling it, training a model, and reviewing results to determine necessary improvements requires both a subject matter expert (who knows the dataset and problem to be solved) and machine learning expert -- which limits the speed at which the iteration can occur. We propose Forager, a system that lets a subject matter expert interactively iterate within a tight loop to rapidly create an ML model themself; to accomplish this, Forager provides a set of tools for data exploration, manual data annotation, machine-aided data annotation, model training, and model validation. Using Forager, we were able to create image classification models for previously-unlabeled rare categories on the Waymo Open Dataset within tens of minutes.

Keywords:  Department of Computer Science
machine learning
active learning
interactive
machine learning infrastructure
ML infrastructure
ML
AI
Thesis
Advisor: Fatahalian Kayvon
Re Christopher
Forming Iranian Jewish identities : education, national belonging, the Jewish press, and integration, 1945-1981

Situated at the intersection of modern Jewish history, Middle Eastern history, the history of education, and Transnational Studies, "Forming Iranian Jewish Identities: Education, National Belonging, the Jewish Press, and Integration, 1945-1981" demonstrates how the Jews of twentieth-century Iran leveraged the press, access to education, and nationalist ideology to claim belonging to the Iranian nation. Jews have lived in Iran for over 2,500 years, with a population of 100,000 at their height in 1945. Today, Iran is home to between 10,000 and 15,000 Jewish inhabitants, representing one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East. This dissertation examines the means by which Jews experienced massive transformations in the period between the mid-1940s and the early 1980s. Drawing from records in Persian, Judeo-Persian, Hebrew, French, and English, collected in eleven archives and libraries, as well as oral histories, I establish the integral place of Jews in Iran and the multi-layered identities they formed as both ardent patriots and proud Jews. In this dissertation, I advance four central claims. First, I assert that even though Jewish emancipation in the Iranian context did not entail total acceptance by the broader Muslim Shi'i populace, Jews still achieved immense economic success, formed strong bonds with non-Jews, and integrated into many layers of Iranian society. Second, I argue that attendance at religiously diverse schools in Iran mitigated antisemitic experiences, engendered fruitful interreligious encounters, and helped Jews achieve significant upward mobility. Third, I contend that education and the press facilitated the Jews' integration by providing them with spaces to interact meaningfully and frequently with non-Jews. Finally, I posit that rather than being on the margins of twentieth-century Iranian life, as many scholars have previously argued, twentieth-century Iranian Jews were active citizens who crafted identities that reinforced and reflected their national agency

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Rodrigue Aron
Milani Abbas 
Zipperstein Steven J.
Framing systemic gender violence : representation and resistance in contemporary Peruvian and Mexican literature

For Framing Gender Violence, I have selected three novels regarding violence against women, two depicting Mexico of the last thirty years and one depicting Peru of the last forty. To begin, I analyze Roberto Bolaño's seminal 2666 (2008) since it is one of the first literary interventions in the Ciudad Juárez femicides that, additionally, illustrates the systemic nature not only of the femicides, but also of violence against women at large. I then transition to Temporada de huracanes (2017) by Fernanda Melchor, published fourteen years later, because of the novel's decentralization of violence and perspective. Lastly, I shift to the Peruvian context to examine La sangre de la aurora (2013) by Claudia Salazar Jiménez and the roles that women chose and were forced into during the Peruvian civil war from 1980-2000. Through the study of these novels, I aim to answer three key questions: how is violence against women represented in Latin American literature, specifically during the last twenty years in Mexico and Peru; how is female resistance portrayed and to what effect; and how is literature uniquely positioned to comprehend such violence more so than other mediums of expression?

Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.
Advisor: Hoyos Ayala Héctor
Briceño Ximena
Saldívar José David
Freedom of speech in a partisan age : political tolerance, hate speech, and public opinion

The United States, like other democratic societies, faces tension between allowing freedom of speech and upholding the dignity of its residents. Two aspects set it apart, however: the United States' First Amendment has provided broad protection for hateful and false speech, and Americans value freedom of expression more highly than people in any other country. In recent years, a growing awareness of the potential harms of extreme speech, particularly on the political left, seems to have tempered this uniquely American enthusiasm for free speech. In this dissertation, comprising three papers, I explore American public opinion on and the ramifications of freedom of speech in numerous settings using experimental methods and survey data. In the first paper, using a survey experiment about speakers on university campuses, I find that Democrats' tolerance of extreme right speakers is lower than that of Republicans, a reversal of prior literature that found Democrats and liberals were always more willing to uphold the speech rights of others. In the second paper, I examine survey data from the past two decades to answer how Americans' tolerance of certain groups has outpaced others, finding that tolerance has grown significantly, except for those groups that use hate speech. In the third paper, I study the impacts--intended and unintendedof banning hate speech on discourse of civic importance using a survey experiment. While I do not find a straightforward chilling effect from banning hate speech, such bans do seem to shift opinions significantly to the political left. Together, these papers contribute to the understanding of Americans' willingness to tolerate groups with whom they disagree, and how policies may or may not ameliorate societal divisions.

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: Rosenfeld Michael J.
Freese Jeremy
Jiménez Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto)
Friendship and firepower : long-term security commitment among like-minded states

States are motivated to do what they can in the present to prepare for long-term threats to their survival. The possibility of facing an overwhelming threat encourages interstate cooperation in the present, but ensuring long-term commitment among states is non-trivial, especially when the cause for cooperation is distant and ill-defined. Despite the challenges posed by both anarchy and uncertainty, states have developed institutions to enhance long-term cooperation, process uncertainty and create a group of like-minded states ready and willing to come to their defense. Some of these security integration institutions, such as alliances, are well known. Others, such as joint military exercises and defense cooperation agreements, are less commonly analyzed. Two of the papers in this three paper dissertation identify understudied security institutions, weapons coproduction and overseas military basing, and present a mix of data sources and methods to show how states utilize these institutions to increase their security ties. The third paper in the dissertation presents a novel measure of security alignment that aggregates existing data on security cooperation and accurately captures security relationships in the international system. Taken together, the papers in this project increase our understanding of how states act in the present to create long-term security commitment among like-minded states

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Schultz Kenneth A.
Fearon James D.
Sagan Scott Douglas
From cancer to COVID-19 : the self-fulfilling effects of illness mindsets on physical, social, and emotional functioning

The diagnosis of a chronic illness like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or cancer is a life altering experience that can negatively affect a person's functioning. While chronic illnesses are physiologically complex, the negative repercussions are not entirely dictated by their biological reality; they are also profoundly shaped by psychological factors. Illness mindsets -- core assumptions about the nature and meaning of an illness - may be one such factor that influences physical, social, and emotional functioning. This line of research introduces illness mindsets (e.g., 'illness as a catastrophe', 'illness as manageable', 'illness as an opportunity') as a novel and clinically useful construct. The impact and importance of these mindsets are demonstrated across six studies. The first four studies (N = 1,234) describe the development and validation of a measure of illness mindsets (The IMI) and report on the internal consistency; convergent, discriminant, criterion, and incremental validity; and the test-retest reliability in healthy and chronically ill participants. In Study 5 (N = 325), I present findings from a pre-registered randomized controlled trial of a digital mindset intervention for recently diagnosed cancer patients. Compared to patients in the treatment-as-usual control condition, patients in the mindset intervention condition reported adaptive changes in their mindsets as well as significant and sustained improvements in physical, social, and emotional functioning over time. Finally, in Study 6 (N = 5,365), I apply the general theoretical framework of illness mindsets to understand the mindsets that people adopted about the COVID-19 pandemic. Results support our pre-registered hypothesis that mindsets formed at the start of the pandemic predict quality of life six months later via changes in affective and behavioral processes. These studies suggest that illness mindsets are a valid construct that can be reliably measured; they account for significant variance in the physical, social, and emotional functioning of people with chronic illness; they can be changed with psychologically wise interventions; and they are relevant in broader health contexts like the COVID-19 Pandemic. The implications of these findings and future directions of this line of work are discussed

Keywords: Psychology.
Advisor: Crum Alia
Dweck Carol S.
Walton Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti)