VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Unveiling Open Secrets of Hometown, War, and Mass Culture in Twentieth-Century Japanese Poetry

My dissertation, Unveiling Open Secrets of Hometown, War, and Mass Culture in Twentieth Century Japanese Lyric Poetry, explores the potential of lyric poetry, when used in conjunction with strategies of translation and rewriting, to unveil politically charged open secrets. Translation theorist André Lefèvre has said that translation can function as a kind of “alibi” that allows the translator to evade or redirect the pressures of censorship, to publish subversive material that might excite a more repressive reaction were it under the author’s name as original work. The poets treated in my dissertation all use various modes of translation, rewriting, or adaptation to create an alibi for themselves, a quietly resistant lyric voice forged from the fragments of other languages, other writers, and other media. Although modern lyric has often been portrayed as an elite art form removed from popular art forms, all the poets and artists discussed in my project adapt visual imagery and motifs from mass culture into lyric poetry in order to show the pervasiveness of these open secrets in a way that permeates the cultural environments of the elite and ordinary people alike./nThe first chapter explores Kitahara Hakushû’s (1885-1942) defamiliarizing portrayal of the nostalgic ideal of the hometown in his 1912 poetry collection Memories and other works. Hakushû uses visual devices drawn from Meiji cinema to reveal the projected, artificial quality of the notion of hometown. The second chapter investigates Ueda Bin’s (1874-1916) translations of Charles Baudelaire, which portray indirect ripples of the distant Russo-Japanese War in the latent violence of urban life in Tokyo. Chapter three discusses several 1930s lyric poets’ use of formal motifs drawn from mass media in their works of propagandistic nationalism during the Pacific War, and argues that these writers endued their works of nationalistic poetry with oblique criticism of wartime militarism. The last chapter of the dissertation investigates the legacy of these prewar and wartime strategies of the open secret in 1960s poetry and film of the Minamata environmentalist activist movement.

Advisor: Tansman, Alan
Corruption in the Court of Public Opinion: How Voters Perceive and Respond to Candidate Corruption

When do voters consider candidates for elected ofﬁce to be corrupt? If corruption is strongly disfavored by voters, why do corrupt candidates remain popular and keep get-ting reelected? These questions are of great importance for a number of reasons. First, understanding how voters perceive candidate corruption can be predictive in determining electoral outcomes. When evaluating candidates accused of impropriety, success in the voting booth for these candidates can be an indicator of prevailing social norms to-ward corruption. Second, having an empirical foundation for how the public perceives corruption can also serve as an important basis for designing interventions to change such norms, including campaign ﬁnance reform and anti-corruption laws. Third, under-standing regional differences in voter perceptions of candidates can lead toward building theories explaining variation in toleration of candidate corruption. Finally, uncovering divergence in how courts, laws, and the public deﬁne corruption has implications for the legitimacy of democratic institutions and electoral accountability./nThe ﬁrst chapter analyzes how voters conceptualize the corruption of political candidates, and offers explanatory and predictive frameworks that include the most important variables that factor into the voter’s decision and predict individual voting behavior when a candidate accused of corruption is up for election. The second chapter, co-authored with F. Daniel Hidalgo and Yuri Kasahara, tests the causal effect of informing voters of corruption on voting behavior with a ﬁeld and survey experiment in a mayoral election. The experiments show voters’ varied responses to corruption information and argues for a novel mechanism that explains the results. The ﬁnal chapter examines a number of mechanisms that explain why voters support or punish corrupt politicians, raising new research questions for scholars to consider in future research.

Advisor: Collier, David
Resident Macrophages are Locally Programmed for Silent Clearance of Apoptotic Cells

Although apoptotic cells (ACs) contain nucleic acids that can be recognized by Toll-like receptors (TLRs), engulfment of ACs does not initiate inflammation in healthy organisms. In this dissertation I explore the mechanisms that help maintain this homeostasis. I discuss nucleic acid sensing TLRs and their regulation. I also provide an introduction to the clearance of ACs from the body. I discuss how I identified and characterized macrophage populations that continually engulf ACs in several distinct tissues. These macrophages share characteristics compatible with immunologically silent clearance of ACs, including high expression of AC recognition receptors, low expression of TLR9, and reduced TLR responsiveness to nucleic acids. When removed from tissues these macrophages lose many of these characteristics and generate inflammatory responses to AC-derived nucleic acids, suggesting that cues from the tissue microenvironment are required to program macrophages for silent AC clearance. I show that KLF2 and KLF4 control expression of many genes within this AC clearance program. Coordinated expression of AC receptors with genes that limit responses to nucleic acids may represent a central feature of tissue macrophages that ensures maintenance of homeostasis

Advisor: Barton, Gregory M
An Application of Item Response Theory to Investigate the Validity of a Learning Progression for Number Sense

Learning progressions are one of the most important curriculum and assessment design ideas to be introduced in the past decade. A well-constructed learning progression can incorporate the knowledge needed to define the “track” that students may or should be on. This can inform teachers about when to teach what to whom. For the development of sound learning progressions, researchers investigate how learning typically unfolds in a particular area of study, and should empirically test and validate it. A learning progression of Number Sense was developed in a research project, Special Education Learning Progressions in Math (SELPM). The progression includes hypothesized levels of achievement for grades K to 3 for four sub-domains of Number Sense: Place Value, Addition, Magnitude Comparison, and Transcoding. This research was concerned with the validation of the learning progression. The study used three student assessment data sets to investigate the validity of the proposed learning progressions using item response theory, specifically the Rasch model and its extension. This research consists of three validation studies – Phase I: Preliminary Study, Phase II: Testing Validity of Learning Progression, and Phase III: Validation of Alternative Learning Progression. Through the iterative validation process, this research aimed to provide an empirically-validated and theoretically-based Number Sense learning progression and a set of assessments for the education community

Advisor: Wilson, Mark
Improving Fibroblast to Neuron Reprogramming through Engineering of the Cell Microenvironment

Cells respond to environmental cues to inform expression. This function is quintessential for effective tissue development and coincides with chemical signaling to depict a host of signals that predispose progenitor cells to adopt a lineage commitment and differentiated cells to adopt mechanoregulated phenotypes. Herein the mechanotransductive effects of substrate stiffness and ligand presentation are explored as they pertain to fibroblast to neuron reprogramming using the Brn2, Ascl1 and Myt1l (BAM) viral system and cross referenced against previous studies in the effect of stiffness on mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). It was discovered that ligand surface density deviations of a single order of magnitude are not sufficient to induce differential reprogramming efficiency. By contrast, stiffness has a profound effect at the intersection of broadly mechanotransductive pathways and neurogenerative genes. Using population RNAseq analysis, it was found that ERK and GSK-3β are largely regulated by viral expression of the singular factor, Ascl1. ERK, in conjunction with SMURF2, combine to have a biphasic regulatory effect on both arms of the SMAD pathway. Furthermore, modern analytical ontology toolsets were used to expose trends in MSC behavior governed by stiffness and cross validation of stiffness dependencies in the induced neuronal system. Similar to reprogrammed fibroblasts, MSCs show a stiffness dependent SMURF2 regulation. Concurrently, surface MHC class was seen to vary across stiffness and the antithrombogenic capacity of MSCs was shown to be stiffness dependent. Collectively this work sets the framework for further exploration into the mechanical regulation which drives progenitor lineage commitment and reprogramming capacity through a common mechanism.

Advisor: Li, Song
Not seeing the forest for the points: Novel LiDAR metrics elucidate forest structure and increase LiDAR usability by managers

Forest and fire ecology have long utilized remote sensing datasets to learn more about landscapes. Advances in gps spatial accuracy, GIS software capabilities, computing power, and remote sensing technology and software, as well as increases in the spatial and temporal resolution of remote sensing products, have made remote sensing a critical component of forest and fire ecology. Aerial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a fast-growing active remote-sensing technology that can be mined for detailed structural information about forests. These data are utilized in the fields of hydrology, forest ecology, silviculture, wildland fire ecology, wildlife ecology, and habitat modeling. LiDAR coverage has also become increasingly common, yet still contains much untapped potential./nDespite widespread research that derived copious valuable metrics from aerial LiDAR, few of these metrics are available to managers due to a significant knowledge and software barrier for LiDAR processing. Even when LiDAR is utilized to derive more complex metrics by scientists and LiDAR experts, metrics are often predictions of plot-based data across the landscape. While these metrics are useful, LiDAR can offer so much more. Because it holds information about forest structure in 3 dimensions, new metrics can be derived that capture the full complexity of forest structure./nI explore ways in which managers can use the plot network and data layers already available to them to derive large tree density, a metric that is critical for habitat modeling for many species, including the California spotted owl. I also explore the utility of LiDAR for estimating ladder fuels that carry fire from the ground into the canopy. Because there was no reliable method for quantifying these fuels, I also developed a plot-based methodology to collect these data. My dissertation work aims to increase LiDAR accessibility to managers and to develop new ways to use LiDAR to solve old problems. While there is much more work to be done, I am excited to share my work with LiDAR experts and forest managers, and hope that my findings improve the way we use LiDAR, the way we manage forests, and the way that we model and manage for wildland fire.

Advisor: Stephens, Scott L
Kelly, Nina M
Dissecting the Role of R-loops in DNA Damage and Repair

R-loops, three-stranded structures that form when transcripts hybridize to chromosomal DNA, are potent agents of genome instability. This instability has been explained by the ability of R-loops to induce DNA damage. Here, we show that persistent R-loops also compromise DNA repair. Depleting endogenous RNase H activity impairs R-loop removal in budding yeast, causing DNA damage that occurs preferentially in the repetitive ribosomal DNA locus (rDNA). We analyzed the repair kinetics of this damage and identified mutants that modulate repair. Our results indicate that persistent R-loops in the rDNA induce damage that is slowly repaired by break-induced replication (BIR). Furthermore, R-loop induced BIR at the rDNA leads to lethal repair intermediates when RNA polymerase I elongation is compromised. We present a model to explain how removal of R-loops by RNase H is critical in ensuring the efficient repair of R-loop induced DNA damage by pathways other than BIR.

Advisor: Koshland, Douglas E
Responding to Pain: Emotion, Medicine, and Culture between German Naturalism and Modernism

This dissertation sets its sights on a group of writers and scientists who cultivated readers capable of responding to the pain of others with emotions ranging from sympathy and empathy to disgust and suspense. These emotions, I claim, shed new light on the significant terrain shared by the history of medicine and literary history between German realism and modernism. The writing on pain examined in this dissertation reveals not only how medicine imagined and ultimately won support for its institutions by relying on literary strategies, but also how literature—by developing its own knowledge of pain—pointed out new directions for medicine as an institution. In this sense, the dissertation maintains that pain became the basis for a culture common to both medicine and literature. The first two chapters locate this common culture by turning to the crucial role sympathy played in the formation of institutions such as public health, naturalist theater, and charitable organizations during the last half of the nineteenth century. Towards this end, I dedicate careful attention to texts such as Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1892 Die Weber, an 1844 report by a representative of an aid organization named Alexander Schneer, and a report on an 1848 typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia by the doctor Rudolf Virchow. The remaining chapters address the shifting stakes of pain that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. Around this time, I argue, pain was no longer to be eliminated as a threat to public health, but rather to be embraced on its own terms. The third chapter outlines the parameters of this shift towards pain in the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner and F. J. J. Buytendijk. The fourth and fifth chapters, in turn, deal with the concrete ways in which this shift gave rise to new emotions and medical institutions that would cope with pain. These chapters focus, respectively, on disgust as a means of restoring emotion to medicine in the early poetry and prose of Gottfried Benn, and on suspense as a counterpart to sympathy for readers observing an epidemic unfold in Ernst Weiss’ novel Georg Letham: Arzt und Mörder.

Advisor: Kudszus, Winfried
Choreography in the Digital Era: Dancing the Cultural Differences of Technology

In this dissertation I argue that body movement can produce new and transgressive physical relationships to ordinary media. To do so, I analyze artworks that foreground the historical, cultural, and ethnic patterns of choreographic movement. Important to this exploration is how the design, production, and dissemination of different media can foster or suppress specificity and identity from feminist, queer, disability, and postcolonial perspectives. Focusing on artists who appropriate technological production to articulate specific kinesthetic relationships to media, I identify minoritarian perspectives on technology in specific historical and cultural circumstances to complicate the universalizing tendencies of digital culture discourses./nBuilding on the tradition of phenomenological analysis of performance and technology experimentation, Choreography in the Digital Era: Dancing the Cultural Differences of Technology expands aesthetic inquiries in the field of dance and technology to examine historical and cultural contexts. The project resides at the intersection of performance and new media, and brings history to bear on the present in order to imagine more culture- and identity-specific digital futures. International artists who make space for political and cultural perspectives at the core of this dissertation include: Lucinda Childs, John Bernd, Rachid Ouramdane, and the Electronic Disturbance Theater. These artists employ varying styles of somatic and kinesthetic engagement, which illustrates how performers and viewers interact with media devices on several levels. I examine these differences to reveal how “mediation” is in constant flux. By challenging the idea of a universal user in digital culture, this dissertation argues that mediation and its socio-cultural contexts impact the way performers move. In foregrounding this movement, my research brings forth the individual identities and cultural stories that universalist conceptions of digitality otherwise overlook.

Advisor: Jackson, Shannon
Black girls speak: Struggling, reimagining, and becoming in schools

The current historical moment is marked by extreme forms of racialized violence, antiblackness, and political repression on the one hand, and a surge of highly-energized, highly-visible race-specific forms of political and racialized resistance on the other. Situated within the contradictions, tensions, and possibilities of the times, several exclusively Black counterpublics have emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the form of intentional all-Black classes, spatially situated within a larger school. These spaces provide an exceptional opportunity to explore the transformative potential of spaces that eschew theories of a colorblind, post-race society and confront race and racialization directly./nTo this end, I utilize BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016), Fraser’s (1990) subaltern counterpublic, and hooks’ (1990) notion of homeplaces and the margin, to theorize about what I call, Black educational sovereign spaces, intentional all-Black counterpublics constructed within the context of multi-racial/ethnic, diverse school settings for the purpose of supporting Black students in racially-specific ways. Drawing on interviews with Black girl students and a Black woman educator, and classroom observations, this study explores one distinct Black educational sovereign space: An all Black, all female, young women’s studies class at a public high school in an urban district in Northern California. This manuscript constructs an ethnographic case study that explores both the ways Black girls are racialized and hypersexualized in schools, and also, the numerous ways their production of Black Girl Space facilitates a reimagining of a Black girl identity, and the development of a radical Black subjectivity. This work contributes a theorization of Black space in education and findings have implications for our understanding of the ways purposefully constructed Black educational sovereign spaces can serve to mitigate students’ racialized experiences and facilitate students’ construction of identities that reimagine problematic notions of blackness that confront them in society and in school.

Advisor: Nasir, Na'ilah
The Disparity Between What We Know and How We Communicate

Research has demonstrated that people systematically overrate their knowledge, intelligence, and skills in various domains. Confronting people with evidence of their miscalibration, however, causes them to reassess these claims. For example, simply asking people to explain how a sewing machine works leads them to subsequently report understanding it less—a bias called the illusion of explanatory depth (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002). While previous work argues that this process is domain-bound, we demonstrate in several experiments that the bias to inflate subjective knowledge is attenuated not only by explanations of the focal item itself but also by explanations of other, entirely different things, implying the existence of a more parsimonious, domain-agnostic process for this bias. We then show that the illusion of explanatory depth holds for difficult, but not easy, explanations.

Advisor: Critcher, Clayton R
Variability-Aware Compact Modeling of Nano-scale Technologies with Customized Test Structure Designs

It is widely recognized that in nano-scale CMOS technology variation in the/nmanufacturing process has emerged as a fundamental challenge to IC design. While/nfoundries are working hard to mitigate process variability, the design houses are/nasking for accurate and appropriate models to handle statistical circuit performance/nevaluation. To accurately represent the process and device variability, it is essential/nto incorporate the variability during the extraction and calibration phase of compact/ntransistor models. In addition, these compact transistor models require customized/ntest structure designs as well as proper statistical characterization procedures./nConventional statistical compact model characterization methodologies require/nspecial single transistor, direct-access test arrays, or virtual measurements from/nphysical simulation data; moreover, these models do not include rigorous statistical/nmodel parameter selection criteria./nOur proposed variability-aware compact transistor models can enable/nstatistically optimized designs by capturing device variations in a concise, yet/nphysically accurate way, and they are relatively easy to integrate with existing CAD/ntool flow. In this work, we have electrical measurements from carefully designed/nSRAM array test structures with bit transistor access, fabricated using a/ncollaborating foundry’s 28nm FDSOI technology. Stepwise parameter selection is/ncombined with sequential extractions of statistical compact model parameters upon/nfoundry-provided nominal compact model cards. These nominal models are trusted/nas they have been tested extensively and used during the test structure design./nOur characterization methodology selects an optimal statistical model/nparameter set that can be reliability extracted with the given measurement data./nWith further data from imaging ROIC test array, we are able to explore the linear/nspatial propagation of variance method to extract the variability in the compact/nmodel parameters with hierarchical models./nWe have also built a customized Monte Carlo (MC) simulation platform to/nutilize these compact transistor models in the statistical IC design flow. Different/nstatistical model parameters can be specified prior to the MC simulation within the/nscripted wrapper of standard SPICE-based simulators. We further exploit the/nstatistical structure of the extracted parameters in order to capture the nonlinear/ncorrelations and the non-Gaussian distributions through mixture of Gaussian/ndistributions. The goal is to demonstrate that significant non-normality in the/nmeasured data can be captured by our simplified model. Such non-normality is/noften evident at the tails of the performance distributions, and capturing that is/nnecessary for the statistical modeling of inherently high-yielding IC designs.

Advisor: Spanos, Costas J