VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
It’s About Time: Linking Happiness and the Pursuit of Sustainability

In the United States, typical patterns of consumption have substantial, negative environmental impacts, including but not limited to greenhouse gas emissions. While consumption and affluence levels have steadily increased in the last several decades, the well-being of the average American has, by many measures, not improved concomitantly. Indeed, certain sacrifices – including of leisure time – made to support greater levels of consumption undermine quality of life. Changing patterns of time use in favor of having more discretionary time can reduce environmental harms while improving quality of life. This dissertation considers the potential for interventions based on time use to bring gains in terms of both the environment and personal well-being. I first examine the relationship between time affluence – one’s available discretionary time – and well-being. I find that more time affluence is hedonically valuable, up to 14 hours of daily discretionary time, and that the average American is living in a condition of time poverty. I next ask whether increases in time affluence that are characterized by spending more time on leisure and happiness-promoting activities could affect consumption patterns. By way of investigation, I estimate the lifecycle energy and carbon intensities of 15 routine activity categories. These calculations indicate that activities have substantially different intensity values and that highly discretionary activities tend to be less consumptive than average. I finish by examining three different policies that can expand employees’ control over their time. I find that there are multiple policies that can coincidently foster greater happiness and achieve environmental gains, each with its own form of change and likelihood of stimulating significant changes in behavior. The time-use lens on consumption developed by this dissertation offers a new way of pursuing the synergistic goals of environmental welfare and improved quality of life.

Advisor: Kammen, Daniel M
Towards Biochemical Conversion of CO2 to Higher Value Chemicals Using Enzyme Design and Engineered Polyketide Synthases

Polyketide synthases produce a remarkable number of diverse products. Many medicines have been produced either directly from polyketide products found in nature, or with limited modification via organic semisynthesis. However, we remain in the early days of engineering the biosynthesis of polyketide synthases. Despite being an active area of research for over 20 years, no commercial application of an engineered polyketide synthase exists. Rapidly advancing technologies like next generation sequencing, DNA synthesis, liquid handling automation and mass spectrometry give us tools to do things faster, and in new ways. In the work presented in this doctoral dissertation I will describe how I have applied some of these new tools to advance our understanding of polyketide synthase biochemistry, as well develop catalysts for new small molecules using engineered polyketide synthases./nChapter 1 begins with a discussion of the current state of the art and challenges associated with engineering these enzymes as well as offering opinions about routes forward to narrow the considerable gap between the promise and reality of engineered PKSs./nChapter 2 presents my work applying mass spectrometry to study the formolase enzyme, which is part of an engineered carbon fixation pathway. This work further characterized the product profile of the formolase and describes alternative routes of carbon assimilation from the pathway. Once this pathway is further evolved, it could supply reduced carbon to engineered polyketide synthase proteins./nChapter 3 explores the role of the histidine in the GHSxS active site motif of acyl transferase domains. The role of this residue in the literature was unclear, with some reports suggesting that this histidine could even serve as an alternative nucleophile. This study showed that removal of this histidine increases hydrolysis, suggesting it is important for the stabilization of acyl-enzyme intermediates./nChapter 4 probes the mechanism for gem-dimethylation in complex polyketide biosynthesis. Specifically, this report shows that methylation can precede condensation in polyketide biosynthesis, contrary to the canonical understanding./nChapter 5 describes the development of the yersiniabactin PKS as a gem-dimethylation catalyst. Specifically, the engineering of this enzyme towards production of several useful gem-dimethylated compounds, as well as the parallel engineering of a thioesterase domain to release gem-dimethylated intermediates is described./nThe final chapter will summarize this work, as well as suggesting future efforts to further enable the engineering of polyketide assembly lines.

Advisor: Keasling, Jay D
A High-order Eulerian-Lagrangian Finite Element Method for Coupled Electro-mechanical Systems

The main focus of this work is on the development of a high-order Eulerian-Lagrangian finite element method for the simulation of electro-mechanical systems. The coupled problem is solved by a staggered scheme, where the mechanical motion is discretized by standard Lagrangian finite elements, and the electrical field is solved on a fixed Eulerian grid with embedded boundary conditions. Traditional Lagrangian-Lagrangian or arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) methods encounter deficiencies, for example, when dealing with mesh distortion due to large deformations, or topology changes due to contacting bodies. The presented Eulerian-Lagrangian approach addresses these issues in a natural way. Within this context we develop a high-order immersed boundary discontinuous-Galerkin (IB-DG) method, which is shown to be necessary for (i) the accurate representation of the electrical gradient along nonlinear boundary features such as singular corners, and (ii) to achieve full convergence during the iterative global solution. We develop an implicit scheme based on the mid-point rule, as well as an explicit scheme based on the centered-difference method, with the incorporation of energy conserving, frictionless contact algorithms for an elastic-to-rigid-surface contact. The performance of the proposed method is assessed for several benchmark tests: the electro-static force vector around a singular corner, the quasi-static pull-in of an electro-mechanically actuated switch, the excitation of a carbon nanotube at resonance, and the cyclic impact simulation of a micro-electro-mechanical resonant-switch. We report improved accuracy for the high-order method as compared to low-order methods, and linear convergence in the iterative solution of the staggered scheme. Additionally, we investigate a Newton-Krylov shooting scheme in order to directly find cyclic steady states of electro-mechanical devices excited at resonance-- as opposed to a naive time-stepping from zero initial conditions. For the examples discussed, we observe power law computational speed-ups of the form S=0.7xi^(-0.8), where xi is the damping ratio of the corresponding resonance frequency.

Advisor: Govindjee, Sanjay
Papadopoulos, Panayiotis
OPHELIA. Her heart is a clock

In Heiner Müller’s play Die Hamletmaschine, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character Ophelia’s entrance is signaled by the words: “OPHELIA. Her heart is a clock.” It is unclear if this line is to be delivered by an actor, whether it is meant for the audience to hear, or whether it is a stage direction to be internalized by those in the production. As an image, it is an arresting one, evoking associations between a quintessential literary archetype and traditions of femininity with mechanization, dehumanization, and capitalism. It is a robust metaphor for chamber music — the human playing the musical “machine” that is her instrument, the relationship of the individual within and against the group, and the reification of art (and artists) into a product, which is produced and distributed./nSpringing from my interest in poetry and theater, words themselves play an integral part of OPHELIA. Her heart is a clock. The rhythm of speech forms the basis of the piece’s musical language, and through the vehicle of text, the players reveal themselves from behind their “music machines,” machines through which they breathe, touch, scrape, pluck, scream, and strike. Their voices emerge only to be subsumed anew into the din of music-noise. Each instrument(alist) is a character, their voices and their music distinct, in discourse about “life” and “love” in all their ecstasies and depravities./nOPHELIA. Her heart is a clock was premiered by Ensemble Linea at the Festival Musica in Strasbourg, France on 3 October 2015.

Advisor: Ueno, Ken
Rationality and Expected Utility

We commonly make a distinction between what we simply tend to do and what/nwe would have done had we undergone an ideal reasoning process - or, in other words,/nwhat we would have done if we were perfectly rational. Formal decision theories, like/nExpected Utility Theory or Risk-Weighted Expected Utility Theory, have been used/nto model the considerations that govern rational behavior./nBut questions arise when we try to articulate what this kind of modeling amounts/nto. Firstly, it is not clear how the components of the formal model correspond to/nreal-world psychological or physical facts that ground judgments about what we/nought to do. Secondly, there is a great deal of debate surrounding what an accurate/nmodel of rationality would look like. Theorists disagree about how much/nflexibility a rational agent has in weighing the risk of a loss against the value of potential gains, for example./nThe goal of this project is to provide an interpretation of Expected Utility Theory/nwhereby it explicates or represents the pressure that fundamentally governs how/nhuman agents ought to behave. That means both articulating how the components/nof the formal model correspond to real-world facts, and defending Expected Utility/nTheory against alternative formal models of rationality.

Advisor: Kolodny, Niko
Buchak, Lara
Model Commodities: Gender and Value in Contemporary Couture

Every January and June, the most exclusive and influential sector of the global apparel industry stages a series of runway shows in the high fashion, or, couture capitals of New York, Milan, London and Paris. This dissertation explores the production of material goods and cultural ideals in contemporary couture, drawing on scholarly and anecdotal accounts of the business of couture clothes as well as the business of couture models to understand the disquieting success of marketing luxury goods through bodies that appear to signify both extreme wealth and extreme privation. This dissertation argues that the contemporary couture industry idealizes a mode of violence that is unique in couture’s history. The industry’s shift of emphasis toward the mass market in the late 20th-century entailed divestments in the integrity of garment production and modeling employment. Contemporary couture clothes and models are promoted as high-value objects, belying however a material impoverishment that can be read from the models’ physiques and miens.

Advisor: Brown, Wendy
Litigating Emancipation: Slavery’s Legal Afterlife, 1865-1877

When litigants entered Southern courtrooms after the end of the Civil War, they encountered a tangled morass of unexpected legal questions related to the end of slavery. Though the need to face such problems was ubiquitous across the former slaveholding republic, each state contended with such matters uniquely, producing a series of different solutions to the same fundamental problems. Principal among them: Why were there so many legacies of slavery contested in court? How should the law treat slavery and former slaves after the supposed end of the peculiar institution? In what ways did litigants themselves help to shape the meaning of freedom? How complete was the abolition of slavery if the institution itself remained open to ongoing litigation?/nState courts and individual petitioners were forced to confront the altered legal terrain of the post-Civil War South and negotiate the precise meanings of the Thirteenth Amendment, the end of slavery, the transformation of the former slave states, and ultimately, the reunification of the United States. Evaluating the many responses to these issues exposes legal Reconstruction’s many possibilities; some would become the road not taken, while others set the standard for managing slavery’s remaining legal quandaries. In some courtrooms, jurists were committed to a total eradication of slavery and the laws that had once supported it, revealing Reconstruction’s fleeting potential to secure true freedom for four million former slaves. The outcomes of other cases reveal judges clinging to assumptions about race, law, and Southern society that reflected the antebellum past. As this dissertation shows, the more conservative route ultimately became the prevailing legal paradigm, but it took nearly ten years to arrive at this conclusion, challenging the notion that there was ever a fixed meaning or moment of emancipation.

Advisor: McLennan, Rebecca M
A Bridge Too Soon: The Life and Works of 'Afīfa Karam, The First Arab American Woman Novelist

This dissertation provides the first in-depth study of the Lebanese-American immigrant writer, journalist, and translator ‘Afīfa Karam (1883-1924), an important contributor to the nahḍa, the Arabic cultural renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Karam published three Arabic novels in New York City between 1906 and 1910, predating the publication of Haykal’s Zaynab (1914), which is widely credited as the first Arabic novel. This study challenges the dominant narrative of the evolution of the modern Arabic novel, and posits that Karam’s absence from the Arabic canon stems not only from her gender, but also from her deterritorialized status as a member of the mahjar (diasporic) community of Arabs living in North and South America./nAn early voice calling attention to the situation of Arab women, Karam was a pivotal figure in the nascent women’s movement in the Arab world. At this embryonic stage of the Arabic novel’s development, Karam articulated a unique gendered theory of the genre that reflects her proto-feminist politics. Karam considered the novel as the most effective platform to reach women readers and a tool for women’s empowerment. An extended analysis of Karam’s three formative Arabic novels – Badī‘a wa-Fu’ād (Badi‘a and Fu’ad), Fāṭima al-Badawiyya (Fatima the Bedouin), and Ghādat ‘Amshīt (The Girl from ‘Amshit) – demonstrates their engagement with contemporary discourses of Westernization and womanhood prevalent within intellectual circles of the mashriq, or the Arab East. Ultimately, this study argues that Karam’s deterritorialized status and distance from the cultural center offered her a unique, hybrid perspective and liberating space for artistic creation. Karam’s stylistic innovations include experimentations in narrative time and structure, and the use of literary techniques such as dialogue and narrative polyphony, a major departure from the paternalistic, omniscient narrative voice that dominated the Arabic novel through the mid-20th century./nBy reconceptualizing the nahḍa as a transnational phenomenon – and highlighting the vital role played by women and mahjar writers in ushering in the modern age in Arabic letters – this study contributes to the expanding palette of scholarly interventions that are refining and reshaping our understanding of a formative period of modern Arabic literary history.

Advisor: Larkin, Margaret
Quadratic and linear optimization with analog circuits

In this work we propose and investigate a new method of solving quadratic and linear optimization problems using analog electrical circuits instead of digital computation./nWe present the design of an analog circuit which solves Quadratic Programming (QP) or Linear Programming (LP) problems./nIn particular, the steady-state circuit voltages are the components of the QP (LP) optimal solution./nThe thesis shows how to construct the circuit and provides a proof of equivalence between the circuit/nand the QP (LP) problem./nWe study the stability of the analog optimization circuit. The circuit dynamics are modeled as a switched affine system. A piece-wise quadratic Lyapunov function and the KYP lemma are used to derive the stability criterion. The stability criterion characterizes the range of critical circuit parameters for which the QP circuit is globally asymptotically stable./nThe proposed method is used to build a printed circuit board (PCB) using programmable components to allow solution of various QP problems. The board supports implementation of an MPC controller for buck DC-DC converter. We conduct an experimental study to evaluate the performance of the analog optimization circuit./nWe study the feasibility of very high speed implementation of the optimization circuit using Analog Very Large Scale Integration (AVLSI) technology. In AVLSI, all the required circuit components are built on top of a silicon substrate using advanced photo-lithographic technologies. AVLSI circuits are fast, small and cheap. Thus, AVLSI implementation is paramount to make the proposed technology commercially competitive./nWe discuss the possible usage of the proposed method to make fast MPC controllers, image processors, communication decoders and analog co-processors. In fact, any application that requires a repeating solution of related optimization problems can benefit from this technology. Besides being faster than the digital computers, analog computers are more power efficient, may occupy smaller area on silicon and may be more resilient in harsh environments.

Advisor: Borrelli, Francesco
Iranian Dialectology and Dialectometry

This dissertation investigates the forces at work in the formation of a tightly knit but ultimately non-genetic dialect group. The Iranian languages, a genetic sub-branch of the larger Indo-European language family, are a group whose development has been profoundly affected by millennia of internal contact. This work is concerned with aspects of the diversification and disparification (i.e., the development of different versus near-identical features across languages) of this group of languages, namely issues pertaining to the development of the so-called West Iranian group, whose status as a legitimate genetic subgroup has long remained unclear. To address the phenomena under study, I combine a traditional comparative-historical approach with existing quantitative methods as well as newly developed quantitative methods designed to deal with the sort of linguistic situation that Iranian typifies. The studies I undertake support the idea that West Iranian is not a genetic subgroup, as sometimes assumed; instead, similarities between West Iranian languages that give the impression of close genetic relatedness have come about due to interactions between contact and parallel driftlike tendencies. I develop new methodologies which make it possible to demonstrate which similarities are due to contact and which are due to drift.

Advisor: Garrett, Andrew
Model-Free Optimal Control of Distributed Energy Resources in Electric Power Distribution Systems

Distributed Energy Resources (DER) have the potential to both improve the manner in which the electric power distribution system is operated and provide services to the bulk electric grid. A key question that has emerged in academic circles is the manner in which DER is governed to provide such utility. While many of the suggested approaches are mathematically elegant and demonstrate positive performance in simulations, they face enormous barriers to implementation due to their reliance on knowledge of network models and burdensome communications requirements. This dissertation focuses on the application of an Extremum Seeking (ES) control approach to manage individual DER, that does not require utility network models and or communication between agents. Results achieved from the application of this technique are shown to be equivalent to those derived from centrally-based optimization strategies that utilize convex relaxation techniques. Initially, I explore the use of Extremum Seeking to manage reactive power resources to perform voltage constrained optimization in balanced radial distribution systems. Next, also for balanced and radial distribution systems, I extend this work to consider the management of four-quadrant-capable DER to enable voltage-constrained distribution substation real power and voltage reference tracking. My approach essentially allows the distribution feeder to act as a controllable (P,V) bus when viewed from the perspective of the Transmission System Operator. Finally, in an attempt to extend my results to 3-phase distribution systems, I derive a linear approximation to unbalanced power flow and explore a new objective of using reactive power resources to regulate and balance system voltages. While the latter-most piece does not specifically consider ES, it lays the necessary foundation for the application of the approach in unbalanced systems.

Advisor: Auslander, David M
What Is and Who Can Do Science?: Supporting Youth of Colors’ Identities as Learners, Doers, and Change Agents in Science

This research explores trajectories of developing the practices of and identification with science for high school students of color as they participate in summer science research programs. This study examines students’ incoming ideas of what science is (i.e. science practices) and who does/can do science and how these ideas shift following program participation. In addition, this study explores the aspects of students’ identities that are most salient in the science programs and how these aspects are supported or reimagined based on the program resources made available. This research utilizes four main data sources: 1) pre and post program student surveys, 2) pre and post program focal student interviews, 3) scientist instructor interviews, and 4) program observations./nFindings show that students’ ideas about what science is (i.e. science practices) and who can do science shifted together through participation in the practices of science. Findings illustrate the emergence of an identity generative process: that engaging in science practices (e.g. collecting data) and the accompanying program resources generated new possibilities for students (e.g. capable science learner). Findings show that the program resources made available for science practices determined how the practices “functioned” for students. Furthermore, findings document links between an instructor’s vision, the design of program resources that engage students in science practices, and students’ learning and identity construction. For example, a mentor that employed a politically relevant and racially conscious lens made unique resources available that allowed students to identify as capable science learners and agents of change in their community. This research shows that youth of color can imagine and take up new possibilities for who they can be in science when their science and racial identities are supported in science programs. Findings highlight the need to re-center race in research involving science identity construction for youth of color./nFindings from this research inform the design of learning environments that create multiple pathways for learning and identity construction in science. Findings can be applied to the creation of opportunities in science programs, classrooms and teacher education that foster successful and meaningful engagement with science practices and empower youth of color as capable learners, doers, and changes agents in science.

Advisor: Linn, Marcia F
Nasir, Na'ilah Suad