VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Learning in social and economic networks [electronic resource]

Social and economic networks are becoming increasingly important, both on the internet and otherwise. Agents in these networks possess limited information, and interact chiefly with their local neighborhood. Yet these networks have proven remarkably effective at the aggregation of 'information' at massive scales. It is of great scientific and commercial interest to build realistic models for phenomena in networks of agents. This thesis focuses on understanding the dynamics of interaction between agents on social and economic networks, and developing general theoretical tools in this context. Exchange networks model the behavior of a set of players who need to reach pairwise agreements for mutual benefit, as in the labor market, the housing market and the 'market' for social relationships. A crucial but little understood aspect of exchange networks is the dynamics of bargaining between players. We present a natural model of the bargaining dynamics in general networks, and show rapid convergence to certain socially optimal outcomes. We also describe internet-based experiments on bargaining in networks, which are the largest such experiments to date. In many contexts, agents 'learn' behavior from interaction with friends/neighbors on a network. We call this phenomenon 'social learning'. We focus on models of repeated interaction, with agents 'voting' in a series of rounds on some issue of interest. Votes in the initial round are based on 'private signals', whereas votes in future rounds incorporate knowledge of previous votes cast by friends. Thus, information is aggregated by the network via iterative updates. We consider two different models of iterative learning. A very simple model is 'majority dynamics' where agents choose their vote based on the majority of neighbors' votes in the previous round. We analyze this model on regular trees. At the other extreme is iterative Bayesian learning: a fully rational model introduced by Gale and Kariv (2003). We introduce new algorithms for this model, challenging a widespread belief that it is computationally intractable. We develop a novel technique -- the 'dynamic cavity method', which serves as a key analytical and algorithmic tool, and is generally applicable to social learning dynamics on tree networks. Finally, we prove fundamental limits on the rate of information aggregation in tree networks via social learning, when votes are discrete.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Montanari Andrea primary advisor. Thesis advisor
El Gamal Abbas A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Goel Ashish advisor. Thesis advisor
The legal culture and migration [electronic resource] : structure, antecedents and consequences

The concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars; more recently, it has been the subject of numerous empirical investigations. However, this research is often over-generalizing, because it overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change—or persistence—of the attitudes and perceptions that constitute legal culture has not received particular attention in the scholarly literature. Drawing on 102 in-depth interviews with representatives of three segments of the Israeli population—immigrants of the early 90's from the former Soviet Union, secular Israeli Jews and members of the Israeli Diaspora in Silicon Valley, CA—this research investigates various aspects of legal culture. First, exploring four parameters of the legal culture—attitudes towards the rule of law, the subjective significance of individual liberty, perceptions of the neutrality of law, and dispute resolution preferences, including readiness to pursue rights and attitudes towards the courts—this study provides a comprehensive account of the legal cultures of these three groups. The second important finding of this research is the persistence of the attitudes and perceptions that constitute legal culture over time. It appears that although two decades elapsed since the respondents of the first group emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel, they still express notions and demonstrate attitudes that bring to mind the Iron Fist of the Soviet Rule. Additionally, it appears that the attitudes characteristic of the pre-immigration outlooks affects—to a certain extent—the socialization of the new generation growing up and being educated in Israel. Finally, this research calls into focus the significant disparities of the attitudes between various groups of population, leading to the conclusion that these differences warrant special consideration on the part of the policy-makers, whose ability to effectively secure desired behavior by means of regulation is linked to the attitudes of the population.

Keywords: Law.
Advisor: Friedman Lawrence M. (Lawrence Meir)
Engstrom David Freeman advisor. Thesis advisor
Hensler Deborah R.
Lgr5+ intestinal stem cells and their maintenance [electronic resource]

The intestinal epithelium is one of the most rapidly proliferating tissues in the body. A complete turnover of the epithelium occurs every 3-5 days in the mouse, a process that is maintained by a small population of intestinal stem cells (ISCs) that reside in the crypt bases. The signals that regulate the behavior of these ISCs are still poorly understood. However, the recent identification of genes that mark functional stem cells has yielded insights into how ISCs are regulated and maintained. Here, we demonstrate that Bmi1 and Lgr5 mark two functionally distinct ISCs in vivo. Lgr5 marks mitotically active ISCs that exhibit exquisite sensitivity to canonical Wnt modulation, contribute robustly to homeostatic regeneration, and are quantitatively ablated by irradiation. In contrast, Bmi1 marks quiescent ISCs that are insensitive to Wnt perturbations, contribute weakly to homeostatic regeneration, and are resistant to high dose radiation injury. Post-irradiation, however, the normally quiescent Bmi1+ ISCs dramatically proliferate to clonally repopulate multiple contiguous crypts and villi. Clonogenic culture of isolated single Bmi1+ ISCs yields long-lived self-renewing spheroids of intestinal epithelium that produce Lgr5-expressing cells, thereby establishing a lineage relationship between these two populations in vitro. Taken together, these data provide direct evidence that Bmi1 marks quiescent, injury-inducible reserve ISCs that exhibit striking functional distinctions from Lgr5+ ISCs, and support a model whereby distinct ISC populations facilitate homeostatic versus injury-induced regeneration. How these ISCs maintain their stemness remains unclear. Paneth cells have been suggested to serve as niche cells for the Lgr5+ ISCs, perhaps through the secretion of essential paracrine factors, but recent reports clearly demonstrate that Paneth cells are not required for Lgr5+ ISC maintenance. Recently, the G-protein-coupled receptors Lgr4-6 were reported to associate with Wnt receptors to mediate R-spondin signaling. Given the importance of Wnt/R-spondin signaling in intestinal crypt maintenance, we tested the in vivo function of Lgr5 by adenovirus-mediated overexpression of the soluble ligand-binding Lgr5 extracellular domain. Circulating Lgr5 ectodomain induced the migration of Paneth cells from the crypts, their eventual loss, and a concomitant disappearance of Lgr5+ ISCs. Paneth cell migration was associated with downregulation of Wnt signaling and its target EphB3. The loss of Lgr5+ ISCs did not affect maintenance of the intestinal epithelium, nor did Lgr5+ stem cells disappear from non-intestinal organs. Together, these findings characterize an easily tractable experimental model for the in vivo deletion of Lgr5+ ISCs, and suggest that Lgr receptors function to actively maintain Lgr5+ ISCs in vivo.

Advisor: Kuo Calvin Jay primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Lowe Anson W. advisor. Thesis advisor
Sage Julien advisor. Thesis advisor
Wernig Marius advisor. Thesis advisor
The life of me upon my death among us [electronic resource] : Seneca's repetitive suicides, his continuous dictation and the scribes who based the genre of historiography on his death

Seneca's tragic works are performative texts that bring to attention particular periods in theatre history that relied heavily on Seneca's writing. Works of Elizabethan writers, or plays from the early French baroque incorporated Seneca through translation, copying and emulation. This practice relates Seneca's own use of the ancient Greek and Roman texts as a pastiche method of composing his own tragedies. The historiography written around Seneca's death moment performs what Seneca's own letters and essays prescribe, in that writing the self, the passions and pleasures of acting on behalf of the self and the prolonged but determined path to death, all contribute to creating the Senecan self, on its daily quest to contain experience and past time within a complete daily composition. Seneca's relationship to space -- that of his private home dedicated to creation, that of the Domus Aurea dedicated to politics, and that internal mind space -- is at the center of the relationship between his tragedies and the geopolitics of the Roman Empire in the Silver Age. Written for the stage while mimicking the stage of politics, the tragedies are innovative compositions in replicating and improving their Greek ideal predecessors.

Keywords: Drama
Advisor: Apostolidès Jean-Marie primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Rayner Alice advisor. Thesis advisor
Weber Carl
Linear optimization methods for vehicle energy and communication networks [electronic resource]

This thesis considers energy and communication systems among vehicles that utilize two developing technologies: battery-powered drive trains and accurate sensors. We use linear optimization to construct separate algorithms for networks of Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) and networks of Sensor-equipped Vehicles (SVs). For a fleet of PEVs, we construct an automated mechanism that efficiently organizes distributed energy trading between consumers and the electric utilities in order to benefit both entities. A linear programming model of the fleet provides a composite valuation, which can be used in an online environment managed by a fleet aggregator to allocate feasible energy exchange schedules that decrease the peak electricity demand and reduce the cost to consumers. We give empirical results based on real data. For a network of SVs, we consider the problem of determining the locations of vehicles on the road given some of the pair-wise distances between them. We present two results on a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation that can be applied to localizing SVs. First, we provide the first non-asymptotic bound on the required sensor communication range to ensure a unique localization of the sensors. Second, we show that networks with a certain framework will admit positive semidefinite stress matrix with maximal rank, and hence the SDP relaxation will produce a correct localization of the points.

Advisor: Ye Yinyu primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Murray Walter advisor. Thesis advisor
Saunders Michael
Living The Dream: How Enrichment Program Minority Students Negotiate Ethnicity and Conceptualize Class at Elite Educational Institutions

This study examines how minority students from an enrichment program based in New York City negotiate race and conceptualize social class at elite private schools. Eleven students who have graduated from the program were extensively interviewed about their experiences in high school and college. The major finding of this study is that students who appear to be assimilated into white mainstream middle class culture tended to emphasize the “social construction” and cultural constituents of class more than students who straddled both white and minority cultures, as they emphasized the income element in class. Their interviews reveal that the “mainstreamers” tended to describe the development of their individuality at school, whereas the straddlers were more prone to focus on social structures of inequality, especially in relation to interpersonal racial conflicts at their elite school. This trend was not apparent in the two mainstreamers who expressed socialist or socialist-leaning viewpoints, as they focused on social structures of inequality, much like the straddlers. The single student in this study who chooses not to embrace or perform white mainstream culture in virtually any setting expressed a strongly developed race consciousness while reflecting little or no class consciousness.

Keywords: enrichment program
ethnicity
race
class
reproduction theory
cultural mainstreamer
cultural straddler
noncompliant believer
Thesis
Advisor: Carter Prudence
Raab Erin
The local poet in the romantic tradition [electronic resource]

Many poems evoke a sense of place; few poems, however, forge a lasting connection between a poet and a particular locale. In "The Local Poet in the Romantic Tradition, " I chart the evolution of this latter type of poetry and document its influence on readerly tastes in Britain over the last two hundred and fifty years. Parting ways with previous studies, I take the view that local poetry is defined less by the invocation of specifically named locations, or even by a proclivity for amassing topographical detail, than by the cultivation of a special kind of poetic ethos. Drawing on the works of William Wordsworth as well as a range of pre- and post-Romantic poets, I examine different instantiations of this ethos and outline the contours of the tradition of local poetry in Britain from its origins in the eighteenth century to its rise to prominence in the Victorian era.

Keywords: Comparative Literature
Advisor: Greene Roland
Gumbrecht Hans Ulrich advisor. Thesis advisor
Vermeule Blakey advisor. Thesis advisor
Low-voltage, low-power, high-resolution, broadband oversampling analog-to-digital conversion [electronic resource]

Oversampling A/D converters exchange resolution in time for that in amplitude by oversampling the input signal and employing sigma-delta modulators that suppress quantization error within the signal bandwidth. As a result, a high-precision A/D converter output can be generated by using back-end digital decimation filtering. However, the use of oversampling converters is typically limited to low bandwidth applications, such as digital audio systems. Recently, sigma-delta modulators operating at relatively low oversampling ratios have been shown to be effective at achieving high-performance A/D conversion for signal bandwidths of several megahertz. However, the limited signal swings and voltage headroom that accompany the aggressive scaling of CMOS technology result in high power dissipation of the analog circuits in conventional modulator architectures. Although sigma-delta modulators based on input feedforward architectures enable reduced analog power dissipation, they require a high-speed quantizer and feedback DAC with attendant high power dissipation. The objective of this research is to investigate means of power minimization for both analog and digital circuits in sigma-delta modulators operating from low supply voltages over several mega-hertz of signal bandwidth while maintaining high precision. To relax the timing constraints on the quantizer and feedback DAC, a half-sample delayed-input feedback architecture is employed in the implementation of a second-order sigma-delta modulator. Power dissipation in the analog amplifiers of the feedforward architecture is reduced by using a single amplifier to implement the two integrators. This amplifier sharing also reduces the area occupied by the integrators. The power scaling of amplifiers in discrete-time multi-order amplifier-based analog integrators is exploited by dynamically biasing the shared amplifier. A low-power, high-speed charge pump circuit for dynamic biasing minimizes the power overhead. Finally, a multi-bit quantizer, which effectively reduces the output amplitude and power dissipation of the integrators, employs interpolated preamplifiers to conserve power and area in the preamplifiers. A 2-2 cascaded sigma-delta modulator, operating from a 1.0-V supply, has been designed using a half-sample delayed-input feedforward architecture for each stage, dynamically-biased amplifier sharing for realization of the integrators, and interpolated multi-bit quantization. An experimental prototype of the proposed modulator has been integrated in a 0.18-[micrometer] CMOS technology. At a 40-MHz sampling rate, the prototype achieves 92 dB of dynamic range, a 91-dB peak SNR and an 84-dB peak SNDR for a signal bandwidth of 1.25 MHz, while consuming only 24.3 mW of total power from a 1.0-V supply.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Wooley Bruce A.
Dutton Robert W. advisor. Thesis advisor
Murmann Boris advisor. Thesis advisor
Lyric cities [electronic resource] : poet, performance, and community

My dissertation analyzes how poets in archaic Greece interacted with their own local communities and how they positioned themselves within the community through their poetry. Archaic Greece (ca. 800-480 BC) was a time of great political and social change as interactions between the various autonomous Greek city-states intensified. Recent research has emphasized the role that poets had in negotiating local identities within this growing network of Greek states. Instead of studying how poets communicate with and praise other communities, this study will analyze how poets interact with and position themselves within their own community. As I argue in this study, a poet adapts a fundamentally different persona at home rather than abroad.

Keywords: Classics
Advisor: Martin Richard P. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Peponi Anastasia-Erasmia primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Ober Josiah advisor. Thesis advisor
Stephens Susan A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Lyric physicality [electronic resource] : bodies and objects in archaic Greek lyric poetry

This dissertation investigates the way that archaic Greek lyric performance represents and displays itself a physical practice. Focusing specifically on descriptions of the bodies of performers and the objects used in performance, it argues that lyric poets do not simply reflect the physical and material conditions of their occasion, but in fact thematize physicality. The dissertation describes the various ways in which the physicality of performance is foregrounded and concludes that Greek lyric poets employ this strategy of physical self-display in order to constitute the parameters and significance of their poetic practice.

Keywords: Classics
Advisor: Peponi Anastasia-Erasmia primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Martin Richard P. advisor. Thesis advisor
Nightingale Andrea Wilson advisor. Thesis advisor
Making silence together [electronic resource] : collaboration in the silent gatherings of Quakers

The central phenomenon of interest in this text is silence, specifically group silence in social interaction. I offer insights gained from a mixed-method, multi-year ethnographic investigation among the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers. For more than three and a half centuries, Quakers have practiced group silence. It forms the very core of their collective approach to religious life and a mystical experience they call 'unity.' Part of what makes Quakers' long, deliberate silences compelling and worthy of study is how strikingly they contrast to situations of silence outside the Quaker Meetinghouse. In Anglo-American culture, group silence is often experienced as uncomfortable, sometimes painfully so: the 'awkward silence, ' scrupulously avoided in conversation among people who have just met, or that hangs in the classroom air after a teacher's question, or that falls inexplicably and contagiously over a room full (now suddenly empty) of conversation. Silence has developed a reputation for being an uncomfortable void, empty of words and thus empty of sense. Compounding this reputation, scholars have been relatively quiet on the subject of silence compared to the attention given linguistic phenomena. The Quaker community I describe, Pacific Friends Meeting (PFM), is a contemporary instance of a centuries-old religious movement, organized around weekly leaderless gatherings as occasions for shared spiritual experience. The gathering is called 'Meeting for Worship.' The most distinctive aspect of a Quaker worship gathering is that it is conducted almost entirely in silence, punctuated by brief, occasional speech acts by participants moved to share an insight that has just occurred to them during worship. Contemporary Quakers are not well-represented in the social science literature. This dissertation contributes one of the few ethnographic studies of contemporary Quaker worship practice, conducted over four years, and is the first to introduce video recordings of Quaker worship into the scholarly record. I developed custom software to analyze these videos and my analysis shows that Quakers demonstrate synchrony in their embodied practice of silence: the tiny body movements and sounds that Quakers make (coughs, fidgets, sniffles, scratches) become coordinated in the silence into waves of synchronous activity. The empirical evidence suggests that Quakers tune into one other's bodily presence in the silence. The experiential evidence, drawn from Quakers' own accounts, confirms this and indicates that the co-presence of others provides social support to participants in their religious practice. My mixed-method approach lends support for the dissertation's central thesis that Quaker group silence is: embodied (multi-sensory), collaborative (multi-body), a means for mystical experience.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Pea Roy D. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Barron Brigid advisor. Thesis advisor
McDermott Ray (Raymond Patrick)
Management Practices and Productivity: the Case of Saudi Arabia

In my Economics honor’s thesis, I examine management practices in Saudi Arabia and see if and how they correlate with firm productivity. Recent evidence points to strong correlation between “good” management practices - defined as practices that emphasize goal targeting, performance monitoring, and human resource management - and firm performance. That is to say, firms that employ good management practices are more likely to be more productive than their industry counter-parts, performing better in terms of sales, output, and survival. However the evidence is centered around and limited to the industrial sector in developed countries. So, I extend the research to Saudi Arabia, a Middle Eastern developing country. Replicating the survey study outlined in Bloom and Van Reenen (2007), I observe 26 Saudi firms and look at how their management scores correlate with their labor productivity. While I do find a positive correlation between the variables, the results are not statistically significant. Nonetheless, the evidence points to consistency between my results and those in the current literature, thus making an
argument for the existence of universally “good” management practices.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Management Practices
Productivity
Saudi Arabia
Stanford Department of Economics
Thesis
Advisor: Bloom Nicholas