VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
"A Class on Whiteness?" Investigating the Need for Anti-Racist Critical Whiteness Studies at the University Level

Despite the emergence of formal “critical whiteness studies” in academia over the last twenty years, there currently remains a dearth of research on the teaching of whiteness studies. Additionally, there remains a lack of formal engagement with the topics of race and whiteness, especially by white students in universities across the United States. This paper investigates the potential for implementing anti-racist critical whiteness studies at Stanford University, seeking to understand how the field of whiteness studies is taught on college campuses and what Stanford students think about studying race and whiteness. The paper analyzes results from a survey of 200 Stanford students that aimed to collect student reactions to studying race and whiteness, as well as students’ impressions of their own qualification and comfort in discussing race with friends and family. Results indicate a strong desire among the Stanford student body to study race, and provide an argument for Stanford University to establish critical whiteness studies within a framework of anti-racism education. The paper proceeds to analyze eighteen syllabi for classes on whiteness, concluding that while there are many ways to teach about whiteness, there is a distinct and common approach which uses high-level concepts like race as a social construction with intersectional implications and a universalized understanding of whiteness to promote the visibility of whiteness to students in the class. There remain incredible tensions around analyzing racism without centering or privileging whiteness. However, taken together, Stanford student’s endorsement of race and whiteness studies and the sample syllabi’s formal structure for teaching about anti-racist critical whiteness provide a case for Stanford University to implement such a curriculum.

Keywords: critical whiteness studies
racism
anti-racism
whiteness
white
black
students
students of color
critical race theory
education
college studies
Thesis
Advisor: Martínez Ramón
A New Journey to the West: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Chinese Foreign Policy

Existing literature has attempted to define the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and determine its role in both Chinese and Russian foreign policy. Unfortunately, misunderstandings of the SCO as a security institution mean that efforts to situate the SCO within foreign policies are mistaken. Some observers have described the SCO as an alliance against the United States and other external forces. Others consider the SCO to be a security management institution balancing Chinese and Russian interests in Central Asia. In reality, the SCO does not fit neatly into any categories. Over the course of its history first as the Shanghai Five mechanism and then as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the developing institution has attempted to perform the functions of both an alliance and a security management institution. However, the lack of institutionalization, whether purposeful or due to competition between member-states, has prevented the SCO from developing into either option. At the same time, Russia’s obstruction of Chinese interests through the SCO have led China to pursue the Belt and Road Initiative as an unconstrained exercise of its power. This raises the possibility of an increasingly competitive, zero-sum “New Great Game” over Central Asia between China and Russia. The relative power disparity between China and Russia puts this competition in Beijing’s favor, but the exercise of power unrestricted by legitimate institutions may well provoke opposition from regional partners. A stable regional order that preserves China’s place in the sun will ultimately require Beijing to accept limited constraints and create legitimate institutions.

Keywords:  Center for International Security and Cooperation
Center for International Security and Cooperation
international institutions
security institutions
alliances
Central Asia
Belt and Road Initiative
Chinese foreign policy
Thesis
Advisor: Blacker Coit D.
A Quantitative Study of 21st Century Performance of Foster Care in the United States

Roughly 10% of US foster children leave foster care without any permanent family or home, which is known to sharply increase a person’s likelihood for unemployment, homelessness, and incarceration. There are three positive, permanent exit avenues from foster care: reunifying with one’s initial family, adoption by a new caretaker; or entering the guardianship of another caretaker, usually a relative of the child. We study how a set of geographic and non-geographic variables relate to the likelihood of exiting foster care through a competing risks analysis on 2543790 foster children from 2000-2014 in 49 states (excluding New York for data validity issues). Geographic variables were a set of clustered control variables, and a state fixed effect variable for each state. Since each state writes their own foster care policy, the fixed effects are used to understand the effectiveness of policies across states. Neighboring states were found to have dramatically different exit likelihoods. For non-geographic variables, race, age, placement stability, reason for removal, and prior removal history all had varying relations to likelihood of exiting, depending on the variant of exit. Clinical disabilities decreased likelihoods of all exits. The foster population, relative to the adult population within a state, decreased the likelihood of adoption. A model made at the end of the paper shows the potential benefits for children needing to be adopted if barriers to interstate adoption were reduced or abolished.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
America
US
Foster Children
Cox
Hazard Model
Competing Hazard
Map
Adopted
Reunification
Guardian
Foster
Aged Out
Fostering
Exiting Care
Neglect
Child
Abuse
Physical Abuse
Sexual Abuse
AFCARS
NDCAN
Thesis
Advisor: David Paul A
Academic Achievement in At-Risk Elementary School Boys: An Evaluation of Charter School Performance

This paper examines the impact of an elementary charter school that targets low-income, black and Hispanic boys in Florida. Using student-level demographic data, charter school students were matched with traditional public school students that shared the same demographic characteristics and were within close range of the starting test score in third grade. The results showed the following impact on the difference in scores from third to fourth grade: for math, attending the charter school is associated with testing .72 standard deviations lower than students in the traditional public school; for reading, the charter school is associated with testing .19 standard deviations lower on the test. Both of these results are statistically significant. This model can be used in different scenarios in order to understand where certain demographics of students are succeeding, and can thus lead to further causal research to identify and disseminate success tactics and pedagogies throughout the school system.

Keywords: Public Policy
Graduate School of Education
Charter Schools
At-risk
Elementary school
Boys education
Florida
Thesis
Actively controlled metasurfaces for light manipulation and control [electronic resource]

Metasurface optics have been developed for a wide variety of optical applications that compete with as well as go beyond the functionality of conventional optics. One upcoming challenge for future metasurfaces is the development of individually addressable optical properties that can be actively changed with controllable input stimuli. In this work, we will explore how electro-mechanics can be used to couple a mechanical degree of freedom to an optical response. We will see how the localized optical resonances within a silicon nanowire placed near a mirror can be leveraged as a building block for engineering an active metasurface. The tuning of the amplitude of scattered light will enable color-tunable active metasurfaces. By designing a structure with a modifiable phase gradient, both light steering and focusing can be controlled by an applied electrical signal. In addition to covering mechanically controlled active metasurfaces, we will also show that it is possible to use passive metasurfaces to gain real-time three dimensional information in a volume and that in certain cases, active metasurface optics are not the only solution to improve optical functionality.

Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Brongersma Mark L. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Melosh Nicholas A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Miller D. A. B. advisor. Thesis advisor
Additive manufacturing for musical applications [electronic resource]

Additive manufacturing (AM) is the automated layer-wise fabrication of 3D objects directly from geometrical computer models. In the music technology lab, AM affords the rapid testing of enclosures and components for both sound capturing and sound producing instruments. These instruments, typically outsourced to manufacturing hubs, are now produced near the site of musical experimentation through desktop fabrication. Parametric modeling and rapid fabrication with AM accelerate the design cycle for the production of instruments for music research. AM alters the site of manufacturing, the duration between the digital sketch and its materialization, and the material constitution of the instruments we might deploy; these shifts have consequences for what gets made and in turn alter artistic practices that integrate such tool-making tools. To illustrate these affordances of AM, I describe a suite of instruments within a taxonomy of usage categories that move from reproduction of known instruments, to the augmentation of found ones and finally a phase of invention. Invention arises not simply from putting such machines in the service of novel ideas but rather from carefully examining the material outcomes of the layering process itself. The term AM is used in place of numerous alternatives to emphasize this anisotropic grain of the printed object. Although the additive method announces a powerful flexibility in the shapes it sheds, its performance in various acoustic and electroacoustic scenarios depends in part on this grain. The practice, therefore, navigates trade-offs between malleable fabrication methods for organizing material and the quality of the resulting forms for organizing sound.

Keywords: Music.
Advisor: Chafe Chris primary advisor. Thesis advisor
DeMarinis Paul advisor. Thesis advisor
Fujioka Takako
Advancing diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging methods for neuronal fiber mapping [electronic resource]

Mapping the complex structural connectivity of the human brain in vivo is essential for understanding healthy brain function and the fundamental basis of many neurological and psychiatric disorders. Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures the diffusion pattern of water molecules to infer the underlying tissue microstructure. Coupled with fiber tracking techniques, diffusion-weighted MRI has become a widely utilized non-invasive method for mapping neuronal fiber pathways. Nonetheless, it is challenging to accurately model the diffusion pattern in tissue while a model-free approach requires a lengthy acquisition. Further, the reconstructed fiber model requires rigorous validation for clinical translation. This dissertation addresses these challenges in the course of three projects. First, a thorough analysis of the effects of q-space truncation and sampling on the water molecule displacement ensemble average propagator (EAP) in the model-free q-space imaging (QSI) framework is performed. This study clarifies guidelines for acquiring and reconstructing Cartesian QSI data such that aliasing is prevented in the EAP and and Gibbs ringing is minimized in the estimated fiber orientations. To increase QSI's applicability to different types of data, an intuitive and practical QSI reconstruction framework for obtaining the EAP and fiber orientations from multi-shell q-space samples is proposed. Finally, a retrospective study is conducted to assess the validity and efficacy of diffusion-weighted MRI fiber tracking-based targeting for transcranial MRI-guided focused ultrasound treatment of essential tremor. The studies presented in this dissertation advanced neuronal fiber mapping approaches for diffusion-weighted MRI.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: McNab Jennifer (Jennifer A.) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Glover Gary H.
Pauly John E. (John Edward)
Advancing the use of crowdsourcing for data-intensive tasks [electronic resource]

All aspects of industry, scholarship, and society have recently been witnessing a rapid growth in the volume of available data and the demand for data-intensive analytics. While automated techniques built on machine learning algorithms are being applied to many problems, a large class of challenging tasks still require human intelligence and input. Crowdsourcing is an effective mechanism for addressing problems that are not easily solved by computers alone, and require human insight. Furthermore, crowdsourcing often plays a crucial role in the development of machine learning algorithms, by being the primary source of high quality labeled training data, and by serving as a tool for the verification of the output of machine-learned models. The goal of this thesis is to characterize the spectrum of crowdsourcing tasks that are posted on real marketplaces, and to develop new and optimized algorithms for some fundamental classes of crowdsourcing tasks. First, we analyze a dataset comprising over 27 million microtasks performed by over 70,000 workers issued to a large crowdsourcing marketplace between 2012-2016. Based on this dataset, we identify two fundamental classes of crowdsourcing task types that are very popular in the marketplace: (a) {\em filtering and rating}, where worker responses are allowed to be any number in a fixed, numerical range $\{1, 2, \ldots, R\}$; (b) {\em counting}, where responses are allowed to be any non-negative integer $\{0, 1, 2, \ldots \}$. Next, we design efficient algorithms for these task types. Specifically: (1) For {\em filtering and rating}, we design an algorithm to discover a globally-optimum maximum likelihood-based solution to identify true answers and worker accuracies. (2) For {\em counting}, we design algorithms to optimally aggregate crowdsourced responses, along with hybrid algorithms that combine crowdsourcing and computer vision techniques to improve the quality and reduce the costs of our inferences even further. Our findings and algorithms have broad ramifications for how to best use crowdsourcing for collecting or processing large volumes of data at low cost and high accuracy.

Advisor: Widom Jennifer primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Garcia-Molina Hector advisor. Thesis advisor
Parameswaran Aditya advisor. Thesis advisor
Airway mechanics in chronic lung disease [electronic resource] : theory, simulation, and experiment

Lung disease is the third leading cause of death in the United States and has an even higher fatality rate in countries with excessive pollution. Strikingly, pulmonary mechanics and airway obstruction remain drastically understudied. The airway is a living system, and its disease-driven adaptation induces remodeling of its geometry and material properties, resulting in airway occlusion. Utilizing computational simulations and experimental characterization of airway mechanical properties, this thesis seeks to confront clinically relevant questions pertaining to airway collapse in diseases such as asthma and bronchitis. The computational results - based on the theory of finite growth, solid mechanics, and nonlinear finite element analysis - rationalize medical observations and elucidate the complex phenomenon of airway obstruction. The complementary porcine tissue experiments address the pressing need for airway-specific material characterization to inform the biophysical response of the small bronchi, the predominant site of obstruction. This research will focus on highlighting the tightly connected, iterative computational-experimental nature of airway mechanics research to enable translational discoveries in the clinic through predictive modeling, advanced medical diagnostics, and optimized interventions in pulmonary healthcare.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Kuhl Ellen
Levenston Marc Elliot advisor. Thesis advisor
Nelson Drew advisor. Thesis advisor
Alleviation of reentry communications blackout by electrostatic methods [electronic resource]

The reentry blackout phenomenon affects most spacecraft entering a dense planetary atmosphere from space, due to a plasma layer that surrounds the spacecraft. This plasma layer is created by the ionization of ambient air due to shock and frictional heating created by the moving reentry vehicle, and, in some cases is further enhanced due to contamination by ablation products. The highly mobile electrons in the plasma cause a strong attenuation of incoming and outgoing electromagnetic waves, including those used for command and control, communication, and telemetry over a period referred to as the ``blackout period''. The blackout period may last up to several minutes, and at reentry speeds that may be of the order of 10 km/s, poses a serious safety hazard for the payload on board the spacecraft, especially for human spaceflight. In this work, we present a method for alleviation of reentry blackout using electric fields in a pulsed fashion. We study the reentry plasma's interaction with electronegative voltage pulses using computer simulations that incorporate models of the plasma's response to the applied electric field and interactions between the plasma sheath and the spacecraft surface. The simulations show how one can create pockets of depleted electron density in the reentry plasma sheath that may be used as ``communication windows'', thereby circumventing reentry blackout. Several parametric sweeps are also performed in order to design a blackout alleviation system. Finally, we present a discussion of experimental efforts to verify the simulation results and conclude with a conceptual design for a reentry communications blackout alleviation system based on the exclusive use of electric fields.

Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Advisor: Close Sigrid
Cantwell Brian advisor. Thesis advisor
Jameson Antony
Oppenheim Meers
Alterations in the parvalbumin interneuron content of the striatum following maternal immune activation

Illnesses that elicit an innate maternal immune activation (MIA) during pregnancy can expose the fetal brain to proinflammatory cues that diffuse across the placenta. Fetal exposure to MIA has been shown to disrupt normal neurodevelopment, and is linked to the progression of a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, cerebral palsy, and mental retardation. However, the diverse range of neurological abnormalities induced by MIA that underlie its role in altering neurodevelopment have yet to be identified. Some studies have suggested that MIA can induce abnormalities in the abundance and distribution of neuronal subtypes in the cortex, while others demonstrate systematic brain atrophy across many brain regions. These cellular changes could contribute to overall circuit dysfunction, perhaps contributing to the pathogenesis of disease. My interests are in the specific relationship between MIA and schizophrenia. MIA-induced changes in neuronal subtypes have been documented in the cerebral cortex, but there is no information available on the effects of MIA on neuronal subtypes within the striatum, an additional region thought to be critical in the etiology of schizophrenia. This study specifically investigates MIA’s effect on the abundance of a particular type of inhibitory interneuron that has been implicated in schizophrenia, parvalbumin-positive interneurons (PVIs), which play an important role in modulating striatal output by delivering inhibition to striatal medium spiny projection neurons (MSNs). As the selective activation of MSNs is thought to be critical to behavior selection and cognition, deficits in striatal PVIs could contribute to abnormal cognitive processing loops initiated in the striatum, perhaps contributing to dysregulation of behaviors implicated in schizophrenia. My study indicates that MIA does indeed result in a reduction in the density of PVIs in the striatum, perhaps analogous to the lowered PVI density observed in the cortex of schizophrenics. This suggests a role for MIA in striatal patterning that could contribute to dysregulation or pathology by altering the cellular composition of schizophrenia-related neural networks.

Keywords: maternal immune activation
inflammation
schizophrenia
basal ganglia
striatum
parvalbumin interneuron
Thesis
Advisor: Palmer Theo
Sapolsky Robert
The alternating direction method of multipliers for mixed-integer optimization applications [electronic resource]

A very large number of practical optimization problems have been expressed as minimization of a convex objective function over a nonconvex set, specifically discrete sets such as the set of integer points. These problems arise in a variety of fields such as statistics and modeling, data analysis, and control. Two general approaches have been used for solving mixed integer optimization problems. One approach is to solve the problem globally using methods such as branch-and-bound, which suffer from exponential worst case time complexity. Another approach is to use heuristics such as semidefinite relaxation hierarchies which terminate in polynomial time, but do not guarantee finding the global solution. In this dissertation, we discuss a generic system of heuristic solutions for such problems. We describe an implementation of these methods in a package called NCVX, as an extension of CVXPY, a Python package for formulating and solving convex optimization problems. Our heuristics, which employ convex relaxations, convex restrictions, local neighbor search methods, and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), require the solution of a modest number of convex problems, and are meant to apply to general problems, without much tuning. Several numerical examples such as regressor selection, circle packing, the traveling salesman problem, and factor analysis modeling are studied. We also describe a fast optimization algorithm for approximately minimizing convex quadratic functions over the intersection of affine and separable constraints. We discuss the favorable computational aspects of our algorithm, which allow it to run quickly even on very modest computational platforms such as embedded processors. We study numerical examples including hybrid vehicle control and power converter control, and we compare our methods with existing open source and commercial alternatives. Finally we discuss how randomized linear programming heuristics can be used to solve graph isomorphism problems. We motivate our heuristics by showing guarantees under some conditions, and present numerical experiments that show effectiveness of these heuristics in the general case.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Boyd Stephen P. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Duchi John advisor. Thesis advisor
Lall Sanjay advisor. Thesis advisor