VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Nested Narrative:Þórðar saga hreðu and Material Engagement

Nested Narrative:Þórðar saga hreðu and Material Engagement/nÞórðar saga hreðu is an Icelandic saga, of the type usually referred to as Sagas of Icelanders or Family Sagas, that lacks much of the drama of other sagas of a similar type. The dissertation utilizes this genre outlier to test a new method for analyzing the sagas, which combines literary analysis with recent anthropological theory. This method foregrounds the interaction of the material world with the saga narrative as an essential way that meaning is constructed. Chapter 1 looks at the saga's physical manifestation in manuscripts, which offers a new emphasis on the saga as a product of a local community. Chapter 2 turns to the human-made objects referenced within the text, suggesting that the depiction of the material world in this saga is in keeping with the non-modern milieu from which it originated. Chapter 3 focuses on scenes in the saga where characters are described as moving through the landscape, and analyzes these as a way to demonstrate how co-constitutive the real landscape was for the saga narrative. Chapter 4 employs Cultural Memory theory to explain why certain placenames are included in the saga instead of others, noting that placename references are a clear invitation to include the real material world into the meaning-making of the saga. Chapter 5 looks at how the dynamic between the narrative of the saga and the local landscape of Skagafjörður as place has been disrupted in the modern period. The Conclusion offers a broad assessment of why repositioning the material world back into the interpretation of saga narratives is important.

Advisor: Lindow, John
Static Model Analysis with Lattice-based Ontologies

This thesis demonstrates a correct, scalable and automated method to infer/nsemantic concepts using lattice-based ontologies, given relatively few manual/nannotations. Semantic concepts and their relationships are formalized as a/nlattice, and relationships within and between program elements are expressed as/na set of constraints. Our inference engine automatically infers concepts/nwherever they are not explicitly specified. Our approach is general, in that/nour framework is agnostic to the semantic meaning of the ontologies that it/nuses./nWhere practical use-cases and principled theory exist, we provide for the/nexpression of infinite ontologies and ontology compositions. We also show/nhow these features can be used to express of value-parametrized concepts and/nstructured data types. In order to help find the source of errors, we also/npresent a novel approach to debugging by showing simplified errors paths./nThese are minimal subsets of the constraints that fail to type-check, and are/nmuch more useful than previous approaches in finding the cause of program bugs./nWe also present examples of how this analysis tool can be used to express/nanalyses of abstract interpretation; physical dimensions and units; constant/npropagation; and checks of the monotonicity of expressions.

Advisor: Lee, Edward A
The Coordination of Social Contextual Features in Children's Use of and Reasoning about Honesty and Deception

This study examined the development of children's judgments about noncompliance and deception of parents and teachers. One hundred and twenty participants from three age groups (8, 10, 12 years) were individually interviewed about hypothetical situations that describe a child whose parent or teacher gives him or her a directive that conflicts with the child's chosen course of action. After appealing the directive without success, the child defies the directive and then deceives the parent or teacher about his or her noncompliance. Participants evaluated the legitimacy of the directive, the act of noncompliance, and the deception of the authority figure, justifying their judgment of each. The stories depicted prototypical acts in the moral, personal, and prudential domains./nChildren's judgments about noncompliance and honesty showed active weighing and prioritizing of different considerations in different contexts. Age-related, domain-related, and authority-related variance was found in evaluations of the acceptability of deception as well as the justification for those evaluations. The pattern of development found in the judgments and prioritization of the parameters and properties of social situations contributes to our knowledge about the reflective and flexible ways in which children approach moral judgments and coordinate honesty with other social goals. The findings suggest that by middle childhood children engage in coordination of social and moral concerns, systematically endorse noncompliance and deception related to particular types of acts, and judge deception of teachers and parents in different ways.

Advisor: Turiel, Elliot
Investigation into the biosynthesis and function of a novel sulfomenaquinone from Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is the leading cause of bacterial deaths worldwide causing two million deaths annually and infects almost one third of the world population. Throughout its lifecycle, Mtb undergoes a series of changes in respiration and metabolic rates. During disease transmission from human to human, the bacteria are in a high respiratory and metabolic rate enabling rapid division. During infection, with the onset of the adaptive immune response, Mtb slows its respiratory and metabolic rates to a non-replicative state. Mtb can persist in this state for years to decades. The delicate balance of the host immune response and Mtb survival is only beginning to be understood./nIn 2006, we identified a sulfomenaquinone, named S881 for its exact mass, that required the sulfotransferase 3 (stf3) gene for production. A Mtb stf3 mutant exhibited a hypervirulent phenotype in the mouse model of infection. Mice infected with the stf3 mutant, succumbed to infection more rapidly than mice infected with wild type and contained a higher bacterial burden in the lungs./nThis thesis explores structural characterization of S881 and its biosynthesis and function. Chapter 1 reviews the role of menaquinone, the metabolic precursor to S881, in Mtb, while Chapter 2 discusses the characterization of the S881 structure using high resolution mass spectrometry fragmentation analysis. Chapter 3 discusses the biosynthesis of S881 and investigates the regulation of S881 production. Using the S881 mutants, Chapter 4 explores various models of Mtb infection to study the function of S881. Finally Chapter 5 describes the initial characterization of the promoter for S881 genes to understand S881 genetic regulation.

Advisor: Bertozzi, Carolyn R
Gender and Generational Change in Egypt

The typical life course of a young woman in Egypt today is significantly different from that of her mother when she came of age a generation ago. In this dissertation, I focus on differences between the experiences of the current generation of female youth and those of their mothers with respect to education, employment and marriage. Using quantitative and qualitative data, I examine both empirical trends and how women themselves make sense of these changes. My main argument is that popular understandings of socio-cultural change in the area of gender relations, which may conflict with the statistical indicators that are commonly used to measure women's empowerment, are undervalued by social scientists in the study of social transformation.

Advisor: Johnson-Hanks, Jennifer
Contested Nationalisms and Propaganda: Birth Pangs of a Malaysian Nation, 1957-1969

This dissertation looks at how the newly independent Malaysian state used propaganda as one of the tools in forging a new nationalism and specific values of citizenship in the face of enduring ethnic cleavages and contesting visions of nationhood. I look at the period from independence in 1957 to the race riots in 1969 that claimed nearly 200 lives and plunged the country into a state of Emergency for a year./nAs Malaya achieved independence, the contest between competing visions of the nation that began after World War II not only remained unresolved but also continued to intensify during the 1960s. One vision constructed a nation based on the primacy of the indigenous ethnic group, the Malays, while non-Malays advanced a vision that emphasized the equality of all ethnic groups in the nation. The former became the basis of the official nationalism of independent Malaya/Malaysia, but the ruling coalition tried to blunt opposition to it by co-opting elements of the latter without resolving fully the tensions between these diametrically opposed ideas. The post-colonial government found itself having to continually defend, justify and advance the official meaning of Malaysia through its developmental policies and propaganda campaigns in the 1960s./nThe state conducted its propaganda campaigns through both personalized and mass channels using two departments: the Information Department that placed men and women on the ground to conduct face-to-face propaganda across the nation but with an emphasis on rural and semi-rural communities, and Radio Malaysia, the state's primary medium for mass communication until television ownership and broadcasting overtook radio from the 1970s onwards. The dissertation looks at the history, operational procedures and goals of the two agencies from the standpoint of the practice of governmentality. It examines their colonial roots, during which they were key components in the anti-Communist war, to their post-colonial iterations, when they had to adapt to meet peacetime objectives./nI suggest that the Department of Information and Radio Malaysia could not fully transcend their colonial legacies and the operational challenges inherent in bureaucracies to meet these new post-colonial challenges. More importantly, the two organizations could not resolve the tensions within the message they were preaching, i.e. a contradictory official nationalism that stated, in effect, that all are equal but one is special. Also, some of the entrenched operational structures of the agencies undermined key/nplanks of the official nationalism. It is for these reasons that the two agencies, and by extension, the government, failed to win over decisively the hearts and minds of its new citizens to its vision of the nation; a failure that contributed to its electoral setback in 1969 and the race riots that occurred as a result.

Advisor: Zinoman, Peter
Hadler, Jeffrey
Heterocycles Old and New: Carbonylazoles as Chemoselective Acylation Reagents and the Synthesis and Applications of Benzindolizinones

Carbonylazole derivatives have been shown to be chemoselective and efficient acylating reagents under a variety of conditions. Catalysis with pyridinium salts, as well as with DBU or DABCO are discussed, as is the thermal reaction of imidazole carbamates with carboxylic acids to provide esters. The application of a protic solvent-mediated cycloisomerization approach to two isomers of benzindolizinone - a relatively unstudied heterocyclic system - and the syntheses of two Erythrina alkaloids are also discussed./nChapter 1 provides an overview of the fundamental importance of the carbonyl group in the chemistry of life, as well as in the service of man. Key processes through which these versatile groups react are illustrated with an emphasis on the chemistry of esters. The chapter concludes with a survey of the application of carbonylimidazoles as acyl donors from their first development by Staab to the present./nThrough another line of inquiry, it was discovered that imidazole carbamates and ureas are chemoselective esterification and amidation reagents. The optimization, substrate scope, and mechanism of esterification and amidation of carboxylic acids mediated by imidazole-based reagents are discussed in Chapter 2. The innate reactivity of carbonyl imidazole reagents with a range of nucleophiles is also explored./nFollowing this initial discovery, it was found that pyridinium salts greatly enhance the reactivity of carbonylimidazole derivatives as acylation reargents for esterification and amidation. Chapter 3 details the development of this mode of catalysis and outlines a mechanistic proposal in which pyridinium salts act as both Brønsted acid and nucleophilic catalysts. Finally, the scope of this technology in the synthesis of difficult to access oxazolidinones, as well as esters and amides, is discussed. This work was executed in partnership with Tingting Fu./nDrawing on the possibility that carbonylazole acyl donors could be potentiated through nucleophilic catalysis, a DBU-catalyzed N-acylation of indoles and oxazolidinones was devised. Chapter 4 covers the development of this reaction, as well as the subsequent finding that this acylation was chemoselective even in the presence of more reactive amine and alcohol functional groups. This work was performed in collaboration with Erica Schultz./nThe solvent-promoted cycloisomerization of quinoline and isoquinoline propargylic carbinols to benz[e]- and benz[g]indolizinones, respectively, is described in Chapter 5. The study of the fundamental reactivity of these new heterocyclic motifs is discussed. The formal synthesis of 3-demethoxyerythratidinone using this cycloisomerization strategy, as well as its application in studies toward the synthesis of cocculidine are also detailed.

Advisor: Sarpong, Richmond
Democracy and Dramatic Form: The Figure of the Non-Citizen in the American Renaissance

This dissertation offers a critical reading of the figure of the non-citizen in American Renaissance literature. Key literary scenes register the effects of restrictive citizenship on law, sovereignty, speech, and expressed political morality. In particular, dramatic techniques and form in the American Renaissance reveal the effects of pre-established semantic divisions such as "slave," "human," and "alien." I argue a specific literary mode of dramatization stages the failures of deliberative democracy and the fissures in juridical form./nHerman Melville's literary style stands out in this regard. The crafting of theatrical scene, gesture, intonation, lighting, music, and masquerade parodies legal rationality, while contrasting political authority and powerlessness. In several major scenes, the ship returns as an allegory of political repression and regulation. At the same time, representations of figures turned to stone show the perpetual entrapment of the disempowered non-citizen and allude to the violence of political exclusion. A key example is how punishments such as ritual floggings become ways of deratifying a claim to citizenship./nIn general, what my work points out is that literature captures the brutal contradictions between the rhetoric of American democracy and practices of regulation./nAnother feature that makes possible a critique of restrictive citizenship is the interpolation of dramatic technique into the novel form. In this context, scenic effect in Redburn and Moby-Dick importantly figures a spectator as a witness and casts this form of spectatorship as an obligation of democratic life./nFinally, I examine how a number of political theorists turn to the dramatic scene within American Renaissance writings to consider citizenship, democracy, law, and national sovereignty in the literary text. In the process, I put forth a comparative model of reading between nineteenth-century American literature, political philosophy, and cultural thought today.

Advisor: Butler, Judith P
Saldivar, Jose David
A cyber-infrastructure for the measurement and estimation of large-scale hydrologic processes

Water shortages, particularly evident in the state of California, emphasize the need for a better hydrologic understanding, and improved water management techniques. The majority of the state's water originates in the Sierra Nevada as snow, melting throughout the year to meet the needs of various stakeholders. Current measurement techniques are unable to resolve variability of the snowpack at the basin scale, and snowmelt processes are not well captured by existing hydrologic models. A system-level solution is introduced to facilitate scientific understanding and water management decisions in basins of the Sierra Nevada. The core of this thesis focuses on expanding current sensing methods at the hydrologic catchment (1-2km2) scale to develop an improved understanding of the mountain water balance. It is shown that Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) offer an ultra low-power, cost-effective solution to instrument catchment-scale regions. An explicit WSN deployment strategy is derived, leveraging in-situ network statistics of the Packet Delivery Ratio, and Received Signal Strength Indicator to optimize network performance. A hydrologic variability analysis is carried out on the dataset collected by the network, showing temporal stability in the variability of snowdepth at the catchment scale, and validating the use of a stratified sampling approach based on the even instrumentation of physiographic variables. To derive estimates of Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) at the larger basin scale, an estimation framework based on Gaussian Processes, and an optimal sampling strategy, which maximizes Mutual Information, is described. The sensor placement method outperforms a number of other sampling designs, reducing estimation error by up to 100mm. A computationally tractable, Hybrid System model of snow dynamics is introduced and shown to accurately reflect the various stages of snowmelt when compared to observations in the Sierra Nevada. The need for improved sensing and estimation procedures is highlighted by an analysis of the effects of improved SWE estimates on basin-scale streamflow forecasting methods. The use of historically reconstructed SWE data shows that streamflow forecasting error could be reduced by nearly 10% through improved SWE estimates.

Advisor: Glaser, Steven D
Reconstruction through collaboration: Negotiation of the housing process in disaster recovery

The great Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December 2004 hit many countries in South and Southeast Asia and affected millions of individuals. As such, it led to one of the biggest reconstruction projects in the world, whether considered in terms of the scale of project, number of people impacted, number of institutions involved, total budget, or land area coverage. Hundreds of multinational design and construction firms were involved with the reconstruction along with relevant institutions and donors from various countries, including Indonesia, the country most impacted./nMy dissertation is an attempt to find a more effective and efficient means of addressing this complex situation by applying the lessons learned from the Aceh post-disaster tsunami recovery process. Investigating stakeholders' interest in this complex context has been the central issue of my dissertation work. To do so, I have applied theories, particularly those regarding collaboration, that explain the interactional or organizational context as the main tools for my investigation. As I have done so, I have come to realize that although the term collaboration was widely used during the course of the Aceh recovery process as a description of the process of working together to achieve specific goals, it is questionable whether the Aceh stakeholders engaged in true collaboration./nThe discussion of the urgency of collaboration in complex situations in this dissertation is based on recognition of the importance of using this approach to examine the nature of collaboration from various perspectives and to measure progress during the recovery process. It must be emphasized that collaboration is neither a goal in the process nor a solution to its problems. As such, theories on collaboration are used as tools with which to examine the dynamics that existed among the project stakeholders in their work together in the recovery of Aceh. As examination of the current problems in urban planning and design in developing countries has indicated that they arise from complex issues among the stakeholders involved, this investigation of the reconstruction process in Aceh allows for a unique means of identifying the lessons learned from this experience that can be applied to many types of projects.

Advisor: Kalay, Yehuda E
Germanic Origins from the Perspective of the Y-Chromosome

This dissertation holds that genetic data are a useful tool for evaluating contemporary models of Germanic origins. The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family and include among their major contemporary representatives English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. Historically, the search for Germanic origins has sought to determine where the Germanic languages evolved, and why the Germanic languages are similar to and different from other European languages. Both archaeological and linguist approaches have been employed in this research direction. The linguistic approach to Germanic origins is split among those who favor the Stammbaum theory and those favoring language contact theory. Stammbaum theory posits that Proto-Germanic separated from an ancestral Indo-European parent language. This theoretical approach accounts for similarities between Germanic and other Indo-European languages by posting a period of mutual development. Germanic innovations, on the other hand, occurred in isolation after separation from the parent language. Language contact theory posits that Proto-Germanic was the product of language convergence and this convergence explains features that Germanic shares with other Indo-European languages. Germanic innovations, on the other hand, are potentially a relic of an era before language convergence./nContemporary models of Germanic origins have gravitated towards language contact theory to explain the position of Germanic within the European linguistic tapestry. However, this theoretical approach is very dependent on the historical record for assessing the influence of language convergence. This dissertation utilizes genetic data, primarily single nucleotide polymorphism from the human Y-chromosome, for overcoming this inherent weakness of language contact theory. With genetic data, the linguist can now assess the influence of prehistoric language convergence by tracing prehistoric population expansions. Based on the available genetic data, the evolution of Germanic during the European prehistory may have been shaped by the convergence of Proto-Basque, Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Proto-Uralic.

Advisor: Rauch, Irmengard