VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Parental Language Learning Beliefs and Practices in Young Children's Second Language Acquisition and Bilingual Development: Case Studies of Mexican Heritage Families in California and Arizona

We know that young children acquire language through everyday interactions. But little is known empirically about the salience and influence of parents' beliefs and explicit strategies, relative to tacit language socialization, especially among parents who consider bilingual language development. This thesis digs deeply into three contrasting Mexican American households to observe the extent to which mothers articulate language goals and beliefs, and then act from them. Parents' beliefs about how languages are learned influence their young children's first and second language development by parents' management of family routines, daily activities, and language practices. Parents' language learning beliefs emerge from understandings they have of their past language experiences and their response to the current environment where their children are growing. Parents express their language learning beliefs in relationship to language practices that occur within the context of their family, community life, and their children's schools. The basic components of Language Policy Theory--beliefs, practices, and management--are useful when considering the importance of parents' influence over their children's first and second language learning, but language policy also must be theorized in the local contexts where children are growing and learning. Ecocultural Theory is useful in situating Language Policy Theory in the historical, cultural, and environmental context where bilingual parenting occurs in order to understand how parental language learning beliefs, coupled with family routines and daily activity choices, influence the language learning opportunities of young children. This thesis presents findings of case studies of three first-generation Mexican American mothers and their young children who participated in a twenty-four family ethnographic study of child-rearing practices in Mexican heritage families. From the twenty-four mothers in the initial study who were the primary care-givers for their pre-kindergarten age child, emic parental beliefs about language development, childhood bilingualism, and features of the local environment emerged. In response to the local context, the mothers consciously served as facilitators, teachers, or role models for their children's bilingual development through their explicit practices. In case studies, mothers expressed and exemplified variation in bilingual parenting intentions with one mother seeing herself as learning to be bilingual from her children, another mother learning to be bilingual with her children, and another mother explicitly teaching her children to be bilingual. Parental language learning beliefs, family language practices, and parents' management of children's daily activities have implications for children attaining the language learning goals which their parents have for them and also have implications for teachers of second language learners.

Advisor: Fuller, Bruce C
Keeping Home: Another Look at Domesticity in Antebellum America

In the eighteenth century and earlier, domesticity functions as the practice of housekeeping. During the American Revolution, republican motherhood set the stage for the concept of domesticity to expand. By the mid-nineteenth century, domesticity becomes connected to womanhood as it develops into a virtue that defines true womanhood. Domesticity also operates as an ideology in the nineteenth century. Are we to assume that all three are identical? Most critics would have us believe so, as they do not differentiate amongst these domesticities. In fact, most critics take the definition of domesticity for granted, leaving the term undefined and assuming their audience knows what it means./nThe criticism on domesticity to date has involved debates over the bifurcation of separate spheres, and whether domesticity operates as resistance to patriarchal authority or as conformity to the status quo. My project does not take sides in these debates, but rather focuses on two under explored aspects of domesticity: practice and virtue. What does it mean for a practice to become a virtue, how does it happen, what are the implications, and how are these two meanings related to the current critical notion of domesticity as an ideology? My project responds to these questions. With the reformulation of domesticity as a virtue, domesticity would seem to be no longer a task anyone can master, but an intrinsic quality that one may or may not possess. As a virtue rather than a practice, domesticity becomes an issue of character, raising the questions: can it be developed and by anyone regardless of race, class, or gender? In addition, as an issue of character, domesticity is no longer grounded in an external location, such as the home, but in the person. What are the implications of this shift? Using an array of texts, I examine the construction of domesticity as a virtue, the cultural significance of the transformation of domesticity from practice to virtue, and the implications for identity. My dissertation analyzes how representations of home, domestic practice, and family in a selection of texts from the long nineteenth century reconfigure current critical notions of domesticity. By investigating the distinctions between practice and virtue, my project expands the critical dialogue on domesticity, and in the process, deepens contemporary discussions of identity and the value of home and family in antebellum American literature and culture.

Advisor: Snyder, Katherine
Reaction of Plutonium(VI) with the Manganese-Substituted Iron Oxide Mineral Goethite

More than 60 years of nuclear power and weapons production in the United States has left this country with a large burden of radioactive legacy waste containing long-lived transactinide elements, as well as highly radioactive fission products. To face the challenge of contaminated site remediation, a solid understanding of the fundamental chemical processes behind the transport and migration of actinides in the environment is necessary. Especially important is the elucidation of interfacial reactions at the boundary between aqueous radionuclide solutions and minerals. This knowledge will allow us to more accurately model and predict the ultimate fate of radionuclides in the geosphere./nThe work presented in this thesis focuses on understanding the binding mechanisms and structure of plutonium on the surface of metal oxide minerals. Plutonium(VI) sorption on the surface of well-characterized synthetic manganese-substituted goethite minerals (Fe1-xMnxOOH) was studied using X-ray absorption spectroscopy. Because manganese is often found in the environment as a minor component associated with major mineral components, such as goethite, understanding the molecular-level interactions of plutonium with such substituted-mineral phases is important for risk assessment purposes at radioactively contaminated sites and long-term underground radioactive waste repositories./nThe first chapter of this thesis is an introduction and motivation to the work presented in the following chapters. The second chapter describes fundamental aqueous solution chemistry and covers the calculation of species in solution including methods for handling statistical errors. The third chapter provides an overview of the fundamental interactions that occur at the interface between aqueous solution and the surface of a mineral. The fourth chapter presents the methods and characterization techniques used in synthesizing goethite (α-FeOOH) and manganese-substituted goethite (Fe1-xMnxOOH) minerals. The fifth chapter presents an overview of the plutonium chemistry needed to conduct and understand the experiments. The sixth chapter presents a fundamental overview of X-ray absorption spectroscopy methods used in this study, including X-ray absorption near-edge structure spectroscopy, extended X-ray absorption fine-structure spectroscopy, micro X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and synchrotron X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. The seventh chapter presents the data and discussion of experiments with plutonium sorbed on the surface of manganese-substituted goethite minerals. Work relating to the modeling of stochastic noise in extended X-ray absorption fine-structure spectra and synchrotron X-ray beam-induced chemistry on plutonium are also presented. The eighth chapter gives an overview of the work and offers suggestions for future work on this topic. The appendices at the end of this thesis are a collection of methods, instructions, suggestions, and computer code that was helpful when conducting experiments.

Advisor: Nitsche, Heino
Organizational Responses to Address Access and Quality of Care Issues for Limited English Proficient (LEP) Patient Populations

Limited English proficiency is a risk factor affecting millions of persons living in the United States. It can compromise the person's access to care as well as the health provider's capacity to deliver high quality, safe, and cost-effective care. This study investigates the environmental influences (i.e., regulatory, socio-demographic factors) to which health care delivery organizations and public health departments must respond to meet the needs of limited English proficient (LEP) patients, and identifies organizational strategies employed in diverse settings. In-depth interviewing of key stakeholders from diverse organizations was utilized to gain perspectives on language access issues. Organizational theory, specifically open systems and resource dependence theories, guided this study, and helped to illuminate the exchanges between these organizations and tactics used to mitigate potential losses of power and autonomy. This study identified interagency collaborative efforts in language access policymaking and practice that varied in scope, formality, and resources. In general, collaboration was viewed favorably, and was an important vehicle to address health equity, limited resources, and increasing regulatory and financial pressures. However, administrators often found it difficult to secure leadership engagement and resource support, as well as maintain language access as a high priority issue within their respective organizations and across partner organizations due to competing and changing priorities. Further research is necessary to explore enabling factors in language access, in light of an ever increasing demand for linguistically appropriate services and limited resources within and across organizations.

Advisor: Bloom, Joan
Properties of Jets Measured with Charged Particles with the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider

Jets are identified and their properties studied, in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at center-of-mass energy √s = 7 TeV, using charged particles measured by the ATLAS Inner Detector. Events are selected using a minimum bias trigger, allowing jets at very low transverse momentum to be observed and the tran- sition to high-momentum fully perturbative jets to be studied. Jets are reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm applied to charged particles with two radius parameter choices, 0.4 and 0.6. An inclusive charged jet transverse momentum cross section measurement from 4 GeV to 100 GeV is shown, for four ranges in rapidity extending to 1.9, and corrected to charged particle-level truth jets. The transverse momenta and longitudinal momentum fractions of charged particles within jets are measured, along with the charged particle multiplicity and the particle density as a function of radial distance from the jet axis. Comparison of the data with the theoretical models implemented in existing tunings of Monte Carlo event generators indicates reasonable overall agreement between data and Monte Carlo. These comparisons are sensitive to Monte Carlo parton showering, hadronization, and soft physics models.

Advisor: Hinchliffe, Ian
Siegrist, James
Effects of Physiologic, Metabolic and Molecular Adaptations to Calorie Restriction on Biomarkers of Longevity

Calorie restriction (CR), reducing caloric intake without malnutrition, increases lifespan and delays the onset of age-related diseases. Characterizing the underlying mechanisms that mediate the effects of calorie restriction on aging and lifespan will provide insight into the fundamental biology of aging, as well as guide research into the development of therapeutics for age-related diseases. It seems likely that some combination of physiologic, metabolic and molecular adaptations to CR lead to cellular responses that in-turn increase the longevity of the organism. Thus the goal of this thesis work was to combine a kinetic biomarker strategy with classic physiologic and molecular techniques to determine the role of physiologic adaptations, fat metabolism and molecular signaling on biomarkers of CR-induced longevity in mice. The data presented here demonstrate that CR leads to significant reductions in cell proliferation rates in keratinocytes, liver cells, mammary epithelial cells and splenic T-cells. These reductions in cell proliferation rates cannot be accounted for by reductions in food intake, energy expenditure, fat mass or body weight. In addition, the CR-induced reduction in cell proliferation is not dependent on Sirt1 expression, nor can it be mimicked by resveratrol treatment. However, reductions in cell proliferation rates were associated with a CR-induced increase in whole body fatty acid oxidation and have a strong negative correlation with circulating IGF-1 levels. Taken together these results suggest that increased reliance on fatty acid oxidation and reductions in IGF-1 signaling may be metabolic pathways that mediate the effects of CR on aging and longevity. These results also point to molecular mediators that can translate changes in substrate utilization to regulation of growth factor signaling as potential regulatory nodes necessary for the CR-induced effects on cell proliferation and longevity.

Advisor: Hellerstein, Marc K
Pairing Centers mediate meiotic chromosome dynamics in C. elegans

Pairing Centers mediate meiotic chromosome dynamics in C. elegans/nAll sexually reproducing animals depend on meiosis, the specialized cell division in which haploid gametes are produced from a diploid germ cell. Meiotic cells undergo one round of replication followed by two rounds of division. A distinctive feature of the first meiotic prophase is the establishment of physical linkages, via crossover recombination, between homologous chromosomes, which are essential for their proper segregation at metaphase I. Prior to the recombination step, however, homologous chromosomes must overcome the problem of finding and recognizing their appropriate partner within the nuclear volume, a process called homolog pairing. Transient interactions between paired homologs are further stabilized by a process called synapsis, in which the synaptonemal complex polymerizes along the entire length of paired chromosome axes. My research aims to address central questions to our understanding of the meiotic process: how do homologous chromosomes find and recognize their correct partner and how is synapsis regulated so that it occurs only between properly paired homologs. In Chapter 1, I present data that Pairing Centers are essential to facilitate proper connections between chromosomes and the nuclear envelope by recruiting a polo-like kinase. In Chapter 2, I identify novel meiotic mutants through a candidate screen and present my preliminary characterization of their meiotic defects. I further describe tools to visualize their chromosome dynamics in vivo.

Advisor: Dernburg, Abby F
The Private Enforcement of Government Interests Under the False Claims Act

Fraud against the federal government can be extremely costly, as the Department of Health and Human Services estimated it made $70 billion in improper payments in 2010 under Medicare and Medicaid. Combating fraud is a similarly costly affair, and the federal government has revitalized a Civil War statute to help in the fight. Under the False Claims Act, the government pays private enforcers a bounty to file cases against defendants committing fraud. These private enforcers, typically whistleblowers, have helped the government recover over $18 billion as of 2010./nPrivate enforcement has a long history under the common law tradition, but its role in a the modern, public enforcement state is less certain. The False Claims Act's private enforcement system, known as its qui tam provisions, specifies government review of private actions in an attempt to curtail past abuses./nIn the first part of this dissertation, I evaluate the role of private enforcers and their attorneys in this qui tam system. The government review process allows a standardized reference point for comparing private performance. I argue that it also provides private actors the opportunity to slack by pursuing a “filing mill” strategy. From the data available, however, I do not find law firms aggressively submitting cases under such a high volume, low effort strategy. Rather, law firms and the government appear to be cooperating as intended under the statutory design./nIn the second piece of this dissertation, I address the question of the optimal bounty percentage for a finder's fee in the False Claims Act. The statute current specifies a minimum 15% bounty for information leading to a successful prosecution of fraud. I consider the responsiveness of private enforcers to variation in the bounty percentage. Using variation from a 2004 change in the tax code, I find evidence that private enforcers are more willing to bring new cases valued under $440,000 given an approximate 23% increase in bounty./nFor the final piece of this dissertation, I consider the bounty percentage for private litigation in the qui tam process. Unlike the finder's fee bounty, I suggest that a 100% litigation bounty may be useful for both compensatory and deterrence purposes. Although a government agency concerned about compensation for fraud losses might initially be concerned about granting a 100% litigation bounty, I argue that the threat of such a litigation bounty may result in additional compensation. The Department of Justice should have the discretionary power to grant high litigation bounties.

Advisor: Cooter, Robert
McCrary, Justin
Mass, Spin, and Physics Beyond the Standard Model at Colliders

The Standard Model of particle physics has thus far proven extremely effective at describing the composition and interactions of matter we observe. However, theoretical considerations, such as the large hierarchy between the weak and Planck scales, and experimental evidence, such as the observation of non-baryonic dark matter, suggest the possibility of new physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). In many scenarios, such new physics would occur around the TeV scale, and therefore has an excellent chance of being seen at current and future collider experiments./nFollowing a review of the standard model, its problems, and some new physics scenarios, we explore a number of ways in which colliders may be used to study such new physics. We first discuss a technique for determining the masses of new particles in single-step decay chains, a task which is typically complicated by missing energy associated with discrete symmetries prevalent in BSM models. We then address the determination of the spins of new particles at colliders, developing a model-independent technique and demonstrating how it could be used to distinguish two specific models, supersymmetry and universal extra dimensions, at a future linear collider. We further demonstrate that the effectiveness of this technique could be realized experimentally using existing data from both e+e- and hadron colliders. Finally, we turn away from model-independent techniques and propose a search for color sextet scalars, which could be copiously produced at the Large Hadron Collider. Pair production of such particles could potentially be seen in the relatively clean same-sign dilepton + jets + missing energy channel, for which we propose an effective reconstruction of the sextet pair.

Advisor: Murayama, Hitoshi
Engineering Lipid Vesicles for Cellular Reconstitution

The reductionist approach to modern cell biology aims to identify the individual molecules and interactions that give rise to complex biological activity. A complementary constructionist approach, known as reconstitution, aims to recapitulate biological structures and functions from basic building blocks in order to show which components are essential and how biophysical constraints, such as membrane boundaries, influence organization and activity. My dissertation research has applied and extended this `bottom-up' approach to study the role of membrane mechanics in the formation of cellular filopodia and to develop new tools for reconstituting processes encapsulated within membranes and for engineering cell-like devices./nWe investigated the mechanics of actin-membrane interactions by studying dendritic actin networks grown on the surface of giant unilamellar vesicles. In this minimal system, we observed the formation of parallel filament protrusions arising from the highly branched dendritic actin network, notably in the absence of bundling proteins. We confirmed through a simple theoretical model that a lipid bilayer can drive the emergence of bundled actin filament protrusions from branched actin filament networks, thus playing a role normally attributed to actin-binding proteins. This revealed a critical role for the membrane in organizing actin filaments at the plasma membrane./nThis work motivated the development of a technique for encapsulating protein contents in the lumen of lipid vesicles in order to emulate the biophysical boundary conditions of real cells. We demonstrated the use of a microfluidic jet to form lipid vesicles with controlled contents by deforming a planar bilayer. These vesicles mimic an essential organizational feature of cells - encapsulation within a lipid membrane - and provide a platform for more complex cellular reconstitution. Subsequently, we adapted this technique to a pulsed inkjet-based device, enabling greater control of vesicle size and improved throughput. Using this inkjet-based device for vesicle formation, we were able to control membrane properties such as asymmetric lipid composition and insertion of membrane proteins, which are essential for numerous cellular processes. We demonstrated the applicability of this technique by reconstituting SNARE-mediated membrane fusion in a geometry that mimics exocytosis./nIn summary, this work has provided new insight into the role of lipid bilayer mechanics on the reconstitution of cellular protrusions and developed a novel technique that enables formation of lipid vesicles with controlled contents and membrane properties. Further development of this technique will enable advanced reconstitution experiments and construction of functional cell-like devices for medical and biomaterials applications.

Advisor: Fletcher, Daniel A