VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Judgments of Children and Adolescents on Exclusion and Inclusion of a Biracial Peer in Korea

This study examined the exclusion and inclusion of biracial peers of Korean children and adolescents in the fourth grade (n = 37, Mage = 9. 09), seventh grade (n = 32, Mage = 11. 92), and tenth grade (n = 32, Mage = 14.90), focusing on their social and moral reasoning. Participants (n =101) differentiated and coordinated the domains of social reasoning reflecting on the nature and context of a social issue when they made judgments about excluding a biracial peer in both initial and conflict situations. The participants tended to negatively judge the exclusion of a biracial peer in order to protect the welfare and rights of the biracial peer and to enhance the fairness of social interactions and the decision making processes. Nevertheless, judgments of exclusion were sometimes found acceptable. Significant variations were found by context and by age in the initial situations. Excluding a biracial peer from a personal relationship setting (i.e., a birthday party) was viewed as more acceptable than excluding him or her from a group activity (i.e., a boys and girls chorus) or a public facility (i.e., a swimming pool). Older participants were more likely than younger ones to judge exclusion acceptable. These findings are similar to previous findings in the U.S. (Killen, Lee-Kim, McGlothlin, & Stangor, 2002), confirming exclusion as a multifaceted phenomenon which is associated with the coordination of multiple forms of reasoning of children and adolescents across cultures./nAnalyses of justification categories for judgments of exclusion showed that moral reasons (i.e., fairness, welfare, and rights) tended to take priority over personal and conventional reasons. In addition, judgments justified with moral reasons were found to be less changeable in conflict situations than were those justified with personal or conventional reasons. In terms of age differences in social reasoning, an age-related increase of personal reasoning was found in the initial situation of the personal relationship context. In addition, an age-related increase of fairness reasoning was found in the public facility and group activity contexts, whereas an age-related decrease of rights reasoning was found in the personal relationship and public facility contexts. No significant gender differences were found./nIn general, the findings and suggestions from this study may contribute to the development of the scientific understanding of the dynamics and structures of children's social reasoning on exclusion. They may also provide future studies on peer exclusion, racial prejudice, and peer victimization with some useful theoretical conceptions and empirical examples in social reasoning as well as exclusion.

Advisor: TURIEL, ELLIOT
The Role of Students' Previous Understandings in Reasoning Across Contexts

Learning is typically thought of as a change in a student's understanding within a single context. The term context is used here to describe a domain or subdomain of knowledge. Students' previous understandings of the context are known to play a considerable role in such learning. Another important kind of learning is reasoning across contexts. Through reasoning across contexts, students' understanding of one context influences understanding of another context. This dissertation investigated the role of students' previous understandings in this reasoning process./nPsychology research has employed one type of experimental design to investigate reasoning across contexts. This has resulted in focus on a particular way of reasoning across contexts, called analogical transfer, in which participants' previous understandings play a minimal role. In contrast, this dissertation employed a case study design for the purpose of investigating the role of participants' previous understandings in reasoning across contexts./nParticipants' previous understandings of contexts were discovered to play a considerable role in their reasoning across contexts. Three categories of ways of reasoning across contexts in which students' previous understandings play a role were identified. In the first of these, a participant's new understanding of a context is a combination of ideas used previously to understand the same context and ideas used to understand another context. In the second, an idea from either the participant's previous understanding or from the participant's understanding of another context is modified to contribute to a new understanding. In the third, an idea from the participant's previous understanding is brought into different focus through comparison with a corresponding idea from another context. These three are termed combining, modifying, and refocusing interactions, respectively./nUnderstanding of these different possible roles for students' previous understandings in reasoning across contexts can inform instruction in which a general concept is instructed through particular contexts. An example of such a general concept is the concept of equilibration considered here.

Advisor: diSessa, Andrea A
Structural Studies of the Yeast Dam1 Complex

All eukaryotic cells must equally segregate their chromosomes between two daughter cells each time they divide. This process must be extremely robust, as errors cause catastrophic losses or gains of genetic material. Chromosmes are attached to microtubules through an organelle called the kinetochore. Greek for movement place, the kinetochore serves as a platform both for generating the forces required to separate chromatids to opposite poles and a major site of regulation to ensure that all chromosomes are segregated properly. In the budding yeast S. cerevisiae a single microtubule attaches to each kinetochore, making this connection extremely precious. In the last decade a complete parts list of the yeast kinetochore, containing approximately 70 proteins arranged into roughly a dozen complexes, has been established. However, very little structural information exists for most of these components, and the mechanism by which the kinetochore remained attached to a dynamic microtubule plus-end. In the past five years the Dam1 complex emerged as an exciting component of the outer kinetochore that forms rings around microtubules and in vitro recapitulates much of the functionality of kinetochore-microtubule attachment, including remaining attached to ends and using the energy of the depolymerizing microtubule to do work on a load./nTo understand Dam1 at the kinetochore we must know how it binds to microtubules, assembles into rings, and how its assembly is regulated by kinases at the kinetochore. In order to answer these questions I used electron microscopy to image Dam1 in various mutant forms both in the presence and absense of microtubules. Computational techniques allowed me to solve structures of the complex alone and bound to microtubules in three different assemblies. I also mapped 5 of the 10 proteins in the complex onto the structure. Integrating all this information I generated a structural model for Dam1 at the kinetochore that substantially advances our understanding of its function and will direct future experiments in the field.

Advisor: Nogales, Eva
Creating Dad: The Remaking of Middle-Class Fatherhood in the United States from 1900-1930

Between 1900 and 1930, a wide variety of authors, journalists, parenting experts, boyworkers, and social scientists expressed interest in fostering closer father-child relationships in the United States. As the interest in fatherhood grew through the late-1910s and 1920s, authors promoting greater paternal involvement also reinterpreted what it meant to be a good father, focusing more on play and camaraderie and less on discipline and education. This dissertation argues that the changing ideal of fatherhood was the result of conscious efforts to convince men to take a more active role in parenting, to revitalize fatherhood by distinguishing the fun, youthful, modern father from the stodgy, Victorian patriarchs of the previous generation. The modern father even had a new name: "Dad."/nInterest in fostering greater paternal participation in child-rearing grew in part out of a fear of the "feminization" of boys and particularly emphasized the benefits of fathers' involvement with sons, but efforts to engage fathers more fully with their children were even more focused on the imagined benefits for men. Authors fretted over the skyrocketing divorce rate and the erosion of the shared economic function of the family and sought to tie the father more tightly to the middle-class home. The changing ideals of fatherhood reflect a more child-centered, democratic middle-class family and a new valuation of youthfulness./nThis dissertation explores a variety of efforts to connect fathers more fully with their children and to make fatherhood seem modern and fun. Such concerns can be seen in efforts to design homes to appeal more to masculine sensibilities, in efforts to increase father participation in child-focused organizations, in more inclusive advice literature, and in the growth of popular humor about fatherhood. In addition to these developments, fathers began seeking parenting groups and books of their own, and the 1910s and 1920s saw the growth of fathers' clubs, fathering classes, father-child organizations and events, and books on childrearing written specifically for and by fathers. Rather than joining their wives in parenting groups, these men reached out to other fathers in an acknowledgement of what some called a "fraternity of fatherhood."

Advisor: Fass, Paula S.
Non-covalent Interactions: Effects on Gas-phase Ion Structure and Reactivity

Experiments investigating the role of non-covalent interactions in the structure, properties, and reactivity of gas-phase ion-biomolecule, ion-water, and water-biomolecule complexes in the gas phase are presented and discussed in this dissertation. Ions generated using electrospray ionization and trapped using Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the FOM Institute for Plasma Physics Rijnhuizen in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands, are probed using infrared photodissociation/infrared multiple photon dissociation (IRPD/IRMPD) spectroscopy and kinetics and electron capture dissociation. IRMPD spectra of alkali metal cationized dipeptides, protonated dipeptides, and trivalent lanthanide cationized polypeptides reported here reveal the role of ion size, formal charge site geometry, peptide sequence, gas-phase basicity, and competition between carbonyl groups and aromatic groups in the structures of these complexes. IRPD spectra of hydrated hydrophobic ions in the gas phase reveal a hydrogen bonding motif that contrasts strongly with those typically seen for more strongly hydrated ions. The role of ion charge state and size in the structures of gas-phase "nanodrops" is discussed based on their IRPD spectra and a computationally inexpensive point-charge model, as well as the dependence of these spectra on the electric field of the ion. These results show that ions can intrinsically affect the hydrogen bond structure of the water network out to three or more solvation shells, in contrast to many recent reports that only the first solvation shell is affected for ions in bulk solution. A new method using IRPD/IRMPD kinetics is demonstrated for directly measuring relative populations of spectroscopically distinguishable ion isomers, and a method for extending IRPD spectroscopic techniques to extensively hydrated ions that dissociate quickly is illustrated. This photodissociation kinetic method is demonstrated for several ion-biomolecule complexes and hydrated biomolecular ions, and relative Gibbs free energies, entropies, and enthalpies for nearly isoenergetic thermal ion populations are obtained with unprecedented precision. Ion nanocalorimetry is used to measure appearance energies for products of the exothermic reaction of a hydrated, doubly protonated dipeptide in the gas phase with a low-energy free electron, and nearly complete quenching of peptide fragmentation is achieved with a very small number of water molecules in the precursor ion complex.

Advisor: Williams, Evan R
PreOccupied Territories: Polar Landscapes in the Cinema

This dissertation argues against the tendency to elevate landscape as an aesthetic object over and against its function as setting and asks, instead, how landscape might be imagined as a representation of place - even if spectacular - that is constituted by narrative and that constitutes narrative in return. I extend W. J. T. Mitchell's definition of the landscape-as-medium to the cinema-as-medium, exploring how motion pictures render landscapes as places of convergence and mediation for humans and non-humans, natures and technologies. I look to new materialism and to phenomenology in order to describe landscape as a site of mediation that challenges the inside/outside binarisms and implicit anthro- or biocentrisms of "environmentalist" thinking. These critical strains of thought indicate how landscape functions as a field of significant materialities in which embodied human vision can be conceived in relation to non-human and technological forces and agencies./nIn doing so, I argue that polar landscapes are particularly apt sites through which to articulate anxieties about the meeting of human, non-human, and technological being. The poles have functioned as rich sites at which to imagine encounters between terrestrial and extraterrestrial others and the subjective and social conflicts that they animate and signify. Accordingly, this argument offers a cinematic history of these sites and sights, from silent and early sound films that attempt to map and interpret polar landscapes in service of imperial aims to contemporary representations of lands un-appropriable and un-masterable by the human because they are always already occupied by their Others: forces and agencies that exceed and defy a merely-human understanding. My readings describe how cinema has framed polar territories as "pre-occupied": dynamic and significant sites occupied by a myriad of forces and agencies that relentlessly de-stabilize human claims to habitation. Ultimately, I argue that a phenomenologically inflected exploration of the cinematic imagination of the poles indicates how we might reconceive of landscape as more than an aesthetic category. In this way, my argument considers polar history to be a preoccupied territory in its own right. My aim is not to illustrate how cinema has screened the "real" landscapes at the poles, nor is it to produce utopian readings of "good" landscape representations. Instead, I aim to show how each text positions its audience in relation to the territory it pictures and to the forms of thing-ly and creaturely life that pre-occupy it.

Advisor: Williams, Linda
Mentor & Intern Teacher Boundary Practices: Integrating Theory and Practice in Effective Alternative Certification Programs

Alternative certification programs for primary and secondary school teachers face a difficult challenge: they must develop highly qualified and high quality teachers while adapting to the unique on-the-job training needs of their participants. Research literature indicates that many programs suffer from a lack of cohesion between coursework and fieldwork, with a resulting sense of fragmentation on the part of participating teachers. The literature points to relevant and applied coursework combined with mentoring as possible remedies. However, little in the research literature describes the actual mentor practices and program design features that can accomplish this integration. This study addresses that gap, describing mentor practices and program design elements that foster theory and practice integration in effective alternative certification programs. Utilizing a cross case study design, I studied four mentor-novice pairs in two alternative teacher credential programs. Drawing conceptually on the theoretical literature on situated learning in communities of practice, I develop a means of categorizing mentor and novice practices as planned integration boundary practices, emergent integration boundary practices, program practices, and school site practices./nI found that the mentors in this study, to varying degrees and with varying consistency, engaged in boundary practices that assisted novices in connecting coursework with fieldwork. Integration was most pronounced when mentors used their knowledge of the program's practices, their knowledge of classroom instruction generally, and their novice's instruction and teaching context specifically, to capitalize on opportunities for integration. Mentors made both spontaneous and structured connections between instruction and school site demands on the one hand; and coursework, assignments, and program conceptions of effective teaching on the other hand. Mentor practices were shaped by the design of the programs in several ways, including: programs sparing use of prescribed activities, intentional inclusion of mentors in the program community, flexible and adaptive protocols guiding mentor and novice interactions, and relevant and applied coursework. These conclusions have implications for program leaders seeking to foster deeper integration between theory and practice in alternative teacher certification programs.

Advisor: Coburn, Cynthia
Learning Dependency-Based Compositional Semantics

Suppose we want to build a system that answers a natural language question by representing its semantics as a logical form and computing the answer given a structured database of facts. The core part of such a system is the semantic parser that maps questions to logical forms. Semantic parsers are typically trained from examples of questions annotated with their target logical forms, but this type of annotation is expensive./nOur goal is to learn a semantic parser from question-answer pairs instead, where the logical form is modeled as a latent variable. Motivated by this challenging learning problem, we develop a new semantic formalism, dependency-based compositional semantics (DCS), which has favorable linguistic, statistical, and computational properties. We define a log-linear distribution over DCS logical forms and estimate the parameters using a simple procedure that alternates between beam search and numerical optimization. On two standard semantic parsing benchmarks, our system outperforms all existing state-of-the-art systems, despite using no annotated logical forms.

Advisor: Klein, Dan
Jordan, Michael I
Essays on Water Resource Economics and Agricultural Extension

This dissertation discusses topics in the microeconomics of water resource economics and agricultural extension. In one chapter I use a hedonic model to explain the price of land transactions, and from this an implied value of irrigation water is inferred. In a separate chapter I develop measures of willingness-to-pay for water supply reliability measures, and estimate how consumers respond to changes in the price of residential water. My final chapter develops a model of a farmer's decision to invest in learning from agricultural technicians about a new integrated pest management technology that improves yields and reduces agricultural run-off of pesticides into surface waterways. Each chapter is grounded in microeconomic models of decision-making.

Advisor: Auffhammer, Maximilian
Sunding, David L
Plasticity and Perception in Primary Auditory Cortex

During an early epoch of development, the brain is highly adaptive to the stimulus environment. Repeatedly exposing young animals to a particular tone, for example, leads to an enlarged representation of that tone in primary auditory cortex. While the neural effects of simple, single-frequency tonal environments are well characterized, the principles that guide plasticity in complex tone environments, as well as the perceptual consequences of cortical plasticity, remain unclear. To address these questions, this dissertation documents the neural and perceptual effects of simple and complex manipulations to the early acoustic environment./nFirst, I show that rearing rat pups in a multi-tone environment leads to complex primary cortical representational changes that are related to the statistical relationships between experienced sounds. Specifically, tones that occur together within short temporal sequences tend to be represented by the same groups of neurons, whereas tones that occur separately are represented separately. This suggests that the development of primary auditory cortical response properties is sensitive to higher-order statistical relationships between sounds./nThe observed neural changes are accompanied by perceptual changes. Discrimination ability for sounds that never occur together within temporal sequences is improved. Heightened perceptual sensitivity is correlated with heightened neuronal response contrasts. These results suggest that early experience-dependent neural changes can mediate perceptual changes that may be related to statistical learning./nFinally, I develop and experimentally test a model of the relationship between cortical sensory representations and perception. The model suggests that cortical stimulus representations may function as the neural representation of previously encountered stimulus probabilities, and makes predictions about how changes in these representations should affect perception within a statistical inference framework. Preliminary behavioral results support the model predictions, suggesting that one function of early experience-dependent plasticity may be to internalize stimulus distributions to shape future perception and behavior.

Advisor: Bao, Shaowen
Quasi-Newton Algorithms for Non-smooth Online Strongly Convex Optimization

The growing prevalence of networked systems with local sensing and computational capability will result in an increasing array of online and large scale optimization problems. We adopt the framework of online convex optimization that allows for the optimization of an arbitrary sequence of convex functions subject to a single convex constraint set. We identify quasi-Newton algorithms as a promising class of algorithms to solve online strongly convex optimization problems. We first examine the relationships between several known algorithms for convex functions that satisfy a α-exp-concave assumption. Next we present two new quasi-Newton algorithms for non-smooth strongly convex functions and show how these algorithms can be parallelized given a summed objective function. Our new algorithms require fewer parameters and have provably tighter bounds then similar known algorithms. Also, our bounds are not a function of the number of iterations, but instead a function of the sequence of strongly convex parameters that correspond to a sequence of strongly convex functions. We then extend these algorithms to use a block diagonal hessian approximation. An algorithm with a fully diagonal hessian approximation results in a large scale quasi-Newton algorithm for online convex optimization. Our results can be translated to convergence bounds and optimization algorithms that solve non-smooth strongly convex functions. We perform numerical experiments on test functions of different dimension and compare our algorithms to similar known algorithms. These experiments show our algorithms perform well in the majority of test cases we consider. We apply our algorithms to online portfolio optimization with a l2-norm regularized constant-rebalanced portfolio model and compare our algorithm to known methods. In addition, a heuristic algorithm for online vehicle routing is presented. Although online vehicle routing does not fit within the framework of online convex optimization, the work provided significant insight into online optimization and provides a future source of ideas and motivation. Finally, we provide conclusions and discuss future research directions.

Advisor: Borrelli, Francesco