VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Religious redirection [electronic resource] : Muslim-Christian market interaction in early islamic Syria-Palestine

This dissertation examines cultural and religious change in a context of interreligious interaction at Jarash city in Jordan during the early Islamic period (600-1000 CE). Through archaeological study of market street shops, an early congregational mosque in the centre of urban Jarash, and an array of material items and practices, it investigates how religion is lived out in everyday experience and changes gradually. In late antique Jarash—a predominantly Christian city with numerous churches—a congregational mosque is built, the urban marketplace expands, and new changes are seen in commercial and material culture. I explore these changes by considering the relationship between mosque and market in the urban environment, studies of macro-botanical, phytolith, faunal and human remains, writing tablets, and mass-produced religious commodities. This enables a description of the material bases of social and religious belonging, changes in farming, food and diet, commercial practices involving money and trust, and ideas of the sacred in material culture. The dissertation suggests that the early urban mosque in Jarash facilitated intermingling and interaction. Evidence indicates that a food suq (market) became closely associated with the mosque and that market streets were organised by trade occupation. The discussion of bio-environmental data provides an account of how people put religious ideas to use and are shaped by their relations with ecological things and market exchange. The dissertation also illustrates how personal texts inscribed on mass-produced lamps created a distinct, local form of spirituality that emerged in the fluid relations between Christians and early Muslims. Overall it offers an understanding of how religious communities reshape each other in grounded, material ways through social interaction. Comparing change at a political state-level with change in religiosity in everyday material culture related to individuals, I show how these processes differ in timing. The dissertation suggests early Islam to be cross-cutting of religious and social boundaries within the study setting.

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Hodder Ian primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Meskell Lynn advisor. Thesis advisor
Walmsley Alan
The religious roots of inequality in Africa [electronic resource]

Compared to Christians, Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa have fewer years of education, are less likely to be literate in any language, and their children are less likely to be in school. This project is the first to provide a quantitative and comparative documentation of this widespread inequality, and addresses two key questions. First, what are the origins of the Christian-Muslim education gap in Africa? Second, what explains variation in its persistence over time? I find that religious demographics play an important role in explaining the origins and persistence of the Christian-Muslim education gap in Africa. Employing case studies of colonial Nigeria and Uganda, I find that the distribution of the Muslim population and the degree of Islamization of political institutions in pre-colonial Africa affected demand for and investment in education in the colonial period through two channels: the religious marketplace and the structure of political power. Within Uganda, the percentage of an ethnic group that is Muslim is negatively correlated with Muslim educational attainment and positively correlated with the magnitude of the Christian-Muslim education gap in the colonial period. Further, Muslim educational attainment during the colonial period is predicted by exposure to missionary schools. There is considerable variation in persistence of educational inequality across countries over time. In some cases, the Christian-Muslim education gap has remained stable or declined, and in other cases the gap has grown. I suggest that part of the persistence of inequality is also related to religious demographics. Muslims in several African countries today continue to have worse educational outcomes, and the Christian-Muslim education gap is larger, where they comprise a local majority. The long-term effect of colonial investments, and particularly physical access to schools, likely explains some but not all of this relationship in the current period. In the case of Malawi, controlling for access, Muslims living as a majority continue to have lower educational attainment than Christians living in the same area and than Muslims living as minority. I conduct a household survey with embedded experiments to investigate a set of mechanisms that may underlie this relationship.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Weinstein Jeremy M. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Dupas Pascaline advisor. Thesis advisor
Fearon James D. advisor. Thesis advisor
Laitin David D. advisor. Thesis advisor
Renewable materials and chemicals from waste lignin [electronic resource]

Lignin is the second most abundant natural polymer, making up 30% of the total carbon in the biosphere. Industries that utilize the "woody" biomass of plants (e.g. papermaking and biofuel production) generate more than 130 million tons of lignin per year. There is intrinsic value in the aromatic components of lignin. Lignin is hence an inexpensive and only renewable feedstock for the production of aromatic chemicals that are currently derived almost exclusively from fossil resources. Despite the abundance of lignin and potential economic benefits of lignin utilization, challenges in lignin utilization has relegated its application to low-value ones. For instance, as a filler in concrete and animal feed, as a dispersant, and as fire-retardant. The challenges stem mainly from its poor physical properties as a material. Moreover, the complexity and high stability of lignin bonds make deconstruction of lignin to aromatic monomers profoundly challenging. Presented herein are efforts towards transforming lignin to functional materials in high-value applications -- as a bulk polymer and aromatic monomers -- by suitably harnessing some unique molecular features of lignin. These include (i) UV-performance arising from lignin's aromaticity; (ii) chemical recalcitrance due to strong stability of bonds; and (iii) the highly prevalent β-O-4 motif in lignin which we chose as a target for depolymerization chemistry. First, we developed a catalytic and solvent-free method to synthesis lignin--lactide copolymers. We used these copolymers as dispersion modifiers in "corn-derived" polylactic acid (PLA)-based materials to allow PLA to block UV radiation. Second, we took advantage of lignin's chemical stability and formulated an eco-friendly, 100% waste-derived wood adhesive. We demonstrated that the adhesive performs on par with formaldehyde-containing ones that are used in household wood-based furniture items. Last, we applied mild chemical methods to target the β-Ο-4 linkage in lignin, and characterized the stream of aromatic monomers produced. The depletion of fossil fuels and the environmental impact of petroleum-based plastics have driven a strong global interest in renewable polymers derived from non-food feedstocks. Our work with synthesis of functional lignin-based materials is an important step towards the complete utilization of lignocellulosic biomass, and serves to complement studies in cellulose and hemicellulose utilization.

Keywords: Chemistry.
Advisor: Sattely Elizabeth primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Kanan Matthew William
Khosla Chaitan
Reproducible research practices, scientific transparency, and subgroup claims [electronic resource] : a meta-research dissertation

There is a growing movement to encourage reproducibility and transparency practices across all scientific fields, including public access to raw data and protocols and the conduct of replication studies. In this dissertation, I evaluate: the status and trends of reproducibility and transparency across all biomedical research fields; the reproducibility of subgroup analyses in randomized controlled trials; and the frequency, validity, and relevance of sex-based subgroup analyses in Cochrane reviews. Among a random sample of 441 biomedical journal articles published in 2000-2014, only one study provided a full protocol and none made raw data directly available. In general, replication studies were rare (n = 4). In a sample of 169 randomized controlled trials (from two datasets containing randomized controlled trials with at least one subgroup analysis), there were a total of 117 subgroup claims made in the abstracts of 64 articles. Of these claims, only 46 (39%) had evidence of statistically significant heterogeneity (P < 0.05 from an interaction test). Five (11%) of the 46 subgroup findings had at least one subsequent pure corroboration attempt by a meta-analysis or a randomized controlled trial. None of the corroboration attempts had a statistically significant P-value from an interaction test. Among 41 reviews, with at least one sex-treatment subgroup analysis in at least one forest plot, published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, there were 109 separate treatment-outcome analyses ("topics"). Eight (7.3%) had a statistically significant sex-treatment interaction and only three were discussed by the Cochrane reviewers for a potential impact on different clinical management for males versus females. Overall, the current published biomedical literature lacks transparency. A minority of subgroup claims made in the abstracts of randomized controlled trials are supported by their own data, i.e., a significant interaction effect. Corroboration attempts of statistically significant subgroup differences are rare, and when done, the initially observed subgroup differences are not reproduced. Lastly, statistically significant sex-treatment interactions are only slightly more frequent than what would be expected by chance and there is little evidence of subsequent corroboration or clinical relevance of sex-treatment interactions.

Advisor: Ioannidis John
Basu Sanjay
Minor Lloyd advisor. Thesis advisor
Nelson Lorene M.
Sainani Kristin advisor. Thesis advisor
Reputation and incentives in online social systems [electronic resource]

Online social systems are quickly becoming fundamental to a large part of the modern world, as the platforms for an ever-increasing diversity of aspects of daily life. This thesis aims to develop principled foundations for the reputation and incentive mechanisms that underpin online social systems. These social mechanisms are studied at various levels of resolution: at a microscale, where the atomic units of online social behavior exist; at a mesoscale, where these atomic units coalesce into collective phenomena that affect groups of people; and at a macroscale, where patterns of social interaction in entire communities are guided by the social mechanisms we design. Work in this thesis begins with an examination of the user-to-user evaluations that form the basis of reputation systems across different domains, and shows how relative similarity and relative status play critical roles in shaping these evaluations. We apply this understanding to successfully predict how communities synthesize the many evaluations of a single person into a collective opinion of their reputation. We also investigate how the structure of feedback from social mechanisms can be used to identify content of long-term value in the important domain of question-answering sites. Finally, we introduce a framework for understanding the incentive structures introduced by badge systems. We develop a model for reasoning about user behavior in the presence of badges, and then validate its predictions on real-world data. We find that badges can influence and steer user behavior on a site---leading both to increased participation and to changes in the mix of activities a user pursues. Several robust design principles emerge from our framework that could potentially aid in the design of incentives for a broad range of sites. Finally, we discuss our implementation of a large-scale badge system to 100,000 students on an online education platform. We find a fivefold increase in forum engagement as a result of our system. Overall, we find that studying social mechanisms at all levels of resolution leads to principled foundations that can improve the design of reputation and incentive systems.

Advisor: Leskovec Jurij primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Jurafsky Dan
Shoham Yoav advisor. Thesis advisor
Reservoir modeling with multiple geological scenarios for deformation of reservoir structure and evolution of reservoir properties [electronic resource]

Deformational uncertainty about subsurface structures and accommodational uncertainty about rocks are not only closely linked to each other, but also significantly impact reservoir responses. The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the effects of these two geological uncertainties on reservoir responses. To achieve this goal, we aim to develop and test a reservoir modeling and evaluation workflow that accounts for the mode of deformation of a reservoir and the mode of accommodation of reservoir properties for a given deformation, by utilizing structural attributes and rock physics models. First, we investigate the sources of geological uncertainty in structural deformation and rock accommodation. We employ different combinations of structural geometry and deformation models to represent multiple scenarios for structural deformation. Distributed and localized accommodation styles and their subsets can represent scenarios for rock accommodation. Second, we develop a new geomodeling workflow accounting for the mode of structural deformation and rock accommodation. The new workflow links the forward deformation and restoration of the reservoir structure to the same processes on the rock. An application on a synthetic field demonstrates that realizations and dynamic responses from different scenarios can be distinguished from one another by comparing seismic responses. Next, we propose a new rock physics method, Reconstruction of Equivalent Isotropic Medium (REIM), which allows us to compute the angular variation of seismic responses of arbitrarily oriented fracture inclusions in an anisotropic medium, and to apply our new workflow to unconventional shale resources. Specifically, we apply these tools to an unconventional Marcellus gas field in which structural complexity and sparse data cause substantial difficulties in evaluation. We identify the sources of geological uncertainties and define multiple scenarios based on basin-wide and field-specific observations. By using rock physics models as vehicles to link geological scenarios with reservoir properties, we propagate geological assumptions to reservoir responses. We then select combinations of structural deformation and rock accommodation scenarios by comparing the actual and synthetic seismic responses. The selected scenario and models successfully explain the field-specific anomalies.

Keywords: Energy Resources Engineering.
Advisor: Mukerji Tapan
Caers Jef advisor. Thesis advisor
Pollard David D. advisor. Thesis advisor
Results on the broadcast channels [electronic resource]

The broadcast channel, first studied by Tom Cover, is a model for one-to-many communications, such as the downlink of a cellular system. The capacity region of this channel, defined as the closure of the set of all achievable rate tuples, characterizes the optimal tradeoff among simultaneously achievable data rates. Inner and outer bounds on the capacity region have been obtained, but they coincide only under certain conditions, and the capacity region in general remains unknown. This dissertation establishes new capacity results for broadcast channels with and without feedback. First, we simplify the superposition coding inner bound and establish new optimality results for the superposition coding inner bound for a 2-receiver discrete memoryless broadcast channel. Second, we show that the capacity region of the continuous-time Poisson broadcast channel is achieved via superposition coding for most channel parameter values. Interestingly, the channel in some subset of these parameter values does not belong to any of the existing classes of broadcast channels for which superposition coding is optimal. For the rest of the channel parameter values, we show that there is a gap between the best known inner and outer bounds, namely, Marton's inner bound and the Nair--El Gamal outer bound. Third, we establish the capacity region of several classes of broadcast channels with random state, in which the channel to each user is selected from two possible channel state components and the state is known only at the receivers. Some classes of broadcast channels for which we establish the capacity region do not belong to any class of broadcast channels for which the capacity region was previously known. Last, we show that the Maddah-Ali--Tse scheme, which establishes the symmetric capacity of two example broadcast channels with strictly causal state information at the transmitter, is a simple special case of the Shayevitz--Wigger scheme for the broadcast channel with generalized feedback. We then introduce a new broadcast channel example that shares many features with the Maddah-Ali--Tse examples, for which we show that another special case of Shayevitz-Wigger scheme attains a higher symmetric rate than the MAT scheme. The symmetric capacity of this example is not known, however. The combined results of this work shed light on our understanding of broadcast channels, and the tools and intuition developed during the research could also be applied to other network information theory problems.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: El Gamal Abbas A. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Özgür Ayfer advisor. Thesis advisor
Weissman Tsachy advisor. Thesis advisor
Retinoic acid and neuroligin-2 [electronic resource] : two molecular regulators of GABAergic synaptic transmission in postnatal somatosensory cortex

In the following thesis, I examine how two different molecular players shown to be critical during early neural development, retinoic acid and neuroligin-2, regulate GABAergic synaptic transmission in the postnatal brain. In chapter one, I explore how retinoic acid (RA) regulates GABAergic synaptic transmission in adult somatosensory cortex. As opposed to RA's crucial role in embryonic neural patterning, in recent years, using in vitro preparations, RA was discovered to mediate homeostatic synaptic plasticity in mature neurons of the hippocampus. In contrast to RARα's classic role as a transcriptional regulator, this ability to trigger homeostasis is conferred by a novel ability of retinoic acid receptor alpha (RARα) to regulate protein synthesis. Here, I conduct the first exploration as to whether retinoic acid also may regulate mature synaptic transmission in brain regions outside the hippocampus, in an acute brain slice preparation that may more closely preserve the in vivo circuitry than do cultured neuron preparations. I show that in contrast to its role in the hippocampus, in the somatosensory cortex, retinoic acid increases inhibitory synaptic transmission with no effects on excitation; that these effects appear to be mediated both pre- and postsynaptically; and that these effects seem limited to spontaneous, as opposed to evoked, transmission. Additionally, I examine the role of neuroligin-2 (NL2), a known regulator of early GABAergic synaptic development, in the mature somatosensory cortex. Using a recently developed conditional NL2 KO mouse, I establish that NL2 also plays a role in postnatal synapse development of the somatosensory cortex, and that consistent with studies from constitutive NL2 KOs, removal of NL2 results in decreased inhibitory transmission, including reduced evoked transmission from fast-spiking inhibitory neurons. I describe a series of attempts to rescue NL2 function at GABAergic synapses in vivo using chimeric proteins and domain deletions, in order to assess the "structure-function" of NL2 in vivo. I will discuss the technical and biological implications of both successful rescue and lack of rescue, both for NL biology and in terms of in vivo versus in vitro molecular approaches.

Advisor: Chen Lu (Professor of neurosurgery) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Hestrin Shaul
Malenka Robert C.
Shen Kang
Revealing electron-phonon coupling in quantum materials using equilibrium and nonequilibrium photoemission spectroscopy [electronic resource]

The electronic behavior of solids is largely determined by the interaction between electrons and other emergent particles. The quantized excitation of lattice vibrations, also known as phonons, is a fundamental emergent particle in solids. The success of Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory in conventional superconductors highlights the importance of understanding electron-phonon coupling for advanced materials, in particular superconductors. On the other hand, the role of electron-phonon coupling in unconventional superconductors is under intensive debates. This thesis aims at understanding electron-phonon coupling quantitatively using equilibrium and non-equilibrium photoemission spectroscopies. In particular, it focuses on novel experimental ideas which provide access to fundamental quantities. By case studies on three representative materials, I provide compelling evidence for the predictive power of the BCS theory on graphitic materials, and for the impact of correlation effects on electron-phonon coupling in unconventional superconductors.

Keywords: Applied Physics.
Advisor: Reis David A.
Shen Zhi-Xun primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Devereaux Thomas Peter
Richards on Imagination: Reanimating a Psychological Poetics

I.A. Richards was one of the most formative, if inconsistently understood, literary critics of the 20th century. This thesis seeks to clarify a key move in Richards' work: his ability to reapply and thus arguably "reanimate" the thought of major historical intellectual figures. In his (1934) book Coleridge on Imagination, Richards applies the 19th-century idealist philosophy of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the analysis of 20th-century poetry and in the same move brings Coleridge into dialogue with 20th-century psychology. Arguing that "reanimation" was one of Richards' modus operandi, the thesis abstracts the method from his book on Coleridge and turns it on him to capture the reinvigorating potential of his criticism.

Keywords:  Department of English
I.A. Richards
Coleridge
poetics
literary criticism
philosophy
Department of English
Thesis
Advisor: Greene Roland
Gigante Denise