VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Promise of Poison: Life in the Field of Pediatric Cancer Treatment

The Promise of Poison: Life in the Field of Pediatric Cancer Treatment is an exploration of the ideologically mediated practices through which people are made into different kinds of participants in processes of pediatric cancer treatment. Since the 1950s, the field of pediatric cancer treatment in the United States has become organized around a multidisciplinary model that the oncologist Sidney Farber dubbed “total care.” In recognition of the various forms of havoc that cancer diagnosis and treatment wreaks on patients and their intimate networks, Farber’s vision calls for multidisciplinary teams of biomedical and psychosocial professionals to provide various caregiving services to both patients and their family members, particularly parents/guardians. Since the time of Farber, many cancer treatment centers throughout the world have adopted some version of his model. In this dissertation, I explore practices of total care at Bay Area Children’s Hospital, which is the site of a major pediatric cancer treatment center in the San Francisco Bay Area. In doing so, I show how models of pediatric cancer care intersect with models of communication and youth in ways that can produce multivalent effects that range from therapeutic to iatrogenic. As young people and their families become positioned as participants in the field of pediatric cancer treatment, their lives become spatially, temporally, and ideologically re-arranged around the demands of particular cancer treatment protocols. In the process, they are not only promised the possibility of healing, but they are also warned about the negative, or iatrogenic, effects of treatment. While the negative effects of biomedical cancer treatment practices are commonly recognized, here I show how psychosocial caregiving practices can also produce harmful effects. One common way in which this occurs is via the subjection of individuals who identify as teenagers to habitats, artifacts, standards, and practices that were designed to facilitate care and communication between adults and young children. Such forms of subjection can enact processes of infantilization, alienation, and stigmatization that inhibit therapeutic interactions. As I will show, the processes that constitute total care are also mediated by ideologies of race, class, and gender that inflect models of care, communication, and youth. Patients and families who inhabit non-white and non-bourgeois identities may be particularly likely to experience the negative effects of total care insofar as it reproduces standards that derive from white, Euro-American, bourgeois ideologies that mark them as “inappropriate” people.

Advisor: Scheper-Hughes, Nancy
Holmes, Seth
Ordering the Disordered: State Classifications of Mental Illness in France and the United States

This dissertation examines how public mental health care systems in France and the United States treat similar diseases while producing very different kinds of mentally ill subjects. Through ethnographic observations of clinics, welfare offices, and courts, three hundred interviews with professionals and policymakers, and government archives, I document the seemingly chaotic and disordered trajectory of severely mentally-ill persons in the post-asylum era. The fragmentation and conflict in each country is consistent with literatures in medical sociology on mental health systems organization and with the sociology of professions./nI argue, however, that there is nonetheless an underlying order to these trajectories in each country. Medical actors and bureaucrats—such as judges, psychiatrists, and social workers—use shared, culturally-specific categories to divide between normality and pathology, disability and functionality, and dangerousness and deviance. In France, a common vision treats the mentally ill as a distinct class of persons with a deep-seated, troubled subjectivity that molds their entire life. This reproduces a system based on specialized, segregated services. In the United States, a perception of mental illness as primarily a behavioral problem—in the same vein as drug use or general delinquency—underpins a shared jurisdiction between different institutions of poverty governance. In place of typologies, the United States locates individuals on a simultaneously moral and medical continuum between failure and redemption, fluctuating based on personal discipline and medication compliance. The result is profoundly different distributions of the severely mentally ill between institutions of care and control./nThese results suggest that the literatures on medical classification, professions, and bureaucratic decision-making need to better account for broader differences in state structure, national culture, and conceptions of the self which set the terrain of professional and bureaucratic conflict and underpin medical diagnoses.

Advisor: Fourcade, Marion
Mechanisms of visual attention, and their relationships to expectation and navigation, in the human brain

The amount of sensory input received by the human brain far surpasses its capacity for conscious processing. Attention serves to gate incoming inputs to enable the receiver to select aspects of the environment for further processing based on its relevance to higher-level goals. When attention is impaired, behavior goes awry, and this often has serious consequences. While it is clear that attentional processes are critical for humans’ ability to interact effectively with the environment, the lack of a clear and conclusive definition of attention itself has, at times, impeded research progress on attention in the neural and behavioral sciences./nIn this dissertation, I examine the construct of human attention from both empirical and theoretical standpoints. In Chapter 1, I provide an introduction to the concept of attention, including diverging definitions. I also articulate the urgency of obtaining a clearer understanding of the neurocognitive processes that support attention. Chapter 2 presents an empirical study of a specific type of attention, known as visual search. The study uses rare intracranial recordings in humans to present evidence consistent with the view that visual search, a classical attention behavior, may need to be reinterpreted as navigation in visual space. In Chapter 3, I present a theoretical discussion of the distinctions and similarities between attention and expectation, including interpretational pitfalls in experimental designs aiming to directly compare the two. Chapter 4 provides closing thoughts with emphasis on future directions for this field of research.

Advisor: Knight, Robert T
Seismic investigation of subduction in Cascadia and Alaska and Simulating the ability of MyShake networks to detect and locate earthquakes

This study has two major focuses, which are united by the theme of applying data processing and imaging techniques to extract valuable information from large volumes of seismic data./nThe first focus is on the use of seismic imaging to improve our understanding of the tectonic settings of two of North-America's subduction zones; namely Cascadia and Alaska. Both exhibit enigmatic features and provide insight into fundamental seismotectonic processes relating to the interplay between subduction, mantle flow, volcanism and continental crust growth. Cascadia, for example, represents the final stages of subduction of the once giant Farallon plate. Using data collected from an ambitious deployment of ocean bottom seismometers across the entirety of the Juan-de-Fuca and Gorda plates offshore Oregon and Washington, this study maps the geometry of upper mantle flow in the region, which has important tectonic implications./nThe Alaskan subduction zone contrasts with Cascadia because the downgoing oceanic lithosphere here is older and more seismically active. This study uses data from an unprecedented seismic survey of Alaska to construct high resolution, three dimensional models of the velocity structure from the surface down to about 400km depth. These elucidate many fascinating features of this region, including the geometry of the downgoing material and its relationship to several enigmatic volcanic provinces./nThe second focus of this study is concerned with earthquake early warning. This is a technology that aims to provide seconds to minutes of warning to people before the onset of severe shaking during an earthquake, potentially allowing them to take life-saving actions. MyShake is a smartphone application developed by the U.C Berkeley Seismological Laboratory that allows mobile devices to detect earthquakes. MyShake is available for public download and is providing a rich dataset for investigation. This study describes an algorithm designed to use networks of MyShake devices to quickly locate and issue warnings about earthquakes, and a simulation workflow designed to test this approach. The results indicate that MyShake networks have exciting potential to issue useful earthquake early warnings worldwide.

Advisor: Allen, Richard M
What Should’ve, Could’ve, Would’ve Been: Affective, Motivational, and Behavioral Consequences of Counterfactual Thinking In Interpersonal Contexts

In a form of mental “time travel”, people often imagine the many ways the past might have been better, if only they had done something differently. This cognitive process, upward counterfactual thinking, commonly occurs after negative events, across a broad range of contexts. The present research examines the affective, motivational, and behavioral outcomes of counterfactual thinking in one particularly understudied context: conflict in close relationships. Study 1 participants recalled a close relationship conflict in which both they and the significant other played a role in the conflict, and then generated either self-focused upward counterfactual statements about the conflict, or self-focused factual statements about a neutral memory. Those who thought counterfactually about the conflict reported increased state guilt and, resultantly, were both more motivated and more likely to apologize to their relationship partners. Incorporating additional control conditions, Studies 2 and 3 provided evidence that these relationship-reparatory effects derive from counterfactual thinking as a broad, content-neutral pathway (as opposed to a content-specific pathway in which those thoughts must focus on the conflict in order for its consequences to help rectify that relationship). Finally, results from Study 4 illuminated potential differences between self-focused counterfactual thinking versus attributions of self-responsibility, particularly regarding the role of conflict resolution status and defensiveness. An internal meta-analysis across Studies 1 to 4 provides summative evidence that counterfactual thoughts about one’s role in a relationship conflict both induced more guilt and more attempts to apologize, relative to thinking factually about a neutral event.

Advisor: Ayduk, Ozlem
Chen, Serena
Genetics and Mechanisms of Host Resistance against Mycobacterium tuberculosis: a Study in Mice

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is the etiological agent of the disease tuberculosis (TB), and is the leading cause of death worldwide from a single pathogen1. Exposure to Mtb in immunocompetent humans results in diverse outcomes, varying from active, transmissible disease to asymptomatic infection that cannot spread to others. Host genetics, amongst other factors, are thought to contribute to the divergent outcomes upon Mtb infection. Improved understanding of the host immune responses against Mtb—how is the pathogen detected, what immune responses are induced, and which responses are protective—would better inform future development of vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics./nTo study the effect of host genetics on susceptibility to Mtb infection, I used a previously published congenic mouse (B6.Sst1S) that carries the susceptible allele of the Super susceptibility to tuberculosis 1 (Sst1) locus on the C57BL/6 (B6) background 2,3. Compared to B6 mice, B6.Sst1S mice are significantly more susceptible to Mtb infection, though the mechanisms of this susceptibility are not well understood. A previous study proposed Ipr1 (also known as Sp110) as the causative gene within the Sst1 locus2, though this has never been thoroughly verified. In this dissertation I first investigate the mechanisms of susceptibility in the B6.Sst1S mice, and demonstrate that the susceptibility is driven by type I interferon (IFN) signaling (Chapter 2). I further show that type I IFN signaling upregulates interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra), which blocks signaling of interleukin-1 (IL-1), a vital antibacterial cytokine. Inhibition of IL-1Ra by genetic deletion or neutralization with a blocking antibody protected B6.Sst1S mice, suggesting that IL-1Ra is a potential target for host-directed therapy./nI then examine the genetic determinants of the Sst1 locus, where I observe that contradictory to previous report2, Sp110–/– mice were not susceptible to Mtb infections (Chapter 3). I demonstrate that a homolog of Sp110, Sp140 is also a possible candidate gene, and generated Sp140–/– mice that were similarly susceptible to infections by Mtb and other intracellular bacteria as B6.Sst1S mice. My work suggests that Sp140 is the dominant causal gene within the Sst1 locus, and is a novel negative regulator of type I IFN signaling during bacterial infections./nThe findings presented in this dissertation highlight the complexities of immune regulation during Mtb infection in vivo, as well as the many questions that remain open. In Chapter 4, I discuss some ideas on future directions and potential experiments that may help illuminate some of these outstanding questions.

Advisor: Vance, Russell E
In Pursuit of the American Dream: How Social Class Affects Future Possible Selves

In today’s society, do people believe they can personally achieve the American Dream, no matter their social class upbringing? In seven studies, we examined this question using the novel framework of social class possible selves. More specifically, we examined how high-aiming individuals’ social class possible selves are as a measure of future hoped-for, expected, and feared levels of education, occupational prestige, income, and subjective social class rank. We also examine how traditionally independent American cultural values will also be representative of future social class possible selves. Furthermore, we aimed to address how social class possible selves are shaped, examining family social class as an important predictor of social class possible selves and cultural values, as well as social mobility beliefs, system justification beliefs, collective social class self-esteem, and optimism as potential moderators. In addition, we addressed how much individuals believe in their social class possible selves by measuring perceptions of their efficaciousness and distance from the current self. Finally, we sought to establish the motivational power of social class possible selves on career attainment behaviors. We find social class possible selves represent distinct conceptualizations of social class in the future and are also represented by different levels of cultural values. Further, these possible selves all are predicted by family social class, though expected social class possible selves are the most strongly associated with class upbringing. In addition, expected selves are perceived as more likely to occur and closer to the present self. Family social class has differential effects on the efficacy and distance of these selves. Finally, we show that social class possible selves lead individuals to apply to opportunities that are in line with their expected levels of future income.

Advisor: Chen, Serena
Indelible Poverties - Ambiguous Visions of the Poor in Four Brazilian Authors

This dissertation focuses on modern representations of precariousness in Brazilian literature through the lens of its canonical fiction. Starting with the rise of industrial capitalism in Latin America, I draw attention to a continuum between colonial and postcolonial forms of marginality that have led to representations of socioeconomically vulnerable subjects under the same category of “the poor”. Drawing upon scholarly debates from affect studies, biopolitical criticism, and post-humanistic theory, I explore the extent to which this label of “the poor” has naturalized class prejudice, systemic oppression, and cultural stigmatization of the lower-class members of Brazilian society whose form of life are primarily perceived by what it lacks. In doing so, I look at how four major twentieth-century literary narratives expose and press against this stigma derived from the traditional idea of “the poor” with an ambiguous characterization of the precarious subject as simultaneously powerless and powerful. These narratives are: Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (1902), Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo (1934), Clarice Lispector’s A Hora da Estrela (1977), and Rubens Figueiredo’s Passageiro do Fim do Dia (2010). My analysis of these novels allows me to theorize what I call the “negative sovereignty of poverty”: the emergence of invisibility, animality, and sublimity as alternative forms of power that allow individuals lacking in material resources to counter oppression with resilience, wonder, and wisdom, thereby defying typically demeaning representations of the poor. By placing the dissenting narratives of poverty in Brazil at the heart of the debate on how literature can open windows to the intricacies of sociocultural values in the Global South, this dissertation stresses that the ambiguous narration of the poor has subtly made poverty one of the most potent literary motifs at the intersection of politics and aesthetics.

Advisor: Slater, Candace
Masiello, Francine
Implicit Models: Theories and Applications

Deep implicit models are very recent developments on deep learning. Traditionally, deeplearning methods rely on explicit forward feeding structures. Super deep structures are proposed to give better performance in various domains. Such approaches have posed difficulty in theoretical analysis and under perform shallower models in some domains. By introducing a recursive structure involving solution to an equilibrium equation in the forward feeding, implicit deep models capture the idea of infinitely deep neural networks while preserving simplicity in model representation, allowing theoretical analysis and better connection to previous efforts in math and control communities. Recent works on implicit models have demonstrated state-of-the-art empirical performances./nDespite great ambition, implicit models are very new and see theoretical and empiricalchallenges. From the theoretical aspect, efficient and effective training and evaluation of implicit models are still open problems. The naive training methods for implicit models are highly inefficient. Trivial initialization easily violates the validity conditions for implicit models. Robustness of implicit models are not well studied. From the empirical aspect, there are still a limited number of works on applying implicit models to solve real world problems. Such works also have not demonstrated significant performance boost over deep learning in general. Applications of implicit models in most areas are mostly unexplored even though implicit models fit in the deep learning framework easily./nIn the dissertation, we introduce our theoretical and empirical contributions on deep implicitmodels. The presentation of the dissertation is split into two parts. The first part focuses on theoretical foundations for deep implicit models where we research the evaluation, training, and other topics for implicit deep learning and deep learning in general. The second part then explores the applications of deep implicit models and corresponding theories on real world machine learning applications. We show that implicit models can out-perform existing deep learning techniques in a set of tasks, thanks to the implicit structure which resembles infinitely deep neural networks.

Advisor: El Ghaoui, Laurent
The Impact of Technology and Presentation Mode on Reading Comprehension Among Blind and Sighted Individuals

Rapid advances in technology are facilitating the electronic distribution of information, especially via auditory formats. These methods of acquiring information are prevalent in educational settings, such as the use of audiobooks. While auditory formats may be more/nconvenient and economical, they may not be the most beneficial for comprehension ability. In fact, previous research has shown that reading rather than listening leads to superior comprehension among sighted individuals. Two possible explanations for this benefit in/ncomprehension exist: (1) Visual processing is fundamental for reading comprehension, or (2) Reading text is more physically-engaging and effortful than listening, leading to better comprehension ability. This dissertation presents research that contributes to this debate by/ncomparing reading and listening comprehension between sighted individuals and blind, fluent braille readers./nThe findings from this research clarify how distributing reading material using different technologies and presentation modes affects comprehension ability. These results are particularly essential for the blind community because previous research on this topic is severely lacking, and currently-used assistive technology primarily presents reading materials in auditory formats. Furthermore, this research is the first to create an assessment that accurately measures comprehension ability among two distinct participant populations, allowing for comparisons between blind and sighted individuals. The benefit of making such comparisons for elucidating the neural underpinnings of cognitive processes, such as comprehension, will be discussed as a novel methodological technique.

Advisor: Orel-Bixler, Deborah