VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Pervasive Well-being Technology

Well-being is the characteristic of humans to feel well with themselves and their environment. A key driver of wellbeing is to have a healthy mind. Stress management, positive emotions, and empathic social interaction get us closer to this goal. The only sustainable way towards wellbeing is by maintaining a healthy lifestyle. In summary, technologies supporting this objective should measure and intervene "life" itself!/nThe good news is that we are in a unique position to challenge the way technology can become a driver of wellbeing. Internet of things (IoT), Big Data, Affective Computing and Critical Engineering, are the key enablers. With pervasive data, interventions can evolve from being reactive to predictive. We could design long-term interventions that foster good habits, resilience, and personal growth. We encapsulate technologies in two parts: "Conceptualization and Sensor-less Sensing" and "Opportunistic Interventions." The former uses data streams to investigate and measure human traits and trends. The latter repurposes popular apps, devices, and environments into effective interventions. /nIn summary, we aim at designing well-being technology that could survive the chasm of adoption.

Advisor: Canny, John F
Specters of '68: Protest, Policing, and Urban Space

Political protest is an increasingly frequent occurrence in urban public space. During/ntimes of protest, the use of urban space transforms according to special regulatory circumstances/nand dictates. The reorganization of economic relationships under neoliberalism carries with it/nchanges in the regulation of urban space. Environmental design is part of the toolkit of protest/ncontrol./nExisting literature on the interrelation of protest, policing, and urban space can be broken/ndown into four general categories: radical politics, criminological, technocratic, and technicalprofessional./nEach of these bodies of literature problematizes core ideas of crowds, space, and/nprotest differently. This leads to entirely different philosophical and methodological approaches/nto protests from different parties and agencies./nThis paper approaches protest, policing, and urban space using a critical-theoretical/nmethodology coupled with person-environment relations methods. This paper examines political/nprotest at American Presidential National Conventions. Using genealogical-historical analysis/nand discourse analysis, this paper examines two historical protest event-sites to develop baselines/nfor comparison: Chicago 1968 and Dallas 1984. Two contemporary protest event-sites are/nexamined using direct observation and discourse analysis: Denver 2008 and St. Paul 2008./nResults show that modes of protest policing are products of dominant socioeconomic/nmodels of society, influenced by local policing culture and historical context. Each of the protest/nevent-sites studied represents a crisis in policing and the beginning of a transformation in modes/nof protest policing. Central to protest policing is the concept of territorial control; means to/nachieve this control vary by mode of protest policing, which varies according to dominant/nsocioeconomic model. Protesters used a variety of spatial strategies at varying degrees of/norganization. Both protesters and police developed innovations in spatial practice in order to/nmake their activities more effective./nThis has significant consequences for professionalized urban design. Both protester and/npolicing spatial innovation involves the tactical reorganization and occupation of urban space. As/nurban space plays a constituent role in protest and policing, environmental designers must be/naware of the political consequences of their designs.

Advisor: Cranz, Galen
A Deal With the Devil: The Political Economy of Lebanon, 1943-75

This dissertation is a contribution to the reframing of the history of postcolonial Lebanon, and in particular the era between independence from France and the outbreak of the civil war of 1975-90. The dissertation’s central argument is that rather than seeing postcolonial Lebanese history as a product of the contentious interaction between sectarian social groups, as is common in much of the literature on Lebanon, it is more useful to see that history as a product of the struggle to impose and maintain a liberal, laissez-faire economic model by the dominant faction of the postcolonial ruling elite, the commercial-financial bourgeoisie. This economic model entailed, in essence, appending the Lebanese economy to those of other regional powers, particularly the oil states of the Gulf, in order to continue the country’s colonial-era role as an entrepôt for the broader Middle East. As a result of its attachment to the economies of regional states, and its concentration in finance, trade, and the service sector, the Lebanese model was both highly unstable and grossly unequal. As a consequence, the Lebanese ruling elite struggled to impose and maintain this model, and they did so only by crafting a highly rigid political system that denied space to even the more moderate reformist forces. These features of the Lebanese system, its instability, inequity, and its rigidity, played a determining role in shaping Lebanon’s postcolonial history./nThe dissertation uses archival sources from Western diplomatic archives, the archives of the World Bank Group, and the private papers of the head of Lebanese General Security, along with published sources, to describe how this laissez-faire model came into being, to explore its key features, as well as efforts to oppose it. The dissertation provides an analysis of the ways in which the model’s inequity and instability impacted Lebanese society, through a discussion of the Litani River hydroelectric project and the Intra Bank crisis of 1966 respectively, and uses an account of the fate of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), as well as some of the major struggles within the Lebanese labor movement, to expose elite efforts to maintain the status quo and to enforce a high degree of political rigidity. Ultimately, the dissertation is an attempt to argue that Lebanese exceptionalism is rooted, not in the sectarian cleavages within Lebanese society, but rather in the laissez-faire economic model which set postcolonial Lebanon’s experience apart from that of its neighbors elsewhere in the Arab world

Advisor: Doumani, Beshara
Vernon, James
Mobilizing Bogotá: The Local and Transnational Politics of Inter-City Policy Circulation

In this dissertation, I critically examine the local and transnational actors, networks and agendas that allowed Bogotá (Colombia) to emerge as a world policy model of urban sustainable transport by analyzing the different ways in which Bogotá’s policies –particularly Transmilenio BRT and Ciclovía- were mobilized in Guadalajara (Mexico) and San Francisco (United States). Policy models are either celebrated as inspirational examples that can spur policy learning in many places at once or rejected as “one-size-fits-all” recipes that do not consider the complexity of local contexts. My dissertation departs from both arguments by demonstrating that although models and “best practices” can indeed be powerful catalyzers of policy change, practices of inter-city policy circulation inevitably take place in a local and transnational field of power in which different actors strategically mobilize other cities’ references to legitimize particular agendas and translate their beliefs about how the city should be organized into policy. In this dissertation I show that the wide circulation of Bogotá policies in the last decade reflects an increasing focus by the apparatus of international development on the circulation of city models as an arena to effect global impact, what I call the “leveraging cities” logic. Bogotá’s Transmilenio and Ciclovía are, then, part of a larger set of cost-effective, impact-oriented and financially-sustainable policy models promoted by international development banks and global philanthropy that seek to intervene in global climate change through their replication in as many cities as possible. Yet, the politics behind the global circulation of Bogotá policies are not about “coercion from above” but rather a politics of learning, persuasion and local coalition-building that takes place through a mobile infrastructure of policy circulation in the form of policy forums, study tours, best practices guides, images and videos. A careful and qualitative analysis of who organizes these events and objects and the practices of learning and persuasion that take place in and through them is key to understand the friction between global and urban agendas that underpinned the wide circulations of the Bogotá model since the early 2000s. To study transnational policy circuits and their effect on urban policy agendas and planning, I used a combination of methods that included archival research, participant observation and more than 90 interviews with mayors, planners, bicycle advocates, bus company owners, local NGO leaders, philanthropists and others in the many sites and situations where the Bogotá model took me during two years of fieldwork.

Advisor: Caldeira, Teresa
Charge Carrier Dynamics in Transition Metal Oxides Studied by Femtosecond Transient Extreme Ultraviolet Absorption Spectroscopy

With the ability to disentangle electronic transitions that occur on different elements and local electronic structures, time-resolved extreme ultraviolet (XUV) spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful tool for studying ultrafast dynamics in condensed phase systems. In this dissertation, a visible-pump/XUV-probe transient absorption apparatus with femtosecond resolution was constructed to investigate the carrier relaxation dynamics in semiconductors after photo-excitation. This includes timescales for carrier thermalization by carrier-carrier and carrier-phonon scattering. The 30 – 72 eV photon energy coverage (17 – 40 nm wavelength) generated by a table-top XUV light source is suitable for probing the 3p-to-3d core level absorptions of various transition metal oxides (TMOs) with specificities to elements and oxidation states./nIn Chapter 1, a brief introduction to charge carrier dynamics in semiconductor-based materials is given. In addition, fundamentals of core-level spectroscopy and the high harmonic generation (HHG) process are also addressed in this introductory chapter. Specifications of the experimental apparatus that was constructed are summarized in Chapter 2, including the design concepts and characterization of performance. Chapter 3 presents the spectral tunability of the XUV pulses generated from a semi-infinite gas cell (SIGC), as well as the data acquisition procedures. Charge carrier relaxation dynamics in Co3O4 following the charge transfer excitation pathway at 400 nm are documented in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5, various visible pump wavelengths are used to excite Co3O4 and the differences in the carrier dynamics versus excitation wavelength are considered. After selectively photoexciting a Si/TiO2 heterojunction, the resulted electron transfer process is observed and reported in Chapter 6. The concluding remarks of the dissertation are made in Chapter 7, while several ongoing time-resolved experiments are addressed in the Appendix sections.

Advisor: Leone, Stephen R
Complex Learning around a Simple Tool: Improving Instructional Supervision by Improving Lesson Analysis

ABSTRACT/nComplex Learning around a Simple Tool:/nImproving Instructional Supervision by Improving Lesson Analysis/nBy/nPamela Coats VandeKamp/nDoctor of Education/n/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Heinrich Mintrop, Ph.D., Chair/nClassroom instruction is a complex interaction that takes place each day between the teacher and students. The teacher has the responsibility to ensure that students are engaged in learning new skills or content, while students are responsible for responding to the teaching in a way that contributes to their own learning. With this in mind, it is important to consider the role of the principal in regards to the effectiveness of the teacher as she or he fulfills this responsibility. Ideally, the principal is the person designated to visit classrooms, observe instruction and develop an analysis to be used by teachers to make necessary improvements./nNonetheless, in many schools, the principal is not able to adequately provide teachers with effective feedback about classroom instruction. This can be attributed to multiple factors regarding the many roles of the principal as manager, facilitator, district representative and parent liaison. One of the most common factors in this dilemma is that principals do not always have the requisite skill or the experience needed to analyze a sequence of teaching for quality instruction. Only when principals have the knowledge to conduct an in depth analysis of the teaching that occurs in the classroom and provide an analysis of what they have observed are they able to create effective feedback for teachers./nAbove all, feedback begins with a clear vision about what instruction should look like in the classroom, observations that describe the current practices that occur during teaching, and a mechanism to move from the current to the desired practices. Clearly, this failure to analyze high quality instruction contributes to insufficient student achievement and engagement in classrooms around the country./nThis Design Development Study addresses the lack of skill among principals to analyze classroom instruction. Through a series of carefully designed professional development opportunities, a cohort of five elementary principals participated in reading professional literature, observed sequences of quality instruction, and engaged in facilitated discussions to deepen their understanding of the behaviors of teaching and learning. They also were introduced to a structured framework for elements of instruction that contributed to the development of a common language for use in their discussions about high quality instruction.

Advisor: Mintrop, Heinrich
Teaching for a Growth Mindset: How Contexts and Professional Identity Shift Decision-Making

What happens to pedagogy when a teacher’s personal goals of supporting students’ productive dispositions toward learning collide with her professional identity as a successful teacher whose students perform well on standardized tests? This dissertation is a mixed-methods case study that shows how context shapes one teacher’s identity and decision-making, such that she seems to be two drastically different teachers in two different instructional contexts – a summer course in which she had complete flexibility over the curriculum, goals, and achievement measures and an academic year course in which she felt bounded by the state standards test. The dissertation examines the very real consequences these pedagogical decisions have for students./nUsing qualitative classroom observations and quantitative survey and assessment data, this dissertation examines why, despite the teacher’s strong commitment to growth mindset instruction and equity in both contexts, the teacher implemented pedagogical moves that contributed to distinctly different opportunities for students to engage with rich mathematics in each, and what those shifts meant for students’ mathematical identities and learning./nThe different cultural contexts in the summer and academic years offered the teacher identity resources about what was valued as good teaching, which led to distinct pedagogical decisions that aligned with the salient aspects of her professional identity in each context. Despite her commitment to growth mindset instruction in both contexts, this teacher implemented pedagogical moves that contributed to distinctly different opportunities for students to engage with rich mathematics and develop productive mathematical self-concepts./nThis dissertation examines the ways the institutional context shifted and practices changed subtly as a result, and uses these comparisons to unpack which elements of the whole system of teaching for a growth mindset are necessary to contribute to productive changes in student mindsets or dispositions toward mathematics, engagement, and persistence with learning. Using Ms. M as a case study, this dissertation sheds light on the ways in which school contexts - in concert with a teachers’ multifaceted identity - contribute to decision-making while setting instructional goals.

Advisor: Schoenfeld, Alan H
Gustatory Processing in Drosophila Higher Brain Centers

The sense of taste, which allows animals to distinguish between nutritious and toxic substances, is essential for survival. However, we know very little about how taste information is processed by the brain, and how this processing allows for complex behaviors, such as those involved in learning and memory tasks. Using the model system Drosophila melanogaster, I investigated taste circuitry and the representation of taste information in the higher brain./nIn the first part of this dissertation, I examine the neural basis of taste memory in Drosophila. First, I establish the role of the mushroom body in aversive taste conditioning, and show that the γ lobe Kenyon Cells, in particular, are necessary for this type of conditioning. I also show the requirement of dopaminergic PPL1 neurons in taste conditioning and demonstrate that most of these neurons are bitter-responsive using calcium imaging. Through an extensive analysis of taste activation in the calyx of the mushroom body, I show how taste is represented in this structure, revealing sparse, modality-specific activation in the mushroom body dendrites in response to taste stimulation./nThe second part introduces a new class of neurons, the Taste Projection Neurons, or TPNs, which we identify and classify through anatomical, functional and behavioral studies. Each of these neurons overlaps with primary sensory projections of a single modality, and responds in a modality-specific manner. We show that all three of these neurons are capable of influencing proboscis extension, an innate feeding behavior. Two of these neurons, TPNs 2 and 3 extend projections into the higher brain and are necessary for aversive taste conditioning, and activation of TPN3 is sufficient to act as the unconditioned stimulus during associative learning. Together, these studies examine the multiple roles taste information plays in the higher brain and provides a foundation for future studies of taste circuitry and learning and memory in Drosophila.

Advisor: Scott, Kristin
Mapping Dysregulated Metabolic Pathways in Cancer Using Functional Metabolomic Platforms

Cancer cells possess fundamentally altered metabolic pathways that provide a foundation to support tumorigenicity and malignancy. Our understanding of the biochemical underpinnings of cancer has benefited from the integrated utilization of large-scale profiling platforms (e.g., genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics), which, together, can provide a global assessment of how enzymes and their parent metabolic networks become altered in cancer to fuel tumor growth. In chapter one, we present several examples of how these integrated platforms have yielded fundamental insights into dysregulated metabolism in cancer. We will also discuss questions and challenges that must be addressed to more completely describe, and eventually control, the diverse metabolic pathways that support tumorigenesis./nIn chapters two and three, using genomic and functional metabolomic platforms, we elucidate the role of two novel metabolomic pathways in promoting the aggressive features of cancer. In chapter two, we show that inositol phosphate recycling can fuel cancer aggressiveness by controlling both glycolytic and lipid metabolism. In chapter three, we use functional metabolomics to discover that the ether lipid generating enzyme, AGPS, is both necessary and sufficient to promote cancer malignancy by maintaining the balance between structural and signaling lipids in the cell. Taken together these studies not only highlight the application of genomics and functional metabolomics in uncovering novel metabolomic pathways that drive cancer malignancy, but they also pave the way for the development of novel metabolism-based chemotherapeutic strategies that may some day be used in the clinic to treat malignant human cancers.

Advisor: Nomura, Daniel K
Synthesis of Lycodine-Type Lycopodium Alkaloids Using C-H Functionalization Tactics

This dissertation describes our syntheses of several lycodine-type Lycopodium alkaloids by the late-stage C-H functionalization of lycodine derivatives. Lycodine-type alkaloids are well-known for their neurological activity. For example, huperzine A is a potent acetylcholinesterase inhibitor and the complanadine family of molecules has been shown to induce the secretion of Nerve Growth Factor. Due to these properties, lycodine-type alkaloids serve as interesting lead compounds for the development of new therapies for neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. Unsurprisingly, these molecules have attracted the attention of the synthetic community. Chapter 1 reviews syntheses of lycodine-type Lycopodium alkaloids with particular emphasis on the syntheses of biologically active congeners. Chapter 2 describes our synthesis of complanadine B, an unsymmetrical dimer of lycodine, using two approaches. In the first, the requisite skeletal oxygenation was installed early in the synthetic sequence. Our second approach utilized a blocking group strategy to enable the late-stage oxygenation of the complanadine skeleton by preventing oxygenation at undesired sites. Chapter 3 describes our efforts toward the synthesis of the casuarinine family of Lycopodium alkaloids by the late-stage C-H functionalization of lycodine derivatives. Using this strategy, we have been able to complete the synthesis of casuarinine D and have made significant progress toward the synthesis of casuarinine H, which we believe can serve as an intermediate in the synthesis of several other lycodine-type alkaloids.

Advisor: Sarpong, Richmond