VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Marsh Dynamics: Laboratory and Field Investigations of Gas Transport, Wave Attenuation, and Biosolids Amendment

Marshes, and tidal salt marshes in particular, are gaining recognition as critical elements in sustainable shoreline protection (Narayan, Beck, Reguero, et al. 2016; Narayan, Beck, Wilson, et al. 2016; Spalding, Ruo, et al. 2014; Spalding, McIvor, et al. 2014). They contribute to coastal resiliency not only by attenuating wave energy in large storms (Gedan et al. 2011; Moller, Kudella, et al. 2014), but also by maintaining the existence of coastal land (Kirwan et al. 2016), supporting sheries (Boesch & Turner 1984; MacKenzie & Dionne/n2008), sequestering carbon (Ouyang & Lee 2014), and removing contaminants (Dhir et al. 2009; Windham et al. 2003). These benets directly contribute to the sustainability of the growing populations in coastal regions (Sutton-Grier, Wowk, et al. 2015). With this/nrecognition, there are many ongoing projects to preserve existing salt marshes, restore former marshes, and create hybrids of natural and engineered structures (Pontee et al. 2016). These projects require an understanding of the underpinning processes that lead to marsh sustainability. The projects presented in this dissertation are efforts to better understand marsh dynamics. The fist project explores the impact of emergent vegetation on gas flux in marsh surface waters. Wind causes the stems of emergent vegetation to wave back and forth, stirring the water column and facilitating gas exchange. To understand the magnitude of this effect, a gas transfer velocity (k600-value) was measured via laboratory experiments. Measuring this transport pathway contributes to a mechanistic understanding of gas flux and can improve models of climatically important gases. The second project examines wave attenuation/nacross a salt marsh. Salt marsh vegetation is effective at reducing wave energy. It is important to understand how this attenuation varies. Through field measurements, wave attenuation is explored as a function of hydrodynamic conditions, season, and vegetation/ntype. The results showed that even fringe marshes, which are common in San Francisco Bay, are effective at reducing wave energy year-round. The last project investigates the viability of using biosolids as an amendment to dredged material in marsh restorations. Biosolids is a reliable and sustainable source of sediment, and more sources of sediment are needed for marsh restoration projects. Both the aboveground and belowground biomass increased when vegetation was grown in soil containing biosolids as compared to only dredged material. Taken together, the three projects discussed here can contribute to improving the success and effciency of marsh restoration and preservation.

Advisor: Variano, Evan
Combinatorial analysis of continuous problems

Many objects in mathematics, at first sight, seem to belong to the domain of continuous mathematics. These objects are continuous, smooth and infinite, far different from the discrete and finite objects that are the classical domain of combinatorics. Objects of the former type are, for instance, determinants of matrices (which can take on every complex value), Grassmannians (which are smooth manifolds), and the eigenvalues of matrices (which take on any tuple of complex values). In the latter class lie objects such as paths in graphs, finite groups and generating functions. Applications of the study of such finite objects to the continuous ones would seem unlikely, or at least, trivial. For example, one may count the number of minors of a matrix, but that's about it. As we will demonstrate, however, this is not the case. The field of combinatorics has developed into a mature field of study, and it is the author's view that combinatorics can be used as a toolbox to obtain interesting and deep information on all areas of mathematics, continuous especially./n/nIn this work, we will demonstrate this by studying three different continuous problems using the techniques of combinatorics. The first problem concerns the study of symmetric matrices and their principal- and almost-principal minors. Here the main result is a proof of a conjectural combinatorial formula of Kenyon and Pemantle (2014) for the entries of a square matrix in terms of its connected principal and almost-principal minors. The second problem is the study of Bruhat interval polytopes. These polytopes arise as the moment-map images of Richardson varieties of flag varieties. Their study is motivated in part by the integrable system called the Toda lattice. Information obtained about these polytopes can be readily translated to information about the Richardson varieties. For instance, the dimension of the polytope will be used to determine when the Richardson variety is toric. The third problem will pertain to the study of the spectral theory of tensors via tropical methods. We show that an elegant theory in which there is a unique tropical eigenvalue arises. We describe briefly how the corresponding eigenvalue informs us of the asymptotic behavior of the corresponding classical eigenvalues.

Advisor: Sturmfels, Bernd
Williams, Lauren
Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines, 1957-1974

In 1967 the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) split in two. Within two years a second party -- the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) -- had been founded. In this work I argue that it was the political program of Stalinism, embodied in both parties through three basic principles -- socialism in one country, the two-stage theory of revolution, and the bloc of four classes -- that determined the fate of political struggles in the Philippines in the late 1960s and early 1970s and facilitated Marcos' declaration of martial law in September 1972./nI argue that the split in the Communist Party of the Philippines was the direct expression of the Sino-Soviet split in global Stalinism. The impact of this geopolitical split arrived late in the Philippines because it was initially refracted through Jakarta. It was in the wake of the massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965-66 that the PKP sought out new contacts with international Communism and in so doing was compelled to take sides in the raging dispute between Moscow and Beijing./nOn the basis of their common program of Stalinism, both parties in the wake of their split sought to form alliances with sections of the ruling class. The pro-Moscow party allied with Marcos, who was pursuing ties with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They facilitated and supported his declaration of martial law, murdering the members of the party who opposed this position. The pro-Beijing party responded by channeling the massive social unrest of this period behind the leadership of Marcos' political rivals. When Marcos declared martial law and arrested his rivals, the movement which had been subordinated to them died. The CPP channeled all residual mass opposition into the armed struggle in the countryside./nI base my analysis on the copious documentary record produced by the CPP, PKP and their front organizations at the time, which I correlated carefully with contemporary newspaper accounts. Using this material, I was able to trace the day-to-day vicissitudes in the political line of the party and the rhetoric used to justify it. On this basis I document that the one unaltered thread woven throughout the entire immense tangle of shifting political tactics and alliances was the program of Stalinism.

Advisor: Hadler, Jeffrey
Essays in Labor Economics

Using matched employer-employee data on the universe of mass layoffs in West Germany from 1980 to 2009, I characterize each of the 4,400 mass layoffs by the relative probabilities of displacement for different types of workers. I find substantial heterogeneity in layoff rules across establishments, with the most common types being based on relative tenure, relative wages, or occupation. Laying off workers with low tenure--which I interpret as a less selective layoff rule--has become less common, while laying off workers with low relative wages--which I interpret as a more selective layoff rule--has become more common. I also find an increase in wage-based layoffs and a decrease in tenure-based layoffs in recessions./nIn the second chapter, I test for asymmetric information in the labor market by studying how earnings losses of displaced workers vary with the degree of selection in employers' layoff decisions. I develop an asymmetric employer learning model with heterogeneous firing costs that implies that earnings losses are smaller for workers involved in tenure-based layoffs, since these layoffs do not serve as a negative signal of workers' productivity. I find strong support for this prediction: earnings losses are 20% smaller for workers displaced in tenure-based layoffs than observationally equivalent workers displaced in other layoffs. Selective layoffs are particularly costly for less-educated workers and workers in high-skilled service occupations, suggesting that asymmetric learning by incumbent employers is more prevalent for these groups.

Advisor: Card, David
Essays in Political Economy and Institutions

The first chapter of my dissertation studies the 2011 student movement in Chile, the largest protest mobilization in the country's history, in which hundreds of thousands of students skipped school to protest with the goal of reforming the educational system. Using administrative data on millions of students' daily school attendance decisions on protest and non-protest days, a large network composed by the lifetime history of classmates, and differential network exposure to the first national protest, I employ an instrumental variables approach to test how networks affect protest behavior. The main finding is that individual participation follows a threshold model of collective behavior: students were influenced by their networks to skip school on protest days only when more than 40 percent of the members of their networks also skipped school. Additional findings show that protest participation imposed significant educational costs on students and helped to shift votes towards non-traditional opposition parties. Taken together, results indicate that networks amplify the effect of protests in non-linear ways with potentially significant consequences for institutional change./nThe second chapter, co-authored with Jose Ignacio Cuesta and Cristi'an Larroulet, investigates the workings of educational institutions in Chile. In education, data on school quality is often gathered through standardized testing. However, the use of these tests has been controversial because of behavioral responses that could distort performance measures. We study the Chilean educational market and document that low-performing students are underrepresented in test days, generating distortions in school quality information. These distorted quality signals affect parents' school choice and induce misallocation of public programs. These results indicate that undesirable responses to test-based accountability systems may impose significant costs on educational markets./nThe third chapter, co-authored with Mounu Prem, studies firms during Chile's transition to democracy. Political transitions are associated with significant economic changes, but little is known about how firms fare across regimes. We study Chile's democratization and show that firms in the dictator's network make critical investments in physical capital during the political transition. These investments are made possible by government banks during the dictatorship and allow firms to improve their market position in the new regime. Our results show how market distortions can be transferred across political regimes.

Advisor: Miguel, Edward
Theoretical and Computational Tools for Analyzing the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe

The analysis of the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe can yield insights into some of the most important questions in contemporary cosmology, and in recent years, has become a data-driven endeavor. With ever-growing data sets, optimal analysis techniques have become essential, not only to extract statistics from data, but also to effectively use computing resources to produce accurate theoretical predictions for those statistics. Future LSS experiments will help answer fundamental questions about our Universe, including the physical nature of dark energy, the mass scale of neutrinos, and the physics of inflation. To do so, improvements must be made to theoretical models as well as the computational tools used to perform such analyses./nThis thesis examines multiple aspects of LSS data analysis, presenting novel modeling techniques as well as a software toolkit suitable for analyzing data from the next generation of LSS surveys. First, we present nbodykit, an open-source, massively parallel Python toolkit for analyzing LSS data. nbodykit is both an interactive and scalable piece of scientific software, providing parallel implementations of many commonly used algorithms in LSS. Its modular design allows researchers to integrate nbodykit with their own software to build complex applications to solve specific problems in LSS. Next, we derive an optimal means of using fast Fourier transforms to estimate the multipoles of the line-of-sight dependent power spectrum, eliminating redundancy present in previous estimators in the literature. We also discuss potential advantages of our estimator for future data sets. We then present a novel theoretical model for the redshift-space galaxy power spectrum and demonstrate its accuracy in describing the clustering of galaxies down to scales of k = 0.4 h/Mpc. Finally, we analyze the large-scale clustering of quasars from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey to constrain the deviation from Gaussian random field initial conditions in the early Universe, known as primordial non-Gaussianity.

Advisor: Seljak, Uros
Manga's Global Century: A History of Japanese Comics, 1905-1989

This dissertation describes the origins and history of manga (Japanese comics) from 1905-89 as a form of sequential art which, while created in Japan in the early 20th century, was influenced by cinema and comics from abroad in addition to indigenous artistic predecessors. Manga’s history as one of the three great world sequential arts traditions is best understood by comparing manga to comics and bandes dessinées, as I do, in order to evaluate local conditions in Japan more accurately, demonstrating that different factors in each country produced different outcomes and developmental trajectories for each medium as part of the global history of the twentieth century. I consider multiple aspects of manga—its status as a form of Japanese mass media, its transnational position as one of multiple global sequential art traditions, and its distinctive history as a medium of expression in which fans and creators have at all points played equally important, and at times not easily divisible, roles—to tell the story of manga’s beginnings as it moves into its next hundred years./nIn particular, I describe the history of competing publishing platforms and formats within manga’s development to demonstrate that manga became widespread in Japanese society less because of any intrinsic quality of comics than because of the affordances of the platforms and formats through which it was distributed. Transformations in platform and format were related to the expansion of audiences for manga, as what began as medium devoted to political satire for adults expanded to encompass children and then to young adults in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, I pay due attention to the development since 1975 of manga fandom, the dôjin sphere, as an unofficial but extremely consequential site of manga production which has now come to dominate the professional manga industry, even as manga has become a subordinate component of the anime media mix.

Advisor: Barshay, Andrew
Promoting Instructional Discourse for Secondary Teachers of Newcomer Students: The Practice of Integrated Language and Content Instruction

Instructional time for newcomer English learners necessitates a balanced integration of language and content within the curriculum (Batt, 2008) and that the development of the academic uses of language for newcomer students becomes the obligation of every secondary content discipline teacher to engage these students in meaningful language use for content specific purposes (Heritage et al., 2015). Now more than ever, secondary content area teachers are critical actors in ensuring that the necessary language skills through their content instruction are taught and supported for newcomer students in their classes. Thus, this design development research employs a robust intervention that promotes a systematic approach for an interdisciplinary team of secondary content area teachers to have productive conversations around instruction in order to better understand and implement an integrated language and content instruction for newcomer students./nSet in a small high school located at a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in a large urban community in Northern California, this study focused on three teachers as a teacher team who serve newcomer students. I found that participants in this study struggled to develop a common understanding and enacting effective language and content integration in classroom practice. However, findings suggested promising efficacy of this design study, particularly around improving participants’ instructional mindset along the dimensions of language and content integration understanding and language and content integration in practice. I present the utility of the Teacher Team Cycle of Inquiry as a systematic, structured sequence of activities that reframes the responsibility of teaching language development for newcomer students as one of a teacher team’s collective and shared responsibility. This teacher team structure, along with the set of learning activities, can serve as a catalyst for capacity building for teachers to improve their practice and understanding of integrating language and content.

Advisor: Mintrop, Heinrich
Leading for Equity: Elementary Principals in Pursuit of Excellence for All Students

The purpose of this study is to understand how three elementary principals in Sequoia Unified School District (SUSD) enact equity-centered instructional leadership in service of increased learning outcomes for its most vulnerable students. Specifically, this study examines how these principals employ leadership content knowledge, skills and dispositions to create learning conditions for all students to thrive. Investigation of how three SUSD principals define and enact equity-centered instructional leadership will shed light on what equity-centered instructional leadership looks like in practice and the types of challenges elementary principals may encounter./nThe methodology used to conduct this three-month study was a cross case study analysis of three elementary principals in SUSD. Principal interviews, professional development observations, teacher focus group interviews and document analysis represented data collection methods employed to understand equity-centered instructional leadership./nFindings from in-depth principal and teacher focus group interviews elucidate the importance of SUSD elementary principals developing a critical consciousness lens, political leadership skills, and technical expertise, grounded in instructional and transformational leadership research, to enact equity-centered instructional leadership. Challenges encountered by the elementary principals suggest that the combination of leadership knowledge, skills and dispositions are required for SUSD elementary principals to transform their school environment into an inclusive space to promote quality teaching and learning for all students.

Advisor: Trujillo, Tina
Platonic Division and the Origins of Aristotelian Logic

Aristotle's syllogistic theory, as developed in his Prior Analytics, is often regarded as the birth of logic in Western philosophy. Over the past century, scholars have tried to identify important precursors to this theory. I argue that Platonic division, a method which aims to give accounts of essences of natural kinds by progressively narrowing down from a genus, influenced Aristotle's logical theory in a number of crucial respects. To see exactly how, I analyze the method of division as it was originally conceived by Plato and received by Aristotle. I argue that, while Plato allowed that some divisions fail to rigorously investigate the essence, he began a program continued by Aristotle (and others in antiquity and the middle ages) of seeking norms for division that would apply in any domain whatsoever. This idea of a rigorous, general method was taken up and developed by Aristotle in his syllogistic. Aristotle also used Plato's conception of predication as parthood in his semantics for syllogistic propositions. As part of my argument, I prove that a semantics based on Platonic divisional structures is sound and complete for the deduction system used in the literature to model Aristotle's syllogistic.

Advisor: Clarke, Timothy
Corcilius, Klaus
Transparency in Perceptual Experience

Perceptual experience, and visual experience in particular, is often held to be 'transparent' in that when you try to focus on your experience you find that you can only focus on the subject matter of your experience. For example, when you look at your hand and try to focus on your visual experience of it, it is natural to admit that the only thing you find yourself able to focus on is your hand. But, of course, hands and visual experiences are two quite different things. In this way your experience, but not your hand, is transparent to you. In the dissertation I discuss the so- called transparency of experience at length./nThe first half of the book aims to make the idea of transparency of philosophically precise. The results of this section of the book generate an understanding of transparency which differs in important ways from how transparency is typically understood in the literature. The second half of the book utilizes this understanding of transparency to query the philosophical significance of transparency. In this portion of the book I argue that transparency is not very illuminating when it comes to questions concerning the nature of perceptual experience. Most philosophers who write about transparency disagree with this and the reason for this is that most philosophers have a mistaken understanding of transparency. When one understands transparency properly, it is clear that the truth of transparency would have no direct impact on what we should say about the metaphysics of perceptual experience. I then argue that transparency is significant from an epistemological point of view. The basic thought I elaborate on is that if our perceptual experiences are transparent then they are first-personally elusive in the sense that when we, the subjects of experience, go to look for our perceptual experiences they are nowhere to be found. Thus transparency raises a number of puzzles concerning our ability to think and know about our own perceptual experiences given their elusiveness. After raising these puzzles I propose a solution to them which treats our understanding of visual experience as theoretical, rather than as something which is given to us introspectively.

Advisor: Lee, Geoffrey
Campbell, John