VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Supramolecule-Directed Self-Assembly of Nanorods

In this dissertation, a procedure for ordering nanorods both spatially and orientationally using a diblock copolymer-based supramolecule is developed and examined in bulk and thin film. Anisotropic nanomaterials display a number of properties that could prove useful in various applications including photovoltaics, magnetic storage, and sensors. However, effective use of these properties often require control over the spatial organization of the particles: some applications, e.g. for use in magnetic storage, require well-defined arrays of particles, while others, e.g. as a method of mechanical strengthening, require interconnected networks. Furthermore, the anisotropy in the properties that arises from the anisotropic structure of the nanomaterials only manifests on the macroscale if the particles are oriented on a macroscopic scale. Thus, to be able to fully employ the properties of these nanomaterials, it is necessary to control both spatial arrangement and orientation over large areas./nThis method, employing a diblock copolymer-based supramolecule to control and direct nanoparticle assembly, was first applied to assemble isotropic nanoparticles. It was used to confine nanoparticles to a sheet with a thickness approaching that of a single nanoparticle, as well as in hexagonal arrays. A variety of small molecules, nanoparticles, and thermal treatments were tested, demonstrating the robustness and versatility of the system./nUsing the knowledge acquired from coassembly with isotropic nanoparticles, the system was applied toward assembling anisotropic nanorods. First, nanorods approximately thirty nanometers in length and four in diameter were arranged into arrays, sheets, and interconnected networks by varying the relative volume fractions of the supramolecular blocks. Then, this process was extended to nanorods of different lengths and at various concentrations and thermal treatment conditions, exposing how the kinetics of assembly affect the process./nFinally, after examination of nanorod assembly in bulk composites, the system was used to form thin film assemblies of nanorod-supramolecule composite. The geometric constraints inherent in the thin film morphology introduce new energetic factors that must be accounted for during assembly. By adjusting nanorod length and concentration, end-to-end assemblies of nanorods over large areas was accomplished.

Advisor: Xu, Ting
How Do Entity Beliefs Shape Perceptions of Immigrants and Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy?

Perceptions of human changeability may be particularly relevant to immigration attitudes. Building upon research showing that beliefs about the fixedness versus malleability of human characteristics (entity versus incremental beliefs) shape intergroup attitudes (e.g., Levy, Stroessner, & Dweck, 1998), my program of research explored how these beliefs shape attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy. Across five studies, using UC Berkeley student and national adult samples, I assessed participants' entity (versus incremental) beliefs regarding the fixedness or malleability of human characteristics, levels of prejudice, and attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy. Relative to incremental beliefs, entity beliefs were associated with stronger perceptions that immigrants are incapable of assimilating into U.S. society, greater feelings of threat toward immigrants, more negative emotions toward immigrants, less feelings of warmth toward immigrants, stronger endorsement of legal punishment for undocumented immigrants, and more prejudice toward immigrants. Implications of entity (versus incremental) beliefs for immigration policy and reform are discussed.

Advisor: Mendoza-Denton, Rodolfo
Variational Inequalities with Gradient Constraints

In this thesis we study variational inequalities with gradient constraints. We consider the questions of regularity of their solutions, and regularity of their free boundaries. We also study the relation between variational inequalities with gradient constraint and the obstacle problem. In particular we consider their relation in the vector-valued case./nIn Chapter 2 we generalize some known results about the equivalence of variational inequalities with gradient constraint and variational inequalities with constraint on the so- lution, by allowing less regular functionals and constraints. In Chapter 3 we prove that some class of vector-valued variational inequalities with gradient constraint is equivalent to variational inequalities with constraint on the solution./nIn Chapter 4 we prove the optimal regularity for a class of variational inequalities with gradient constraints. The regularity and the shape of the free boundary of this problem is the subject of Chapters 5 and 6. We prove that the free boundary is as regular as the part of the boundary that parametrizes it. In order to prove this, we generalize the notion of ridge, by replacing the Euclidean norm by other norms. We also consider the singularities of the distance function (in the new norm) to the boundary of a domain.

Advisor: Evans, Lawrence C
Reshetikhin, Nicolai
An Extended Linear Difference Model for Mortality Projection, with Applications to Japan

In this dissertation, we propose the Tangent Vector Field (TVF) model for Japanese mortality projection, which is an extended Linear Difference (LD) model, and show its applications./nIn the two chapters following the introduction, we describe the mortality trends in Japan and review the mortality projection models for Japan./nThen, in the following two chapters, we describe the data and methods for the mortality models, show the results of fitting, and discuss them with special emphasis on the LD model. We describe the mathematical formulations for decline-type and shift-type models, and discuss the inverse function of log mortality and differential forms of mortality models. We discuss five models: two decline-type models (the Proportional Hazard (PH) and Lee--Carter (LC) models), and three shift-type models (the Horizontal Shifting (HS), Horizontal Lee--Carter (HL), and LD models). In particular, we compare the LC and LD models from a statistical viewpoint. The result guides better construction of a mortality projection model, namely, a blended model with LC properties in youth and LD properties in older age./nIn the last chapter, we propose the TVF model applying the idea of tangent vector fields on the log mortality surface. We show a fully specified example of the projection procedure of the TVF model with all constants and coefficients applied for Japanese mortality projection. Then, we compare the TVF and LC models' results of mortality projection. From the observation of the relative mortality rates, we see that the LC model expresses mortality improvement only in a vertical direction, whereas the TVF model succeeds in expressing a shifting of mortality improvement in the direction of older ages that are observed in the actual mortality. In addition, we compare the projected mx curves. The mx by the LC model exhibits an unnatural pattern because the slope of the curve diminishes once around the age of 60 years and becomes much steeper after 80 years. The curve of the TVF model is more plausible. As a whole, we observe that the TVF model has many advantages for Japanese mortality projection compared with the LC model./nWe show that the TVF model proposed in this dissertation is not only quite useful for Japanese mortality projection but also has various applicability. At this point in time, there may be few countries with such strong shifting features for old age mortality as Japan. However, some countries are likely to experience the same mortality situation as Japan in the future through the extension of life expectancy. Thus, the TVF model will be a useful tool for projections in such situations.

Advisor: Wachter, Kenneth W
Wilmoth, John R
The Changing Foundations of Chinese Development: From Low-Cost Labor to Land Dispossession

What are the foundations of China's rise? This dissertation argues that two central mechanisms are foundational to the Chinese economy. First, enterprises suppress labor prices to low levels through the employment of rural migrant laborers who hold generalized rights to rural village land, an arrangement which outsources the full social cost of labor reproduction to villages. Second, rural governments, bankrupted from absorbing these costs, raise revenues by expropriating village land for urban construction. These two mechanisms - one labor-based and the other land-centered, both driving discrete mechanisms of capital accumulation in China today - are interdependent but mutually antagonistic. The migrant labor system has bankrupted the rural governments that absorb labor reproduction costs, thus necessitating their turn to profitable land redevelopment for fiscal recovery. Yet rural-urban land conversions are gradually undermining mechanisms for the reproduction of the Chinese labor force./nBased on two years of long-term and intensive ethnographic fieldwork, conducted from 2007 to 2011 in Beijing and in two villages in Sichuan Province, this dissertation traces a subcontracting chain of labor recruitment in the construction industry, a prototypical but overlooked sector where profitable revaluations of rural land are paired with a persistent need to delay labor costs to keep up with a speculation-rife real estate market./nIn "Fa-ming village," labor recruitment is regulated by brokers who leverage village networks of surveillance to minimize changeover among laborers, subject to poaching by outside brokers. Many of these outside brokers originate in "Lan-ding village," 500 km away. There, village land is expropriated for urban construction by a rural county government seeking a cut of real estate revenues as well as administrative promotion to district-level status. As rural-urban land conversions destroy the subsistence farming economy in Lan-ding, creating landless laborers unable to withstand delayed wage payment, labor brokers divert recruitment to Fa-ming. The incompatibility of maintaining China's low-cost labor force during the emergence of a locally-competitive, speculatively-financed urbanization, now responsible for 77.7% of local government revenues nation-wide, pushes labor recruitment channels further into the hinterland.

Advisor: Burawoy, Michael
Stillness: The Intersubjective Encounter in Portraits by Odilon Redon and Fernand Khnopff

At the heart of the very specific ambitions of the portrait project at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were a number of interlocking and often anxiety-producing uncertainties. The human subject had come to seem more vulnerable to, and less separate from, his or her environment. Also, debates about the subjectivity of artists themselves, and their duty both to nature and to the goals of art made the portrait an arena for a very focused battle: the occasion of portraiture, it was thought, had the potential to register an intersubjective encounter, with all of its rich, irreducible and subtle meanings. Fernand Khnopff and Odilon Redon demonstrated a determination to mark both the uncertainties about subjectivity and the strangeness of the portrait encounter in many of the portraits they produced. Both artists shifted the conventional relationship between viewer and portrait, Redon by creating portraits whose meaning and emphases change radically in front of an active and mobile viewer, and Khnopff by conjuring a sense that the depicted figure is putting pressure on the membrane of the surface of the painting, and challenging its control over its little empire of represented space. Both of Redon's portraits of the Baroness de Domecy (1900-01), and Khnopff's depictions of girls and women have hints within them of the possibility of the subject calcifying into a Symbolist icon, but they also provide consistent and multiple resistances to this eventuality.

Advisor: Clark, T. J.
The Building Blocks Of Anticipatory Pleasure: Prospection, Memory & Imagery

Anticipatory pleasure deficits have been recently documented in people with schizophrenia (Kring & Caponigro, 2010). However, less is known about the extent to which particular processes that support anticipatory pleasure, including memory, prospection, and imagery, are disrupted in schizophrenia. We asked 32 people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 29 people without schizophrenia to provide prospection narratives in response to positive, negative, and neutral event cues. Prior to prospection, participants provided personal memory narratives or completed a control task. When prompted with salient event cues, the content and experience of personal memories rendered by people with schizophrenia did not differ from those of controls. Further, people with and without schizophrenia reported similar vividness of mental imagery and their prospections varied by valence in similar ways. However, we found interesting group differences in the context and experience of prospections. Specifically, the prospections of people with schizophrenia included fewer time and place indicators, less sensory experience, and were less likely to reference the past than controls. Contrary to expectations, talking about personal memories before prospection didn't influence the content or manner of rendering prospections with one exception: People with schizophrenia reported experiencing less positive emotion when prospecting and less predicted positive emotion than controls if they completed the control task before prospection, but did not differ from controls in current or predicted positive emotion if they completed the personal memory task before prospection. Taken together, these findings suggest that whereas the ability to generate memories and rich vivid imagery appear intact in schizophrenia, difficulties in anticipatory pleasure may be related, in part, to difficulties in prospections, including drawing from the past.

Advisor: Kring, Ann
The Behavior and Electrophysiology of Directed Forgetting in the Auditory Domain

There are many instances in life when a person wants or needs to forget a memory. These unwanted memories can range from something that is simply now irrelevant such as an outdated fact, to something as serious as a traumatic experience. In extreme cases such as post-traumatic stress disorder, the benefit of forgetting becomes obvious. As such, it is important that we understand not only how our brain is able to remember, but also how it is able to forget. Unlike the traditional view of incidental forgetting, recent studies have shown that forgetting can be a strategic and active process. However, the mechanisms by which we can intentionally suppress our memories are not fully understood. Moreover, most of the directed forgetting research has focused on suppressing visual memories. A more complete understanding of the way we can exert inhibitory control over our memories should include all sensory modalities. To address this issue, we examined whether similar electrophysiological findings, as reported in visual electroencephalography (EEG) studies of directed forgetting, would be observed in the auditory domain. Additionally, the role of the prefrontal cortex in this higher-order process was investigated. Here, we utilized the Think/No-Think paradigm to examine the neural correlates of the cognitive control of memory in three studies. First, we compared findings from healthy young adults in two tasks that varied in the number of to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten repetitions, and found that behavioral and electrophysiological evidence points to similar effects using auditory stimuli, but that it may be more difficult to achieve than the inhibition of visual memories. Second, we extended those findings to older adults, and found that they too showed behavioral and EEG evidence of successful suppression of unwanted auditory memories. Third, we determined that prefrontal cortex plays a causal role in the ability to actively inhibit auditory memories by examining the behavioral and EEG effects of unilateral frontal lesions in a patient cohort. The behavioral evidence for the inhibition of auditory memory and the corresponding electrophysiology is a step toward a more complete picture of how we intentionally suppress unwanted memories.

Advisor: Knight, Robert T
Anticipating the future and remembering the past: The time course of emotion in schizophrenia

While people with schizophrenia report just as much emotion in the presence of emotional evocative stimuli, evidence suggests that they may show deficits in the anticipation of positive emotion. However, no work to date has directly tested this notion utilizing standardized stimuli across multiple methods of measurement. The present study took a multi-method approach by examining reported experience and emotion modulated startle response in people with (n = 27) and without (n = 27) schizophrenia as they anticipated and subsequently viewed evocative pictures. In addition, given that anticipation relies, in part, on our ability to remember the past, we assessed memory for emotional stimuli immediately and one-week later. Results indicated that people with schizophrenia had a deficit in the anticipation of both positive and negative emotion. Furthermore, anticipatory responses, especially to positive cues, were related to symptoms and functioning in schizophrenia. Results also suggested that while delayed recognition of emotional stimuli is intact, those with SZ showed a deficit in immediate recall that was associated with anticipation and cognitive difficulties.

Advisor: Kring, Ann M
Refining Constraints on Seismic Discontinuities and Elastic Structure in the Earth's Upper Mantle

We propose a modification to the Non-linear Asymptotic Coupling Theory (NACT), a normal mode coupling method used for synthesizing seismograms and computing sensitivity kernels in 3D Earth. The modification is aimed to meet the computational challenges for NACT when approaching higher frequencies, which is required for obtaining finer scale images of the Earth's upper mantle. The new scheme is numerically validated./nWe present new constraints on the topography of the 410 and 660, two important seismic discontinuities in the Earth's upper mantle. The data used are the SS precursors recorded by the US Transportable Array. We first demonstrate a case of 3D mantle heterogeneity interplaying with discontinuity depth. We show observations from one event for which a large scale heterogeneity away from the SS precursor bounce point region produces an artificial "precursor". This new discovery raises a caution for identifying and interpreting SS (and perhaps PP) precursors./nWe then present high resolution maps of 410 and 660 discontinuity topography across a large area of the Pacific Ocean, derived from SS precursors. A new filtering tool called the Local Slant-Stack Filtered (LSSF) is employed to successfully clean up the SS precursor record sections, leading to robust precursor travel time measurements with increased spatial resolution. Good agreements are observed between our discontinuity images and a very recent upper mantle tomography model SEMum2./nBesides the new constraints on the discontinuities, we also work on refining the elastic structure of the Earth's upper mantle in the context of regional/continental scale full-waveform tomography. We propose a framework for a hybrid adjoint tomography, in which the gradient of the misfit function is numerically computed using the adjoint method with the highly accurate Regional Spectral Element Method (RegSEM) code, while the Hessian is computed approximately using NACT. We present results from tests on a dataset for imaging the North American continent./nFinally, we study the infra-gravity wave induced long-period noise on an ocean bottom broadband seismometer, MOBB, deployed offshore in the Monterey Bay, California, using ~10 years' continuous recording data. Strong correlation between the vertical component seismogram and the pressure record is observed. We define and calculate the transfer function between the two channels, and demonstrate that the transfer function is stable over time. We then utilize the average transfer function to remove pressure-correlated noise from the vertical component seismogram, and show that the cleaned MOBB waveforms help to better constrain the moment tensors for regional near-shore earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault system in Northern California.

Advisor: Romanowicz, Barbara
California Hard Core

California Hard Core is a narrative history of the pornographic film industry in California from 1967 to 1978, a moment when Americans openly made, displayed, and watched sexually explicit films. Two interrelated questions animate this project: Who moved the pornographic film from the margins of society to the mainstream of American film culture? What do their stories tell us about sex and sexuality in the U.S. in the last third of the twentieth century?/nThe earlier academic literature concentrates on pornographic film and political debates surrounding it rather than industry participants and their contexts. The popular literature, meanwhile, is composed almost entirely of book-length oral histories and autobiographies of filmmakers and models. California Hard Core helps to close the divide between these two literatures by documenting not only an eye-level view of work from behind the camera, on the set, and in the movie theater, but also the ways in which consumers received pornographic films, placing the reader in the viewing position of audience members, police officers, lawyers, judges, and anti-pornography activists./nI argue that in the late 1960s a small group of sexual entrepreneurs, motivated by profit and inspired by the sexual revolution, moved pornographic film from the illicit to the mainstream of American film culture. Hard core film put sex on display, both reflecting and advancing the central tenet of the sexual revolution, which sought to increase the visibility of sex above all else. This movement, however, was mediated by a give and take relationship with the state, a relationship that, in turn, rendered pornographic films relatively tame in comparison to the sexual fluidity that marked the personal and professional lives of industry participants. Their stories demonstrate that when it came to sexual behavior, the sexual revolution was more easily lived in the private realm than the public sphere because the state seemed to have far less influence in private spaces. Paradoxically, however, it was in those private spaces that the state ultimately had the most control over sexual behavior because the individual was unaware of its quiet internalizing, regulatory presence.

Advisor: Martin, Waldo E