VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Myth and Appropriation: Fryderyk Chopin in the Context of Russian and Polish Literature and Culture

Fryderyk Chopin's fame today is too often taken for granted. Chopin lived in a time when Poland did not exist politically, and the history of his reception must take into consideration the role played by Poland's occupying powers. Prior to 1918, and arguably thereafter as well, Poles saw Chopin as central to their "imagined community." They endowed national meaning to Chopin and his music, but the tendency to glorify the composer was in a constant state of negotiation with the political circumstances of the time. This dissertation investigates the history of Chopin's reception by focusing on several events that would prove essential to preserving and propagating his legacy. Chapter 1 outlines the indispensable role some Russians played in memorializing Chopin, epitomized by Milii Balakirev's initiative to erect a monument in Chopin's birthplace Żelazowa Wola in 1894. Despite their political tension, Russia and Poland came together in the common cause of venerating Chopin. Chapter 2 examines two instances of the Russian-Polish cooperation: Chopin centennial celebrations in 1910 and 1949. These celebrations featured speeches and commemorative concerts that later became the norm. Chapter 3 considers the International Chopin Piano Competition, founded in independent Poland in 1927. As one of the earliest international musical contests of its kind and scale, the Chopin Competition effectively turned Chopin from a national into an international figure. Furthermore, the public nature of the competition led to the engagement of the entire society, involving spectators and the press. Besides the three main chapters, two Interludes survey the representations of Chopin and his music in Russian and Polish literature. In addition to literature, this dissertation analyzes works of visual art and music to consider the process of mythmaking and its implications.

Advisor: Nesbet, Anne
Frick, David
Investigation of the mechanism of coupling between two domains of T4 lysozyme: the role of an alpha helix in coupling distant regions

As the molecular biology and metabolic engineering fields move towards more thorough exploration and design of biological systems, it is imperative that there is a wealth of knowledge available about the biological macromolecules that comprise these systems. Proteins are important members of these biological systems and understanding the biophysical complexities of these macromolecules is the central focus of the protein-folding field. Protein folding researchers use a wide array of techniques to elucidate the forces that allow polypeptides to fold into the three-dimensional structures that allow them to function. The work presented in this thesis both unveils more about a hallmark of protein folding and utilizes knowledge of protein folding to alleviate an enzymatic bottleneck in an important recombinant metabolic pathway./nIn the second chapter of this thesis, I use a number of techniques to probe how cooperativity, a common characteristic of proteins, is conferred in the model protein T4 lysozyme (T4L*). Cooperativity is a property that allows most proteins to exist as either fully folded or fully unfolded without significant population of a partially-unfolded intermediate under equilibrium conditions. The molecular mechanisms that allow for this two-state behavior are not completely understood. T4L* is a single domain protein comprised of two-subdomains that fold cooperatively. In this chapter I uncover an allosteric mechanism allowing for cooperativity between the two subdomains via a central helix./nIn the third chapter, I utilize what is known about the interplay between protein misfolding and heterologous protein expression to optimize an engineered metabolic pathway. The recombinant glucaric acid pathway utilizes E. coli machinery to express three heterologous enzymes, one of these, myo-inositol oxygenase (MIOX), has been identified as the bottleneck of this pathway. Expression of recombinant MIOX is dependent on its substrate myo-inositol. In this chapter, I demonstrate that myo-inositol acts as a chemical chaperone and its action as a protein folding aid can be replaced by the action of the chaperonin GroEL/ES.

Advisor: Marqusee, Susan
Collaborative Team Evasion Against a Faster Pursuer

In the past decade, the level of autonomy of unmanned vehicles has been rising rapidly from remote-controlled towards fully autonomous. Without human operators on board, teams of autonomous vehicles are the best candidates for high risk applications such as search and rescue after disasters and information gathering in hostile environments. For a team of autonomous vehicles to operate effectively in these scenarios, it must be able to respond promptly to environmental hazards and/or hostile entities. In this dissertation, a collaborative team evasion framework is proposed to maximize the survival time of a team of autonomous vehicles against a faster and more agile hostile agent. The proposed framework is based on an open-loop formulation of the single-pursuer-multiple-evader pursuit-evasion game that is conservative to the evaders and provides guarantees on team survival time in the worst-case scenario. An iterative open-loop approach that repeatedly solves the open-loop problem corresponding to the most current state of the game is developed to relax the conservatism of the open-loop formulation and enhance the survival time performance. Extensions to the framework make it possible to take into account the turning rate constraints of the evaders and uncertainties in the position of the pursuer. Numerical approximations are also proposed to reduced the required computation time. Through extensive simulations, the proposed framework is shown to produce reliable strategies for the evaders that result in significantly longer team survival time than previous work in the literature.

Advisor: Hedrick, John K
Node-Pore Sensing: A Robust, High Dynamic Range Method for Multi-Parametric Screening of Biological Samples

Resistive-pulse sensing is a technique that allows for measurements of particles in a solution. The underlying principle relies on measuring the electrical resistance across a small pore connecting two reservoirs filled with fluid. As an insulating particle enters the pore, the particle displaces the conducting fluid, leading to an increase in the resistance measured. Pulse magnitude and width reveal information about the particle in transit. The size of the pulse magnitude corresponds to the size of the particle, while the width of the pulse represents the length of time the particle takes to transit the pore./nWe show that resistive pulse sensing can be used in combination with protein functionalization to achieve surface marker screening of small sample sizes. We analyze single satellite cells from muscle fibers of mice. We also present unique channel geometries that offer advancements to traditional resistive-pulse sensing. This new technique, node-pore sensing, provides unique signal detection benefits and essentially provides particle tracking, allowing us to determine specifically when a particle transits a specific region of a pore. Ultimately, node-pore sensing provides unprecedented sensitivity, which we show can be used to detect human immunodeficiency virus in human plasma. The particle tracking aspect of this technique affords us the capability of probing particle interactions in different regions of the pore, ultimately allowing us to perform single-cell screening of multiple biomarkers in a single device. We demonstrate multi-marker screening on cultured leukemia cells and bone marrow from leukemia patients. These studies showcase the promise of our platform for broad screening and diagnostic applications.

Advisor: Sohn, Lydia L
Negotiating an identity to achieve in English: Investigating the linguistic identities of young language learners

Qualitative research methods guide data collection and analysis (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Heath & Street, 2008; Schram 2006) of this 18 month study researching the academic lives of 21 Spanish-English language learners classified as limited English proficient (LEP) in two urban, elementary school communities. In this dissertation, I argue language learners in elementary school begin to construct identities with language through the school community resources they are able to access as they participate in school-based activities. These language identities are related to students' engagement and motivation to participate in school, and also hold a relationship with students' language classification status. By triangulating the data of 21 focal students to include: 1) student interviews, 2) observations of students in academic and non-academic school activities, and 3) students' performance on academic tests, findings reveal how all language learners construct one of three language-learning identities - dual, separation, or distant - where a distant identity is associated with students who remain classified LEP or are reclassified as a long-term English language learner upon exiting elementary school.

Advisor: Baquedano-Lopez, Patricia
Re-Examining Real Earnings Management to Avoid Losses

I re-examine the tests of real earnings management to avoid losses developed in Roychowdhury (2006). I find that small profit firms do not contain a higher proportion of observations with real activities manipulation than other firms in nearby earnings intervals. In addition, the real earnings management detected by the models is highly persistent, while the likelihood of staying in the small profit zone is not, suggesting the presence of omitted variables. I confirm this interpretation by demonstrating that the appearance of real earnings management for small profit firms is driven by persistently abnormal values for firms in extreme earnings intervals. Finally, a set of newly designed tests is unable to confirm the use of real earnings management to avoid losses in Roychowdhury's setting.

Advisor: Dechow, Patricia
Kavva and Kavya: Hala's Gahakosa and Its Sanskrit Successors

The study begins by looking at how the compilers of later Sanskrit and Prakrit Kavya anthologies select, interpret, and impose meaning on poetry and how, in so doing, they tie it back into their own wider cultural and ideological mi- lieus. The dissertation then considers the early recensions of the Prakrit Gahakosa (Treasury of Gathas), as it was known in the centuries following its creation, or the Sattasai; (Seven Hundred Poems), as it came to be known later, an anthology of lyrical Maharastari Prakrit poetry commonly attributed to the Satavahana king Hala, whose arrangements, themes, and concerns reveal an ofentimes different poetic universe. The study contrasts the Gahakosa with the later anthologies and the Sanskrit categories on which they are based, reflecting, in particular, on the Prakrit anthology's aesthetics of surprise, its inscription of gendered voice, and its representations of naturalness and the natural world. In the second part of the dissertation the discussion of the earlier chapters is brought to bear on Tribhuvanapala's Chekoktivicaralila, the Gahakosa's earliest extant commentary. Part II contains an edition and annotated translation of Chekoktivicaralila 1-28 based on a Kesar Library Manuscript (NGMPP C6/12, nak acc. no. 76). The third part of the dissertation presents further materials for the study of the Gahakosa.

Advisor: Goldman, Robert P.
Rospatt, Alexander v.
In a Queer Place in Time: Fictions of Belonging in Italy 1890-2010

In a Queer Place in Time: Fictions of Belonging in Italy 1890-2010 maps the "elsewheres"--spatial, temporal and intertextual-- that authorize same-sex desire in modern Italy. Tracing a genealogy that spans from nineteenth century travel writing about Italy to contemporary Italian novels, I argue that texts exported from the Northern Europe and the U.S. function as vital site of affiliation and vexing points of discrepancy for Italy's queers. Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Camere separate (1989), for instance, cites the British novelist Christopher Isherwood as proof that - somewhere else - silence did not yoke homosexuality. Rather than defining sexuality as a constant set of desires, I demonstrate it to be a retroactive fiction. It is the fleeting affinity that the reading of inherited texts can evoke. In examining the reception of transnational gay narratives in the national context of Italy, this dissertation argues that the concept of "Western" homosexuality is internally riven. Ultimately, In a Queer Place in Time illuminates how local histories - including affective differences like shame, estrangement and backwardness - continue to haunt gay culture's global fictions./n!

Advisor: Spackman, Barbara
Children of Empire: Postcolonial Agency, Sexuality, and Filipino/American Contact Zones

Although colonial discourse about Filipinas/os is marked by images of the childish and childlike native and of the hypersexual native, there has been no sustained study of the simultaneity of infantilization and sexualization in the process of racializing and minoritizing Filipinas/os. My dissertation, "Children of Empire: Postcolonial Agency, Sexuality, and Filipino/American Contact Zones," traces the historical development of these two figures--the Filipina/o-as-child and the hypersexual native--in American colonial texts and images, and argues that the collusion of these figures has significant implications for the agency of the postcolonial Filipina/o subject as seen in cultural productions and social justice movements./nThe first two chapters of the dissertation focus on how Filipina/os were portrayed as a people in a state of dependency and in need of tutelage in colonial-era materials that circulated widely, such as travelogues, political cartoons, newspaper and magazine articles, and photographs produced by American colonials from the late 1880s through the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that the Filipina/o-as-child and the hypersexual native were two important modalities through which Filipina/os were racialized. I detail the links between the racialization of Filipinos and the respective racializations of African Americans and Native Americans in order to illuminate the contours of a larger pattern of domination. Significant themes that collect around the image of the "Other" child are education, child labor, sexual precocity, and nationalist competence and agency./nThe last two chapters focus on the postcolonial responses to the legacy of infantilization and sexualization. I argue that portrayals of child sexual agency and child sexual victimization in contemporary Filipina/o and Filipina/o American novels, memoir, and film bespeak certain critiques of the powerful legacy of this colonial figuration of the hypersexual, childlike native. In particular, the tropes of childhood innocence and child's play are used to explore the relationship between the post/colonial subject and social justice movements that organize around child welfare, the abolition of sex-trafficking, and reparations for past sexual enslavement. Ultimately, through an intensive, systematic examination of figurations of the child in the Philippine colonial and postcolonial context, my dissertation project contributes to a larger interrogation of minority subject-formation and reconceptualizes how we think about the boundaries of agency and personhood. By studying childhood at the intersection of sexuality, racial theories, and colonial contact zones, my project offers a specific historical understanding of the cultural construction of personhood still prevalent in our contemporary globalized cultures.

Advisor: Lye, Colleen
Choy, Catherine C
Thermal Ground Plane for Chip-Level Electronics Cooling

The three-dimensional thermal ground plane was developed in response to the needs of high-power density electronics applications in which heat must be removed as close to the chip surface as possible. The novel design for this planar cooling device was proposed with three key innovations in the evaporator, wick, and reservoir layer, which provided enhanced and reliable cooling performance without wick dryout and back flows. For the evaporator and reservoir layer, a combination of a tapered channel and a triple-spike microstructure was designed to break up the pinned meniscus at the end of the vapor and liquid channels. The overall microstructure had three spikes where the main liquid meniscus was separated by a middle spike and then continued to flow between the tapered walls of the middle and side spikes. For the wick layer, a nanowire-integrated microporous silicon membrane was developed to overcome dryout by driving the coolant out of the channels and spreading the coolant on top of the wick surface with the assistance of extended capillary action. This innovative design used nanowires to extend and enhance capillary force, especially at the end of the pores where the coolant was pinned and unable to overflow out of the pores. The chronic dryout problem in micro cooling devices could be solved by these innovative designs./nTo analyze the thermal-fluid system, fluid dynamic and phase-change models were used to calculate thermodynamic and fluidic properties, such as operating temperature, pressure, vapor-liquid interface radius of curvature, and rate of bubble formation. The microscale heat conduction theory derived from traditional Fourier's law with classical size effect and effective medium theory were used to calculate the thermal conductivities of nanowires and porous silicon wick in the cross-plane direction, respectively. The theoretical results of porous silicon showed good agreement with the experimental results measured by the 3ù technique, demonstrating the reduction of thermal conductivity from bulk silicon. Cooling performance of the developed device was demonstrated experimentally with a micro ceramic heater, thermocouple modules, and microfabrication techniques, including photoelectrochemical etching to create porous silicon, deep reactive-ion etching to form a thin wick membrane, and hydrothermal synthesis to grow nanowires on top of the wick membrane. This study shows the feasibility of reliable, continuous, and high-performance micro cooling devices using enhanced capillary forces to address the increasing requirements of thermal management for chip-level electronics.

Advisor: Pisano, Albert P
Making Miracles at the Scuola Grande di San Marco

In 1548 Tintoretto delivered the Miracle of the Slave to the Scuola Grande di San Marco. It was the latest in a painting cycle focusing on St. Mark, patron of both the city of Venice and the eponymous confraternity. Each painting in the cycle negotiates the tension of the foreign origins of a saint habitually conflated with the state. Tintoretto's dramatic rendition featured an upturned flying saint and a crowd of spectators gawking at the miracle. In tenor, composition, and tone the painting radically diverged from the established painting tradition that had embedded miraculous occurrences quietly into the quotidian experience of Venetian life. Tintoretto's painting was initially rejected and the painter did not work again at the confraternity for twenty years./nThis dissertation argues that the seemingly abrupt pictorial caesura at the Scuola Grande di San Marco in fact continues traditional Venetian pictorial strategies but in an avant-garde visual vocabulary. In the introduction I establish the phenomenological experience of Venice and its invocation in imagery temporally and spatially. I contend that Venetian understanding of the miraculous referenced a multiplicity of time and space. In chapter one I propose that Venetian local identity was intrinsically intertwined with the foreign, a conceptualization readily apparent in the processions, architecture, and pictorial decorations making up the city's spectacle. Chapter two delves into the Venetian practice of using narrative as historical evidence and as a claim to their possession of the body of St. Mark. Chapter three concerns the failure of modernization efforts on Tintoretto's part with the Miracle of the Slave and the more successful examples of Paris Bordone and Palma il Vecchio. Chapter four looks at Tintoretto's paintings at the confraternity from the 1560s that insist on the disruptive power of miracles while retaining venezianità through invocation of local phenomenological experience. Tintoretto's Stealing of the Slave prefigures St. Mark's translatio to come by transposing the historical event in Alexandria onto the Piazza San Marco thus visualizing the body's eventual predestined resting place in the Basilica San Marco.

Advisor: Olson, Todd P
Multiple Optimality Guarantees in Statistical Learning

Classically, the performance of estimators in statistical learning problems is measured in terms of their predictive ability or estimation error as the sample size n grows. In modern statistical and machine learning applications, however, computer scientists, statisticians, and analysts have a variety of additional criteria they must balance: estimators must be efficiently computable, data providers may wish to maintain anonymity, large datasets must be stored and accessed. In this thesis, we consider the fundamental questions that arise when trading between multiple such criteria--computation, communication, privacy--while maintaining statistical performance. Can we develop lower bounds that show there must be tradeoffs? Can we develop new procedures that are both theoretically optimal and practically useful?/nTo answer these questions, we explore examples from optimization, confidentiality preserving statistical inference, and distributed estimation under communication constraints. Viewing our examples through a general lens of constrained minimax theory, we prove fundamental lower bounds on the statistical performance of any algorithm subject to the constraints--computational, confidentiality, or communication--specified. These lower bounds allow us to guarantee the optimality of the new algorithms we develop addressing the additional criteria we consider, and additionally, we show some of the practical benefits that a focus on multiple optimality criteria brings./nIn somewhat more detail, the central contributions of this thesis include the following: we/n- develop several new stochastic optimization algorithms, applicable to general classes of stochastic convex optimization problems, including methods that are automatically adaptive to the structure of the underlying problem, parallelize naturally to attain linear speedup in the number of processors available, and may be used asynchronously,/n- prove lower bounds demonstrating the optimality of these methods,/n- provide a variety of information-theoretic tools--strong data processing inequalities--useful for proving lower bounds in privacy-preserving statistical inference, communication-constrained estimation, and optimization,/n- develop new algorithms for private learning and estimation, guaranteeing their optimality, and/n- give simple distributed estimation algorithms and prove fundamental limits showing that they (nearly) optimally trade off between communication (in terms of the number of bits distributed processors may send) and statistical risk.

Advisor: Jordan, Michael I.
Wainwright, Martin J.