VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Enhancing resilience of urban water systems : coordinating regional water management to enable innovation and prompt collective action

In response to increasing pressures on our water systems, urban water utilities are progressively adopting water conservation and supply diversification strategies. There is growing recognition that tapping into alternative and decentralized water supplies, such as water recycling and reuse, stormwater capture, desalination, as well as conservation and efficiency can help improve resilience under emerging challenges by decreasing dependence on imported water supplies and already stressed sources. However, even though the technologies are available to support the introduction of these new water supply sources, a number of socio-economic, financial, and political hurdles stand in the way of re-invention in the water sector. Furthermore, despite spatial and institutional inter-dependency of many water utilities, supply diversification efforts have traditionally been tackled by individual utilities operating in isolation, which hinders knowledge transfer and innovation. The five studies that comprise this dissertation collectively develop novel insights and tools to facilitate the adoption of more collaborative and adaptable water management strategies. Specifically, these studies focus on leveraging the untapped potential for the diversification of water supplies at regional scales through collective action incentives. Using case study regions in the San Francisco Bay Area, we identify emerging water supply- and demand- management trends and challenges in urban areas, provide new insights into changing public behaviors in response to water scarcity, and introduce novel metrics to guide regional resilience efforts. Based on these insights, we also demonstrate the development of incentive-based schemes for water conservation and water supply diversification, taking lessons from other sectors including cap-and-trade for emissions reduction and tradable certificate markets for renewable energy adoption. Results indicate that coordinating water supply diversification efforts regionally can lead to reduced costs and increased resilience compared to the traditional isolated approach, with greater benefits as utilities engage in collective efforts and cooperate in the exchange of information. This research contributes to the growing literature on urban water resilience by demonstrating that emerging technological and infrastructure solutions need to be accompanied by well-informed and more collaborative institutional arrangements that can leverage the unique characteristics of diverse urban areas.

Advisor: Luthy Richard G. 
Ajami Newsha 
Cain Bruce E.
Entertainment in Containment: Courtesans and Space in the Game of Romance in Taiping guangji and Yijian zhi

This thesis studies the lives of Chinese courtesans within the space assigned to them, as portrayed in courtesan-related stories in Taiping guangji and Yijian zhi, two voluminous collections of stories compiled in the Song Dynasty, each of which has the reputation of being an encyclopedia of life in premodern China. Among a corpus of approximately 124 stories that mention courtesan from Taiping guangji and 81 from Yijian zhi, this thesis pays special attention to ìHuo Xiaoyu Zhuanî (the Story of Huo Xiaoyu) and ìLi Wa Zhuanî (the Story of Huo Xiaoyu), which by themselves provide note-worthy details exemplifying the relation between space and romance. To better illustrate the history and definition of courtesans, and explore specific themes, examples from beyond the two aforementioned collections are also eclectically drawn from premodern Chinese literary texts from different periods, including poems and lyrics, bi ji stories, and novels. The nature of the occupation of a courtesan is to provide entertainment. This particular kind of entertainment often requires separate space. In a narrow sense, the space of a courtesan is the place in which they live and work, sometimes love, and when betrayed, hate and plot revenge. In a broader sense, the space of a courtesan is constructed by the courtesanís value in menís hearts, position in society, identity in relation to marriage, and symbolic function in literature. The contained space of courtesans is also an indicator of womenís assigned roles and space in menís comfort zone in premodern China, which can be perceived through literary phenomena intertwined with male imaginations and social realities.

Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
Premodern Chinese Literature
Taiping guangji
Yijian zhi
Space
Courtesan
Thesis
Advisor: Zhou Yiqun
Entertainment-Education and Narrative Persuasion in the Context of the Culture Cycle and Communication Theories

Media narratives are an extremely powerful communication tool that affect society, culture, and individuals in many ways. As people increasingly reject explicit persuasive attempts, the work of spreading prosocial and health information that was previously disseminated through directly persuasive outlets will fall to interwoven narratives that do not interrupt the freely selected user experience of media, and utilize entertainment tactics that elude perception. Using Markus and Conner’s (2013) culture cycle framework throughout, I will use theories of communication and media psychology to illustrate how narratives intersect with culture at the individual level (and at the levels of interactions, institutions, and ideas). Through the lens of cultivation theory, this paper sheds light on how inadvertent pieces of media narratives can maintain invisible social structures that privilege certain ways of being, and suggest how these same pathways might be used to dismantle these structures in the future. Much of the focus will be on how culture, social information, and internal processes influence the attitudes and behaviors of the individual in the context of persuasion and change. This paper also describes why narrative persuasion is effective, especially in the media environment of today, and why it is important to consider this potential impact in health and prosocial realms. Additionally, I will explore how storytelling and narrative processing change the way messages are perceived, and highlight the strengths of entertainment-education and narrative storylines in the context of both the culture cycle and communication theory.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
media
culture
entertainment education
narrative persuasion
communication
media studies
Stanford University Department of Communication
Thesis
Advisor: Reeves Byron
Entrepreneurial capitalism : the making of the Central Pacific Railroad, 1861-1899

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented economic and social change in the United States. Largely agrarian in 1850, by 1900 the United States had become the world's premier manufacturer. My thesis is that these changes were wrought, in part, when millions of immigrants were engaged in entrepreneurial actives. In California over a million immigrants came to join the gold rush, and many stayed to build the railroad and/or engaged in agriculture and manufacturing. An examination of the development of the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) gives us a window into the workings of the early American capitalist system. Specifically, I demonstrate how the political power of the company's early investors and principals - Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Charles Crocker - was derived from social networks. During the period under study, the networks of trusts these entrepreneurs brought from home to operate in California were place-based, which was in essence race-based. Because the terms of economic exchange were set politically, groups with strong political connections experienced wealth accumulation that was significantly better than other social groups. These results were evident in the making of the CPRR. Using the CPRR's own accounting ledgers and daily cash books as supplemented by railroad commission testimonies, I analyzed the motivations and decisions made by management at critical junctures. By tracing the timing and amount of cash receipts and disbursements, I infer the relationship of the payee/payer to the company, including the early investors taking the most risks. I also examine the mechanism by which conflicted transactions involving transfer of company assets to individual shareholders were effected. I introduce a business perspective into the discussions of the CPRR born of my thirty-years at the intersection of technology and finance in the Silicon Valley. Very much like Mark Hopkins, I was chief financial officer of a start-up company, and our team managed the day-to-day cash flow, making sure we made payroll every two weeks. We went through private funding with venture capitalists and finally brought the company to Wall Street in a public offering. The road show covered money centers such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco, cities that Stanford and Huntington tapped in the 1870s. What emerges is a picture of an entrepreneurial capitalist system with strong ties to political power centers where legislation was often to benefit one group to the detriment of others. This study contributes to our understanding of how our sociopolitical system came about and how our world came to be.

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Chang Gordon H. 
Hu-DeHart Evelyn 
Van Slyke Lyman P.
Episodic degassing from unsteady lava lake convection in Ray Lava Lake, Mount Erebus, Antarctica

Lava lakes are surface features that represent the upper portion of volcanic systems, and their behavior places limits on processes occurring in the interior of volcanoes. Persistently active lava lakes show continuous degassing and open convection over years to decades, which implies near steady-state conditions. The persistently active lava lake on Mount Erebus, Ross Island, Antarctica, known as Ray Lake, shows periodic activity in the form of small pulses of gas and hot magma at the surface every 5-18 minutes and occasional Strombolian eruptions while maintaining long-term near steady-state behavior in temperature, heat flux, gas flux, and composition when time-averaged over multiple cycles. This episodicity has been most commonly attributed to gas slugs: large gas bubbles rising through the conduit that burst at the surface. Alternate hypotheses, however, include unstable bidirectional flow in which episodicity is driven from the upper portion of the conduit. These hypotheses invoke a conduit source for episodicity. We present numerical simulations of Ray Lake with a constant inflow rate of gas-rich magma from the conduit and consider periodicity present in the convective pattern of the lava lake, consistent with a near-surface cause of episodicity. Our simulations of convection on Mount Erebus show drip instabilities with a periodicity of 5-20 minutes. Our results match the observed behavior well, showing a similar period as field observations. An increase in ascent velocity when magma enters the openly convecting lake can result in periodic behavior without invoking conduit dynamics, challenging existing ideas about near-surface volcanic conduit processes in persistently degassing volcanoes.

Keywords:  Department of Geophysics
School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
Lava Lakes
Magma
Convection
Thesis
Advisor: Suckale Jenny
Keller Tobias
Epistemic roles of mathematical diagrams

Visual representations of various kinds are ubiquitous in pure and applied mathematics, in the natural and social sciences, as well as in many other human activities. By investigating these visualizations, many questions arise: What are they? How do they function? What are the conditions of their correct use? Why are they, at times, such eﬀective aids to cognition? What type of knowledge can they promote? In this thesis, I focus on diagrams in mathematics, not exclusively in geometry, but in diﬀerent mathematical domains as well. Despite the extreme variety of mathematical diagrams, it is possible to distill some of their characteristic properties. Diagrams are not usually static bookkeeping devices, but displays for advancing thought in a dynamic way: experts can manipulate diagrams in order to discover and prove mathematical results. In this thesis, I will first provide an epistemological framework for investigating mathematics in a way that appreciates how human agents actually practice it and in particular how they engage with concrete external artifacts. I will show that the normative dimension at play in mathematics is not monolithic, but multi-dimensional, with different objects of normative assessment and diﬀerent appropriate sorts of evaluation. After this general discussion, I will investigate the importance of mathematical notations and then I will put diagrammatic notations into focus. I will propose a technical deﬁnition of mathematical diagrams based on their two-dimensionality and on their operative dimension, which is constituted by the supported manipulations that correspond to mathematical operations. This deﬁnition will allow me to unveil the features of diagrams that underwrite the possibility of them entering into the inferential structure of proofs. To exemplify and sustain my theses I will then present three case studies from contemporary mathematics; these examples are representative of diﬀerent ﬁelds (knot theory, homological algebra, and category theory) and will allow me to exhibit the heterogeneity of diagrammatic notations in mathematics. I will show that in all these cases diagrams not only have important heuristic roles, but play a justiﬁcatory role as well.

Keywords: Philosophy.
Advisor: Ryckman Thomas 
Friedman Michael
Giaquinto M. (Marcus)
Lawlor Krista
The equivariant cobordism category

For a finite group G, we define an equivariant cobordism category C_d^G. Objects of the category are (d-1)-dimensional closed smooth G-manifolds and morphisms are smooth d-dimensional equivariant cobordisms. We identify the homotopy type of its classifying space (i.e. geometric realization of its simplicial nerve) as the fixed points of the infinite loop space of an equivariant spectrum.

Keywords: Mathematics.
Advisor: Galatius Søren
Carlsson Gunnar
Cohen Ralph L.
Essays in econometrics

In this dissertation, I propose novel approaches to causal inference in the settings characterized by an explicit clustering structure. I study different aspects of this problem, considering settings with few large clusters as well as with many small clusters. The dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay proposes a new model for causal inference in the settings with few large clusters and cluster-level treatment assignment. The second essay studies causal inference questions in the settings with many clusters of moderate size and individual-level treatment assignment. In the first essay, I construct a nonlinear model for causal inference in the empirical settings where researchers observe individual-level data for few large clusters over at least two time periods. It allows for identification (sometimes partial) of the counterfactual distribution, in particular, identifying average treatment effects and quantile treatment effects. The model is flexible enough to handle multiple outcome variables, multidimensional heterogeneity, and multiple clusters. It applies to the settings where the new policy is introduced in some of the clusters, and a researcher additionally has information about the pretreatment periods. I argue that in such environments we need to deal with two different sources of bias: selection and technological. In my model, I employ standard methods of causal inference to address the selection problem and use pretreatment information to eliminate the technological bias. In case of one-dimensional heterogeneity, identification is achieved under natural monotonicity assumptions. The situation is considerably more complicated in case of multidimensional heterogeneity where I propose three different approaches to identification using results from transportation theory. The second essay is co-authored with Guido Imbens. We develop a new estimator for the average treatment effect in the observational studies with unobserved cluster-level heterogeneity. We show that under particular assumptions on the sampling scheme the unobserved confounders can be integrated out conditioning on the empirical distribution of covariates and policy variable within the cluster. To make this result practical we impose a particular exponential family structure that implies that a low-dimensional sufficient statistic can summarize the empirical distribution. Then we use modern causal inference methods to construct a novel doubly robust estimator. The proposed estimator uses the estimated propensity score to adjust the familiar fixed effect estimator.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Benkard C. Lanier 
Imbens Guido 
Athey Susan
Essays in econometrics and industrial organization

In my dissertation I study econometric methods of causal inference with a particular focus on the use of prediction methods developed by researchers in the fields of statistical learning, machine learning, and pattern recognition. I'm also interested in the application of these methods as well as the more traditional ones to answer relevant policy questions. Chapter 1 (joint with Guido Imbens) considers the synthetic control method developed by Abadie, Diamond, Gardeazabal, and Hainmueller in several influential papers. The method is designed for estimating the effect of a treatment, in the presence of a single treated unit and a number of control units, with pre-treatment outcomes observed for all units. The method constructs a set of weights such that selected covariates and pre-treatment outcomes of the treated unit are approximately matched by a weighted average of the control units (the synthetic control). The weights are restricted to be nonnegative and sum to one. These restrictions are important partly because they make it easier for the procedure to obtain unique weights even when the number of lagged outcomes is modest relative to the number of control units, a common setting in applications. In the chapter we propose a generalization of the synthetic control procedure that allows the weights to be negative, and their sum to differ from one, and that allows for a permanent additive difference between the treated unit and the controls, similar to the difference-in-difference procedures. The weights directly minimize the distance between the lagged outcomes for the treated and the control units, using elastic net regularization to deal with a potentially large number of possible control units. In Chapter 2 (joint with Ali Yurukoglu) we quantify how bargaining power derived from firm size affects the analysis of downstream mergers and the profitability of downstream entry in the multichannel television industry. We estimate an empirical model of the industry which features negotiations between the upstream content producers and the downstream distributors of varying size. We estimate that large distributors like Comcast are able to negotiate about 25% lower content fees than smaller downstream firms such as Cablevision. We evaluate the short-run welfare effects of several recently reviewed mergers taking into account the size effects in negotiations. We also assess the degree to which size based bargaining power creates contracts which are a barrier to entry for new distributors.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Benkard C. Lanier 
Imbens Guido 
Yurukoglu Ali
Essays in economics of education

This dissertation focuses on how choices of students are affected by information by using experimental and empirical methods. Students are different from other decision makers since they mostly do not bear the costs of education directly and that the rewards of education are far in the future. However, the decisions they make are quite important both for themselves and for society. In the first paper, I explore how students' study decisions are affected by information about returns to effort. To answer this question, I design a field experiment where students enroll in an online platform to learn Spanish. I find that change in beliefs affects study effort, but that the direction of the response depends on one's locus of control, the extent to which individuals feel control over their outcomes. In the second paper, I explore how students' major choices are affected by information about returns to different majors. Using one of the biggest negative shocks to labor market outcomes in U.S. history, I look at whether the Great Recession affected field of study choices of students. I find that after the recession, there is a decrease in (the percentage of) degrees awarded in recession-sensitive majors and an increase in (the percentage of) degrees awarded in recession-resistant majors in areas with severe unemployment shocks. The third paper, co-authored with Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Donna Harris, explores how students' investments choices are affected by information from their peers in a laboratory setting. We find that communicating with a peer improves the quality of financial decision making. More interestingly, we find that this type of communication is most beneficial when it is between students who have similar knowledge levels.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Bernheim B. Douglas 
Hoxby Caroline Minter 
Chetty Rajendra
Dupas Pascaline
Essays in energy and environmental economics

This dissertation explores topics in energy and environmental economics, and in particular regulations intended to address market failures in the purchase and utilization of energy-consuming durable goods. The market failures in question include environmental externalities as well as information frictions in durable goods purchase. The durable goods studied range from household appliances to homes themselves. Although market-based approaches to these challenges are becoming more common, subsidies and standards are still much more widely practiced public policy tools. Given the pervasiveness of the regulatory approach over the market-based approach, evaluating the success of these energy-consuming durable goods subsidies and standards allows policy makers to use society's scarce resources where they are most effective.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Wolak Frank A. 
Goulder Lawrence H. (Lawrence Herbert) 
Reiss Peter C. (Peter Clemens)