VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The invisible Romans : an archaeological investigation of the poorest Roman burials and their contexts in imperial period Italy

ABSTRACT Contemporary perspectives on the ancient Mediterranean tend to be top down and because of this, many segments of Roman society are effectively invisible in modern scholarship. The problem is due at least in part to the challenges of attributing past activity and material culture to the members of Roman society who had the least. The lack of traditional sources has resulted in a treatment of the non-elite in simplistic terms or as an essentially homogeneous entity. This research uses human remains analyses and multiscalar contexts to address the invisibility problem of the poor in three settings: the very urban context of the burials at Casal Bertone just outside Rome, the burials outside the city of Aesernia high in the Apennines which arguably straddles the urban and rural divide, and the rural context of the Vagnari vicus cemetery. This interdisciplinary approach juxtaposes bioarchaeological assessments, digital mapping and the work of economists with ancient texts, epigraphic evidence and more traditional archaeological reports to learn more about the poorest members of Roman society. The results of the comparison show a clear diversity in the lifestyles and life experiences of the non-elite, help explore ritual activity even among the simplest graves in the Roman archaeological record and raise important questions about how Roman cemeteries can be interpreted.

Keywords: Classics.
Advisor: Trimble Jennifer
Morris Ian
Prowse Tracy Lynn
Scheidel Walter
Iron and copper active sites in zeolites and their correlation to metalloenzymes

Metal-exchanged zeolites are a class of heterogeneous catalysts that perform important functions ranging from selective hydrocarbon oxidation to remediation of NOx pollutants. Among these, copper and iron zeolites are remarkably reactive, hydroxylating methane and benzene selectively at low temperature to form methanol and phenol, respectively. In these systems, reactivity occurs at well-defined molecular active sites. In this thesis, I discuss significant advances in the spectroscopic characterization of these active sites and their reactive intermediates. Site selective spectroscopy plays a critical role, making it possible to focus on active sites that exist within a distribution of inactive 'spectator' metal centers. Work presented here advances our understanding of the geometric and electronic structures of metallozeolites to the level attained in bioinorganic chemistry, enabling direct comparison of metallozeolites to functionally analogous Fe and Cu active sites in biology. Parallels and differences between metallozeolites and metalloenzymes are identified, leading to a number of new mechanisms to tune the performance of synthetic catalysts.

Keywords: Chemistry.
Advisor: Solomon Edward I. 
Hodgson K. O. (Keith O.)
Karunadasa Hemamala
Is the United States Ready for a Female President? An Examination of American Media Culture and Current Political Evaluations

The 2016 presidential election was a pivotal moment for the United States of America. For the first time in history, a woman ran as an elected major-party candidate in the race for President. Despite her deep political background, Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump, a man who had only recently entered the world of politics, and whose brash character is analyzed more than his actual policies. To fully understand the outcome of the election requires an examination of American culture. In particular, the victory of Donald Trump, and more importantly, the loss of Hillary Clinton cannot be explained without discussing the role in which gender played in the election, and more broadly, the role in which gender continues to play in American culture. By assessing America’s long history with traditional gender roles as well as how media has continued to reinforce those roles over time, this paper demonstrates how crucial the genders of these two candidates were in 2016. More specifically, gender provided a framework by which Americans evaluated the presidential candidates throughout the campaign. Despite critiques and other potential explanations, it is necessary to include gender when discussing the campaign and subsequent outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Before a woman can successfully hold the office of the President, American society and all of the institutions within it must commit to challenging and expelling traditional gender stereotypes.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
Stanford University
Stanford University Communication Department
media studies
media culture
media representation
presidential election
gender politics
political evaluations
gender stereotypes
female presidential candidates
Thesis
Advisor: Iyengar Shanto
Is this My Home?: How White Ethnic Organizations Shape Latinx Communities

Historically, academic themes of urban settlement have focused on topics such as white flight. Yet there exists scarce literature that considers the interplay of the history of white ethnic abandonment of urban communities and its effects today given new patterns of spatial settlement. This research aims to revisit the history of mass urban demographic shifts in an effort to understand the long-term implications of the history of white flight for new waves of racialized immigrants. Because formal organizations are indicative of the existing social structures within a community, this research focuses on the role that white ethnic organizations play in ethnically transitioned neighborhoods. This study is based on semi-structured interviews with eight individuals within the working-class communities of Berwyn and Cicero, IL in suburban Chicago. These individuals are all affiliated with Czech organizations based in these now predominantly Latinx communities. This research shows that white ethnic organizations capitalize on collective memory to maintain involvement in the community and influence ongoing cultural exchange between current and previous populations. This points to the importance of the reevaluation of spatial patterns in accordance with the differing settlement practices of new immigrants.

Keywords: Immigration
White ethnicity
Neighborhood change
Latinx
Stanford
Urban Studies
Sociology
Ethnic Studies
Thesis
Is You Woke? Examining the Impact of Schools on the Racial-Ethnic Identity Development of Black Multiracial Students

This study aims to discover if and how secondary schools are impacting the racial-ethnic identity development of students in the US. Students spend the majority of their time with their families growing, the latter having a major influence on how students see themselves and think about their identity. It is important to identify what role students view their schools supporting their racial-ethnic identity development as schools should be fostering personal development through both formal and hidden curriculum. An understanding of the schools' role in this context could be used to ensure bridging of cultural development between school and home. Data were collected through semi-structured in-person interviews with fifteen Stanford affiliates who self-identified with at least two distinct racial or ethnic groups, Black and another “non-white” Multiracial identifying individuals age eighteen to twenty-three. One participant identified as Black and White. Participants believed that their schools made little to no effort to support their racial-ethnic identity as there were very few teachers of color, no formalized classes such as Ethnic Studies, and peers either dismissed or inappropriately addressed issues of race and identity. It was also found that these Black Multiracial students were having these conversations in their homes with their parents mostly but were not continuing these conversations at school. Therefore, this study found that the messages students were receiving from school were more
academic focused as opposed to culturally and the role their schools played was more passive in terms of their racial-ethnic identity development.

Keywords: Graduate School of Education
Black identity
Multiracial
ethnic identity development
schools
racial awakening
Thesis
Israel’s Founding in Words: Israeli Speeches at the UN and the Palestinian Refugee Crisis

The state of Israel was founded on May 14, 1948. For those who had fought for the creation of a Jewish state, 1948 represented a triumph after centuries of Jewish experiences of oppression, displacement, and most recently, genocide. However, in most Palestinian narratives, Israel’s founding is called the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe,’ due to the resulting displacement of around 700,000 Palestinians and the creation of an ongoing refugee issue. This thesis seeks to understand how the Israeli collective memory of 1948 was communicated politically in the early years of Israeli statehood. In particular, the thesis examines how Israeli leaders portrayed the refugee crisis to the international community through speeches to United Nations General Assembly. I examine the speeches of Golda Meir and Abba Eban, two important orators and politicians in Israel’s early history. In doing so, this thesis will examine the formation of narratives to describe the outset of the Palestinian refugee crisis still in use today.

Keywords:  Program in International Relations
Program in International Relations
Collective Memory
Abba Eban
Golda Meir
Thesis
Advisor: Zipperstein Steven
Journalism and Crowdfunding: A close look at Kickstarter’s website. How has the presence of journalism projects evolved on crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter, since those websites launched in the late 2000s?

This research paper will analyze the presence of journalism projects on crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter, and explore how this presence has evolved since those crowdfunding websites emerged.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
journalism
crowdfunding
Kickstarter
Thesis
Advisor: Nguyen Dan
Kant's idea of a critique of practical reason

"Kant's idea of a critique of practical reason" presents a novel and sympathetic treatment of Kant's method, anti-skeptical aspirations, and metaphysics in the Critique of Practical Reason. Some of Kant's most sympathetic readers have found the Critique's account of the foundations of morality both methodologically obscure and metaphysically extravagant. I venture a reading according to which the Critique's moral metaphysics emerges in the course of Kant's rich and surprising moral psychological explanation of the possibility of moral obligation. The resulting account of the practical side of human experience is, I argue, fully in line with the metaphysically anodyne approach to its theoretical side he takes in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Keywords: Philosophy.
Advisor: Friedman Michael
Hills David A. (David Allen)
Wood Allen W.
Know History, Know Self, Know Mental Health: Using a Decolonization Framework to Educate Filipino-American High School Students About Mental Health

This study examines the use of a decolonization framework to educate Filipino-American high school students about mental health in an educational workshop. Mental health issues disproportionately affect Filipino-American youth. This health disparity may be linked to the centuries of colonialism in the Philippines, which is seen through the phenomenon of colonial mentality (CM). Scholars argue that Filipino-Americans may better understand their own mental health with knowledge of the history of colonialism in the Philippines. The current study employs a triangulation mixed methods research design to investigate how Filipino-American high school students talk about their identity, culture, and mental health and apply the decolonization framework after participation in the mental health educational workshop. Data were collected through the use of pre- and post-intervention surveys and a final sample population of 15 high school students, all of whom self-identified as Filipino-American, were analyzed. Thematic analysis revealed the emergence of three primary outcomes after participation in the intervention: increased awareness, evidence of decolonization, and connecting the history of colonization, ethnic identity, and mental health. I found that Filipino-American high school students are not only talking about their identity, culture, and mental health in isolation, but rather their influence on one another. In addition, although the intervention impacted the students to varying degrees, students were able to apply the decolonization framework to their own experiences and even beyond the workshop content. These findings are aimed towards educators and clinicians to consider the sociopolitical contexts for mental health interventions.

Keywords: Filipino-American adolescents
mental health
ethnic identity development
colonial mentality
decolonization
Graduate School of Education
Thesis
Advisor: LaFromboise Teresa
Laborers becoming agriculturalists : counter-trajectories of development on a Sumatran Volcano

On the Aren Volcano in the Sumatran uplands lies the town of Casiavera, where twenty years ago a group of agricultural laborers reclaimed their land from a plantation company. Since then, they have gone on to create new forms of agriculture and livelihood. In place of working for a wage on the industrial plantation, Casiavera's rural workers established their own claims to the land, and then chose to cultivate diverse agricultural forests as basis for their emergent smallholder economy. Along the way, Casiavera's agriculturalists joined up with both national and global rural workers' political movements to work together to occupy and reclaim the land, and rehabilitate the damage done to it by almost a century of industrial abuse. In search of more autonomous livelihood, Casiavera's agriculturalists acknowledged industrial agriculture's many problems, but also moved beyond them with their own forms of rural nature, work, and politics. This study draws on ethnography and oral histories, archival documents and maps, and satellite photography covering a fifty year time series. Taken together, these sources offer an account of the agrarian changes that have unfolded in Casiavera. I find that that this collection of transformations, of Casiavera's agricultural laborers becoming smallholder agriculturalists, and the ruined, industrial plantation becoming agroforest, represent an especially modern elaboration of politics and ecology. With agroecology and political mobilization, agriculturalists reclaimed the land from an industrial agriculture to create a landscape of lively, collectivist agroecology, and political mobilization. They are a counter-trajectory of development, a form of eco-social change through time that challenges normative practices and values of rural industrialization.

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Durham William H. 
Ferguson James
Frank Zephyr L.
Lady Hero: Teaching Models of Empowerment in Young Adult Fantasy Literature

This paper illustrates the diversity and complexity of empowerment models through exploring Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley’s lady heroes. I first discuss how fantasy has historically been a hostile space for female empowerment, in part due to magic being used as an excuse for a lady hero’s success. I also give a brief overview of feminist history and main feminist theories to establish a working definition of empowerment through agency and identify four main models used to gain that agency: individual action, collective action, traditionally male characteristics, and traditionally female characteristics.
Through four character studies, I then illustrate how Pierce and McKinley put pressure on each of these empowerment models. From each author, I focus on two female characters and their mentorship relationship, arguing that each pair has an intentional order in which they “read” each other, either actively improving on or misunderstanding empowerment models. In Song of the Lioness and The Protector of the Small series, Pierce explores the pitfalls of gaining empowerment through individual and traditionally gendered characteristics, prescribing more collective and androgynous strategies. In The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword, McKinley builds a more complex empowerment model designed for older readers. Through her characters’ struggle to understand and explain where their own power comes from, she redefines the definition of agency. That is, she suggests that perceived effort by both the character and the reader is required to achieve true empowerment.
Pierce and McKinley demonstrate how they are committed to providing pragmatic models of empowerment for young readers. Furthermore, they show how the Young Adult genre can circumvent the problematic aspects of the fantasy genre: they repurpose the issues of agency and power inherent in fantasy for their feminist mission rather than casting the genre aside entirely.

Keywords:  Department of English
young adult
fantasy
feminist theory
Tamora Pierce
Robin McKinley
Alanna the Lioness
Keladry of Mindelan
Aerin Dragon-Killer
Harry Crewe
Empowerment
The Hero and the Crown
The Blue Sword
Thesis
Advisor: McGurl Mark
Nomura Nichole
Land use policy for forest management : impacts on forest outcomes

While researchers have increasingly accurate data about changing forest cover from satellites, the complex causal mechanisms that link forest cover change and forest management policy are not yet fully understood. My dissertation contributes broadly to the question: How does land use policy for forest management directly and indirectly impact forest outcomes? I address this overarching question in four chapters, with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of land use policy for forest management, and the direct and indirect outcomes of deforestation, forest carbon storage, and air pollution. First I examine an empirical case and demonstrate that multiple use allocation decreases deforestation rates in the Peruvian Amazon. Second I analyze sustainability commitments and fines in private concessions in the Peruvian Amazon and find that they are not associated with significant changes in deforestation rates. Third I examine forest carbon offset projects in the US and find that they have increased forest carbon stock for climate change mitigation. Fourth, I examine the use of forest carbon offsets and find that they have a small potential impact on human-health related air quality.

Advisor: Field Christopher B. 
Lambin Eric F. 
Asner Gregory P. 
Dirzo Rodolfo 
Mach Katharine J.
Lattice-based non-interactive argument systems

Non-interactive argument systems are an important building block in many cryptographic protocols. In this work, we begin by studying non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) arguments for general NP languages. In a NIZK argument system, a prover can convince a verifier that a statement is true without revealing anything more about the statement. Today, NIZK arguments can be instantiated from random oracles, or, in the common reference string (CRS) model, from trapdoor permutations, pairings, or indistinguishability obfuscation. Notably absent from this list are constructions from lattice assumptions, and realizing NIZKs (for general NP languages) from lattices has been a long-standing open problem. In this work, we make progress on this problem by giving the first construction of a multi-theorem NIZK argument from standard lattice assumptions in a relaxed model called the preprocessing model, where we additionally assume the existence of a trusted setup algorithm that generates a proving key (used to construct proofs) and a verification key (used to verify proofs). Moreover, by basing hardness on lattice assumptions, our construction gives the first candidate that plausibly resists quantum attacks. We then turn our attention to constructing succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs) for general NP languages. SNARGs enable verifying computations with substantially lower complexity than that required for classic NP verification. Prior to this work, all SNARG constructions relied on random oracles, pairings, or indistinguishability obfuscation. This work gives the first lattice-based SNARG candidates. In fact, we show that one of our new candidates satisfy an appealing property called "quasi-optimality, " which means that the SNARG simultaneously minimizes both the prover complexity and the proof size (up to polylogarithmic factors). This is the first quasi-optimal SNARG from any concrete cryptographic assumption. Again, because of our reliance on lattice-based techniques, all of our new candidates resist quantum attacks (in contrast to existing pairing-based constructions).

Advisor: Boneh Dan
Reingold Omer 
Wootters Mary
LDT MA Project Final Paper - PeerHouse

Sleep is a universal human need. For adults, it helps the brain to process information and transfer short-term memory to long-term memory. For children, it not only acts as a processor but also as an enforcer of executive functions including focusing attention and emotional management in the face of obstacles. Therefore, sleep is important both for health and learning.
Young children ages 3-5 need to sleep 11-13 hours each day. In addition, the adults – the parents – need 7-9 hours of sleep each day. Routine is a mechanism that parents use to balance all of the obligations in a day to ensure the important activities including meals and sleep get done. For instance, a typical evening routine consists of dinner, bath, and bedtime story. However, two main issues make enforcing routines difficult in practice. First, children tend to resist transitions from one activity to another. Second, parents struggle to implement routines with consistency.
PeerHouse is a solution that addresses the aforementioned issues. Children learn and practice following routines through modeling the behavior of a character programmed to mirror the family’s routines. The character signals transitions in the routines through auditory and visual cues to remind and gently nudge parents and children to follow their routines. The initial user tests show that children can form strong emotional bonds with the character and understand that the character has a routine. Future learner studies will assess the long-term impact of the intervention including children’s sustained interest after the novelty effect wears off, and lasting behavior change in consistency.

Keywords: Early childhood education
social emotional learning
design thinking
bedtime routine
parent-child communication
prototyping
needfinding
child development
imaginative play
Thesis
Leaked emails and American political knowledge

In academia and in popular discourse, leaks have long been associated with transparency, while their potential as a source for disinformation has gone largely unexamined. The turmoil of the 2016 U.S. presidential election cast doubt on this association by demonstrating the potentially disorienting impact of leaked emails on political knowledge. Nonetheless, the dynamics of this disruption remain little understood. Through an online experiment, I find that individuals perceive leaked emails as generally more credible than other forms of anonymously sourced political information. I contextualize this finding within the general understanding that leaks are just as pliable to the spread of doubt and misinformation as they are to the cause of transparency. Looking ahead, disclosures similar to the 2016 leaks are likely to figure prominently in American politics, particularly in the context of future elections. Whether these future leaks are committed in the name of transparency or disinformation, their impact on democratic practice will ultimately be determined by the reaction of their audience — journalists, politicians, and voters — who must decide whether or to what extent their contents can be trusted.

Keywords:  Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy
leaked emails
disinformation
wikileaks
hack
democracy
political knowledge
podesta emails
misinformation
political communication
center for democracy development and the rule of law
cddrl
fisher honors program
Thesis
Advisor: Bonica Adam