VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Modeling flood hazards and exposure in the context of sea-level rise: Implications for human, engineered, and natural systems

Sea-level rise (SLR) threatens coastal communities by increasing flood exposure for people, homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure. In order to protect residents and the infrastructure systems on which they rely, coastal communities will need to plan for and adapt to higher sea levels and increased flood hazards./nThis dissertation contributes to the understanding of SLR impacts on human, engineered, and natural systems. More specifically, the text addresses three important aspects of SLR adaptation: the need for data-driven methods to inform regional SLR adaptation networks, the impacts of SLR on critical infrastructure and service disruptions, and the influence of coupled SLR, precipitation, and storm surge on coastal groundwater aquifers and flooding./nMany collaborative networks aimed at promoting SLR adaptation at the global, national, or regional scale are primarily based on geographic proximity or voluntary participation and are not grounded in any quantitative assessment of shared vulnerability. The first part of this dissertation presents a method to group communities based on similar SLR exposure variables using statistical cluster analysis. The method is applied to cities and counties in the San Francisco Bay Area to demonstrate the usefulness for developing regional SLR adaptation networks./nIn coastal communities, critical infrastructure assets, such as wastewater treatment plants, are susceptible to flooding due to SLR. However, the extent and progression of this exposure and the impacts on service disruptions are poorly understood. The second part of this work presents a geospatial analysis of wastewater exposure to SLR-induced marine flooding at the national scale and a similar analysis of SLR-induced groundwater flooding at the regional scale in the San Francisco Bay Area. Overall, hundreds of wastewater treatment plants could face flood disruptions due to SLR, which could lead to a loss of wastewater services for millions of residents. In some cases, groundwater is more of a threat than marine flooding./nTo understand the potential impacts of SLR on coastal groundwater aquifers and flooding, most previous studies have used steady-state methods and have focused on SLR and other climate factors, such as precipitation, separately. However, the strong coupling between precipitation and other weather variables that influence coastal water levels suggests a need for multivariate approaches. The final part of this dissertation describes the use of a copula approach to correlate precipitation with wind speed and atmospheric pressure. These variables are then used to determine changes in water levels due to wind setup and pressure-driven surge under current and future climate scenarios. Forcing a groundwater model with this data provides insight into the potential for a narrower unsaturated zone and groundwater emergence./nTogether, these chapters explore the local disruptions and regional impacts of SLR, as well as the coupled processes that lead to flooding.

Advisor: Stacey, Mark
Tracing the Ritual 'Event' at the Classic Maya City of Palenque, Mexico

In this dissertation, I consider a theoretically driven methodological approach to the study of ritual in archaeology. Inspired by a renewed materialist perspective, the project employs a comprehensive series of methodologies in a study of ancient Maya ritual. Through excavations of two funerary shrines of an elite residence in the city of Palenque, it considers each discrete context not as a “ritual deposit” but as an ‘event.’ Each ‘event’ was comprehensively sampled in order to recover the residues and traces of past actions, and of the various materials brought together in a moment of heightened relationality. The inclusion of multiple macroscale and microscale archaeological methods together not only identifies residues of materials previously undetected, but also employs a microhistorical approach. Micromorphology of ‘events’ shrinks the time frame of analyses and presents archaeological stratigraphy as lived, generational, time. Paleoethnobotanical, zooarchaeological and micromorphological analyses combined with a single context excavation strategy resulted in the recovery and identification of periodic ritual events carried out in honor of the dead./nThe ancient residence under consideration, known as “Group IV,” was materially rich and politically well connected. The leading members of the house were recorded in texts in the residential group as well as in the main palace, thus providing additional lines of evidence to pull from in order to explore the ritual life of the generations of Maya that lived, died, and were buried in what is suspected to be a founding residence. This work not only provides a general framework for archaeological approaches to the study of ritual in the past, but also provides important information for Maya studies in particular. Few studies in the Maya area have been fortunate enough to have a residence with the names of its occupants, as well as accompanying well-dated, fine-grained stratigraphic resolution that coincides with occupation of the residence within the span of a human lifetime.

Advisor: Joyce, Rosemary A
The Rosewood Paradox: from the Malagasy forest to the modern Chinese home

Globalization, many now acknowledge, is characterized by disconnection as much as by connection. Capital “hops” across various hubs of development, bypassing underdeveloped spaces altogether. Yet between zones of intensive development and those areas entirely “left behind” are the places that straddle the difference. Northeastern Madagascar provides a unique example. Through its illicit trade in endangered rosewood, this remote region of Madagascar is tied to the global cosmopolitan centers of Chinese consumption and Western conservation, despite its extreme lack of development outside of these basic connections. China sends thousands of ships to the undeveloped shores of northeastern Madagascar to pick up rosewood fresh from the forest in order to fuel a growing demand for classical furniture, while the United States and Europe fund a “rosewood task-force” to fight against the trade. The equivalent of over a billion US dollars has been channeled into Madagascar to finance either rosewood conservation or logging in an area where most make less than a dollar a day./nThis dissertation uses the case of rosewood, as it travels from the Malagasy forest to the modern Chinese home, to explore emerging global resource dynamics. I find that the rosewood logging crisis has not only transformed the forests of northeastern Madagascar, but has also contributed to the political rise of a group of local rosewood traders with direct ties to China. These elite traders now ride the wave of Chinese demand for rosewood, gaining new political heights within the Malagasy government in a power grab the international community has yet to fully appreciate. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in China, global financial speculation has reinvented classical rosewood furniture into a new form of speculative investment. Certain species of rosewood have become worth nearly their weight in gold. Paradoxically, environmental restrictions imposed for the protection of these species often exacerbate the speculation, driving Chinese importers deeper into the forest to satisfy the booming market./nAs the world’s most trafficked endangered wildlife, rosewood serves as a powerful symbol of wider struggles for resources as they unfold across the globe. While often portrayed in terms of an East-West tension, the divergent global demands to cut or conserve rosewood demonstrate not the stark contrast of an increasingly bifurcating global order, but rather an emergent space of global connectivity that complicates binary understandings of East and West while simultaneously speaking to the reality of these geopolitical imaginaries. Taken altogether, the case reveals the paradoxical reality that those closest to global resources benefit least from their extraction and, conversely, that places that seem to be furthest removed from larger clashes in the global system can become one of the primary arenas of their unfolding.

Advisor: Peluso, Nancy L
Geopolitical Ecologies: Tracing the Shift From Citizen to User at Tempelhof and the Presidio

This project examines the post-Cold War development of two new public parks at Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin, Germany, and the Presidio Army Base, in San Francisco, California. It situates these two cases against a larger literature on the revival of the public park during the same period, providing an alternative theoretical understanding of public parks linked to technology and geopolitics. This takes form by examining each case across three chapters, the first establishes the development of each site and its role in nation-state formation and urban development in its respective location. The second examines the emergence of post-war urban environmentalism, and the new concepts of nature and citizenship that manifested in the management of the urban environment by organizations like Grün Berlin GmbH, the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy, and the Presidio Trust. Finally, the third chapter examines the impact of these organizations on the production of public park spaces at the Presidio and Tempelhof. Comparing the genealogical development of these spaces sheds light on the political and social processes at work in the contemporary production of public park spaces, as well as the broader reconfiguration of concepts of citizenship and nature.

Advisor: Wolch, Jennifer
Mozingo, Louise
Illuminating degradation: The coordination and timing of substrate processing by the 26S proteasome

Selective protein degradation is a constant and critical process in cells. It is essential for maintaining tight control over protein abundance, which allows for finely tuned regulatory responses in a variety of cellular pathways. The degradation of certain proteins is also an important step in the regulation of many physiologically important cellular processes, such as cell cycle progression and stress responses. In addition, misfolded proteins accumulated both spontaneously and as a result of cellular stress must be degraded to prevent the formation of cytotoxic protein aggregates, which have been implicated as the cause of several neurodegenerative diseases. The 26S proteasome is the principal macromolecular machine responsible for protein degradation in eukaryotes. To reliably process all the proteins presented to it in the complex cellular environment, the proteasome must combine high promiscuity with exceptional substrate selectivity. Recent structural and biochemical studies have shed light on some of the steps involved in proteasomal substrate processing but have been mostly limited to static views of the process with little information about the dynamics of substrate processing. Hence, much remains to be learned about the detailed kinetics and coordination of the underlying substrate-processing steps of the proteasome, and how they correlate with observed conformational states./nThe goal of my thesis work described here was to develop assays which would measure the kinetics of proteasomal degradation and reveal important details of the processing mechanism. I began by developing a method for the targeted incorporation and labeling of unnatural amino-acids at specific residues in recombinantly expressed sub-complexes of the 26S proteasome. I then designed a series of FRET and anisotropy-based assays to probe substrate-proteasome interactions, the individual steps of the processing pathway, and the conformational state of the proteasome itself. Using these assays, I developed a complete kinetic picture of proteasomal degradation, which reveals that the engagement steps prior to substrate commitment are fast relative to subsequent deubiquitination, translocation and unfolding. Furthermore, by modulating the architecture of the substrate and then investigating the kinetics of its processing, I found that non-ideal substrates are rapidly rejected by the proteasome, which thus employs a kinetic proofreading mechanism to ensure degradation fidelity and substrate prioritization.

Advisor: Martin, Andreas
Topological phases of matter in low dimensions with and without disorder

While the essential features of wide classes of phases of matter are well-captured by the conventional frameworks such as the Landau theory of symmetry breaking, there do exist unconventional phases of mater, including topological phases, that provide examples of exotic phases of matter lying beyond the conventional paradigms. Although such phases of matter are hard to understand in general, there are cases where explicit model wave functions can be written. Using the model wave functions, one can extract topological information using the entanglement structures of the wave functions./nIn this thesis, we study various kinds of unconventional phases of matter where the quantum effects are essential, using various methodologies. We study not only the ground states of clean systems but also excited states of disordered systems, as the disorder may protects quantum order at highly excited states./nFirst, we study the crossover between the ground state and the excited state criticality where the quantum criticality is protected by the quenched disorder even at finite energy density. Using the strong-disorder renormalization-group technique, we are able to extract the long distance physics at zero and finite temperature exactly, as well as the crossover between the two./nSecond, we consider the fractional quantum effect, which is a strongly interacting quantum system in two dimensions. We first establish the algebraic formulations of the fractional quantum Hall effect by speculating the underlying algebraic structures in the lowest Landau level. We then focus on a model state called the Gaffnian state, which is believed to represent a quantum critical state as opposed to conventional gapped states. Using the Girvin-MacDonald-Platzman mode analysis together with the exact diagonalization, we provide a possible gap closing picture at the Gaffnian critical point./nNext, we consider disordered non-chiral topological phases and the phase transitions between the topological and the trivial phase. With the help of quenched disorder, the ground state topological order may survive at finite energy density, possibly realizing a many-body localization in two dimensions. Using the strong-disorder real-space renormalization group technique, we found a super-universal quantum phase transition between the non-chiral topological phase and the trivial phase, where the quantum critical point is governed by an infinite-randomness fixed point./nFinally, we present how the momentum polarization can be defined in quantum lattice models where the translational symmetries are discrete. We explain how the discrete, non-onsite symmetry is gauged to yield the crystalline gauge field. Using the gauging of the translational symmetry, we present the Berry phase formulation of the momentum polarization, a quantity that is closely related to the Hall viscosity.

Advisor: Moore, Joel E.
Numerical and experimental investigation of the Argon Power Cycle for power generation efficiency improvement and emissions reduction

Carbon capture has been deemed crucial by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change if the world is to achieve the ambitious goals stated in the Paris agreement. A deeper integration of renewable energy sources is also needed if we are to mitigate the large amount of green house gas emitted as a result of increasing world fossil fuel energy consumption. These new power technologies bring an increased need for distributed fast dispatch power and energy storage that counteract their intermittent nature. A novel technological approach to provide fast dispatch emission free power is the use of the Argon Power Cycle, a technology that makes carbon capture an integral part of its functioning principle. The core concept behind this technology is a closed loop internal combustion engine cycle working with a monoatomic gas in concert with a membrane gas separation unit. By replacing the working fluid of internal combustion engines with a synthetic mixture of monoatomic gases and oxygen, the theoretical thermal efficiency can be increased up to 80%, more than 20% over conventional air cycles. Furthermore, the absence of nitrogen in the system prevents formation of nitrogen oxides, eliminating the need for expensive exhaust gas after-treatment and allowing for efficient use of renewable generated hydrogen fuel. In the case of hydrocarbon fuels, the closed loop nature of the cycle affords to boost the pressure and concentration of gases in the exhaust stream at no penalty to the cycle, providing the driving force to cost effective gas membrane separation of carbon dioxide./nThis dissertation investigates the potential benefits of the Argon Power Cycle to improve upon current stationary power generation systems regarding efficiency, air pollutants, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Advisor: Dibble, Robert W
Giving Words: Translation and History in Modern Iran (Dissertation Abstract)

Based on two years of ethnographic and archival research in Tehran and Qom in Iran, Giving Words recovers histories of violence, secret connections, and political hopes that have brought Iranian state officials, Shi’i seminarians, academics, and activists to read, translate, and write in direct relation to European traditions of political philosophy and social theory. Engaging the insights of anthropology on synchronic forms of difference, and of historical epistemology on diachronic shifts in coordinates of truth, it reads the political history of modern Iran as a contested terrain of translation that is formed at the intersection of Islamic legal and philosophical discourses, Iranian historiography, Persian literary traditions, and currents of European thought. It traces the history of translation to the Perso- Russian wars of the 19th century and to the anti-Western discourses of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Through ethnography, Giving Words demonstrates that the proliferation of translation after the Revolution is at once a manifestation of a political crisis and the travails of cultural regeneration. The post-revolutionary practices of translation issue from, and extend, the conflation of the Shi’i tradition and national politics on the one hand, and struggle to conceive of religious and political belonging anew, on the other.

Advisor: Pandolfo, Stefania
Mahmood, Saba
Essays on Strong Presidencies and the Politics Behind the Ballot: Evidence from South Korea

This dissertation project seeks to understand the political dynamics of ruling parties under strong presidencies at the legislative recruitment stage with a regional focus on South Korea. The first paper introduces my main argument regarding how strong presidencies can determine the form and function of ruling party reforms such as legislative primaries. I argue that under strong presidential systems, wherein the executive abides by formal rules but is still willing to push her de facto power to its constitutional limits, ruling party elites - especially those who do not belong to the president's faction - can counteract presidential discretion by voluntarily democratizing the candidate selection process. I provide empirical evidence of these dynamics from South Korea during 2008-2016. The second paper formalizes the conditions under which ruling party elites endogenously choose to implement legislative primaries as a means to prevent the president from interfering in the party nomination process and provides implications of ruling party reforms on voter welfare. Whereas the first two papers study the contexts under which competing factions within the ruling party are able to agree upon the party's nomination processes and outcomes, the third paper examines a case of a failed coordination. The paper draws upon empirical evidence from the 2008 South Korea Legislative Election, where some party elites chose to defect from the ruling party and successfully formed a transitory electoral alliance.

Advisor: Chhibber, Pradeep
Methods for plasma stabilization and control to improve antihydrogen production

The ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) collaboration creates and performs precise measurements on antihydrogen to test Charge-Parity-Time (CPT) symmetry. Prior to creating antihydrogen we must prepare the antiproton and positron plasmas to have optimal and repeatable parameters. This thesis presents the development of a new method to simultaneously control the number of particles and plasma density of lepton plasmas, developments that increased our antihydrogen trapping rate, precision physics measurements performed on antihydrogen, and other plasma studies still under development. The method to stabilize the number of particles was based on a zero-temperature plasma model, which states that the plasma's on-axis self potential and density uniquely define a plasma. It is the combination of two previously existing techniques, radial compression in the Strong Drive Regime (SDR) with Evaporative Cooling (EVC), thus we called it SDREVC. Experimentally this method has proven to be very robust in delivering nearly identical plasmas, and theoretical calculations applying a finite temperature plasma model indicate that temperature effects in our operating regime are insignificant. The development took place in ALPHA's Penning-Malmberg traps, and consisted of designing and testing potential well shapes that allowed the compression and evaporation to occur simultaneously. The standard deviation in particle number of our initial load of positrons in 2016 was 24%, a fluctuation which was previously uncontrolled, but the standard deviation after SDREVC amounted to only 3%. After implementing SDREVC in our experimental routines, the stability made it possible to optimize plasma manipulations for antihydrogen production runs and increase our antihydrogen trapping rate by approximately a factor of 20. This increase in the trapping rate played a major role in our recent measurements of the hyperfine transition and 1S-2S spectroscopy of antihydrogen, and the 1S-2S spectroscopy measurement is now one of the most precise tests of CPT symmetry.

Advisor: Fajans, Joel