VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A Background-Subtracted Search for Annual Modulation in CDMS II

The identification of dark matter is one of the outstanding problems of our time. Cos- mological and astrophysical clues such as structure formation and relic densities, anomalous galaxy rotation curves, and mass density profiles provide ample evidence of an undetected mass component of the universe. Meanwhile, recent advancements in particle physics point toward extensions to the Standard Model, many of which posit candidates for new particles and new physics at the weak scale and beyond. If, as expected, the confluence of the hints of new physics in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology at the weak scale is more than coincidence, the detection of dark matter will pave the way for a paradigm shift in our fundamental understanding of the universe./nWeakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), in particular, are a well-motivated class of candidates for particle dark matter. Naturally predicted in supersymmetry (SUSY), WIMPs are stable, weakly-interacting, and produced in sufficient abundance to comprise the quantity of missing mass in a number of simple cases. Over the last two decades of experimentation, significant areas of the parameter space defined by the simplest SUSY theories have been ruled out, but WIMPs and related particles remain compelling candidates for dark matter searches./nSeveral avenues for the detection and identification of dark matter are currently being pursued. The present work is a description of the search for a direct detection of super- symmetric dark matter via scattering from standard model particles. The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) Experiment uses ionization and athermal phonon sensor technolo- gies to achieve event-by-event discrimination of electron and nuclear recoils in cryogenic germanium crystal detectors. At low energies, where the the ability to discriminate individ- ual nuclear recoil events from background is reduced, a periodic variation of the rate and crossover signatures in the energy spectrum can aid the identification of a WIMP signature in the presence of significant backgrounds. In general, the direct detection of dark matter is the first step toward the identification and classification of dark matter in the universe./nThis work describes a background-subtracted search for annual modulation in the WIMP- search data acquired in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II (CDMS II) Experiment, which was the second implementation of the highly successful CDMS technology. We observe no significant modulation in the 2.7 keVnr to 11.9 keVnr (nuclear-recoil-equivalent) energy range selected for this analysis. These results are not compatible with a WIMP dark matter interpretation of the signals reported by the DAMA/LIBRA and CoGeNT experiments, and provide complementary support to earlier CDMS low-threshold germanium analyses.

Advisor: Sadoulet, Bernard
Ascription at Work: Essays on Discrimination, Networks, and Employment Histories

This dissertation consists of three essays examining ascriptive inequality in the labor market. In the first two essays, I draw on an original, two-wave experiment with a sample of white hiring agents to advance the sociological understanding of the determinants of employers’ discriminatory behavior and the consequences of jobseekers’ racially-segregated networks. First, I examine what motivates employers to discriminate. I find implicit (largely unconscious), but not explicit, racial attitudes predict employers’ evaluations of white applicants, and of black applicants relative to white applicants. Thus, instead of deliberately rejecting black jobseekers, hiring agents’ behavior appears to be driven by largely unconscious biases. Further, in open-ended responses, hiring agents justify their racially-motivated evaluations without invoking race, suggesting the ambiguity of the hiring process enables them to maintain and portray an egalitarian image. Second, I analyze how white hiring agents reward employee referrals. I find that in the most prevalent real-life conditions—black applicants referred by black employees, and white applicants referred by white employees—black applicants’ referrals were significantly discounted relative to white applicants’ referrals. Indeed, black applicants only benefited from having a referral when two conditions were met: the referring employee was white and the hiring agent was relatively low-prejudiced. Thus, in addition to their disadvantage in access to employee referrals, black jobseekers suffer from a disadvantage in returns to these referrals. In the third essay, I use the rich week-by-week measures of work experiences from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) to examine the role of labor market experiences—specifically, employment histories—in explaining the intergenerational transmission of economic status. I document a strong association between parental income and employment histories for men without a college degree. Among this group, men from higher-income families accumulate more work experience and tenure, and less unemployment, throughout their careers than men from lower-income families. In contrast, regardless of parental income, college graduates quickly settle into stable, long-term employment. Thus, a college degree appears to be a powerful resource that leaves little room for family background effects on employment histories. Consequently, for non-college graduates (but not for college graduates), employment histories mediate approximately one-third of the effect of parental income on earnings. Ultimately, these essays highlight the enduring effect of race and family background in the labor market.

Advisor: Haveman, Heather
Public Enemies: Transience, Lyric, and Sociality in American Poetry

A shadowy double to infrastructure expansion, resettlement, and urban development, the "transient" has long been a contradictory figure of permission and repression in imaginations of America, be it as Emerson's idealized "being-in-transience," the romantic freedoms of the "hobohemian," or the criminalized "stranger." What Public Enemies argues is that a crucial genealogy of thinking about transience and its antagonistic relationship to existing concepts of democracy has been carried out in the most local, seemingly private of scenes: lyric encounters between an “I” and a “you.” While Walt Whitman was the first to put serial pressure on the relation between transient persons and lyric formation, a long history of twentieth-century poetic interlocutors—Robert Frost, Hart Crane, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, and Amiri Baraka—adapt his experiments in transient speech acts to challenge normative conceptions of personhood, masculinity, affiliation, publicity, and national belonging. To understand the social character and content of lyric speech, Public Enemies situates current debates in literary formalism and lyric theory within political, juridical, sociological, and queer theoretical accounts of transience in America. In turn, the project reframes a trajectory of modernist and postmodern American lyric poetry as both a critical and complicit interlocutor in defining who or what counts as a member of a democratic whole.

Advisor: Blanton, Charles D
Racing to class: School, sport, and inequality

College sport is a uniquely American phenomenon in which participants must split their time, energy, and devotion between two institutions: school and sport. In recent years, the institution faced legal threats and possible player unionization. The research informing these efforts assumes that sports are entertainment based and therefore non-educational (Sperber, 2000; Ingrassia, 2012). Yet framing the conflict for student athletes and schools as education versus entertainment leads to a narrow set of proposed reforms such as paying athletes or eliminating sports (Bowen, 2014; Smith, 2011; Wilbon, 2011). Using participants who are free from commercial pressures—male and female Olympic sport student athletes—this research asks: How do social structures such as race, class, and gender shape student athletes’ ability to negotiate the competing demands of sport and school? To address this question, this year-long qualitative study used multiple sources of data including in-depth interviews and time diaries with student athletes, interviews with academic advisors, and tutors, and various institutional measures. Research and analysis was guided by theories of social reproduction theory and intersectionality. By moving away from an economic-centric analysis of college sport I unveil how the struggles facing student athletes cannot be solved through employee status. Instead it reveals that in the current context of U.S. higher education, school and sport are fundamentally structured to conflict along central areas of college student life: requirements, availability, and legibility. The institutional make-up and legal support of college sport disguises the conflict present and individualizes the resulting educational problems for athletes to navigate on their own. Even athletes with robust economic and social resources struggle to achieve success in both school and sport simultaneously.

Advisor: Garcia Bedolla, Lisa
Selling School Reform: Neoliberal Crisis-Making and the Reconstruction of Public Education

Abstract/nThis study asks how neoliberal reform became the hegemonic framework for racial justice and educational equity. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I examine three reform projects that operate on different terrains – or scales – of ‘governmentality’: that of broad public sense-making, that of district policymaking, and that of individual and community-based subjectivities./nThe first project (Chapter Two) was a national publicity campaign funded by the Broad and Gates foundations. In this chapter, I use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to understand how reformers used language to shape public consciousness, pointing to the continuity of an educational “crisis discourse” first manufactured in the Reagan era. Chapter Three examines the state takeover and neoliberal reconstruction of an urban school district. Using the theoretical framework of “disaster capitalism” (Klein, 2007), I trace how the neoliberal reform network penetrated the district, fundamentally reshaping its structures and processes. In the fourth chapter, I use ethnographic methods to study the effects of ‘punitive privatization’ on a school site steeped in historical traditions of anti-racist and anti-capitalist critique. I argue that neoliberal accountability is “devitalizing” (McDermott & Hall, 2007) to the political vision and practices of the school, and that it works to co-opt dissent and redirect parent participation./n/nTaken together, these projects demonstrate both coercive and consensual processes: the corporate reform network penetrates public institutions and democratic processes, redirecting them to do the work of marketization and capital accumulation. At the same time, it employs sophisticated and well-funded marketing to articulate these projects across a breadth of terrains and at different scales. Each project demonstrates how market advocates, driven by venture-philanthropic funding, position their work as the only possible means for racial justice and educational equity. The findings point to two powerful aspects of neoliberalism: its role in creating and manipulating educational crises and its ability to absorb and reframe challenges to capitalism.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel
A Theory of Nanoparticle Growth and a Theory of Thin Film Nucleation

This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first will discuss a theory that was identified to narrow the size distribution of nanoparticles grown via ion beam synthesis (IBS). Specifically, a simple mathematical argument explains a processing route for the ion beam synthesis of nanoclusters with a narrowed size distribution. The key idea is that growth conditions for which the average nanocluster size is increasing rapidly can lead to narrowed size distributions. Modeling candidate processes using a self-consistent, mean-field theory shows that normalized nanocluster size distributions with full-width at half-maximum of 17% of the average can be attained./nThe second part presents a theory for nucleation in confined high-aspect ratio thin films. Specifically, classical nucleation theory is used to consider the solidification of a melt confined between two planar surfaces. The critical nuclei shapes and the associated nucleation energy barriers are computed as a function of the thickness of the film, and the film's relevant bulk and interface energies. The analysis is then repeated for the melting transition, and expressions for the depression and elevation of the melting temperature are found. A nucleus morphology diagram is constructed. This diagram presents the lowest energy morphology of the nuclei, as well as melting points, as a function of the system parameters. Using the nucleus morphology diagram, experimental and system parameters that allow for the desired nucleation behavior can be identified. Furthermore, the nucleus morphology diagram illustrates a region of parameter space where the film is predicted to solidify above its thermodynamic bulk melting temperature, a behavior termed presolidification. The theory is used to predict the temperature at which nucleation of the solid phase and liquid phase are expected for Ge between two glass substrates. Furthermore, a possible route for controlling the orientation of the film is identified as confinement of the film can lead to a large range of solid phase nucleation temperatures, which are a function of the system's interfacial free energies. By controlling the growth temperature, certain orientations may not be able to nucleate thereby reducing the possible number of orientations within a film.

Advisor: Chrzan, Daryl C
Community Formation among Recent Immigrant Groups in Porto, Portugal

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in migration to Europe, primarily by refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia, but with significant flows of refugees and other migrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa as well. Portugal is not among the primary European destinations for refugees or immigrants; possibly, in part, because there are fewer migrants in Portugal, it is an E.U. country where new arrivals are still met with a degree of enthusiasm. Hard right, anti-immigrant parties—on the rise in other parts of the E.U.—have not gained much traction in Portugal. This work looks at the relative invisibility of immigrants in Porto, the country’s second largest city, which may make those immigrants a less visible target for intolerance and political opportunism, but may also impede a larger, more self-determinant role for immigrants and their communities in greater Portuguese society./nA major contributing factor to immigrant invisibility is the absence (outside of Lisbon and southern Portugal) of neighborhoods where African immigrants are concentrated. In Porto, communities do not form around geography; instead, communities form around institutions. The role of religious institutions in community formation is examined—institutions such as Protestant and Catholic churches, Catholic seminarian education, and one of Porto’s two mosques. Some of these institutions are attended mostly by non-Africans, but nevertheless appeal to sub-Saharan African immigrants on an aesthetic and/or affective level. Others are attended mostly or exclusively by immigrants. The roles of charismatic and well connected individuals in facilitating further connections between immigrants and their communities is also examined, as are aging shopping centers—the centros comerciais—which offer a secular space where Africans might gather together, socialize, and share information in the course of patronizing African groceries, cafés and hair salons./nPorto’s African immigrants have created or nurtured communities through common goals, interests, and beliefs. In the absence of geographic concentration, they have managed to find ways to share information, support one another, and celebrate their shared experiences.

Advisor: Brandes, Stanley
Enlightening the Skin: Travel, Racial Language, and Rabbinic Intertextuality in Modern Yiddish Literature

This dissertation argues for a new model of continuity - offered by the Jewish travel narrative form - to explain the appearance of race and racism in the literary history of Ashkenazi Jews. The ascendance of emigration in its heyday invigorated a new social order that derived its legitimacy from entirely different ways of conceptualizing Jewish identity - from a structured, territorialized Yiddishkay t of rabbinic authority, ritual observance, and the vernacular to a more ethereal Ashkenazi individuality embedded in the colonial and racial contingencies of the Atlantic world./nThe first part of this study examines the first Yiddish adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Vilna,1868), retitled Slavery or Serfdom, by Isaac Meir Dik. I show how the author’s rereading of rabbinic slave laws transformed Stowe’s sentimental novel of Christian abolitionism into a travel report about the ethical superiority of Jewish over Christian slaveholding practices, and thus the socio-political benefit of Jewish emigration to the United States. During the 19th century Yiddish, in contrast to Hebrew, offered a stylistically pliant medium for Atlantic and racial language to be disseminated to all segments of Jewish society. The second part of the dissertation traces the development of Lithuanian Yiddish in Southern Africa in triangulated contexts of race, travel and intertextuality. I focus on the development of Yiddish literary modernism, which first appears in the midst of the South African War (1898-1902) and culminates in the reappearance of Yiddish as a language of white resistance in the Apartheid era. I analyze biblical and rabbinic intertextuality in the Yiddish literature of Southern Africa, including in texts narrated from the point of view of black Africans./nBy reassessing the travel form, I argue that the literature of “Black-Jewish Relations” ought not to be understood as the objective assessment of interracial contact between Jews and African-Americans, but rather an imagined and imaginative construct, internal to modern Jewish literature and culture, and rooted in the global dynamics of Jewish modernization.

Advisor: Kronfeld, Chana
Advances in Computational Methods for Water-Wave Problems

We developed three different techniques to enhance the computational methods used for time-harmonic linear water-wave theory. The first makes use of hypersingular boundary integral equations to model thin solid bodies in a wave field. The method developed allows for numerical treatment of the problem in its original hypersingular form using higher-order Overhauser elements without the need for regularization. We then use the method to study the case of a thin bottom-touching barrier in waves with particular interest in the effect of the harbor mouth (opening) over its hydrodynamic characteristics. Our results shed light on the drastic changes that occur in the presence of the opening and its size. We also point to the discovery of particular opening widths that allow for zero total loads on the harbor at particular frequencies./n\indent The second part still deals with hypersingular boundary integral equations but in the context of thin arbitrarily shaped plates. A Galerkin approach is used to treat the high-order singularity and results are used to fill some gaps in the literature of the values of added mass for these plates, particularly those plates with openings or holes./n\indent The third numerical method we present allows for the efficient treatment of general linear water-wave problems with multiple arbitrarily shaped bodies and arbitrarily shaped seabed geometry when the number of unknowns in the problem N is large. The problem domain is divided into an internal region that is modeled using a simple-source boundary integral equation allowing for arbitrarily shaped body and bottom geometry and an outer domain that is assumed free of solid bodies and of uniform water depth. The two domain solutions are then matched to complete the solution. The major contribution in this present topic is introducing the "fast-multipole method" to the solution procedure and therefore changing the complexity of the problem from O(N^3) (or O(N^2) if an iterative solver is used) to O(N) for large values of N. The memory requirements scale linearly with $N$ as well. This methodology is needed when the number of solid bodies is large or when very large floating structures with complex shapes are needed. It is also necessary when the bottom topography for a particular problem varies considerably. We use the computational code developed to study the effects of variable bottom topography over two case examples of multiple floating bodies. The first case is a set of 4 truncated floating vertical cylinders over a bottom protrusion, for which results indicate that variations in bottom topography cause slight to medium level changes on the wave loads on the floating bodies. The second case is applied to a configuration of 16 floating cylinders (with $N \sim 150,000$) and the effects of the variable ocean floor are again considered. Wave elevation details of this complex geometry is shown for illustration.

Advisor: Yeung, Ronald W.
Investigating the organofluorine physiology of Streptomyces cattleya: Regulation of transcription and control of mistranslation

The soil-dwelling bacterium Streptomyces cattleya produces the antibiotics fluoroacetate and fluorothreonine, and has served as a model system for the discovery of naturally occurring fluorine-selective biochemistry. While fluoroacetate has long been known to act as an inhibitor of the TCA cycle, the fate of the amino acid fluorothreonine is still not well understood. Here, I show that while fluorothreonine is a substrate for translation, this activity is averted in S. cattleya by the activity of two conserved proteins. The first, SCAT_p0564, acts in vitro and in vivo as a fluorothreonyl-tRNA selective hydrolase, while the second, SCAT_p0565, is proposed to be a fluorothreonine exporter. Additionally, overexpression of SCAT_p0564 in the model strain Streptomyces coelicolor M1152 confers resistance to fluorothreonine, suggesting that the antibiotic activity of this compound is related in part to its ability to enter the proteome. The ability of SCAT_p0564 to selectively hydrolyze fluorothreonyl- over threonyl-tRNA is striking, given that these macromolecular substrates differ by a single atom. In order to understand the basis of this selectivity, I have solved the crystal structure of this enzyme, and characterized its ability to act on the related substrate chlorothreonyl-tRNA. I also have also begun to elucidate the regulatory architecture of the organofluorine biosynthesis locus, with the aim of understanding how this unusual process is controlled. I find that transcription of the fluorinase is driven by the master regulator FlG, while FlF is an amino acid binding transcription factor that may be required for full expression of the fluorothreonine transaldolase. These findings expand the range of known naturally occurring fluorine biochemistry, and a represent a step towards the rational discovery of new organofluorine metabolism in nature.

Advisor: Chang, Michelle C