VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
American Techno-Orientalism: Speculative Fiction and the Rise of China

American Techno-Orientalism asks how Orientalism and literary form have responded to China’s post-socialist, post-1989 rise. It explores this question through readings of speculative fiction, in which Orientalism has been an aesthetic dominant since the 1980s, and demonstrates how technologically-inflected, future-oriented genres have transformed Asian racial forms as they have been mediated by Anglophone and Asian/American fiction. It argues that techno-Orientalist forms enable the depiction and racialization of new groups of economically privileged yet aesthetically underrepresented subjects like transnational workers holding H1-B visas, queer techno-cosmopolitans, and Asian/American math and science nerds. While these subjects are well known through caricature and stereotype, the texts examined in this dissertation reveal how such caricatures and stereotypes have adjusted to account for subjectivities newly privileged by deepening U.S.-China interdependency./nThis dissertation also argues that a historically informed description of techno-Orientalist aesthetics will reveal how China’s rise has rebalanced the East versus West framework that has hitherto grounded critiques of Orientalism. This development is due in part to how perceptions of U.S.-China interdependency, which conform and conflict with the more familiar logics of Saidian Orientalism, bring into focus historically and formally specific modes of Orientalism, which is typically treated as antinomic and transhistorical. Consequently, the techno-Orientalist forms in Japan-inflected novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer differ sharply from China-inflected novels like Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. These forms move away from an aesthetic of reification indexed to U.S.-Japan rivalry of the 1970s and 1980s, to an aesthetic of totality indexed to U.S.-China interdependency and attuned to social relations. As a consequence, fiction by Asian American writers like Ted Chiang and Charles Yu has developed along so-called “postracial” lines, as Asian and Asian American characters are complicated when mapped geopolitically rather than domestically.

Advisor: Lye, Colleen
Dispelling Perceptions: Montessori Education – Attaining Common Ground with Public Schools

Abstract/nUsing concepts from cognitive science, this dissertation explored changes in perception among Montessori education leaders and traditional education leaders. Although Montessori education programs have grown as an option in the public school sector, their unique features in mainstream environments have brought to the fore serious challenges in understanding and communication between decision makers at the institutional level of public education and among Montessori academies. Nationally, Montessori education entities have fostered a strong momentum for improvement at the state policy level. However in some states, including California, differing perceptions still hinder inclusive decision making, resulting in lack of teacher credential recognition, denial of eligibility and funding./nMy study implemented a communication intervention through which an iterative conversation between both sides aimed to address perceptions and language and provide shared understandings. Using the challenge between Montessori and traditional public education and framed under the cognitive theories of mental models, framing, schemas, metaphors and embodiment, this intervention addressed whether perceptions can begin to shift when one is more fully informed at a deeper cognitive level./nIncorporating a workshop intervention involving several modalities, my findings suggested a shift in perception which seemed to persist over time. The effects in shifting actors’ perceptions of Montessori education were statistically significant and modest in terms of magnitude. I also found a weaker perceptual shift among traditional educators in California compared with peers in other states. I obtained specific suggestions for future iterations of kinesthetic learning, along with how to best share perspectives between Montessori and traditional leaders, along with possible collaborations between these pedagogies.

Advisor: Fuller, Bruce
Hemodynamics and Transport in Patient-specific Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a permanent local enlargement of the abdominal aorta. Complex anatomies, presence of side branches, and pulsatility of blood flow creates a complex chaotic flow field in AAAs. The progression of AAA can lead to rupture, which is one of the leading causes of death in the elderly. In this study, the flow topology in AAAs, role of hemodynamics in AAA progression, complex vectorial wall shear stress (WSS) patterns, and near-wall transport in AAAs were investigated./nPatient-specific computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to obtain blood flow information. Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS) were computed to study the flow physics. The utility of these structures in studying chaotic mixing and transport, flow separation, and vortex wall interaction was demonstrated in different patients. The effect of exercise on flow topology and quantitative mixing was evaluated. The evolution of a systolic vortex formed in the proximal region, strongly influenced the flow topology in the aneurysms. Intraluminal thrombus (ILT) deposition and lumen progression were quantified in several patients using magnetic resonance imaging over a 2--3 year followup. Point-wise spatial correlation of hemodynamic parameters to ILT deposition, revealed a negative correlation between oscillatory shear stress and ILT deposition. This was attributed to persistence recirculation, which can lead to unidirectional backward WSS./nComplex vectorial variations in WSS was studied. Namely, variations in WSS magnitude, direction, and vector in space and time were quantified and compared. Several new WSS measures were introduced to better quantify WSS vectorial variations. The concept of Lagrangian wall shear stress structures (WSS LCS) was introduced. WSS was scaled to obtain a first order representation of near-wall velocity. Tracers representing biochemicals in thin concentration boundary layers were tracked on the aneurysm surface based on the WSS vector field. Formation of coherent structures from WSS tracers were shown. The WSS LCS organize near-wall transport in high Schmidt number flows and could be used to predict regions of high near-wall stagnation and concentration. A wall shear stress exposure time (WSSET) measure was introduced to quantify near-wall stagnation and concentration. Excellent agreement between WSSET and surface concentration obtained from 3D continuum mass transport was obtained. Finally, the important roles that WSS fixed points play in cardiovascular flows was discussed.

Advisor: Shadden, shawn C.
Mass Party Formation: Land, Civil Society, and Political Organization in Post-Revolutionary Mexico and Bolivia

How do political parties emerge? Prevailing understandings conceive parties forming as reflections of pre-constituted social sectors, seizing divisions that exist in society prior or independently of the party itself. The advent of parties has also been understood as an after-effect of democratization undertaken by modernizing states. My dissertation tests these theories by asking why the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico emerged as a mass party after the revolutionary upheaval of the early twentieth century, while Bolivia’s Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) failed in undertaking a homologous process after the country’s revolution of the mid 1950s, despite attempts to do so and the presence of similar sectors available for mobilization and identical bureaucratic structures./nI develop a two-pronged argument contending that the emergence of parties requires the existence of a strong civil society upon which to act; in turn, the presence of this civil societal realm is facilitated by the collapse of ‘pre’-capitalist land tenure arrangements. The dissolution of village identity and traditional authority in Mexico and not in Bolivia – underpinned by the destruction of communal property – permits the emergence of a civil societal realm of unions and organizations. This realm enables the articulation of demands and interest aggregation in a way compatible with the party-form. Hence, I show the power of the party to shape and construct political constituencies; at the same time, by pointing to the role of property arrangements, I identify structural determinants to the capacity for political organizations to produce constituencies. To control for differences between countries, the dissertation is organized around four subnational case studies showing how both inter- and intra-country variation in party formation is explained by examining the relationship between land privatization and organizational absorption.

Advisor: Riley, Dylan J
New Tools for Econometric Analysis of High-Frequency Time Series Data - Application to Demand-Side Management in Electricity Markets

This thesis develops novel methods for econometric analysis of time series data, and applies these methods in the context of demand-side management in California’s electricity markets. The first method is an optimization framework for simulating the behavior of electricity consumers with realistic dynamic consumption models under various dynamic electricity tariffs. This allows to generate new insights into the effect of intertemporal substitution on individual and social surplus under various existing and hypothetical pricing schemes, including Real-Time pricing, Time-of-Use pricing, Critical Peak Pricing, and Critical Peak Rebates. By introducing the concept of a baseline-taking equilibrium, it is possible to quantify the welfare implications of the manipulation of Demand Response (DR) baselines. A second contribution of this thesis is the formulation of the optimal contract design problem a DR aggregator faces when employing inter-temporal flexibility of commercial buildings' HVAC-related power consumption in order to participate in the regulation capacity spot market. The associated bilevel optimization problem can be cast as a mixed-integer optimization problem that can be solved efficiently. The third contribution of this thesis is a novel methodology for causal inference on time series data based on ideas from Machine Learning. This two-stage approach allows to evaluate conditional individual treatment effects in experimental and non-experimental settings with repeated treatment exposure. The setup is very general and agnostic to the specific regression models used. Besides establishing core theoretical results, this thesis presents associated multi-stage bootstrapping techniques, which allow to perform statistical inference even under computationally challenging prediction models. Based on the developed inference methodology, the empirical contribution of this thesis is to study the effect of receiving DR notifications on energy consumption of residential electricity customers in California, including causal estimates of individual and average treatment effects. These results inform the design of a large-scale randomized controlled trial of much broader scope, which is currently being implemented in collaboration with a DR provider in California and involves more than 10,000 customers over a 14 month duration.

Advisor: Tomlin, Claire J
Confronting the Artinatural: Science, Wilderness and 21st Century Nature

Three hundred years after the Scientific Revolution and the exploration of the vast “wilderness” of the “New World,” concepts of “nature” have found themselves in some peculiar orientations. On the one hand, the hyper-advancements in science and technologies have continued to induce a sense of human mastery of nature, a story of the human hand skillfully manipulating earth as it deems fit. On the other hand, a strong idea of wilderness, or untouched and wild land, has remained in the lexicon and imagination of many American minds. These concepts – science and wilderness – rely on notions of the natural and the human as separate realms, and yet so much of science and wilderness indicates a special bond and symbiosis between humanity and nature./nIn this work I explore the realms of the natural and artificial by comparing and contrasting two seemingly dissimilar institutions: The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and Muir Woods just to the north in Marin County. Both pillars of the Bay Area’s window into nature, these sites offer diverse and contradictory narratives about the human place in the environment and the kinds of behaviors and attitudes that are appropriate in each. What I uncover are the strange overlappings and coincidences of the apparently divergent institutional perspectives./nThe idea that I bring to bear to confront these strange parallels is a concept I call the “artinatural.” Like other words that intend to integrate two opposing realms – hybrid or cyborg – the concept of artinatural combines the ideas of natural and artificial to suggest that things, institutions, and even ideas can be simultaneously artificial and natural. A wooden chair, for example, is both from nature (wood from trees) and artificial (made with human hands and/or technologies). The concept is also meant to ask whether the artificial is really outside the realm of the natural at all./nWhat becomes clear through the exploration of the questions and topics above is that American perspectives on nature that have assumed a great distance between humanity and nature have been a driving force behind both environmental destruction and social injustices. It is through a new understanding of nature, one that accepts humanity and its artifice as significant parts of the natural, that these destructive practices can begin to be counteracted.

Advisor: Merchant, Carolyn
Engineering Magnetoelectric-Multiferroic Composites Using FeRh

This thesis presents the study of magnetoelectricity in artificial multiferroic heterostructures, focussing on the FeRh metamagnetic phase transition. Spin based electronic systems are ideal for many applications, primarily as a result of long term stability. Toward this goal, there is a need for electrically modifiable and differentiable magnetic states. First, new methodologies to determine and control the antiferromagnetic axis in the low temperature antiferromagnetic phase of FeRh are considered. Second, In an effort to increase the ability to control magnetism with an applied electric field through the converse magnetoelectric effect, FeRh is combined with piezoelectric materials. In association with the large volumetric magnetostriction coefficient of FeRh, a composite multiferroic with the largest magnetoelectric coupling is observed. Finally, the out-of-plane magnetic anisotropy is investigated as a function of the ferromagnetic phase fraction and epitaxial strain. This is applied toward investigation of zero magnetic field magnetoelectric control of the magnetic phase and the apparent memory of the magnetization direction across repeated phase reversal.

Advisor: Ramesh, Ramamoorthy
Spectral Analysis on Point Interactions

This thesis explores the spectral properties of Schrödinger-type operators on various/ndomains such as R^2, rectangles, and metric graphs. In particular, we consider special types of operators called point scatterers that act as the Laplacian away from a discrete set of points. Such a model provides a simple tool to study how the presence of point-wise potentials perturbs the spectral properties of the Laplacian./nIn Chapter 1, we introduce the general procedure to properly define the point scatterers/non a general domain. The theory of self-adjoint extension and Krein’s formula play important/nroles in the process./nIn Chapter 2, we formulate point scatterers in R^2 using the renormalization process/nmentioned in the previous chapter. We start with the one-point scatterer which is the/nsimplest case and then generalize the result to finitely many point scatterers and infinitely/nmany point scatterers. Then we consider a special case in which the scatterers are placed/nperiodically as a combination of infinitely many point scatterers and the Floquet-Bloch/ntheory of solid-state physics for crystal structures. As an application inspired by carbon/nnano-structures such as graphene, we prove that honeycomb lattice point scatterers generate/nconic singularities on the dispersion relation./nIn Chapter 3, we consider a point scatterer on a rectangular domain to investigate how/nthe eigenfunctions on the rectangle are affected by the point-wise perturbation. We prove/nthat a point scatterer eventually acts as a barrier confining the eigenfunction as the domain/ngets thinner./nIn Chapter 4, we introduce how the point scatterers can be incorporated with the notion of/nquantum graphs. In addition, the resonances of quantum graphs are investigated. We provide/nthe quantum graph version of a Fermi golden rule, which provides an explicit expression for/nthe infinitesimal change of states in terms of the scattering resonances.

Advisor: Zworski, Maciej R
Flashing in the 'Disco' Clam Ctenoides ales (Finlay, 1927): Mechanisms and Behavioral Function

This dissertation investigated the ‘disco’ clam Ctenoides ales (Limidae), which is the only bivalve to have a behaviorally-mediated flashing display. Topics covered include (i) mechanisms, ultrastructure and movement that produce the flashing, (ii) the fitness value (function) of the flashing, (iii) the clams’ sensory abilities and vision, and (iv) the clams’ ecology, distribution and habitat. The flashing occurs on the clams’ mantle lip. Electron microscopy revealed two distinct tissue sides; one highly scattering side that contains dense aggregations of spheres composed of silica (white), and one highly absorbing side that does not (red). High-speed video confirmed that the two sides alternate rapidly, creating the appearance of flashing. Optical modeling suggested that the sphere’s diameter is nearly optimal for scattering light, especially at shorter wavelengths, which predominate in the ocean. This simple mechanism produces a striking optical effect. Three potential hypotheses for the fitness value of the flashing were investigated; conspecific attraction, prey luring, and/or predator deterrence. The lack of movement toward other C. ales when given visual cues in behavioral trials, as well as the clams’ inability to resolve flashing in other C. ales suggested conspecific attraction was not the function of the flashing. The lack of significant differences in prey abundance in experiments testing flashing versus non-flashing clams suggested prey luring was also not the function of the flashing. Predator deterrence is considered a possible function of the flashing due to (i) sulfur presence in the clam’s tissues, (ii) behavioral responses by predators during feeding trials as well as tissue preferences that suggest potential distastefulness, and (iii) the clams’ increase in flash rate when exposed to predators in the lab and the field. The presence of photosensitive pigments (rhodopsin, tubulin and retinochrome) was suggested from immunohistochemistry results in the ~40 eyes of C. ales in collaboration with A. Nahm-Kingston (University of Maryland Baltimore County). Transmission electron microscopy done in collaboration with R. Dubielzig, L. Teixeira, and C. Schobert (University of Iowa Veterinary School) confirmed that the morphology of the eye was inconsistent with image formation or the ability to resolve flashing in conspecifics. Therefore, the visual capability of C. ales is most likely used for predator detection. The clams’ distribution, depth, main habitats, projected sex ratios, movement based on size (sex) and sphere properties with depth were identified through SCUBA research at four field sites. The clams are found throughout the Indo-Pacific, from depths 3m to ≥50m. Their movement doesn’t vary with sex, and they exhibit a clumped distribution seemingly skewed towards males, which compounds their vulnerability in aquaria collections and highlights the need to determine their conservation status.

Advisor: Caldwell, Roy L
Modeling and optimization of transients in water distribution networks with intermittent supply

Much of the world's rapidly growing urban population relies upon water distribution systems to provide treated water through networks of pipes. Rather than continuously supplying water to users, many of these distribution systems operate intermittently, with parts of the network frequently losing pressure or emptying altogether. Such intermittent water supply deleteriously impacts water availability, infrastructure, and water quality for hundreds of millions of people around the world. In this work I introduce the problem of intermittent water supply through the lens of applied mathematics. I first introduce a simple descriptive mathematical model that captures some hydraulic features of intermittency not accounted for by existing water distribution system software packages. I then consider the potential uses of such a model in a variety of optimization examples motivated by real-world applications. In simple test networks, I show how to reduce pressure gradients while the network fills by changing either the inflow patterns or the elevation profile. I also show test examples of using measured data to potentially recover unknown information such as initial conditions or boundary outflows. I then use sensitivity analysis to better understand how various parameters control model output, with an eye to figuring out which parameters are worth measuring most carefully in field applications, and also which parameters may be useful in an optimization setting. I lastly demonstrate some progress in descriptively modeling a real network, both through the introduced mathematical model and through a fluid-mechanics-based method for identifying data where the model is most useful.

Advisor: Wilkening, Jon
Rycroft, Chris