VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Through the Second Looking Glass: Inventing the Minority Bildungsroman

My dissertation argues for the importance of what I term the minority Bildungsroman, a genre that twentieth-century writers adopted in order to represent racial anxiety as well as to imagine a way for the minority subject to move beyond it. By looking at the minority Bildungsroman as a literary form that exposes the process of Bildung not as self-formation but as self-dissolution, I aim to offer an important new perspective into how minority literature uses genre and literary history: only close attention to plot, character, and narrative reveals how these texts create a new genre to depict the minority subject's escape from the complex of socially-imposed identities originating from the dead mother complex. Unlike the subject of the traditional Bildungsroman, who achieves social integration and a stable ego, the minority subject in this new genre fails to successfully internalize the social roles that he is assigned. The instability and suffering imposed by double consciousness and racial anxiety cause him to throw off his prescribed identities. The narrator of Invisible Man, for instance, pursues experiences aimed at achieving social integration. Yet these paths result only in failure. He excels at college and glimpses a future of affluence and prominence, for instance, but only to be summarily expelled. Such experiences fail to produce what they promise, eventually thwarting his desire for normality and success. Seeking to be more than the poor, rural blacks that haunt his memory, yet unable to assimilate, Invisible Man progressively casts off elements of his social identity, and, in the novel's climax, reaches a state of social formlessness, or invisibility. The structures of white society, Ellison implies, cannot but deform those minorities who attempt to live in accordance with them. This movement towards self-disintegration, however, opens the space for the radical conclusion of the minority Bildungsroman. As a subject without subjectivities he begins what I call a "second mirror stage." By combining Lacan's notion of subject formation with Du Bois's conception of the end of double consciousness as a "longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self," I argue that the second mirror stage allows the subject to reconstitute his ego and identity. This process terminates racial anxiety and the double consciousness that engenders it. Reworking the form of the traditional Bildungsroman, these authors use formal innovation as the means of reimagining the self and, I argue, show that literary analysis is capable of recovering otherwise hard-to-access originary psychic traumas.

Advisor: JanMohamed, Abdul
Reinventing the PN Junction: Dimensionality Effects on Tunneling Switches

Tunneling based field effect transistors (TFETs) have the potential for very sharp On/Off transitions. This can drastically reduce the power consumption of modern electronics. They can operate by either electrostatically controlling the thickness of the tunneling barrier or by exploiting a sharp step in the density of states for switching. We show that current TFETs rely on controlling the thickness of the tunneling barrier but they do not achieve the desired performance. In order to get better performance we need to also exploit a sharp step in the density of states./nIn order to have a sharp density of states turn on, a variety of non-idealities need to be accounted for. A number of effects such as thermal vibrations, heavy doping, and trap assisted tunneling are analyzed and engineered./nAfter accounting for the various non-idealities, the ideal density of states will determine the on state characteristics. The nature of the quantum density of states is strongly dependent on dimensionality. Hence we need to specify both the n-side and the p-side dimensionality of pn junctions. For instance, we find that a typical bulk 3d-3d tunneling pn junction has only a quadratic turn-on function, while a pn junction consisting of two overlapping quantum wells (2d-2d) would have the preferred step function response. Quantum confinement on each side of a pn junction has the added benefit of significantly increasing the on-state tunnel conductance at the turn-on threshold. We analytically demonstrate these effects and then give a numerical non-equilibrium greens function (NEGF) model to verify the key results. Finally we introduce some new device designs that will take advantage of the benefits of 2d-2d tunneling.

Advisor: Yablonovitch, Eli
Applications of Atomic Magnetometry and Hyperpolarized Xenon

Conventional nuclear magnetic resonance techniques have been exploited by scientists for everything from protein structure determination and clinical imaging, to drug synthesis and design. However, there are still several limitations, including portability, expense, and sensitivity. New methods will be described for sensitivity enhancement using xenon hyperpolarization and inexpensive low-field detection of nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR), J-coupling, and hyperpolarized xenon (hp-Xe). Low-field detection is performed with an alkali vapor atomic magnetometer which is known to be extremely sensitive at earth's magnetic field and lower. This low field sensitivity allows for detection of nucleus interactions that are normally overshadowed by the much stronger Zeeman interactions at low field, such as NQR and J-coupling interactions. Lower magnetic field detection of conventional (Zeeman) NMR interactions are problematic due to the inherent loss of polarization at low fields. Hyperpolarization techniques, such as hp-Xe, allow NMR signal to be independent of the leading field strength. Hp-Xe is explored at high fields for microfluidic rapid screening applications, and at low field to expand the applications of these techniques.

Advisor: Pines, Alexander
Reforming Medicine in Sixteenth Century Nuremberg

In 1571 the Nuremberg physician, Joachim Camerarius (1534-1598), submitted for the appraisal of his city's Senate, a substantial manuscript titled "Short and Ordered Considerations for the Formation of a Well-Ordered Regime." As one of these 'considerations', he petitioned the Council to establish a Collegium medicum: an institutional body that would operate under the council's mandate to regulate and reform the practice of medicine in the Imperial City of Nuremberg. Although never published, this text became the manifesto of an ongoing movement for the reform and reorganization of medicine throughout the sixteenth century. This 'medical reformation' was a professional claim to social status and political authority on the part of academically educated municipal physicians. More elusively and more importantly, the medical reformation was also the consequence of a series of epistemological shifts within medical knowledge, as practiced and conceived by German municipal physicians in the sixteenth century. In a series of chapters on publications, personal libraries, and correspondence networks respectively, this dissertation examines the way in which the Nuremberg physicians re-created their practice of medicine, privileging their medical 'methodologies,' tactile processes, observation, consensus between physicians and new pharmaceutical distillations, over the simple reception of Galenic branches of knowledge./nThe municipal physicians and their medical reformation offer a perspective on distinctly artisanal practices: experience, demonstration, an engagement with the vernacular, and professional consensus. However, they do so from a non-artisanal social background. As all were graduates of German, French and Italian universities, no one more embodies the world of scholastic learning than they. Their claim to professional primacy was based not just on an appreciation of the value of new mechanical and technical processes, such as pharmacy, diagnostics and treatment but, also, on an appropriation of their social role. When the Collegium medicum was established in 1592, it elevated university educated physicians above other practitioners in the medical marketplace. It restricted pharmaceutical innovation to physicians, rather than apothecaries, awarded to the physicians jurisdiction over the allocation of medical duties among the medical marketplace, and put in place a set of relationships between physician, patient and polity that endures to this day.

Advisor: Brady, Thomas A
Sheehan, Jonathan
World Art and the Illumination of Virtual Space

This dissertation explores the relationship between pictures and the lighting conditions in which they were originally viewed. Using advanced rendering technology, I reconstruct the original architectural context in which a work of art was displayed and simulate the effects of variable daylight and artificial illumination on the picture's appearance. This research methodology enables me to describe the interaction between real lighting and depicted lighting relative to the picture's symbolic content. I provide a typology of these interactions (which I call "pictorialized illumination") using examples from diverse art historical traditions. In the final chapters, I analyze two case studies: Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper at the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, and Peter Paul Rubens's altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome.

Advisor: Davis, Whitney M
Calibration Techniques for Time-Interleaved SAR A/D Converters

Benefits of technology scaling and the flexibility of digital circuits favor the digital signal processing in many applications, placing additional burden to the analog-to-digital con- verters (ADCs). This has created a need for energy-efficient ADCs in the GHz sampling frequency and moderate effective resolution range. A dominantly digital nature of successive approximation register (SAR) ADCs makes them a good candidate for an energy-efficient and scalable design, but its sequential operation limits its applicability in the GHz sampling range. Time-interleaving can be used to extend the efficiency of the SAR ADCs to the higher frequencies if the mismatches between the interleaved ADC channels can be handled in an efficient manner./nNew calibration techniques are proposed for time-interleaved SAR ADCs capable of cor- recting the gain, offset and timing mismatches, as well as the static nonlinearities of individ- ual ADC channels stemming from the capacitor mismatches. The techniques are based on introducing two additional calibration channels that are identical to all other time-interleaved channels and the use of the least mean square algorithm (LMS). The calibration of the chan- nel offset and gain mismatches, as well as the capacitor mismatches, is performed in the background using digital post-processing. The timing mismatches between channels are cor- rected using a mixed-signal feedback, where all calculations are performed in the digital do- main, but the actual timing correction is done in the analog domain by fine-tuning the edges of the sampling clocks. These calibration techniques enable a design of time-interleaved con- verters that use minimum-sized capacitors and operate in the thermal-noise-limited regime for maximum energy and area efficiency./nThe techniques are demonstrated on a time-interleaved converter that interleaves 24 channels designed in a 65nm CMOS technology. The ADC uses the smallest capacitor value of only 50aF, achieves 50.9dB SNDR at fs = 2.8GHz with the effective-resolution bandwidth higher than the Nyquist frequency, while consuming only 44.6 mW of power.

Advisor: Nikolic, Borivoje
Kinetic isotope and trace element partitioning during calcite precipitation from aqueous solution

Precipitation of carbonate minerals is ubiquitous in the near-surface environment, and the isotopic and trace element composition of carbonates may be used to reconstruct the conditions of growth. Little is known about the mechanisms controlling isotope and trace element distribution into carbonates. Proposed growth mechanisms are typically inferred from the supersaturation dependence of CaCO3 precipitation rates. As different experimental techniques often generate different apparent reaction orders, numerous hypothesized mechanisms can be found in the literature. These descriptions of crystallization pathway cannot be used to identify processes controlling trace element and isotope partitioning./nRecent advances in experimental methodology allow us to observe microscopic to nano-scopic structures at the mineral surface during growth. The mechanisms controlling calcite growth have been directly determined by using fluid flow cells placed in an atomic force microscope (AFM; chapter 3). Calcite growth below the threshold oversaturation for amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) formation &ndash typical of seawater and most terrestrial fluids &ndash occurs primarily through the attachment of ions to kink sites on the surface. The net flux of ions to kink sites governs both overall growth rate and mineral composition./nIn this thesis, I present a self-consistent model based on observed calcite growth mechanisms that may be used to predict growth rate (chapter 1), and isotopic (chapter 2; Nielsen et al., 2012) and trace element (chapter 5; Nielsen et al., in prep.) partitioning as a function of solution composition. I apply this model to calcium isotope fractionation during the precipitation of synthetic calcite, which I grew and analyzed using novel secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) methods (chapter 3). In chapter chapter 4 (Nielsen and DePaolo, in review), I model calcium isotope fractionation in carbonate minerals that I collected from the highly alkaline Mono Lake, CA. The mechanistic framework developed here may be extended to multicomponent systems, and may be adapted for use in reactive transport models. When interpreted through the lens of this model, trace element and isotope signatures preserved in carbonates may eventually be used to reconstruct the chemistry of natural aqueous fluids.

Advisor: DePaolo, Donald J
Mechanism Design for Multi-layer Supply Chains

In this dissertation, we consider a three-layer supply chain with a manufacturer, a reseller, and a salesperson. In the manufacturer's target market, the sales outcome is jointly determined by the market condition and the salesperson's sales effort. While the salesperson can privately observe both, the manufacturer observes none. If the manufacturer contracts with the salesperson directly, it faces a mixture of the adverse selection and moral hazard problems. Because the reseller has a closer contact to the market and the salesperson, she can better monitor the two pieces of private information. Therefore, the manufacturer may delegate the sales responsibility to the reseller to indirectly mitigate the inefficiency caused by information asymmetry. As different resellers have different monitoring expertise, the manufacturer faces a supply chain construction problem by deciding which reseller to delegate to. Unlike traditional two-layer principal-agent problems in which the principal searches for the optimal direct monitoring functions, this dissertation studies the optimal strategy of indirect monitoring./nUsing the mechanism design approach and extending the traditional principal-agent model, we discuss the manufacturer's reseller selection strategy and the embedded salesforce compensation problem faced by the reseller. When the reseller can either observe the market condition or the sales effort, we show that the manufacturer should delegate to the latter one. We then study the reseller's resource allocation problem when the reseller can estimate the two aspects, both imperfectly, subject to a fixed budge constraint. When the reseller can only estimate the market condition, we show that the manufacturer's expected profit is convex on the reseller's accuracy. Collectively, our results deliver insights to manufacturers in selecting their reselling partners with various monitoring abilities and answers how the reseller's monitoring functions affect the supply chain performance.

Advisor: Chen, Ying-Ju
Integrated Drama Groups: Promoting Symbolic Play, Empathy, and Social Engagement With Peers in Children with Autism

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are currently viewed as presenting impairments in several important areas, including socialization, communication, and imagination (American Psychiatric Association, 2000; Wing & Gould, 1979). As a result, they may benefit from interventions that aim to increase competence in these areas. This study examines the efficacy of Integrated Drama Groups (IDG), a proposed new application of the Integrated Play Groups (IPG) model, an established research-based invention (Wolfberg, 2009). IDGs apply the guiding principles of the IPG model to a group focused on drama and improvisation. The goal of an IDG is to allow children with ASD to increase their social understanding and competence in a fun and supportive environment while making friends and building dramatic skills./nEach of three groups was comprised of one child with autism and three typically developing peers. Using a mixed-methods design which incorporated a multiple-baseline study across subjects, a qualitative examination of field notes taken during IDG, and interviews with caregivers of the primary participants, the present study examined whether or not exposure to IDG led to changes in the social play, symbolic play, initiations, responses to initiations, and joint engagement of the three children with ASD. As an additional measure, the child version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) was used to determine whether participants showed improvement in reading external emotional cues as a result of their involvement. Intervention fidelity, generalization, and social validity were addressed./nResults indicate that a drama-based intervention can be successful at improving some of the spontaneous play skills of children with ASD. All three primary participants showed improvement in their social and symbolic play skills, willingness to accept the ideas of others, and spontaneous joint engagement. All three caregivers considered the IDG to be a valuable investment of their children's time which led to significant change in their lives outside of the groups. Exposure to the IDG had no discernible effect on participants' scores on the Eyes Test. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Advisor: Turiel, Elliot
Wolfberg, Pamela J.
Sparse Coding of Speech Data Predicts Properties of the Early Auditory System

I have developed a sparse mathematical representation of speech that minimizes the number of active model neurons needed to represent typical speech sounds. The model learns several well-known acoustic features of speech such as harmonic stacks, formants, onsets and terminations, but I also find more exotic structures in the spectrogram representation of sound such as localized checkerboard patterns and frequency-modulated excitatory subregions flanked by suppressive sidebands. Moreover, several of these novel features resemble neuronal receptive fields reported/nin the Inferior Colliculus (IC), as well as auditory thalamus and cortex, and my model neurons exhibit the same tradeoff in spectrotemporal resolution as has been observed in IC. To my knowledge, this is the first demonstration that receptive fields of neurons in the ascending mammalian auditory pathway beyond the auditory nerve can be predicted based on coding principles and the/nstatistical properties of recorded sounds. In my second study, I look at linear filter estimation by creating spike-triggered averages for my model neurons. Surprisingly, whitening does not remove/nthe effect of choosing different probe stimulus sets. This suggests that the type of probe stimulus is very important for uncovering the true receptive field of a neuron.

Advisor: DeWeese, Michael R
Tools for modeling and control of freeway networks

This dissertation presents algorithmic tools that are useful to transportation engineers for freeway traffic modeling and control. A modeling framework that utilizes the link-node cell transmission model (LN-CTM) to simulate traffic dynamics on a chosen freeway network is presented here. A data driven approach, which utilizes available detector measurements on the freeway network to calibrate and specify the model is also illustrated. Flow measurements in ramps, which are needed to specify demands and routing characteristics for the freeway, are usually not available. Two novel imputation algorithms which estimate the missing ramp flows in the freeway network are presented. These algorithms employ a model based estimation procedure, that calculates the unknown on-ramp flows and off-ramp split ratios which can be fed into the model to match the observed mainline density and flow measurements. A detailed analysis of the convergence of these algorithms is presented, along with the advantages of these individual approaches. The final model, specified with the imputed ramp flows is able to replicate the traffic dynamics with good accuracy, as seen by error rates around 5-8% for density/flows contours, and the accurate replication of the bottleneck locations. These imputation algorithms, used within our modeling framework, enables a user to build a freeway model simulating multiple days of freeway behavior, within a week./nA model based optimal predictive controller for freeway congestion control, which utilizes the LN-CTM as its underlying model is also presented. The approach searches for solutions represented by a combination of ramp metering and variable speed limits. The optimization problem corresponding to the optimal control problem based on the LN-CTM is non-convex and non-linear. A relaxation method is presented to solve this problem efficiently using an equivalent linear program, before generating the solution to the original problem using a new mapping algorithm. The predictive controller is also extended to cover situations when ramp weaving and/or capacity drop exists in the freeway network. In this case, a set of heuristics are presented and the optimal control problem is solved using a sequence of linear programs, before mapping the solutions back to the original problem.

Advisor: Horowitz, Roberto