VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Consistent population estimates: an application to Brazil

Demographers have long been aware that the practical application of basic demographic identities often leads to inconsistent estimates due to data quality limitations. Despite the considerable effort to produce demographic estimates and reconcile inconsistent demographic data in different contexts, this issue remains unsolved. This dissertation proposes a Bayesian probabilistic approach that allows for a concurrent estimation of consistent counts of population, mortality, fertility and migration. Old and new methods are combined, thus building upon well-established demographic techniques and statistical methods./nThis dissertation addresses these issues in three chapters. Chapter 3 describes a set of methods to estimate and reconcile past demographic data, including measures of uncertainty. These methods are highly flexible and applicable to different contexts, both at national and subnational levels, with varying availability and quality of data. In addition to reconciling past population estimates, the methods detailed in this dissertation are concerned with estimating fertility, mortality and migration based on a set of raw observed data. Chapter 4 presents novel estimates and analysis of population, fertility, mortality and migration for Brazil and its 27 states for the period 1980-2010, based on several methods and data sources. Chapter 5 applies the data obtained in Chapter 4 to the methods presented in Chapter 3 to produce demographic estimates for Brazil and its three selected states./nThis dissertation offers several important methodological contributions to the fields of formal demography and statistical demography. The application of the proposed methods for Brazil and its states unveils new perspectives for generating higher quality demographic estimates in the country. Among other findings, the results reveal higher internal migration flows than those estimated with census data, and fertility estimates that differ from previous work./nThis dissertation also offers substantial methodological contributions specifically toward techniques of fertility and mortality estimation. Chapter 4 presents a new sensitivity analysis for the Brass P/F ratio method to evaluate the magnitude of bias in the results of its application when one or more conditions of the method are not met. This leads to a refinement in the original method to correct for these biases. This chapter also introduces a method to adjust for bias on recent deaths in the household reported in censuses. The application of the method for Brazil shows that such adjustment greatly improves the efficiency of mortality estimation, particularly at old ages, resolving one of the main limitations of these data.

Advisor: Wachter, Kenneth W
Feehan, Dennis M
Kitchenette Building: A Cultural History

Kitchenette Building: A Cultural History is an interdisciplinary investigation of kitchenette buildings on the South Side of Chicago during the 1940s and ’50s. Kitchenette buildings were the primary habitation for black southern migrants establishing themselves in the densely populated Black Belt. In the project, I contend that the kitchenette building of mid-twentieth-century black Chicago is the material, discursive, and symbolic representation of black exclusion from the modern nation manifested in a local urban setting. I examine literary, archival, and visual texts of the era using performance and design theories, and I offer a theoretical framework of black spatial affordance for the interrogation of these domestic spaces. This project, driven by the unique demands of analyzing the site and symbol of the Black Belt kitchenette, engages the Great Migration, the Chicago Black Renaissance, the Chicago School of Sociology, urban design, and local and federal policy./nWhile countless scholars have dedicated attention to Chicago’s housing projects, few have investigated the domestic spaces that preceded them and that in many ways precipitated the city’s mid-century housing policy. Until now, the nuances of kitchenette living have been underexplored, although the vast majority of black residents in Chicago’s Black Belt in the mid-twentieth century had connection to kitchenette buildings: through residence, proximity, enterprise, or advocacy. Kitchenette Building: A Cultural History addresses this lacuna in scholarship on Chicago’s history of housing, urban race and space relations, and black domesticity. Furthermore, it revisits the centrality of representation in the making and documentation of black life in Chicago./nMoreover, I argue that the ongoing desires, struggles, and strivings for homemaking that took place in or in association with Black Belt kitchenette buildings belie the struggle for inclusion in the modern nation black Americans aspired to during the mid-twentieth century. I suggest that the kitchenette offers entree into the geographical, social, economic, and political landscapes of Chicago in general, and of black Chicago in particular. The kitchenette exposes the contours of black domesticity and spatiality as they intersect with American urban modernity.

Advisor: Catanese, Brandi W
‘Jewish Dionysus’: Heinrich Heine and the Politics of Literature

Heinrich Heine’s body of work presents seeming disparities between poetry and prose, Romantic lyricism and bitter polemics, love and hate, manifesting the complexity of the author and his vision. Another fundamental yet elusive dimension of Heine’s work involves his Jewish background. Hannah Arendt provocatively described Heine as “the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew,” in part because he recognized their implicit conflict. His ambivalent attitude toward Jews and Judaism and German-Jewish identity is difficult to separate from his contentiousness and humor. Heine has not been taken seriously enough in part because of a disinclination to approach him as a thinker, including what the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk called Heine’s “satirical, polemical... holy nonseriousness.” At stake is a ‘politics of literature’ in the sense of how literature is evaluated or categorized. Our task is to locate Heine’s original voice and his historical and contemporary significance./nThis study addresses Heine’s work largely in relation to his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. Heine’s belated dialogue with the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe involved their shared opposition to Christianity, nationalism, and Romanticism as a literary movement, as well as their love poetry reflecting the connection between their lives and their work. Heine’s engagement with German philosophy and his “Jewish” pantheism, associated with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, anticipated Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept “God is dead.” Heine’s Ludwig Börne. A Memorial defined the late liberal, converted Jew Ludwig Börne as a Christian or Jewish, ascetic, moralistic “Nazarene,’ in contrast to Heine and Goethe as pagan, sensual, art- loving “Hellenes.” At stake in part was Heine’s modern resistance as a Jew to others’ interpretations of what is a Jew./nFriedrich Nietzsche’s relation to Heine constitutes a particularly important consideration. The philosopher’s early infatuation with and later rejection of the composer Richard Wagner, announced in Nietzsche’s publication and revision of his Birth of Tragedy, can be understood as a turn back to Heine as an unacknowledged and humorous source for several of Wagner’s ideas. Nietzsche’s Dionysian outlook was anticipated by Heine’s iconoclastic response to German Hellenist interpretations of classical antiquity, although Heine combined his embrace of Dionysus with an ostensible late “conversion” to Judaism. Through his entertainingly thought- provoking art, Heine offers perhaps the definitive non-systematic thinker of profound ambivalence, internal conflicts, and radical juxtapositions of ideas, a unique ‘Jewish Dionysus.’

Advisor: Jay, Martin
Interplay of Galactic Winds and Circumgalactic Media

The flow of gas through the circumgalactic medium (CGM) regulates galaxy growth over cosmic time. Observations have recently revealed a complex multi-phase structure in the CGM that has challenged many of the established theories and highlights significant gaps in our understanding of this critical aspect of galaxy formation. The spatial scales relevant to the CGM span a huge range with its structure and evolution determined by small-scale processes—such as the launching of galactic winds by clustered supernovae and thermal instability in the hydrostatic halo—and large-scale processes—such as cosmological accretion. I will describe my efforts to use controlled numerical simulations to understand the details and interplay of these multi-scale processes in order to develop a coherent picture of the CGM that is consistent with observations.

Advisor: Quataert, Eliot
Mechanisms to establish higher-order chromosome structure and regulate gene expression

In species that use chromosome-based sex determination, the copy number of sex/nchromosomes differs between the two sexes. Multiple different molecular mechanisms have/nevolved independently in diverse animal taxa to compensate for this imbalance in sex/nchromosome dose. In Drosophila species, gene expression from the single X in males is/nupregulated twofold. In Caenorhabditis species, genes from the two hermaphrodite Xs are/ndownregulated by half. In mammals, one of the two X chromosomes is inactivated in females./nIn Chapter 1, I use these three dosage compensation strategies to illustrate the variety of ways/nin which gene expression can be coordinately regulated across an entire chromosome. The/nproteins and non-coding RNAs that enact dosage compensation also change histone marks over/nbroad domains, compact chromosomes, restructure higher-order domain organization, and/nreposition X chromosomes within the nucleus, providing valuable models to dissect how/nchromosomes are organized at multiple scales./nIn Chapter 2, I use the process of Caenorhabditis elegans X-chromosome dosage compensation/nto investigate how chromosome architecture is established and its relationship to gene/nexpression. In C. elegans, a dosage compensation complex (DCC) equalizes X expression/nbetween sexes by repressing transcription from the two hermaphrodite Xs by half while also/nestablishing a unique structure composed of megabase-scale topologically associating domains/n(TADs). DCC-dependent TAD boundaries all contain a strong DCC binding site (rex site). By/nmaking a series of rex site deletions and insertions and measuring the resulting chromosome/nstructure, I determined that DCC binding at a strong rex site is necessary and sufficient for/nboundary formation. Deleting all eight of the rex sites at DCC-dependent boundaries/nrecapitulated the TAD structure of a DCC mutant. When TAD structure was disrupted but most/nDCC binding was retained, X chromosome expression was not changed, indicating that TADs are/nneither a cause nor consequence of X repression. However, the worms showed increased/nthermosensitivity, accelerated aging, and shortened lifespan, suggesting a role for chromosome/nstructure in regulating stress and aging programs.

Advisor: Meyer, Barbara J.
The Cult of Coercion: Religion and Strategic Culture in British Counterinsurgency

Why are religious civil wars so difficult to resolve peacefully? This dissertation argues that states, not just insurgents, drive the intractability of religious conflicts. More specifically, it draws on insights from social psychology, along with religious and strategic studies, to develop and test a novel theoretical framework for why and when government officials refuse to compromise with opposition movements that mobilize along religious lines./nThe argument posits that Western political and military elites share a secular strategic culture that heightens the correspondence between religious insurgents’ behavior and motives. This cognitive bias leads decision makers to infer that religious guerrillas fight to radically alter the status quo, rather than protest unfavorable conditions, such as poverty or territorial occupation. It is most influential when religious demands represent a central incompatibility in the conflict and counterinsurgents face an unfamiliar faith tradition. Ultimately, government officials discount the efficacy of a negotiated settlement because they conclude their opponents will stop at nothing to achieve their objective. It is not that religious insurgents are necessarily unwilling to make concessions; it is that they cannot credibly do so./nThese claims are tested with comparative evidence from British counterinsurgency campaigns during the early postwar period with an emphasis on Mandatory Palestine, Cyprus, and Kenya. The dissertation draws on original data collected from more than a half dozen archives in Great Britain, Cyprus, and Israel. This includes documents from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and housed at The National Archives of the United Kingdom that have only been available to the public since 2013. For each case, process tracing is employed to show as explicitly as possible the link between British decision-makers general beliefs about religion and their strategic preferences over the course of the conflict./nThe dissertation’s argument and findings challenge the influential notion that dissidents’ spiritual beliefs alone drive civil wars to endure longer and remain resistant to bargained solutions. In addition, they promise to augment the study of religious conflict by establishing a research agenda on the role of state forces in such engagements.

Advisor: Hassner, Ron E
Managing city traffic with boundary flow control

Boundary flow control is potentially one of the most effective approaches for city traffic management. Under the control scheme, a city is partitioned into multiple, properly-sized neighborhoods and the transfer flows crossing neighborhood boundaries are metered. In this work, we divide boundary flow control into two stages and address them separately. In the first stage, the total metering rate of each boundary is determined. In the second, the boundary metering rate is distributed among individual road links./nThe first stage is handled by a model-predictive controller embedded within a macro- scopic traffic model. The most commonly used macroscopic traffic model, which we refer to as Neighborhood Transmission Model (NTM), uses Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams (MFDs) in combination with flow conservation laws to model the dynamics of neighborhood vehicle accumulations. We propose an enhanced NTM, which resolves multiple concerns of previous models. Unlike its predecessors, our model accounts for the constraining effects that outbound queues at the boundary can impose on a neighborhood’s circulating traffic. It also differentiates between saturated and under-saturated metering operations. With the proposed NTM, we use a model-predictive control algorithm to generate control actions at small time steps based on their forecasted impacts. Our scalable numerical method can do this for an arbitrary number of neighborhoods within a city. Computer simulations show that these enhancements improve the predictions of trip completion rates in a neighbor- hood, and of the rates at which vehicles cross metered boundaries. Optimal control actions generated as a result are similarly shown to do a better job in reducing the vehicle-hours traveled (VHT) in a city. VHT reductions stemming from the proposed model and from its predecessors differed by as much as 18%./nThe second stage of control distributes boundary metering rates onto individual road links along the controlled boundary, which we refer to as the metering distribution. An effective model-free approach for determining the metering distribution is proposed in this work. To do this, we represent the street network as a directed graph and formulate the metering distribution problem as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, which is solved with an actor-critic method. In extensive numerical experiments, the RL-based metering distribution policy shows consistently better performance in terms of VHT reduction than a baseline policy.

Advisor: Cassidy, Michael
Hospitality at Thresholds

If dwelling spaces, for example a house, serve the goal of habitation with the help of exterior walls which is to protect its inhabitants against adverse elements and with a door to instantiate hospitality and discern between enemy and friend, what is the reason for the designation of a special place often called a threshold? In other words, if humanity can be known and recognized in terms of its modes of dwelling such as resident, builder, occupier, host, guest, intruder, refugee, nomad, labor migrant, etc, still what can thresholds add to that anthropological knowledge if at all? By way of questioning the where, how, why, and when of thresholds, this dissertation attempts to describe those anthropological sites where hospitality (or the lack thereof) is turned into a problem of living space, where modes of dwelling have been effaced, degraded or replaced by phenomena such as upheavals, flows, dispersals, echoes at distance, refractions, and recurrences born out of concrete socio-historical events. In the vast territorial events spanning from the cold-war Iran to Stalinist Central Asia and to Post-war Tajikistan, socio-historical quagmires darkened by the double absence of epistemological clarity and spatial orientation, hospitality reveals a different dimensionality of knowledge/life, one less guaranteed in the embodied extensions of habitus and more promised in the ensouled spatium of threshold. In this sense, thresholds as well as this dissertation celebrate the anthropological possibility of that second dimension, the originary re-beginning, the being-for of a living space to come.

Advisor: Pandolfo, Stefania
The Generalized External Order, and Applications to Zonotopal Algebra

Extrapolating from the work of Las Vergnas on the external active order for matroid bases, and inspired by the structure of Lenz's forward exchange matroids in the theory of zonotopal algebra, we develop the combinatorial theory of the generalized external order. This partial ordering on the independent sets of an ordered matroid is a supersolvable join-distributive lattice which is a refinement of the geometric lattice of flats, and is fundamentally derived from the classical notion of matroid activity. We uniquely classify the lattices which occur as the external order of an ordered matroid, and we explore the intricate structure of the lattice's downward covering relations, as well as its behavior under deletion and contraction of the underlying matroid./nWe then apply this theory to improve our understanding of certain constructions in zonotopal algebra. We first explain the fundamental link between zonotopal algebra and the external order by characterizing Lenz's forward exchange matroids in terms of the external order. Next we describe the behavior of Lenz's zonotopal $\mathcal{D}$-basis polynomials under taking directional derivatives, and we use this understanding to provide a new algebraic construction for these polynomials. The construction in particular provides the first known algorithm for computing these polynomials which is computationally tractible for inputs of moderate size. Finally, we provide an explicit construction for the zonotopal $\mathcal{P}$-basis polynomials for the internal and semi-internal settings.

Advisor: Holtz, Olga
Byzantine Canon Law and Medieval Legal Pluralism: The Southern Italian Manuscripts (10th-14th Centuries)

This dissertation examines the role of legal culture in shaping the identity of the Greek Christians of southern Italy as a cultural and religious minority in the pluralistic pre-modern Mediterranean world. In the period in question, southern Italy passed from the jurisdiction of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire to that of the Latin Kingdom of Sicily and the Roman papacy. Nonetheless, the Italo-Greeks continued to compile and read manuscript collections of Byzantine religious law, known in Greek as ‘nomocanons’, for another three centuries afterwards. This study provides the first ever comprehensive attempt to identify and study the surviving nomocanons of southern Italy./nThe aims of the dissertation are threefold: to introduce the reader to the Italo-Greek nomocanons and their contents; to explain why they were produced and preserved under Latin rule; and to analyse what they reveal about the place of Greek-rite Christianity in medieval southern Italy. I have combined the theoretical perspective of legal anthropology – especially legal pluralism – with the methodology of material philology to examine the manuscripts as evidence for the legal, cultural, and religious context in which they were produced. My interpretation has been guided in particular by the legal scholar Robert Cover’s theory of law as a social discourse or narrative./nThe dissertation’s key conclusions are that the formal system of Byzantine religious law in southern Italy survived the Norman conquest for over a century as the local institutions of the Greek church remained largely intact. However, as the Italo-Greeks became more closely integrated into the institutional structures of the Church of Rome in the thirteenth century, the nomocanons began to lose their value as sources of legal authority. They came to serve instead as sources of cultural authority, used to explain and justify the maintenance of a separate Greek identity in the face of increasing assimilation into the Latin majority./nFinally, the dissertation provides a series of comprehensive descriptions of the contents and material characteristics of each of the manuscripts in question for scholarly reference.

Advisor: Mavroudi, Maria
Emotions at Work: Norms of Emotional Expression and Gender Dynamics in Workplace Communication

This dissertation examines how people express and exchange emotions in the workplace and how these expressions relate to their social positions in organizational networks. Prior literature has tended to focus on employees’ expressed emotions towards external actors, such as customers, which are often required by their job roles; this dissertation instead focuses on emotional exchanges between colleagues in routine communications at work. I investigate four key questions: (1) How do people express emotions in the workplace? (2) How do people respond to the emotions of others in the workplace? (3) What kinds of emotional expressions are associated with valuable positions in organizational networks, and for whom? (4) Are there social network rewards (or penalties) associated with engaging in the emotion work of aligning towards colleagues’ emotions? Core to this inquiry is gender, as a primary cultural frame for organizing social relations. I bridge insights from the sociology of gender with the social psychology of emotion to unpack how these factors shapes people’s tendencies to express their emotions, respond to the emotions of their colleagues, and construct and navigate networks inside of organizations./nFindings from these studies contribute to research across five domains by: (1) enhancing our understanding of the cultural and emotional experience of employees in the workplace; (2) unearthing a less visible form of emotion work; (3) highlighting gender differences in emotional expressions, emotion work, and social network positions; (4) expanding interactional accounts of how individuals navigate social networks; and (5) identifying gendered and emotional correlates of social network positions.

Advisor: Srivastava, Sameer B