VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A Nation under Joint Custody: How Conflicting Family Models divide US Politics

Across the globe and throughout history, politics are regularly divided into "left-leaning" and "right-leaning" camps. Explaining the sources of this conservative-liberal divide has become a major quest in the cognitive and social sciences. Early attempts have focused on self-interest as a possible explanation. However, as the self-interest hypothesis repeatedly failed, researchers' belief in its explanatory power dwindled. Recent investigations have thus begun to tap into genetic material, personality traits, psychological needs, and moral concerns as possible explanations./nOne early account of the moral underpinnings that guide conservative and liberal politics is Moral Politics Theory (Lakoff, 1996). It proposes that conservatives and liberals endorse different moral worldviews, which conceptually unify their positions on issues as diverse as abortion, education, the economy, or the environment. Those worldviews are grounded in different beliefs about ideal parenting: conservatives endorse a strict-father and liberals a nurturant-parent model. The theory proposes that parenting beliefs are mapped onto national politics via the NATION AS FAMILY metaphor, and that language use in synch with the two models can significantly influence people's perception of political issues./nMore specifically, Moral Politics Theory has three principal components: First, it holds that the two parenting models form unified and independent belief systems that are predictive of conservatism and liberalism. Second, it predicts that people engage in a metaphoric mapping process when making political judgments, mapping parenting beliefs onto governance. Third, it predicts that issue framings in terms of the two worldviews result in framing effects, and that only those who endorse a given worldview are susceptible to framings that echo it./nDespite the academic and political world's fascination with Moral Politics Theory, its three principal components have not been tested to date. The present research is a comprehensive test of Moral Politics Theory's principal components in a series of six studies. Studies 1 and 2 test the two parenting models' internal consistency, conceptual independence and predictive power for conservative and liberal political attitudes. Studies 3 and 4 examine the mediating role of the NATION AS FAMILY metaphor for political judgments in terms of parenting models. Finally, Studies 5 and 6 investigate framing effects associated with the two worldviews.

Advisor: Lakoff, George
Regier, Terry
Buddhism and Ideology in Japan, 1868-1931

This dissertation is a critical history of Buddhist thought in Japan from 1868 to 1931. During this time, many intellectuals became fascinated with the Buddhism of Japan's medieval period. Some saw it as a form of religious experience that could overcome the modern problem of alienated existence. Others declared that the cultural history of medieval Japanese Buddhism held the essence of Japanese cultural authenticity. These philosophical and historical interpretations of Buddhism together constituted a modern cultural discourse that I call Japanese Medievalism: a romantic vision of medieval Japan as a world of Buddhist spirituality. This dissertation traces the evolution of Japanese Medievalism, reconstructs its main arguments, and examines its ideological significance as a cultural artifact of modern Japan. Japanese Medievalism had an ambiguous ideological function. On the one hand, it was a religious revolt against the ideology of the ruling class - the ideology of the kami (the "native gods" of Japan), which renounced Buddhism as a foreign superstition inimical to national progress. Japanese Medievalism was an attempt to reassert the meaningfulness of Buddhism in defiance of state ideology. But on the other hand, Japanese Medievalism also supported the political order. By evoking a cultural realm of religious experience, Japanese Medievalism diverted attention from the concrete problems of industrial capitalism and anti-democratic politics in Japan. In sum, Japanese Medievalism was a Japanese analog to Existentialism in the West - a spiritual alternative to Marxism's materialist critique of modern society that ultimately had politically conservative consequences.

Advisor: Barshay, Andrew E
Delivering Design: Performance and Materiality in Professional Interaction Design

Interaction design is the definition of digital behavior, from desktop software and mobile applications to components of appliances, automobiles, and even biomedical devices. Where architects plan buildings, graphic designers make visual compositions, and industrial designers give form to three-dimensional objects, interaction designers define the digital components of products and services. These include websites, mobile applications, desktop software, automobiles, consumer electronics, and more. Interaction design is a relatively new but fast-growing discipline, emerging with the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. In a software-saturated world, every day, multiple times a day, billions of people encounter the work products of interaction design./nGiven the reach of their profession, how interaction designers work is of paramount concern. In considering interaction design, this dissertation turns away from a longstanding question of design studies: How does interaction design demonstrate a special form of human thought? And towards a set of questions drawn from practice-oriented studies of science and technology: What kinds of objects and subjects do interaction design practices make, and how do those practices produce them?/nBased on participant observation at three San Francisco interaction design consultancies and interviews with designers in California's Bay Area, this dissertation argues that performance practices organize interaction design work. By “performance practices,” I mean episodes of storytelling and narrative that take place before an audience of witnesses. These performances instantiate — make visible and tangibly felt —the human and machine behaviors that the static deliverables seem unable on their own to materialize. In doing so, performances of the project help produce and sustain alignment within teams and among designers, clients, and developers./nIn this way, a focus on episodes of performance turns our concerns from cognition, in which artifacts assist design thinking, to one of enactment, in which documents, spaces, tools, and bodies actively participating in producing the identities, responsibilities, and capacities of project constituents. It turns our attention to questions of political representation, materiality and politics. From this perspective, it is not necessarily how designers think but how they stage and orchestrate performances of the project that makes accountable, authoritative decision-making on behalf of clients and prospective users possible.

Advisor: Van House, Nancy
From Farm to Farmville: Circulation, Adoption, and Use of ICT between Urban and Rural China

In the mid-2000s, China began a set of policies to `informatize' the countryside, i.e. to bring Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to rural residents in order to improve their economic conditions. These policies posit the countryside as a world of `less,' compared to urban areas, and they are framed in terms of what people who are at the margins of China's modernization (migrant workers, rural residents, older people, and farmers) need in order to improve their lives, how ICT can benefit them, and how they can access more and better information despite their low educational and income levels. In contrast to this widespread view of marginalized users as passive recipients of technologies that will help them improve their material conditions, this dissertation looks at the diffusion and appropriation of ICT such as mobile phones and computers among rural residents and migrant workers in their own terms: not as foils for elite views of why they would/should go online, but rather as people who discover the opportunities offered by the Internet that are of interest to them, and try to use these opportunities as best as they can. By following the paths through which ICT travel in urban and rural China and the social relations that are maintained, renewed, and reinvented along the way, I argue that people at the margins have to `invent' themselves as users, and find a connection between themselves and ICT. Migrant workers play a key role in bringing ICT to the countryside, where family networks, shop keepers, and community life foster the circulation of information about ICT and their use. With the help of these intermediaries, even people who are typically dismissed by urban elites as non-users because of their age or educational level, and who live far away from the resource-rich areas where such devices are common, can still be connected to them through their personal ties as well as through appropriate and mediated use of new ICT. As a counter-narrative to the prevailing discourse on ICT and rural users, this dissertation argues that the combination of new technologies and personal networks are a powerful but often overlooked vector along which some aspects of urban growth are shared with the countryside, and that ICT have so far helped to strengthen the familial and personal networks commonly present in rural villages and often lamented as being broken by the dual forces of migration and urbanization.

Advisor: Burrell, Jenna
Understanding and engineering protein function from an energy landscape-based perspective

The three projects discussed in this thesis are unified by the common goal of understanding and manipulating protein function from an energy landscape-based perspective./nFirst, I explore how the energy landscapes of ribonucleases HI have evolved over time by resurrecting and characterizing extinct ancestors to the modern-day homologs from E. coli and T. thermophilus. Our results suggest that thermostability is a finely tuned property, which has adapted along each evolutionary lineage of RNase H to accommodate diverse environments. The thermodynamic mechanisms by which these changes occur, however, are found to be highly variable./nThen, I describe the construction of an unfolded maltose-binding protein and its subsequent analysis using neutron scattering to probe pico-nanosecond dynamics on the protein's surface. We find that our model for the unfolded state is more dynamic than its folded state and, perhaps more surprisingly, also more dynamic than an intrinsically disordered protein, tau. This interesting result highlights the difference between proteins that have evolved to be disordered and the unfolded state of proteins that have a well-defined native state./nFinally, I design and characterize an enzymatic switch that responds allosterically to a novel effector. The design is based on the principle of mutually exclusive folding and involves fusing a ligand-binding protein with an enzyme to create a construct in which only one domain is folded at a time. Several of the constructed chimeras are inhibited by ligand, and the strengths and weaknesses of our design are discussed.

Advisor: Marqusee, Susan
The in vitro characterization of heterologously expressed enzymes to inform in vivo biofuel production optimization

The mevalonate pathway is of critical importance to cellular function as it is the conduit for the production of terpenoids, hormones, and steroids. These molecules are also valuable on an industrial scale because they are used as antibiotics, flavoring agents, and fragrances, examples of which are clerocidin, cinnamon, and sandalwood, respectively. Because the biosynthetic route for the production of these compounds is the deoxyxylulose 5-phosphate pathway in E. coli, by engineering the heterologous mevalonate pathway into E. coli the native forms of pathway regulation were overcome to successfully create a bio-industrial route for the production of artemisinin, an antimalarial drug. Advanced biofuels can also be biosynthesized via the mevalonate pathway with some minor alterations to the final enzymatic conversions./nHowever, the toxicity of intermediates and products, as well as regulation internal to the pathway, limited our ability to increase production. The mevalonate pathway enzymes we used were native to S. cerevisiae, two of which had not been kinetically characterized. We set out to determine the nature of these enzymes and how they might be regulated by mechanisms internal to the mevalonate pathway, such as feedback inhibition. Because both mevalonate kinase (MK) and phosphomevalonate kinase (PMK) were derived from S. cerevisiae they had to be codon-optimized for production in E. coli, particularly because they had already been identified as expressing poorly in laboratory production strains through targeted protein studies. By cloning the codon-optimized sequences into high copy expression vectors with a six-histidine tag at the C- or N-terminus (PMK and MK, respectively) we were able to produce large enough amounts of the active proteins to purify on a Ni2+ resin column./nKinetic characterization of MK revealed a KMATP of 315 ± 21 μM and a vmax of 50 ± 3 μM/min/μgE (or Kcat = 41 ± 3 s-1). Additionally, substrate inhibition of MK by mevalonate was determined to exist at concentrations above 2.5 mM, and Ki values for farnesyl pyrophosphate (79 ± 11 nM), geranyl pyrophosphate (147 ± 6 nM), geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate (303 ± 64 nM), dimethylallyl pyrophosphate, (29 ± 12 μM), and isopentenyl pyrophosphate (36 ± 5 μM) were determined./nKinetic characterization of PMK revealed that maximum activity occurs at pH = 7.2 and [Mg2+] = 10 mM. KMATP was determined to be 98.3 μM and 74.3 μM at 30 °C and 37 °C, respectively. KMmev-p was determined to be 885 μM and 880 μM at 30 °C and 37 °C, respectively. vmax was determined to be 45.1 μmol/min/μgE and 53.3 μmol/min/μgE at 30 °C and 37 °C, respectively. From the high KMmev-p value it appears as if PMK might have very poor activity at normal cellular concentrations of mevalonate-5-phosphate, indicating that MK and PMK might play a very coordinated role in balancing intermediate levels within the pathway.

Advisor: Keasling, Jay D
Wemmer, David E
Quantum Algebras Associated to Irreducible Generalized Flag Manifolds

The first part of this thesis deals with certain properties of the quantum symmetric and exterior algebras of Type 1 representations of Uq(g) defined by Berenstein and Zwicknagl. We define a notion of a commutative algebra object in a coboundary category, and we prove that the quantum symmetric algebra of a module is the universal commutative algebra generated by that module. That is, the functor assigning to a module its quantum symmetric algebra is left adjoint to a forgetful functor. We also prove a conjecture of Berenstein and Zwicknagl, stating that the quantum symmetric and exterior cubes exhibit the same amount of "collapsing" relative to their classical counterparts. We prove that those quantum exterior algebras that are flat deformations of their classical analogues are Frobenius algebras. We also develop a rigorous framework for discussing continuity and limits of the structures involved as the deformation parameter q varies along the positive real line./nThe second part deals with quantum analogues of Clifford algebras and their application to the noncommutative geometry of certain quantum homogeneous spaces. We introduce the quantum Clifford algebra through its spinor representation via creation and annihilation operators on one of the flat quantum exterior algebras discussed in the first part. The proof that the spinor representation is irreducible relies on the Frobenius property discussed previously. We use this quantum Clifford algebra to revisit Krahmer's construction of a Dolbeault-Dirac-type operator on a quantized irreducible flag manifold. This operator is of the form d + d*, and we relate d to the boundary operator for the Koszul complex of a certain quantum symmetric algebra, which shows that d2 =0. This is a first step toward a Parthasarathy-type formula for the spectrum of the square of the Dirac operator.

Advisor: Rieffel, Marc A
Reshetikhin, Nicolai
Attention and Disruption: Modulating the Interactions between Large-scale Brain Networks and the Properties of Local Cortical Regions

An abundance of research has demonstrated that the brain is both organized into discrete, highly specialized, regions and that distributed regions work together in the form of large-scale networks. It remains unclear, however, how to reconcile these two views of brain function. In this thesis, I present several projects that investigated the specialized properties of individual regions, how these change depending on cognitive demands and external disruption, and how these changes interact with modulations across large-scale networks. Across these projects, I use a combination of methods including psychophysics, univariate and multivariate modeling of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and the study of patients with focal lesions./nThe first section of this thesis focuses on visual attention to high-level face stimuli. Here, I demonstrate that highly specialized representations exist for individual faces, but that engaging in sustained top-down attention can cause selective modulations in these representations. This suggests that large-scale networks can interact with, and modify, the properties of local regions in an extremely selective manner./nThe second section of the thesis examines how disrupting local regions, through focal brain lesions or TMS, impacts the structure of large-scale networks. The first two chapters in this section examine how acute and chronic disruptions modulate the magnitude of interactions throughout cognitive control networks. An additional project explores methodological considerations involving the variability in TMS effects and how these might be measured most effectively. The final project in this section examines how focal brain lesions also affect the organization of distributed networks. This section illustrates how the properties of local regions can modulate both the magnitude and organization of distributed networks./nIn sum, these projects demonstrate that large-scale networks can both drive and be driven by the highly specialized properties of local regions. This research will hopefully provide some insight into how brain regions may concurrently demonstrate highly specialized brain activity and participate in distributed brain networks, and flexibly modify these interactions, in order to carry out complex behavioral functions.

Advisor: D'Esposito, Mark
A Multiscale Analysis of Dynamic Wetting

A computational multiscale Finite Element Method on dynamic wetting and droplet spreading on various substrates at micron scale is proposed. The model is formulated in the framework of large deformation continuum mechanics, and two different implementations are proposed to maintain the strain dependence of the surface stress./nWe set forth a multiscale soft contact model and its Finite Element Method formulation for dynamic wetting, which includes an atomistic-based Coarse Grained Contact Model between the liquid and solid without using Molecular Dynamics, and the surface tension model along the contact interface allows droplet spreading due to the surface energy difference./nBy employing the proposed method, we have successfully simulated droplet spreading, and our results compare well with the theoretical, experimental and Molecular Dynamics results. The results of the numerical simulation show that the proposed method is an efficient and viable computational tool for simulation of dynamic wetting, and it successfully removes the singularity problems that plague in most of macroscale hydrodynamics analysis of dynamic wetting and droplet spreading in the past.

Advisor: Zohdi, Tarek
Theoretical and Computational Investigation of Self-Assembly in Bio-Inspired and Polymeric Materials

Fabrication of materials through bottom-up, noncovalent self-assembly has the potential to revolutionize many areas of science and engineering that depend upon the precise arrangement and interaction of nanometer-scale particles. Theory and computation provide a useful route to studying self-assembly of these materials due to their ability to study the kinetic and thermodynamic features of simplified systems at a level of detail not possible in experiments. In this thesis we study the self-assembly of two bio-inspired systems using a combination of theory and computation. The first is comprised of archaeal chaperonin proteins that form in-vitro two remarkably different structures: filamentous chains and layers of sheets. Using a quasi-dynamical Monte Carlo algorithm, we show that the binary decision for sheet or string formation can be explained by allowing for conformational changes between a sheet-favoring state and a string-favoring state. Using advanced sampling techniques, we find that the energy gap for this conformational change controls structure formation. The second system is a self assembling cyclic peptide inside a block copolymer matrix. We develop a computationally efficient pseudospectral technique to simulate a Langevin dynamics derived from the block copolymer field-theoretic Hamiltonian and demonstrate two different processes by which nanoparticles may be incorporated into this framework./nIn support of the peptide-polymer work, we develop a new algorithm for Metropolis Monte Carlo simulations on high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) that relies on the local equilibration of non-interacting regions of a lattice system. We show how the technique can better exploit the GPU memory hierarchy resulting in over 100-fold speedups. This technique is well-suited for lattice systems with couplings beyond nearest neighbors and systems with complicated local or dynamical constraints./nFinally, we investigate the implications for excluding volume in a $\phi^4-\phi^2$ field theory, representative of a block copolymer theory. We provide a simplified derivation for the response of a Gaussian liquid to a volume-excluding solute. We apply this technique to a discrete $\phi^4-\phi^2$ theory and show that the effects of volume exclusion act independently of the $\phi^4$ term. Finally, we show using Monte Carlo simulations that the stabilization provided by the $\phi^4$ term may be replaced by a hard constraint on density fluctuations that imparts stability, while making the model's connections to well-studied Gaussian models of liquids more transparent.

Advisor: Geissler, Phillip