VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Adolescent Girls’ Struggles with Weight: Identifying Modifiable Risk Factors Associated with Eating Disturbances, Waist-to-Height Ratio, and Cardiovascular Biomarkers

The present study examines the modifiable risk factors associated with eating disturbances, waist-to-height ratio, and cardiovascular biomarkers among a well-characterized cohort of black and white girls in the United States from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study (NGHS). For 10 years, the NGHS followed black and white preadolescent girls, who were recruited from public and parochial schools in Richmond, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and from families enrolled in a large health maintenance organization in the Washington, DC area. The dissertation is divided into three papers./nPaper 1 investigates the correlation of parental weight comments and the daughter’s unhappiness with her weight with eating disturbances among 874 black and 852 white girls, from adolescence (12-13 years) to late adolescence (18-19 years). Findings showed that either parents’ weight comments were positively associated with their daughters’ eating disturbance scores. It is important to remind parents that their direct verbal messages can have a lasting impact on their children’s likelihood to develop eating disturbances later in life./nPaper 2 examines the two-year time-lagged association between intake of sugary beverages and WHtR among 896 black and 988 white girls, from childhood (9-10 years) to late adolescence (18-19 years). Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption among all girls was significantly associated with a slight increase in waist-to-height ratio (WHtR), a sensitive marker of abdominal obesity, while fruit juice or flavored milk was not. The findings about the influence of SSBs have important public health implications as increased WHtR has been linked to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular risk. Since taste preferences in childhood can track into adulthood, it is imperative that public health efforts are directed towards reducing children’s consumption of sugary beverages./nPaper 3 investigates the one-year time-lagged association between abdominal obesity measures and cardiovascular biomarkers among 760 black and 719 white girls, from childhood (10-11 years) to late adolescence (18-19 years). The study provides evidence using longitudinal data that abdominal obesity measures are associated with an increased score in cardiovascular biomarkers among young girls. Though BMI is the most commonly used measure of body fat among children, our findings underscore that where children store their fat—especially, near the abdomen—is important in assessing their potential to develop risk factors for heart disease.

Advisor: Laraia, Barbara A
Multiscale multichroic focal planes for measurements of the cosmic microwave background

We report on the development of multiscale multichroic focal planes for measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). A multichroic focal plane, i.e., one that consists of pixels that are simultaneously sensitive in multiple frequency bands, is an efficient architecture for increasing the sensitivity of an experiment as well as for disentangling the contamination due to galactic foregrounds, which is increasingly becoming the limiting factor in extracting cosmological information from CMB measurements. To achieve these goals, it is necessary to observe across a broad frequency range spanning roughly 30-350 GHz. Depending on the foreground complexity, it may become necessary to observe across an even larger range. For this purpose, the Berkeley CMB group has been developing multichroic pixels consisting of planar superconducting sinuous antennas coupled to extended hemispherical lenslets, which operate at sub-Kelvin temperatures. The sinuous antennas, microwave circuitry and the transition-edge-sensor (TES) bolometers to which they are coupled are integrated in a single lithographed wafer./nWe describe the design, fabrication, testing and performance of multichroic pixels with bandwidths of 3:1 and 4:1 across the entire frequency range of interest. Additionally, we report on a demonstration of multiscale pixels, i.e., pixels whose effective size changes as a function of frequency. This property keeps the beam width approximately constant across all frequencies, which in turn allows the sensitivity of the experiment to be optimal in every frequency band. We achieve this by creating phased arrays from neighboring lenslet-coupled sinuous antennas, where the size of each phased array is chosen independently for each frequency band. We describe the microwave circuitry in detail as well as the additional benefits of a multiscale architecture, e.g., mitigation of beam non-idealities, reduced readout requirements and polarization-wobble cancellation. Finally, we discuss the design and fabrication of the detector modules and focal-plane structures including cryogenic readout components, which enable the integration of our devices in current and future CMB experiments.

Advisor: Lee, Adrian T
Exhibition, Document, Bodies: The (Re)presentation of the Minamata Disease

This dissertation explores the artistic representations of Minamata disease and their/nspatial presentation from the critical framework of tenji (exhibition). The examination of/nMinamata disease’s complicated history through the tenji framework discloses the relations/nbetween this disease as an ongoing incident and the change brought on to Minamata as an/nactual city, and also as a symbolic image of pollution and corruption. Moreover, the manner/nand contents of tenji can be construed as a keen reflection of the larger social and national/nconditions. With the expanded interpretation of the term “exhibition” beyond mere spatial/npresentation and instead as an act of arranging exhibits under curators/exhibitors’ specific/nintentions, I widen my observation to what are often categorized under production, such as/nartworks. Therefore, my analyses include not only the works being exhibited themselves, but/nalso how these works, and the artists themselves, are being exhibited in various spaces and/ncontexts. While the works themselves remain unchanged, what does change are the contexts/nand conditions in which they are used or exhibited, or even the very presence of the works/nthemselves in the space of exhibition./nThe dissertation is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 examines how the issue of/nvisual ethics plays out in various forms of exhibition through the close analyses of the ways in/nwhich two young female patients are being (re)presented. They both played symbolic roles in/nthe history of Minamata disease, and the resulting works compel artists to face the difficulty of/nreflecting these patients’ voices onto representations. Chapter 2 focuses on iei (funeral/nphotograph) in order to observe the relationship among death, photograph and this disease./nThe exploration of the portrayals of two Minamata disease patients both as the dead and/nundead and also the iei mural created by Tsuchimoto Noriaki reveals how the meaning of each iei, thus each death, is created through its social relationships. Chapter 3 compares two/nphysical spaces of exhibition for Minamata disease and their environmental and historical/ncontexts. This observation foregrounds various Minamata disease narratives being created/nthrough the act of (re)presenting this disease, and re-confirms that no one attempt to exhibit it/nwill be meaningful without the recognition of this essential complexity. And the conclusion/nsuggests Minamata’s role as part of larger struggle against discrimination and the authority,/nrather than as a singular historical event.

Advisor: O'Neill, Daniel
Speech Stereotypes of Female Sexuality

At its core, my dissertation addresses one primary question: What does it mean to sound like a lesbian? On the surface, this may seem a relatively simple question, but my work takes a broad perspective, approaching this single question from a multitude of perspectives. To do so I carried out a combination of production and perception experiments and interpreted the results through the exemplar-based Attention Weighted Schema Abstraction model that I developed./nFollowing the introduction Chapter 2 lays out the AWSA model in the context of previous literature on stereotype conception and speech and sexuality. Chapter 3 presents the production experiment, which recorded speakers reading a series of single words and sentences and interviews discussing stereotypes of sexuality. Phonetic analysis showed that though speech did not vary categorically by sexual orientation, familiarity with Queer culture played a significant role in variation of speech rate and mean pitch. This pattern was only seen for straight and bisexual speakers, suggesting that lesbian stereotypes are used to present an affinity with Queer culture, which was further supported by the decrease or loss of their significance in interview speech./nChapter 4 describes three perception experiments. First, listeners judged speakers on attributes including likelihood of being a lesbian. Despite production results showing no variation by sexual orientation, listeners correctly identified lesbian speakers as more likely to be lesbians. Though not accurately predicting self-identification, four phonetic features contributed directly to lesbian ratings. A Principal Components Analysis of the ratings identified four recognizable social personae, including an ‘angry butch lesbian’ persona, showing a complex lesbian speech stereotype. The second experiment tested how listeners would judge sexuality without prompting. Listeners provided five adjectives to describe each speaker. Of 3480 adjectives, only one referenced sexual orientation. Finally, listeners judged only sexual orientation. Listeners were highly consistent in lesbian and straight ratings, but not at all for bisexual. In interpreting my results through the AWSA model, I posit a process of perception of lesbian speech, in which, rather than cueing orientation directly, phonetic features prompt perception of gender expression. Non-linguistic stereotypes then link these to sexual orientation.

Advisor: Johnson, Keith
Lin, Susan
Expanding the Structural Scope of Supramolecular Assemblies and their Applications as Mechanistic Probes

Abstract/n/nExpanding the Structural Scope of Supramolecular Assemblies and their Applications as Mechanistic Probes/n/nby/nCynthia Marilyn Hong/nDoctor of Philosophy in Chemistry/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor F. Dean Toste, Co-Chair/nProfessor Kenneth N. Raymond, Co-Chair/nProfessor Robert G. Bergman/n/nChapter 1. A brief background and perspective is provided for the field of supramolecular chemistry. Justification for the continued expansion of the field as well as the work described in this dissertation are presented./nChapter 2. A new synthetic strategy for the rapid diversification of M4L6 host structures is described. The outlined approach consists of two components: the first is the late-stage functionalization of a ligand precursor to access structural variation while preserving favorable self-assembly properties, and the second is the post-synthetic modification of these functional groups after host assembly. Through this approach, new amine-, azide-, and carboxylatefunctionalized hosts are described with preliminary work and outlook for future applications./nChapter 3. A novel supramolecular mechanistic probe is introduced, which serves as an experimental platform for isolating and evaluating the role of host charge in supramolecular catalysis. The probe consists of two isostructural metal–ligand catalysts of M4L6 stoichiometry with a significant variation in overall anionic charge: 12- versus 8-. Together, they enable a unique experimental investigation that allows supramolecular structural features to be connected to specific mechanisms of reactivity. Though the importance of charge and electrostatic effects have been highlighted in enzymes and other supramolecular catalysts, this is the first example in which these effects have been experimentally defined in a synthetic microenvironment./nChapter 4. An unusual enzyme-like mechanism of host–guest binding is described in a new metal–ligand host of Ga4L4 stoichiometry. The introduction of a sufficiently large and tightly bound guest enforces a configurational isomerization in the host from an S4-symmetric conformation to a T-symmetric conformation with a proposed larger internal volume. Detailed mechanistic investigations reveal that this configurationally adaptive binding phenomenon proceeds via a conformational selection mechanism, a unique enzymatic mechanism that has never been definitively recapitulated in a synthetic system prior to this work. This comprehensive study shows that a simple chemical system can stand as a model for analogous behavior in biological systems that are often too challenging to experimentally deconvolute and speaks to the symbiotic relationship between the fields of enzymology and supramolecular chemistry.

Advisor: Toste, F. Dean
Raymond, Kenneth N.
A method of constructing invariant measures at fixed mass

Invariant measures are a useful tool in constructing and analyzing solutions u(t,x) to nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations, especially when a deterministic well-posedness result is not known, and have been studied extensively since the formative work of Bourgain in the 1990s. Due to a wealth of research in recent years, most dispersive PDEs are known to admit an invariant measure with little or no restriction placed on the profile of the initial data u_0 = u(0,x). This prompts one to analyze the ergodicity of such a measure. Unfortunately there has been little progress on decomposition of these measures into invariant measures supported on smaller subsets of the initial data space. Oh and Quastel constructed an invariant measure for each fixed mass and momentum for the NLS equation on T, but there has only been this isolated result./nIn this thesis we present a more general method of constructing invariant measures supported on H^(1/2-)(T) ∩ {|u|_{L^2}^2 =m} for a fixed mass m. Typically one constructs an invariant measure by multiplying a Gaussian measure µ by a density function Ѱ(u) to produce a new probability measure ρ with density containing the exponential of the remainder terms of a conservation law of the PDE. Combining Ѱ with the Gaussian base ensures that ρ is proportional to the exponential of the conservation law, making ρ invariant with respect to the PDE flow. One can only define ρ to satisfy the Radon-Nikodym derivative/ndρ(u) = |Ѱ(u)|_{L^1(µ)}^{-1} Ѱ(u) dµ(u)/nif |Ѱ(u)|_{L^1(µ)} is finite, therefore bounding |Ѱ(u)|_{L^1(µ)} is the main obstacle to constructing the invariant measure./nFor each m>0 we will construct a base measure µ_m that is supported on the set of functions of mass m and decompose this measure as a sum/ndµ_m = m^{-1} Σ_{k ≥ 0} c_{k,m} dν_m^k/nfor a sequence {ν_m^k : k ≥ 0} of measures derived from scaling the Fourier coefficients of u. We then compute a specific formula for the integral of a function F with respect to each ν_m^k, allowing us to utilize this measure decomposition to integrate functions with respect to µ_m. In the introduction we will demonstrate that this computation is motivated by an alternative proof of the divergence theorem. We use this method to construct an invariant measure at fixed mass supported on H^{1/2-}(T) for two PDEs: the Benjamin-Ono equation, for which L^2(T) well-posedness is already known, and the derivative non-linear Schrodinger equation, for which well-posedness has only been proven at H^{1/2}(T) level.

Advisor: Tataru, Daniel
Sympathetic Materialism: Allan Sekula’s Photo-Works, 1971–2000

This monographic dissertation analyzes the photography-based artwork of Allan Sekula (1951–2013) by focusing on the contested status of the human figure in his works made from 1971 to 2000. The first part situates his photography within a struggle over documents and documentation in Southern California during the Vietnam War era, showing how his early works engage not only with the use of photographic documents by conceptual art, but also with activist antiwar journalism in underground newspapers as well as surveillance photographs and mug shots made by the police. In addition to exploring evidentiary photography’s role in both art and politics, the dissertation also investigates how Sekula adopts a performative model of portraiture that acknowledges the social relations and material infrastructure that allows for picture-making to take place, especially the relation between viewer and subject. It contextualizes this performative portraiture as partly a struggle over realism that rejects photorealism in painting while adopting Brechtian aesthetics in photography. The second part explores how Sekula revives the neglected genre of the group portrait, contrasting his works that depict crowds of workers or his own family with the representations of public life by both the business corporation and liberal social documentary. It argues that Sekula’s artworks ultimately aim, through their use of sequential montage, or the quasinarrative sequencing of multiple still images, to make visible transindividual forms of social life. It shows how Sekula’s works weave together singularity and collectivity in ways that contest the usual partitions of social and economic life, especially the global division of labor, which he address in his late works that document maritime space, containerized shipping, and the political and spatial changes wrought by globalization. It concludes by demonstrating how Sekula’s practical aesthetics involve a documentary ethic of responding to the given that is implicitly in tension with the iconoclastic model of ideology critique at work in many of his critical texts. This documentary ethic can be described as what Sekula called “sympathetic materialism,” an ethico-political orientation of sensitivity, receptivity, or exposure to bodily vulnerability and suffering that goes beyond the iconography of labor and Marxian politics with which he is commonly associated.

Advisor: Butler, Judith
A Seat at the Table: The Federal Reserve Banks and the Politics of Governance

This dissertation investigates the Federal Reserve Banks and their governance by boards of directors. It brings to bear original data to address a longstanding blind spot in the political science literature on the Fed. The first empirical chapter examines the political ideologies of Reserve Bank directors since 1975 and shows that directors are more conservative than the average campaign donor in the United States. The second empirical chapter analyzes one of the selection processes that generates this observed ideological distribution, the election of directors by private banks. The analysis first describes the contours of the electoral landscape, and then evaluates predictors of election outcomes. The final empirical chapter presents the results of an original survey of sitting and former directors, which provides first-hand accounts of what directors do, how Reserve Bank policymakers are selected, and how directors perceive their own policy influence. Taken together, the chapters shed light on the the Reserve Bank boards of directors and highlight the critical but little-known role they play in shaping monetary and regulatory policy. In doing so, this dissertation provides the first systematic inquiry into the Reserve Banks and the individuals who oversee them, laying the groundwork for a new research agenda that devotes greater attention to the “private” tier of the Federal Reserve System.

Advisor: Farhang, Sean
Electron-Lattice Dynamics of Solid-State Materials Relevant for Solar Energy Conversion Studied by Femtosecond Extreme Ultraviolet Absorption Spectroscopy

For many decades, electron dynamics and lattice dynamics have been studied by performing separate experiments, requiring different instrumentation. In general, electronic dynamics are most often studied by using visible pump probe spectroscopy, while lattice dynamics can be followed by core level spectroscopy performed at synchrotrons. With the advent of high harmonic generation (HHG), it became possible to generate femtosecond to attosecond bursts of extreme ultraviolet (XUV) radiation that are both spatially and temporally coherent. Since high harmonic generation can be performed on a table-top setup, it has become possible to follow both electronic and lattice dynamics concurrently, without the need for a synchrotron. In this dissertation, visible pump-XUV probe transient absorption spectroscopy is used to elucidate the excited state electronic and lattice dynamics of two materials relevant for solar energy conversion, namely a-Fe2O3 and single crystalline Si thin films./nIn this dissertation, the first chapter deals with the pertinent information necessary to understand both the core-level spectroscopy that can be used to glean information about the electronic and lattice dynamics of solids, and the solid-state physics which govern the electronic and lattice dynamics, with special focus on the theoretical models used in these fields. The second chapter outlines the experimental apparatus that is used to perform the pump probe experiments on solid state samples, as well as several upgrades made to it during the course of this thesis. The third chapter details experiments performed on a-Fe2O3 that provide insights into its excited state dynamics following photoexcitation by multiple pump wavelengths (400 nm, 480 nm, 520 nm, 560 nm), including polaron formation and its impact on the photoconversion efficiency of photoelectrochemical cells. The fourth chapter details experiments performed on single crystalline Si thin films following photoexcitation with 800 nm pump pulses. This experiment highlights the strengths of HHG pump probe spectroscopy by giving insights into the electron-phonon scattering mechanisms that follow photoexcitation across the bandgap.

Advisor: Leone, Stephen R