VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Integrated Education and Training: Making Sense of a New Form of Vocationalism Impacting Adult ESL Learners

Discussions of English language access and instruction continue to be framed by human capital perspectives that view English as a set of linguistic skills tied to employment opportunities. Integrated Education and Training (IET) is an example of the latest curricular approach to the ‘mainstream' English as a second Language instruction at Adult Education agencies. It strives to complement the English curriculum with the so-called ‘employability’ skills to help learners adapt to the new language and culture of work in the United States. This dissertation examines IET’s underpinning assumptions and its implications for adult immigrants of color from marginalized backgrounds, who comprise the majority of learners at these agencies./nFirst, it situates the IET development as an example of a vocational approach within the broader context of school-to-work reform efforts and explores its connections to the neoliberal ideological thinking. With close attention to the new job categories and the 21st century skills landscape, and drawing on historical parallels, it then examines the rise of IET in light of the realities of class, race, and the asymmetrical power relations that characterize the modern nation state. The analysis is based on an intersectional approach centering the way both race and class relations manifest in the educational experiences of people of color. Second, using a mixed method approach, the study analyzes data to illuminate students’ uptake of the vocational discourse. While limited research on IET and similar models of curriculum and instruction has focused on the assessment of outcomes and effectiveness, there has been little scrutiny about the relevance to students’ aspirations and pre-established goals. Specifically, research has not addressed the possibility of constraining impacts on students’ aspirations./nFindings indicate that the learning module, implemented within an experimental framework, impacted IET participants differently and that the practices of ‘realistic goal setting’ along with the phenomena of ‘social mirroring’ were central to students’ sense making. Analysis reveals that learners with greater educational capital in their country of origin seemed to have higher aspirations but were more readily influenced by the promise of IET. For these learners, IET succeeded in promoting minimal training and subsequent lower- grade employment options. Data further suggest that concepts such as ‘stress and time management’, ‘prioritizing’ and ‘multi-tasking’ took center stage, and once invoked by the teacher, were reified by students through engagement in typical classroom practices. This is consequential for learning, in that the deployment of such narratives in social interaction frames students’ opportunities to build identities as neoliberal subjects. It highlights critical issues that need to be taken into account in the design of ESL learning environments, especially for students of color from persistently marginalized backgrounds.

Advisor: Leonardo, Zeus
Metal Optics Based nanoLEDs: In Search of a Fast, Efficient, Nanoscale Light Emitter

Since the invention of the laser, stimulated emission has been the de facto king of optical communication. Lasers can be directly modulated at rates as high as 50GHz, much faster than a typical solid state light-emitting diode (LED) that is limited by spontaneous emission to <1GHz. Unfortunately, lasers have a severe scaling problem; they require large cavities operated at high power to achieve efficient lasing. A properly designed LED can be made arbitrarily small and still operate with high-efficiency. On-chip interconnects is an area that is in desperate need of a high-speed, low-power optical emitter that can enable on-chip links to replace current high-loss metal wires. In this work, I will show that by utilizing proper antenna design, a nanoLED can be created that is faster than a laser while still operating at >50% efficiency./nI start by formulating an optical antenna circuit model whose elements are based completely off of antenna geometry. This allows for intuitive antenna design and suggests that rate enhancements up to ~3,000x are possible while keeping antenna efficiency >50%. Such a massive speed-up in spontaneous emission would enable an LED that can be directly modulated at 100’s of GHz, much faster than any laser./nI then use the circuit model to design an arch-dipole antenna, a dipole antenna with an inductive arch across the feedgap. I experimentally demonstrate a free-standing arch-dipole based nanoLED with rate enhancement of 115x and 66% antenna efficiency. Because the emitter is InGaAsP, a common III-V material, I experimentally show that this device can be easily and efficiently coupled into an InP waveguide. Experimental coupling efficiencies up to 70% are demonstrated and directional antennas are employed that offer front to back emission ratios of 3:1./nFinally, I show that a nanoLED can still have high quantum yield by using a transition metal dichalcogenide, WSe2, as the emitter material. By coupling a monolayer of WSe2 to a cavity-backed slot antenna, I demonstrate a record rate enhancement for a solid state emitter of 320x. In addition, the nanoscale devices (30nm x 250nm) have a quantum yield comparable to an unprocessed WSe2 monolayer. Such a fast, efficient, nano-emitter not only has the ability to reduce power consumption in central processing units (CPUs) by orders of magnitude but may also revolutionize integrated sensing and imaging applications at the nanoscale.

Advisor: Wu, Ming C
Local Probe Investigation of the Electronic Structure of Molecule–Based and Transition–Metal–Based Low Dimensional Systems Using Cryogenic Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy

Of the many fascinating topics in condensed matter physics, this dissertation aims to/ncover three subtopics in some detail: 1) Functionalization of surfaces – using single molecules/nand/or atoms to change the behavior of a surface. 2) Low dimensional systems – 0D, 1D,/nor 2D materials whose behavior is often drastically different from the 3D world. 3) 3D to/n2D crossover – studying what happens to materials as they are thinned down from a bulk/n3D morphology to a single 2D layer. In addition to these areas of research, there will also/nbe a focus on the modifications I made to the Toucan STM, and the rationale behind those/nchanges. This portion, in combination with Niv Levy’s dissertation, should serve as a user’s/nmanual for that microscope.

Advisor: Crommie, Michael F
Strategies for Metabolic Pathway Optimization in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Metabolic engineering of microorganisms promises to enable the large-scale, renewable production of many valuable molecules that are difficult to synthesize using existing methods. To achieve commercial viability for these processes, the most difficult chal-lenge typically is not identifying a pathway to produce a desired molecule; rather, it is optimizing the production host to maximize titer, yield, and productivity. The process of strain optimization mirrors other engineering disciplines, consisting of three critical phases—rational design, prototyping, and testing—which are performed iteratively un-til the desired specifications have been met. Here, we present new technologies for more efficiently navigating each stage of the engineering cycle in the widely used pro-duction host, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeast), which benefits from a long history in industrial fermentations and a plethora of genetic tools. First, we describe a standard-ized framework for yeast strain prototyping that enables rapid and high-throughput experimentation. We then turn to strain testing, where we focus on optimizing the pro-duction of benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (BIAs), a large family of plant secondary me-tabolites with a variety of therapeutic uses. Using a novel biosensing strategy that links production of a key BIA intermediate to the generation of a highly fluorescent plant pigment, we perform library screening to identify yeast mutants capable of producing BIAs directly from glucose. Finally, we attempt to improve upon our ability to rational-ly design efficient production strains by taking the initial steps to repurpose the peroxi-some as a synthetic organelle. We propose organelle compartmentalization as a general-izable strategy for reducing undesirable and difficult-to-predict interactions between an engineered metabolic pathway and the cellular context in which it is expressed. Taken together, these tools improve our ability to quickly iterate through the engineering cycle to develop yeast strains for the efficient production of valuable molecules.

Advisor: Dueber, John E
Mambí Totems and Reconcentrado Taboos: Violence and the Unjust Dead in Cuban Literary and Visual Cultures

This study examines the representational strategies that Cubans have employed in order to come to terms with violence in their revolutionary history and the extents to which such strategies have worked in the service of alibi as opposed to critique. Accordingly, the study looks most closely at the discursive and visual portrayals of the mambí, guerrilla soldiers of Cuba’s wars for independence (1868-98) and, not incidentally, icons of Cuban identity and revolutionary ethos. Within or relative to these very portrayals and the same wartime history, however, stands the specter of the reconcentrado, victims to Spain’s “camps of reconcentration” and by far the largest and most tragic casualties of the wars. Drawing on rhetorical and contrapuntal reads of war literature and historiography, political cartoons, monuments, and revolutionary era cinema, I tease out the myths and iconography by which the mambí has come to bespeak racial fraternity, virility, cunning, martyrdom and liberation, whereas, by stark contrast, the reconcentrado bespeaks vulnerability, imperialism, anonymity and atrocity./nIn this respect, four representational strategies stand out: the reconcentrado as (i) a campesina or señorita damsel in distress under the threat of rape by Spaniards and in need of a machete-endowed savoir; (ii) an emaciated, sickly mass of anonymous children with vacant gazes and no voice, carnal evidence of an atrocity that, presumably, speaks for itself yet clearly cites Holocaust iconography; (iii) interned mambisa or patriot who stoically bears her and her children’s agony; or (iv) as sheer absence, where only the mambises, their heroic machete charges, and the cry “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” are visible and audible. Whichever the case, the actual history of antagonistic and coercive acts within or by the Liberation Army and any collateral responsibility for the unjust dead are disavowed; in lieu of critique, thus, the reconcentrado is rendered an alibi for revolutionary violence, centralized power, and nationalist interpellations in which sacrifice for the Patria constitutes the “sublime.”/nCloser scrutiny, however, reveals that the reconcentrado could signify otherwise. Given her agony, the paternalism with which she was dealt, and her labors against an unjust death, deaths for which patriotic consolations ring hollow, I argue the reconcentrado, as ethical figure and as historical fact, speaks on behalf of non-violence, democratic voice, and the summons to care for life at its most precarious. Such ethical hails have proven all the timelier in a “post-socialist” Cuba where mambí mythology and revolutionary identity have had to wrestle not only with transnational finance capital and consumerist culture but also the specters of (UMAP) labor camp confinados and Special Period balseros.

Advisor: Butler, Judith
Trinh, Minh-ha
From Genes to Circuits: Genetic Suppression of Epilepsy in Drosophila

Seizure and epilepsy disorders are debilitating neurological disorders characterized by recurrent, high-frequency and coordinated neural activity. Progress has been made in the last few decades to determine genetic loci and mutations that increase the susceptibility to these various types of neurological disorders. Additionally, much focus has centered on the voltage-gated sodium channel SCN1A, an identified seizure susceptibility gene with over 500 mutations that produce a spectrum of phenotypes in humans. In some types of epilepsy, current anti-epileptic drugs are unsuccessful- and in some cases, even exacerbate the phenotypes, making development of novel anti-epileptic drugs very important. Modeling epilepsies and intractable epilepsies is possible with the model organism Drosophila. In addition for the need of new anti-epileptic drugs, less is known about the extent of how neural circuits are differentially affected by the seizure mutations, which will be important for fully understanding the mechanism of anti-epileptic drugs. In this dissertation, I investigate the circuits involved not only in creating the seizure, but also the circuits that can be utilized to suppress seizures and high-frequency neuronal activity. Using two different approaches of manipulating neural circuits in Drosophila, I identify neurons critical for the seizure sensitivity and for suppression of the seizures. First, through the use of genetic rescue experiments, I determine the sets of neurons that are important for rescuing seizure sensitivity in a seizure-sensitive mutant, finding that primarily excitatory neurons are most effective at suppressing seizures, in contrast to inhibitory neurons, suggesting that the bang-sensitivity in the mutant is due to excess excitatory activity rather than insufficient inhibitory activity. In the next approach, using shibirets1 to restrict synaptic vesicle recycling, I determine the importance of different neurons in the spread or manifestation of the seizure, and what neurons are sufficient for seizure suppression. In different seizure-sensitive mutants, I find that excitatory circuits, and the giant fiber neurons, a pair of neurons involved in the “escape” response and other behaviors, strongly inhibit seizures, making them important neurons within the seizure circuit. Overall, only a portion of the nervous system needs to be targeted by anti-epileptic/ndrugs or genetic modifications, indicating that the circuits necessary to suppress seizures need not be the same circuits that create them.

Advisor: Tanouye, Mark
Financial Constraints, Corporate Investment and Future Profitability

This paper provides evidence consistent with the idea that the implications of investment on future profitability differ for financially constrained and financially flexible firms. In particular, this study finds that the investment of financially constrained firms is associated with higher persistence in profitability than the investment of flexible firms. This paper also finds that this result is related to differences in future write-downs and goodwill impairments, suggesting that the difference in persistence in profitability between both groups of firms is associated with differences in investment quality. Finally, it shows that investors do not fully understand the role of financial constraints on the relation between investment and future profitability, since the investment of financially constrained firms is associated with higher one-year ahead abnormal returns than the investment of flexible firms. Moreover, for financially constrained firms, large levels of investment are not associated with negative abnormal returns, suggesting that the negative relation between corporate investment and future abnormal stock returns documented in previous research is not general to the entire cross-section of firms.

Advisor: Dechow, Patricia M
Sloan, Richard G
Contention and Control: U.S. City and Police Responses to the Occupy Campaigns of 2011

Abstract/nContention and Control: U.S. City and Police Responses to the Occupy/nCampaigns of 2011/nby/nNicholas B. Adams/nDoctor of Philosophy in Sociology/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Kim Voss, Chair/nResearch on social movement repression and protest policing has identified four main factors affecting police responses to protest: political context, police capacity, police culture, and the characteristics and actions of the movements police face. However, there has been little consensus about when or under what conditions these factors influence police decisions. Case studies and large-N studies featuring thin data on incomparable cases have not been able to assess the relative strengths of these factors in determining protest policing under varying circumstances. This dissertation treats 184 U.S. Occupy campaigns as a natural experiment on U.S. cities and towns to explore how political context and police factors shape protester and police behavior, and how they do so over the course of protest campaigns. Using innovative text-analysis methods that combine the best of human hand-coding and automated techniques like topic modeling, this dissertation analyses reports of protester and police activities from over 8,000 local, regional, and national news accounts to find (1) that the Occupy campaigns followed a rather similar life course, and (2) that, contrary to going sociological theory, police are influenced by political elites at the city level and behave strategically. City and police responses are more decisive in cities where political authority is relatively concentrated in an executive. Police are more accommodating of movements when elections are near. Police with relatively small budgets or workforces are more likely to shut down protest campaigns sooner. Departments with relatively fewer officers are also more likely to avoid force-on-force mass arrests, preferring to arrest individuals and smaller groups of protesters. Police departments dedicated to a community policing philosophy are more accommodating of movements, and more likely to focus enforcement efforts on individuals rather than engage in group punishment. And, departments in cities with high violent crime rates are more likely to take a nonchalant approach to protest campaigns.

Advisor: Voss, Kim
A Crenelated Wall: The Rise and Fall of Southern Baptist Institutions for the Separation of Church and State, 1936-1979

This dissertation centers on the origins and projects of the Baptist Joint Committee (BJC), founded and funded in 1936 by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and the Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU), founded in 1948 as the brainchild of Southern Baptist elites. I argue these organizations were primarily concerned with opposing American Catholic projects, especially those which sought public monies for parochial schools. Ironically, the structures and organizations which greatly aided this effort to expand religious tolerance and liberty in this period had their origins in concerns about the Catholic Church and American Catholicism held by many Baptists./n/nA crisis point for the BJC and the POAU occurred when, in 1963, in the Schempp case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the devotional use of the Bible and prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. This decision was deeply unpopular with most evangelical politicians and lay people. Working against pressures and measures to amend the First Amendment “to put God back in the schools” in the post-Schempp U.S., evangelical elites of the BJC and POAU helped save it from emendation by vigorously, systematically, and publicly opposing the Becker Amendment and similar legislation. However, BJC and POAU support for Schempp and its de-Christianization of the public schools greatly alienated the broad evangelical support for these organizations. By the 1980s, after the SBC was captured by its right wing, Southern Baptist support was effectively withdrawn from the BJC and the POAU, and these organizations lost their evangelical underpinnings. The BJC and the POAU reinvented themselves and subsequently worked to oppose those projects of the Religious Right they deemed contrary to the separation of church and state—a Religious Right where, ironically, the SBC now played a large role.

Advisor: Hollinger, David A
Cándida Smith, Richard
Bioorthogonal Chemical Tools Toward the Study of Bacterial Pathogens

In this dissertation, I describe the development of bioorthogonal chemical tools toward the study of bacterial pathogens during infection. Bioorthogonal chemistry has enabled the visualization of biomolecules not amenable to fluorescent protein fusion. By feeding an organism an unnatural metabolite bearing a bioorthogonal chemical reporter, the reporter is incorporated into the cellular biopolymer of interest and can be detected by bioorthogonal reaction with an imaging agent. To adapt this approach towards visualizing pathogenic bacteria in an infection setting, my dissertation research focused on two main areas. First, I developed a family of fluorogenic azide probes activated by bioorthogonal click reactions with alkynes. These probes offer significant advantages in imaging studies where it is challenging to wash away unreacted probe, such as within live cells or in live organisms, the settings in which bacterial pathogens reside. Secondly, I developed a family of unnatural D-alanine analogues bearing cyclooctynes, which are incorporated into nascent peptidoglycan in a wide variety of bacterial species and undergo bioorthogonal reactions with azides. In conjunction with the fluorogenic azide probes I developed, these analogues enabled the visualization of cell wall synthesis in an intracellular bacterial pathogen during infection.

Advisor: Bertozzi, Carolyn R.
Regulation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae Mating Pheromone Response: G-protein-coupled Receptor Ste2 Down-modulation by Specific α-Arrestins

The yeast G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) Ste2 is an integral plasma membrane protein that initiates response to an extracellular stimulus (the peptide mating pheromone α-factor) by mediating ligand-dependent activation of a cognate heterotrimeric G-protein. Prolonged pathway stimulation is detrimental, and feedback mechanisms have evolved that act at the receptor level to limit the duration of signaling and stimulate recovery from pheromone-induced G1 arrest. In the research described in this dissertation, I found that three α-arrestins — Rod1/Art4, Rog3/Art7 and Ldb19/Art1 — serve as adaptors to promote the ubiquitinylation-dependent internalization of Ste2 and block its ability to signal, thereby desensitizing the cells to continued stimulation. Deleting the genes encoding these three α-arrestins increases the sensitivity of a MATa haploid cell to mating pheromone and results in an increase in Ste2 abundance at the plasma membrane. Conversely, overexpression of either Rod1 or Rog3 enhances the rate of adaptation. To contribute to negative regulation of the mating pheromone response pathway, Ldb19 requires binding of a HECT domain class of ubiquitin ligase, Rsp5, and most likely clears misfolded Ste2 from the PM. I found that Rod1 and Rog3 contribute to clearance of the pheromone-bound state of Ste2 and negatively regulate the mating pheromone response pathway by both Rsp5-dependent and Rsp5-independent mechanisms. In addition, I identified two classes of protein kinases (Snf1/AMPK and Ypk1/SGK) that phosphorylate and inactivate Rod1. Conversely, I showed that the phosphoprotein phosphatase responsible for dephosphorylating and re-activating Rod1 is calcineurin / PP2B. Because the S. cerevisiae genome does not encode any β-arrestins, the findings I made and present in this dissertation are the first to show that α-arrestins alone are capable of negatively regulating a GPCR.

Advisor: Thorner, Jeremy