VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Chen Renyu’s Junpu: An Annotated Translation with Discussion on China’s Earliest Edible Mushroom Manual

Though not widely acknowledged in the present era, the Junpu《菌譜》(“Materia Mycologica”, 1245), also known as the Xiangxunpu 《香蕈譜》(“Manual of Fragrant Fungi”), is a historical Chinese mycological monograph authored in the late Southern Song (1127-1279) by scholar-official Chen Renyu 陳仁玉 (b. 1212), significant for its dual status as not only the earliest manual of edible mushrooms recorded from China, but also indeed the oldest practical treatise on fungi known from anywhere in the world. Despite the considerable limitations of the Junpu in terms of its actual informational scope – comprising fewer than nine hundred characters in total, with contents featuring only a brief synoptic preface followed by summary descriptions for a small number of mushrooms found from the author’s native county, and entirely devoid of illustrations – Chen Renyu’s pioneering work on fungi is nevertheless notable for having achieved a remarkable degree of influence on the subsequent development of more comprehenesive mycological literatures both in China and elsewhere in East Asia.
Thus, with the primary goal of establishing greater awareness of Chen Renyu’s Junpu as China’s archetypal mycological monograph, this thesis first proceeds with a brief biography on the life and activities of Chen Renyu, followed by a select overview of the complex contents of his original work, thereby presenting a conceptual basis for interpreting the text itself. The next section of the paper then presents readers with a new comprehensive English-language translation of the entire Junpu treatise. This translation is supplemented by extensive annotations providing commentary on the material covered therein, with particular attention being given to possible identites of the mushrooms featured in the work as well as the numerous linkages between pre-Song Chinese ethnomycological records and contemporary Song mushroom culture revealed by its contents. Following the annotated translation, the third section of the thesis engages in a brief discussion on the textual history of the Junpu and its considerable influence on later Chinese and Japanese mycological monographs. Finally, the paper concludes with an assessment of the Junpu’s unique significance to the overlapping fields of Chinese, East Asian, and global ethnomycological research, as well as a brief closing statement regarding its relevance both to present-day mushroom cultures around the world and to the future trajectory of human relations with fungi at a universal level.

Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Junpu
Ethnomycology
History of Science
Chen Renyu
Translation
Song Dynasty
China
Mushrooms
Fungi
East Asia
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Thesis
Advisor: Wang Ban
Bartlett Thomas
China’s Economic Statecraft in Cross-Strait Relations: A Case Study of Outbound Tourism and Agricultural/Fishery Trade

This thesis aims to analyze and evaluate Beijing’s use of economic statecraft in cross-strait relations through case studies of outbound tourism and preferential treatment for agricultural/fishery trade. China’s economic inducement and coercion in outbound tourism and agricultural trade concessions were unsuccessful, but the contract farming program of milkfish in Syuejia was somewhat successful. This thesis draws the following conclusion about factors determining the effectiveness of China’s economic statecraft. The lack of compatibility of goals between state and commercial actors, especially intermediaries’ maximization of their own economic profit, posed implementation challenges to the Chinese state. The direct communication between targeted people and mainlanders could work both positively and negatively. In the coercion phase, efforts by the target to diversify its market helped mitigate the economic damage of coercive measures.

Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
economic statecraft
cross-strait relations
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Thesis
Advisor: Miller Alice
Chrisitianizing harmonies : the transformation of sound in late antiquity

In the early fourth century CE, the Roman emperor Constantine embraced Christianity and initiated the Christianization of the Roman Empire. In this revolution, old institutions lost power, while new social, political, and religious forces emerged. This dissertation explores one major aspect of this revolution that has not appeared in scholarly narratives about the transformation of the Roman Empire in late antiquity: sound. It argues that the Christianization of pagan sound was a central feature of the Constantinian revolution. To convert the Empire to Christianity, Christians sought to transform the soundscape, or acoustic environment, from the realm of pagan gods into a vast cathedral resonating with harmonies for Christ. In other words, perceiving the non-Christian world as out of calibration like a poorly tuned instrument, Christians endeavored to retune the world from dissonant and demonic paganism into a Christian consonance that would govern the new Christian Empire. Taking many forms, these harmonizing efforts produced a multivocal soundscape that consisted of psalm singing, shouting, silencing demonic outbursts, and even belching. In sum, late antiquity hosted a polyphonous chorus of Christian voices all participating in the great harmonizing work of Jesus as they Christianized the soundscape of the world

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Religious Studies.
Advisor: Penn Michael Philip
Elm Susanna
Fonrobert Charlotte Elisheva
Parker Grant Richard
Circuit quantum acoustodynamics with a fluxonium qubit

Quantum information is fragile, and the physical systems we use to protect it are often complex. Even with rapid advances in superconducting circuits over the past two decades, this leading platform for quantum engineering utilizes substantial electronic and spatial resources per qubit. This inspires a search for hardware-efficient strategies to build on the success of superconducting circuits. One such strategy involves the integration of mechanical resonators, offering smaller spatial footprints, sensitive detection of mass or force, and prospects for long energy-relaxation lifetimes. Coupling rates between circuits and mechanics are enhanced by the use of strongly piezoelectric materials, extending the reach of circuit quantum electrodynamics into the domain of mechanical systems. In this thesis I describe efforts to achieve strong coupling between a superconducting qubit and a piezoelectric mechanical resonator with frequency below 1 GHz. The main result is a device achieving phonon-number-resolving readout of a 690 MHz mechanical resonator. Phonon-number resolution was first observed using few-GHz nanomechanical resonators coupled to a transmon qubit at a similar frequency, leveraging strong piezoelectricity in thin-film lithium niobate. I show that integrating a lithium niobate mechanical resonator with a fluxonium qubit can access lower mechanical frequencies while preserving strong coupling and control capabilities at the single-phonon level. I describe initial attempts to measure coherence times of a phonon at 690 MHz, argue that these attempts were limited by thermal effects, and suggest cooling protocols to control thermal effects in future work. I conclude by discussing future experiments in strongly-coupled quantum acoustics, some of which may be enabled with near-term improvements in the fluxonium-mechanical system

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Applied Physics.
Advisor: Safavi-Naeini Amir H.
Fan Shanhui
Hogan Jason
Climate Change Leads to Relative Decrease in Coarse Woody Debris Volume in West Coast US Forests

The impact of climate change on dead wood volumes in US forests remains uncertain. Coarse woody debris, or pieces of dead wood at least 3 inches in diameter, play an especially important role in habitat quality, wildfire risk, and carbon storage. This study leverages machine learning techniques and data from the US Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program to predict coarse woody debris volumes in California, Oregon, and Washington under different climate change scenarios. Our results suggest that though coarse woody debris volumes are predicted to increase due to increasing stand age, climate change has a relatively negative impact on CWD volume. We posit that this could be driven by increased decomposition. This study represents the first machine learning approach to predicting the volume of coarse woody debris under climate change and adds to a small but growing body of evidence that climate change will have a negative impact on CWD volume.

Keywords: climate change
forests
Coarse woody debris
Machine learning
model
Forest Inventory and Analysis Program (U.S.)
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Article
Thesis
Advisor: Field Chris
Climate crucible : American choices in Germany, Japan, and the making of the Great Acceleration, 1939-1953

This dissertation presents a new interpretation of American responsibility and reveals overlooked contingencies in the acceleration of key drivers of anthropogenic climate change in the mid-twentieth century. Historians have recognized links between the ascent of the United States to superpower status in the 1940s and the launching of the Great Acceleration--a global skyrocketing of greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption starting soon after 1945. Scholarship has focused largely on longer-term climate effects of American actions and domestic consumption. Less attention has been paid to another form of American contribution: choices by U.S. foreign policymakers as they shaped transnational patterns of industrialization and resource use across a pivotal decade for global politics and environmental change. More fully understanding the making of the Great Acceleration requires investigating the degree of choice and knowledge of risk among U.S. policymakers from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Engaging U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence archives, this dissertation investigates how American policymakers developed ideas that stressed equality over competition in postwar industrial geography and resource use in Europe and Asia--and why they ultimately discarded these ideas. Each chapter focuses where competing choices and risks appeared sharply: debates regarding Germany and Japan during war and occupation. While U.S. policymakers did not understand the climate impacts of their choices, they knowingly turned from plans that supported more balanced and sustainable transnational patterns of industrialization and resource use in Europe and Asia to accept risks of global inequality, resource exhaustion, and preparation for future world war. This work bridges historiographies of the American empire, U.S. foreign relations, and critical Anthropocene studies to expand historical insights on the deepening climate crisis

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
History.
Advisor: Chang Gordon H.
Uchida Jun
Wolfe Mikael
Cloud services and the performance of small firms

Do cloud services boost small firms’ performance? Cloud services change a risky, fixed- cost investment in IT services to a variable-cost purchase of only IT services that have been used. As a result, cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon often advertise their products to small firms. However, cloud service has their own drawbacks for firms, such as the possibility of high costs due to unexpected high usage and changing prices by cloud service providers. This paper aims to answer whether the usage of cloud services improves the financial performance of small firms. Previous papers have limited their analysis to manufacturing plants, or have only been able to use survey or proxy data. In this paper, I use data from querying the website of small firms directly to find out whether they are using a cloud service technology as part of their IT infrastructure. This more direct dataset standardizes what is meant by a “cloud service” and focuses analysis on the impact of infrastructure cloud services, as opposed to the diverse array of cloud services more generally. Using a dataset of firms’ Amazon Web Service (AWS) usage and financial performance from 2000 and 2018, I run a difference-in-difference model to find the effect of using AWS on small firms’ revenue compared to larger firms’. I found that there is significant evidence that adopting AWS improves small firms’ revenue by as much as 60%, while adopting AWS appears to actually have a negative impact of large firms’ revenue.

Keywords: Cloud computing
Small business
Text
Thesis
Advisor: Bresnahan Timothy
Clustering approaches for faster nonlinear projection-based model order reduction

Projection-based model order reduction is a technology for dramatically reducing the cost of expensive computational physics simulations by approximately solving the governing equations in a data-driven approximation subspace. This dissertation proposes a set of techniques that exploit the concepts of locality and clustering to further accelerate reduced-order models on challenging problems. The first exploits the fact that many physical systems exhibit spatially localized features such as shocks or wakes to construct space-local reduced-order models that are more efficient than existing model-reduction schemes. The second takes advantage of locality in the simulation's state-space to construct smaller bases composed of a few nearby solution snapshots. Both novel techniques proposed here are applied to multiple systems drawn from computational fluid dynamics, including a challenging large-scale turbulent flow problem. In all applications, multiple orders of magnitude of speedup are observed relative to the original high-dimensional computational model, and substantial speedups are also observed relative to previously-existing model-order reduction techniques

Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Advisor: Farhat Charbel
Alonso Juan José
Kochenderfer Mykel J.
CMOS-compatible strain engineering and device scaling of monolayer molybdenum disulfide transistors

Moore's Law has been the driving factor behind the exponential growth of the semiconductor industry over the past six decades. As the reduction of silicon features approaches the atomic limit, we are once again at an inflection point, requiring researchers to investigate new ultrathin semiconductors to overcome these limitations. Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a class of atomically-thin materials which have demonstrated promise for nano-scaled transistors owing to their excellent electrical properties in this regime. In silicon technology, the first great advance beyond conventional scaling came from harnessing strain to improve performance. Strain is also known to affect the band gap of TMDs but has rarely been investigated in TMD transistors on rigid substrates. In the first part of this thesis, I explore how electron beam evaporation, the most commonly used technique for contact formation to TMDs, can introduce significant tensile strain to monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). Next, I demonstrate a fully industry-compatible approach to impart strain to two-dimensional TMD transistors using tensile-stressed silicon nitride capping layers. I apply it to both back and dual-gated devices, demonstrating improvements up to 60% in the on-state current of monolayer MoS2 transistors. The next major advance in silicon technology came from the introduction of high-κ /metal gate technology, offering improved gate control. In the final part of this thesis, I developed a process which allows the integration of monolayer MoS2 on thin, high-κ dielectrics which enables lower voltage operation, improved subthreshold behavior and drive currents up to ~700 μA/μm at a channel length of 50 nm. Together, these results offer a holistic approach to channel and contact engineering, offering a path for TMD transistors to become industrially relevant.

Keywords: Engineering.
Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Saraswat Krishna
Pop Eric
Wong Hon-Sum Philip
Cognitive Framework for Blended Math-Science Sensemaking for Vectors, Vector Operations, and Integrals

Blended mathematical sensemaking in science (blended MSS) involves developing a conceptual understanding of quantitative relationships and the scientific meaning of equations describing phenomena. In recent work, Kaldaras & Wieman developed and provided initial validity evidence for a unified cognitive framework (the framework) for blended MSS across various scientific disciplines, including Physics and Chemistry. The framework describes increasingly sophisticated ways of engaging in blended MSS as students develop an equation describing the scientific phenomenon or build a deeper understanding of the known equation describing the phenomenon. Kaldaras and Wieman validated the framework for simple mathematical relationships describing scientific phenomena involving multiplication, division, subtraction, and addition. In my senior thesis, I am extending the framework by Kaldaras & Wieman to include mathematical relationships describing phenomena that include vectors, vector operations, and integrals. I will present initial validity evidence for my framework grounded in analysis of student interviews. I use my cognitive framework to investigate whether taking vector calculus and intro electricity and magnetism (E&M) in separate contexts or courses that do not support blended MSS is effective in helping students build an integrated understanding of physics phenomena involving vectors, vector operations, and integrals. The interview analysis showed evidence for the validity of most of the levels of my framework for vectors, vector operations, and integrals. Interview analysis results showed no significant difference in the ability to engage in blended MSS between students who took intro E&M and students who did not. This finding suggests that intro E&M does not sufficiently prepare students to engage in higher levels of blended MSS for physics phenomena involving vectors, vector operations, and integrals.

Keywords: Physics
Cognitive Framework
Blended Math-Science Sensemaking
Vectors
Vector Operations
Integrals
Electricity and Magnetism (E&amp;M)
Text
Thesis
Advisor: Wieman Carl
Kaldaras Leonora
Collaborative multi-robot autonomy via distributed optimization

The high complexity of real-world tasks necessitates the deployment of multi-robot teams, equipped with different onboard sensors and capabilities. Typically, no robot has all the capabilities required to complete the specified task; as a result, the multi-robot team must collaborate together to realize the shared objective. This thesis presents distributed algorithms that enable multi-robot teams to operate autonomously while working collaboratively. Specifically, we leverage distributed optimization to derive efficient algorithms that enable multi-robot autonomy in core robotics applications, such as autonomous transportation, search-and-rescue problems, and collaborative object manipulation. Our algorithms are fully-distributed (i.e., our algorithms do not require a central node (station) for any computation or coordination). Rather, each robot communicates with its one-hop (immediate) neighbors over a peer-to-peer communication network. We introduce a distributed optimization algorithm for problems consisting of optimization variables that can be partitioned among the robots. The proposed algorithm enables robots to avoid unnecessary optimization over irrelevant problem variables, resulting in greater computation and communication efficiency. Problems of this form are prevalent in the field of robotics, e.g., trajectory optimization. We present specialized algorithms for contact-implicit trajectory optimization and model predictive control. Our distributed contact-implicit optimization algorithm enables each robot to make and break contact, as required, to perform complex object manipulation tasks through narrow areas. Further, our distributed algorithm for model predictive control enables each robot to compute the required forces and torques needed to successfully complete a specified multi-robot task. Our algorithms eliminate the need for each robot to compute the torques of other robots, which may not be directly relevant to its performance on the given task. In addition, we present distributed algorithms for multi-robot target tracking and task assignment. Through maximum a-posteriori optimization, we derive a distributed trajectory estimation algorithm that enables each robot to estimate the trajectory of the target without sharing its local (potentially high-dimensional) observations. In addition, we introduce three algorithms for the multi-robot task assignment problem. These algorithms are designed for a broad class of multi-robot systems, considering the broad range of computation and communication resources available to multi-robot teams. In our distributed algorithms, each robot does not share its local problem data (including its local observations) and its objective and constraint functions. Rather, each robot communicates its local problem variable, which is of a generally lower-dimension, reducing the computation and communication overhead associated with our algorithms.

Keywords: Engineering.
Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Cutkosky Mark R.
Schwager Mac
Lall Sanjay
Collective cell migration on viscoelastic substrates

Cells push and pull on the soft tissues of our bodies in order to move around and to gauge the mechanical properties of their surroundings. These physical interactions influence a wide range of key cellular processes, including collective cell migration. Collective migration is a central feature of development, cancer invasion, wound healing, and tissue homeostasis, and relies on coordination of motion and force generation between individual cells. The complexity of cell-material responses and cell-cell interactions gives rise to the rich spectrum of collective behaviors observed in multicellular living systems. In this dissertation, I focus on understanding the role of substrate viscoelasticity in collective cell migration. Specifically, we use engineered biomaterials (i.e., alginate hydrogels) with tunable viscoelastic properties (i.e., solid-like and fluid-like behavior) to study the expansion of micropatterned epithelial monolayers. A more complete understanding of tissue-substrate interactions and collective cell dynamics will provide insight into new therapeutic strategies, tissue engineering approaches, and interventions to promote health and treat diseases.

Keywords: Engineering.
Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Chaudhuri Ovijit
Heilshorn Sarah
Levenston Marc
Color me Khmao:The effects of social factors on colorism among Khmer women

Given the lack of academic literature on colorism focusing specifically on the Cambodian community and the lack of colorism scholarship focusing on the influence of the complexion of those in the community, this study seeks to analyze how Khmer women's perceptions of colorism are shaped by their family and community contexts. The data and methods consist of forty in-depth qualitative interviews of Khmer American women and their experiences with colorism analyzed through a thematic analysis. Findings reveal factors such as family support and Khmer cultural connections worked in combination with relative skin tone in both women’s families and their broader communities to shape their self-esteem and experiences with colorism. Women with darker skin did not necessarily have the lowest self-esteem, especially if they had supportive families and lived in communities with more darker skinned people. Similarly, women with lighter skin did not necessarily have the highest self-esteem, especially when their families reinforced color hierarchies and they lived in communities dominated by White or East Asian Americans. By examining and understanding the structural issue further that is colorism, communities of color work towards racial and ethnic justice while considering strategies for future generations to engage in moving forward against colorism.

Keywords: Cambodian community, colorism, complexion, Khmer American, Khmer cultural connections
Text
Thesis
Advisor: Saperstein Aliya