VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Persuasive Design Techniques in the Attention Economy: User Awareness, Theory, and Ethics

The systematic study of persuasion has captured researchers’ interest since the advent of mass influence mechanisms such as radio, television, and advertising. With the unprecedented growth of popular social media applications that are ubiquitously accessible on smart devices, consumers’ attention, attitudes, and behaviors are constantly influenced by persuasive design techniques on platforms that profit by maximizing users’ time spent on site. We take three different approaches - empirical, theoretical, and philosophical - to better understand the awareness, mechanisms, and ethicality of persuasive design techniques in the modern attention economy. Many users feel that these digital platforms draw them in and manipulate their time and behavior, but they lack a detailed awareness of persuasive design techniques in context of their use of the products. We discuss the creation and evaluation of a system called Nudget that makes persuasive design techniques visible on social media. We compare the effectiveness of our system in improving user knowledge of such techniques to traditional methods of educating users, finding a significant improvement when our system is used. Although there exists a rich social psychology literature on methods of persuasion and exploitable cognitive biases, we lack a mapping of the specific persuasive design techniques used by products like Facebook or LinkedIn onto this persuasive space. We take a theoretical approach to persuasive design with the goals of showing how design techniques interrelate to function as influential systems, and of providing a more nuanced vocabulary with which to discuss them, drawn from a range of relevant disciplines. We map our datasets of persuasive design techniques used on Facebook and LinkedIn onto existing theoretical frameworks in behavioral design, and also identify useful dimensions for future taxonomies. Finally, we find it important to include a detailed discussion of the ethical questions surrounding persuasive technologies in the attention economy. We discuss philosophical approaches to the balance between persuasive structure and human agency, and compile useful ethical heuristics to make progress on the question of what constitutes ethical persuasive design. We discuss the method of value-driven design as a way to create products designed for intention-fulfillment rather than impulse-fulfillment, and we provide a sample phenomenological analysis of a modern product to showcase how philosophy of technology can add value to our understanding of what technology adds and subtracts from our lives.

Keywords: Symbolic Systems
SymSys
Human-Computer Interaction
HCI
Thesis
Perverse attachments : reading fiction around 1800

My dissertation investigates a resilient trope in the theory of reading--the notion that readers "participate" in the fictions they experience--by concentrating on a moment in British literary history when this idea exercised a special cultural force. In the decades that witnessed the novel's quantitative rise, techniques for soliciting the reader's engagement multiplied, from the literature of suspense to the immersive powers of free indirect discourse. By uncovering the range and complexity of these techniques, my dissertation challenges the rubrics--in particular the concept of character identification--through which reader participation is usually understood. The works I consider belong to a period before the emerging doctrine of aesthetic autonomy had secured its hold and to a set of genres that fall largely outside its claims. Rather than celebrating the aesthetic as a domain of disinterested free play, they exploit the suppressed interactivity harbored by narrative form: its capacity to solicit the desires of its readers even as it curtails their effects. In the basic narratological divisions between reader, narrator, and character, writers discovered the formal resources for generating "perverse attachments, " situations in which a person's strong desires affix to things she is not a part of or cannot control. From the sense of complicity William Godwin invites his readers to share in Caleb Williams's confession to the ineffectual political careers of Walter Scott's passive heroes, these vicarious investments dominate the representational program of Romantic fiction and the experience of reading it. In an analogy these works pursued, such relations also defined the unfulfilled experience of being a political subject in the period between the French Revolution and the first significant expansion of the franchise in Britain under the Reform Act of 1832. Maneuvering between the alternatives staked out in current debates about reading (irony or identification, suspicion or repair), my dissertation focuses on states of complicity, embarrassment, and longing that connect the phenomenology of fiction to the psychodynamics of collective life.

Advisor: Bender John B. 
Woloch Alex
Cohen Margaret
Pf bacteriophage as novel pathogenic factors in pseudomonas aeruginosa infections

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative pathogen that contributes to the morbidity and mortality of a variety of chronic infections. P. aeruginosa is particularly known for infecting the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients and colonizing non-healing wounds, where its presence is strongly associated with poor clinical outcomes. With the increasing incidence of antibiotic-resistant strains, it is important to gain a better understanding of the virulence factors that contribute to P. aeruginosa pathogenesis, as such knowledge can lead to new effective treatments. One such proposed virulence factor is Pf phage, a family of filamentous bacteriophages specific to P. aeruginosa, which have been found in high numbers in P. aeruginosa biofilm. For the studies outlined in this dissertation, we investigated the impact of Pf phage on P. aeruginosa pathogenesis, both in mouse models and human clinical infections. We describe how Pf phage organize extracellular polymers in the P. aeruginosa biofilm matrix into a protective liquid crystal. Furthermore, we utilized a newly-developed wound infection model to determine that Pf phage contribute to wound colonization, morbidity and mortality through induction of antiviral immunity, which inhibits protective antibacterial immune responses. In addition, we found that active and passive immunization against Pf phage coat protein protect against P. aeruginosa infection. These findings were translated to the clinic, where we found that presence of Pf phage is correlated with chronic infections and poor health in patients with cystic fibrosis and non-healing wounds with P. aeruginosa infections. Ultimately, our investigation of Pf phage provides new mechanistic insights into the pathology of P. aeruginosa colonization and persistence of infection, toward the development of new treatments for patients infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Keywords: Immunology.
Advisor: Bollyky Paul
Cegelski Lynette 
Engleman Edgar G. 
Monack Denise M.
Photoemission study of exotic quantum states in ZrTex and development of new spin-resolved spectrometer

Zr-Te compounds is a very interesting family of materials, with a great many stable stoichiometry and different lattice structures. Known for its large thermopower, resistivity anomaly, and recent discovery of superconductivity under high pressure, ZrTe5 3D crystal has been predicted to be near the transition boundary between weak and strong topological insulator (TI), offering a promising platform to study topological phase transition. The existence of a gap and the existence of topological surface state (TSS) are two critical criteria to make such a categorization. However, different previous studies have reported discrepant results. Using 6eV-laser-based ARPES, I have performed a high-momentum-resolution and photon-energy-dependent measurement on ZrTe5. My experiment gives a defining quantification of the gap size and reconciles the discrepancies of previous works regarding the TSS, suggesting ZrTe5 not a 3D strong TI. With a different stoichiometry, ZrTe2 not only exhibits a significantly different lattice structure, but shows a more exciting physics than ZrTe5 as well. Recently, charge density wave (CDW) has been observed in monolayer (ML) form ZrTe2. Given that there has been no work officially reporting CDW in bulk ZrTe2, it is important to understand whether the CDW in ZrTe2 ML is lattice-driven or exciton-driven, the latter of which indicates a new platform to study excitonic insulator. One way to distinguish the two scenarios is to see the ultrafast response of the system. Using femtosecond-resolved 6+1.5 eV pump-probe ARPES, I have observed the ultrafast disappearing of CDW folded band at Gamma point in ZrTe2 ML, which shows a time scale much faster than what is expected to be a lattice-driven CDW, indicating that CDW in ZrTe2 ML is contributed by exciton. Tuning knobs like photon-energy and ultrafast snapshot reveal us important information of quantum materials; are we able to observe spin-dependent phenomena? Traditional way to detect spin is to use a Mott detector attached to a hemispherical analyzer, which is commercially available but has very low spin-resolving efficiency and low data-acquisition throughput. Therefore, in parallel to my scientific exploration, I have been developing a next-generation spin-resolved ARPES using time-of-flight (TOF) method to detect kinetic energy and low-energy exchange (LEX) scattering to detect spin, with a significant improvement of both efficiency and resolution. A deflection mapping capability with different focusing modes is also incorporated. After a series of experiments and simulations, I conclude that the newly developed spin-TOF spectrometer achieves a comparable energy and angular resolution compared to the state-of-the-art spin-ARPES setup.

Keywords: Applied Physics.
Advisor: Shen Zhi-Xun 
Devereaux Thomas Peter
Heinz Tony F.
Poetic nation : Iranian soul and historical continuity

This dissertation reviews the presence and participation of Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez Shirazi, the fourteenth century Iranian poet, in the life of a nation who considers him to be the core of her constitution. It looks at self-understandings in the twentieth-century Iran that imagine the Iranian soul traversing through history with unique associations with poetic and mystical traditions, epitomized in the figure of Hafez and unfolded in new understandings of the category of ʻerfan or Iranian Mysticism. The intellectual debates around the topic are saturated with immense political overtones and this study looks at a range of them from Pure Aryanism to Islamism to Communism in the works of And al-Hosay Hazhir, Ahmad Kasravi, and Ayatollah Morteza Motahari on the one hand, and the poetry of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and H. E. Sameh on the other.

Keywords: Religious Studies.
Advisor: Bashir Shahzad
Yearley Lee H. 
Kumar Aishwary
The poetics of style in the shield of Heracles : speech, ekphrasis, and sound

This dissertation assesses the style of the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles and its significance in the Greek hexameter tradition. Since antiquity, the style of the Shield has been the lynchpin of its reception and the test by which it has been included or excluded from the Hesiodic corpus. This dissertation addresses the poem's style in two parts. Part one uses quantitative means to identify characteristic features of the poem's diction, narrative, and traditional composition. Part two then interprets three remarkable elements in the Shield, namely, its character speech, ekphrasis, and sound. For each element, the Shield does two things: it conforms to Hesiodic style while progressing a Hesiodic program. Chapter two shows that, as in Hesiod's didactic poetry, the Shield's speeches ensure compliance and suppress verbal dissent. Chapter three outlines how the Shield's ekphrasis promotes Zeus' cosmos through an act of philosophical imagination. Chapter four charts the soundscape of the Shield, which matches the harmony and thunder of the Theogony and Catalogue of Women but now soundtracks the exploits of Zeus' son, Heracles. The conclusion synthesizes these findings by looking to the poem's use of voice as an instrument of Zeus' divine order. This dissertation thus argues for the centrality of style to our understanding of the Shield, its composition, and its position in early Greek hexameter poetry.

Keywords: Classics.
Advisor: Martin Richard P. 
Hunter R. L. (Richard L.) 
Peponi Anastasia-Erasmia
Polarons, disorder and charge transport in polymeric semiconductors

Polymeric semiconductors are an exciting group of materials with the potential to enable a new generation of solution-processable, flexible electronics for a wide variety of applications. Due to their complex microstructure, however, it can be difficult to determine the structure-property relationships that govern polymer performance. For the development of new, high performing polymers, a better understanding of the polymer microstructure and the processes that limit charge transport in both doped and undoped polymeric semiconductors is crucial. In this dissertation, I focus on understanding how the polymer microstructure influences charge transport. First, I present experimental evidence supporting the findings of a new, vigorous and complete theoretical model, crucial for interpreting infra-red (IR) studies of polaron absorption in order to glean rich information about the local, nanoscale packing of the polymer. Through a combination of experimental measurements with theoretical simulations, these IR studies reveal the link between disorder, polaron localization, and charge transport in polymers. By correlating polaron measurements in a model polymer system to independent studies of carrier mobility, I provide direct evidence demonstrating the effect of charge delocalization and crystallite connectivity on charge transport. Next, I discuss the effect of doping on the polymer microstructure and charge transport at various dopant loadings. When dopants are present in trace amounts, I show that measurable changes in the local hole environment and polymer conformation occur, influencing the carrier mobility. At high dopant loadings on the other hand, a series of complementary spectroscopy techniques are used to gain further insight into the doping mechanism in polymers, as well as the potential to use doping as a method of tuning polymer morphology. Finally, I use the techniques developed in this dissertation to study a novel high performing donor-acceptor copolymer material, demonstrating the general applicability of the experimental strategies outlined for revealing insights into the local nanoscale disorder and charge transport in polymer semiconductors. An understanding of how the different microstructural features influence charge transport in polymeric semiconductors at multiple length-scales, as explored in this dissertation, is important for material design and will serve to inform the engineering of new, improved organic electronic devices of the future.

Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Salleo Alberto
Reed Evan J. 
Toney Michael Folsom
Policy, not Politics: An Examination of California ELA Teachers’ Text Selection Practices, Motivations, and Barriers

Despite the increasing diversity of students in the United States and the varied benefits of diverse literature, the high school literary canon still primarily reflects the voices, values, and beliefs of dominant whiteness. This thesis interviews seven and surveys thirteen public high school English language arts teachers at a school district in Southern California in order to explore this phenomenon, and to answer the following questions: what book-length texts are being taught in the 2017-2018 academic year in these particular high school ELA classrooms, and how do they compare to the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of texts in previous studies and surveys done on teacher text selection? What range of reasons do ELA teachers give behind keeping certain book-length texts in their curriculum? What do these teachers see as their barriers in bringing new texts into the classroom, and, conversely, what encouragement or support do they receive in bringing new texts into the classroom? What are the policies surrounding literary text selection in California high school ELA classrooms, and how do they translate into practice? This thesis examines the responses of these teachers through a qualitative, thematic lens, identifying four main barriers (time, money, comfort, and controversy) teachers confront when navigating the text selection process and providing recommendations to take steps towards a more diverse and inclusive high school literary canon.

Keywords: California schools
high school
Graduate School of Education
undergraduate honors
high school teachers
ELA teachers
text selection
text diversity
diverse books
English
curriculum
teachers
Thesis
Advisor: Bromley Patricia
The political pollution cycle : an inconvenient truth and how to break it

Scholars have applied the principal-agent (p-a) framework widely to explain policy implementation in democratic and authoritarian contexts alike. The conventional wisdom is that the misalignment of interests and information asymmetry between the principal and the agent contribute to policy distortion on the ground. Building on the p-a tradition with more recent insights, this dissertation challenges the implicit assumption in existing p-a models that the level of local compliance is constant over time, especially in autocracies like China. The dissertation centers on the critical case of air pollution control policies. Air pollution is the biggest environmental health threat to humanity in the twenty-first century, causing one in eight deaths and endangering the health of 95 percent of the world's population. As the dissertation demonstrates, politics play a major role in the regulation of air pollution. Furthermore, air pollution is highly responsive to the intensity and scale of regulatory efforts (i.e., very little time lag). Hence, the case of air pollution has offered a unique opportunity to fathom the effect of political incentives on policy implementation over time. This dissertation offers a new answer for when environmental policy implementation becomes deficient or excessive while extant works have almost unanimously focused on why. Using China as a natural experiment, this dissertation shows that local agents in China catered to the policy prioritization of the principal and in the process fostered local political regulation cycles. These cycles resulted in regional patterns of air pollution over time. Towards the end of a local leader's tenure in office, s/he would ease environmental regulation when the economy and stability were highly priced by the principal, leading to what I call "political pollution cycles." When the environment became significantly valued by the principal, s/he would order more environmental regulation near the end of tenure, resulting in dampened political pollution cycles, or even what I call "political environmental protection cycles." Both types of political regulation cycles incurred tremendous welfare losses and human costs. Different from extant publications, while dirty economic growth (or degrowth) explains why the amount of pollution, regulatory relief (or pressure) ordered by career-minded local leaders or politicians accounts for the systematic variation in air quality over time. Combining empirical evidence from China and some very preliminary analysis based on the United States and Mexico, I argue that electoral and career incentives of local politicians or leaders influence their prioritization of multiple policy goals over time, with systematic environmental consequences, and this may hold across regime types.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Cain Bruce E. 
Oi Jean C. (Jean Chun) 
Sweeney James L. 
Tomz Michael
Political Uprisings and Skilled Migration: An Empirical Analysis of the Arab Spring

This study identifies the relationship between the Arab Spring-induced domestic conflict and interest in emigration among a country’s skilled workforce. I measure interest in emigration by the volume of United States Diversity Visa applications from each source country. Using differences in differences regression models, I find that the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent transition periods motivated positive interest in migration to the United States among the skilled workforces (high school education or more) of several Arab countries. I find no differential effects between states that experienced the most combustive Arab Spring uprisings and those that experienced weaker shocks. This suggests that it was not necessarily the political violence induced by the uprisings that spurred greater interest in emigration. Rather, attitudes concerning the failures of the post-uprising transition processes to address the economic and political challenges that paved the way for the Arab Spring – such as disproportionately high unemployment especially affecting educated populations – are more likely determinants of this increased interest in skilled migration.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Department of Economics
Arab Spring
Middle East and North Africa
uprisings
emigration
Thesis
Advisor: Dupas Pascaline
Polling in Practice: Accuracy of National and State Polls in the 2016 Election

This study focuses on the impact of mode and sampling procedures on polling accuracy during the period of the 2016 presidential election. Utilizing all national and state level polls released during the final 7 days of the election, polls are classified based on the mode and sampling procedure utilized. Accuracy is then analyzed using the average absolute error of the top two candidates (Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton). The study finds that polling methodologies are utilized at very different rates, with polling in the final weeks of the 2016 election being dominated by Internet / River sampling methodologies (45% of polls). Within the sample of polls, RDD / Live Interviewer polls were the most accurate at both the state and national level. The least accurate polls were those that utilized online / river sampling methods. Significance testing was also conducted to measure the significance of the differences in average absolute errors between RDD / Live interview polls and the least accurate, Internet / River Sampling. Both a stratified Fisher-Pitman permutation test and a test using the untransformed absolute difference from the election outcome find strong support for the hypothesized difference between RDD and river surveys.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
survey methodologies
pre-election polling
mode
sampling
Stanford University
Department of Communication
journalism
2016 presidential elections United States
Thesis
Advisor: Krosnick Jon A.