VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
“Don’t Watch this Video!” Online Privacy, Porn, Sutura, and Health among Senegal’s Digital Dissidents

This dissertation explores how sutura – the Senegalese ethic of discretion – has transformed within shifting landscapes of digital media use. In historically contingent ways, sutura has predicated one’s moral legitimacy, legible gender identity, and national belonging on one’s ability to shield aspects of life considered “intimate” from public view. Those who disrupt gender expectations may be construed as lacking sutura. This can undermine their claims to moral belonging. What happens when social media allows users to share intimate life with wide audiences in real time? What does digital media use entail for sutura, and for the configurations of gender and moral belonging invoked in its name? I show that fears of non-consensual digital exposure and image-based sexual abuse have grown in tandem with the importance of digitally mediated intimacy as a site for defining oneself as an ethical Senegalese subject. This affects sexually stigmatized Senegalese acutely and paradoxically. For example, sex workers face high risks of non-consensual exposure online. Yet others may accuse them of transgressing sutura through purported “digital dissidence,” indiscreet or excessively embodied online behavior.Rather than provoking straightforward censorship, perceived digital transgressions of sutura produce unlikely collaborations between “digital dissidents” and institutions that seek to align everyday practices with national ideals of ethical intimacy. Drawing on over 18 months of ethnography and participatory action research, I trace these unlikely interactions across multiple sites: from digital sexual health programs, to Muslim youth groups, to pornography production. In this dissertation, sutura is more than an object of research. I argue that sutura challenges the intransigent analytical distinction between “communication” and “health.” Moreover, it illustrates the gendered operation of health/communicative inequities. Magnified by anxieties about social media’s capacity to multiply affective or erotic attachments, sutura may be invoked to conflate communicative excess with bodily excess, and associate both with gendered illegibility. However, digital dissidents reject the devaluing of their communicative practice. For them, sutura is not a boundary dividing the “intimate” from the “public,” but rather, a practice of collective protection. They reframe digital privacy as mutual aid. I argue that digital dissidents’ reimagining of sutura disrupts dominant paradigms in digital privacy policy that emphasize individual awareness and responsibility. If we heed the expertise of those most vulnerable to digital harms, we can better leverage digital health strategies to promote health equity. By reclaiming sutura, digital dissidents gesture to an alternative digital future, one marked by the equal distribution of digital privacy, health, and protection.

Advisor: Cohen, Lawrence
Identifying and characterizing genetic determinants of antibiotic sensitivity in Mycobacterium abscessus

The work presented here focuses on identifying and characterizing genetic determinants of antibiotic sensitivity in Mycobacterium abscessus (Mabs), a non-tuberculosis mycobacterial pathogen responsible for various human infections that are notoriously difficult to treat with standard antibacterial therapy in clinical settings. Using bacterial genetics and high-throughput DNA sequencing methods, we have identified genes important for growth on amikacin and clarithromycin, two clinically relevant antibiotics used to treat Mabs, and ethionamide (ETH), a second-line drug currently used for treating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis infections. In chapters 1 and 2, I discuss the types of infections caused by Mabs, notable risk factors associated with Mabs infections, its epidemiology and transmission, and treatment options currently available. In chapter 3, I specifically focus on antibiotic treatment of Mabs infections and provide an overview on various antibiotic resistance mechanisms that are associated with treatment failure. In chapter 4, I present data that examines the antibacterial activity of ETH alone and in combination with clinically relevant antibiotics in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, we present sequencing data on MAB_2648c, which encodes for a transcriptional repressor that confers ETH resistance. We demonstrate that Mab_2648c-dependent ETH resistance requires the activity of MmpSL5, a putative membrane transporter whose function remains unknown. In chapter 5, we attempt to identify the function of MmpSL5 and its potential substrates. In conclusion, we show that ETH is slightly bactericidal against Mabs in vitro and potentially in vivo, does not antagonize with clinically relevant antibiotics used to treat Mabs infections, and identified a biological mechanism that confers ETH resistance in Mabs. Future work should further examine the repurposing potential of ETH against Mabs and identify compounds that may reverse ETH resistance in vitro and in vivo.

Advisor: Stanley, Sarah
Laser Ablation Mass Spectrometry for Fuel Analysis

Femtosecond and faster lasers have opened a new regime of physics. Because their pulseduration is shorter than the phonon relaxation time of most materials, they deposit energy with almost no loss to the surrounding area. Calibration curves using NIST Glass, CRM 125-A, and tungsten metal allowed the use of Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LAMS) to interrogate element distributions in Pressurized Water Reactor fuel surrogates fabricated at Los Alamos National Laboratory. LAMS can be faster and less expensive than traditional acid dissolution of surrogate PWR fuel pellets. With traditional acid dissolution, spatial information is mostly lost, whereas LAMS oers the possibility of three-dimensional isotope analysis. This three-dimensional data could help resolve longstanding issues in ssion product movement through the fuel. The LAMS system used here had a limit of detection for tungsten of approximately 800 parts per billion, which is better than the Los Alamos neutron tomography study (Tremsin et al., 2013) but not state of the art. A calibration curve for tungsten was obtained with a least-squares residual R2 = 1 (Sewall, 1921). Isotope ratios were generally within 1% of declared values. These results corroborate the ndings of LANL neutron tomography study and suggest LAMS to be a cost eective approach to the rapid three-dimensional analysis of spent fuel. Other applications may include fuel fabrication, additive manufacturing, and nuclear forensics.

Advisor: Hosemann, Peter
Preliminary Practices and the Formation of Tibetan Buddhism

Scholars have long recognized the influence of canonical Indian tantras and their attendant sādhanas and vidhis on the formation of new Buddhist traditions in Tibet. The impact of the more popular tantric preliminaries has, however, received far less attention. This dissertation argues that the Tibetan preliminary practices that are so widespread today are historically rooted in the rise of the lay tantric guru. In early medieval India, lay gurus were controversial, so much so that even a well-known collection of devotional practices for relating to such figures—Fifty Verses on the Guru—cautions against bowing to them in public. In eleventh- and twelfth-century Tibet, however, influential lay lamas came to serve as respected heads of monastic institutions. Throughout this period, preliminary practices were an important site for innovation, where Indians and Tibetans alike worked out the changing place of the guru within Buddhism. In Tibet, the popularization of preliminary rites such as guru yoga (bla ma’i rnal ‘byor) reflected the elevated status of the lama in the new (gsar ma) Buddhist schools. By the thirteenth century, preliminary practice systems (sngon ‘gro) that were almost entirely focused on the lama—lay or monastic—had become a mainstay of Tibetan Buddhism.

Advisor: Dalton, Jacob
The Dynamics of Recommender Systems

Over the past three decades, the reach of recommender systems has grown exponentially. Today, recommender systems are deployed on all major internet platforms, influencing our opinions, decisions, careers, and relationships. However, despite their far-reaching impact, these algorithms and their consequences are still poorly understood. In this thesis, we argue that this is due to the challenging dynamics of the recommendation problem. We outline four problems that distinguish the dynamics of recommendation from other dynamical systems, making them particularly hard to reason about: (1) direct measurement and experimentation are often infeasible, (2) feedback effects make it difficult to reason about cause and effect, (3) the scale of internet platforms requires increased algorithmic complexity, and (4) incentives created by recommender systems cause users to behave strategically. We build the foundations necessary to understand and remedy these four problems, paving the way for a complete understanding of the dynamics of recommender systems and their consequences.

Advisor: Jordan, Michael
On the Mechanics of Hydrogels for Tissue Engineering Applications

The dissertation research focused on exploring relationships between composition, structure, and mechanical properties in hydrogels used for tissue engineering application. Specifically, these series of separate but related studies focused on agarose-based gels and co-gels, looking at how different concentrations of agarose, alginate, and collagen affected their ability to serve as a tissue-engineering scaffold with appropriate manufacturability, compressive mechanical properties, and extra-cellular matrix production of embedded cells. These relationships between composition and structure add to the growing literature of tissue-engineering scaffolds, and help researchers move closer towards functional repair of damaged tissues. The main results of this work identified agarose-alginate co-gels as a suitable candidate for bioprinting tissue engineering scaffolds. Later, it was observed that crosslinking agarose-alginate gels changes the short-term recovery behavior under unconfined compression, and increases elastic mechanical properties. This dissertation work also observed that methods used to quantify collagen content from commercial collagen type I gels vary by species source, and that combining these collagen gels in an agarose-based cell-embedded scaffolds produces a minimal, dose-dependent effect on matrix production and compressive mechanics. In short, the dissertation has expanded on the known literature of agarose co-gel mechanics under different loading scenarios. It is my hope that researchers will use the relationships between matrix production, initial gel content, and compressive and shear mechanics to continue improving the functionality of tissue engineered constructs.

Advisor: O'Connell, Grace D.
Towards diffraction-limited short-wavelength imaging systems

Modern applications of optics, especially those which require shorter wavelengths of light, place ever-increasing demands on the performance of optical tools and systems. Working with extreme ultraviolet, soft x-ray and hard x-ray light poses complex limitations and challenges to diagnosing and maintaining diffraction-limited performance by measuring and controlling optical aberrations. By utilizing computational methods such as optimization and machine learning, we show that some of these limitations can be circumvented without sacrificing accuracy or precision./nIn this work, we discuss a method for aberration measurement that is based on an analysis of speckle images acquired in situ. By using a stationary random object, our method eliminates the need for precise manufacturing and alignment of a test target. Moreover, the method provides a full, dense characterization of the optical system under test using relatively few images. The method has been successfully applied to an EUV microscope system, and is shown to be accurate to within λ/180. We also discuss a method for aberration compensation via the characterization and control of an adaptive optical element for x-ray optical systems. Adaptive x-ray optics are a relatively new technology, and our work aims to enable their use within the specifications of synchrotron beamline systems. To this end, we demonstrate the ability to experimentally predict and control the behavior of the glancing-incidence deformable mirror surface to within 2 nm rms, allowing the application of sub-wavelength corrections to an incident wavefront.

Advisor: Waller, Laura
Self-Silencing in Romantic Relationships: Is it Related to Worse Relationship Conflict Outcomes

Self-silencing (i.e., withholding one’s true thoughts and feelings) is a behavior that romantic partners engage in to minimize conflict in their relationships, yet previous research has not directly examined its prevalence nor its effectiveness. Across four studies using multiple methods (total N = 1,601), we found evidence that self-silencing is a common relationship behavior, and one that may be associated with more and worse conflict. Specifically, we established that contrary to widespread lay beliefs in self-silencing’s adaptiveness, it is associated with more frequent and more negatively-valenced conflict as well as lower conflict resolution. Furthermore, our findings suggest that lower subjective feelings of relational authenticity may help explain the counterintuitive association between self-silencing and worse conflict outcomes, but also that self-silencing and conflict may be bidirectionally linked. In our final, pre-registered study, we used a longitudinal dyadic approach to investigate couples during the COVID-19 pandemic and found that both actor’s and partner’s self-silencing were positively associated with conflict in the moment and that partner’s self-silencing predicted greater conflict over time. Throughout our studies, we examined the effects of self-silencing alongside related constructs and processes (e.g., self-disclosure, emotional suppression) and found that self-silencing is uniquely associated with conflict. Taken together, these results suggest that when individuals withhold their thoughts and feelings from a romantic partner to avoid arguing in the moment, or when their partners do so, this may be associated with lower relational authenticity and worse conflict outcomes.

Advisor: Chen, Serena
Once and Again: Repeated viewing affects judgments of spontaneity and preparation

Reality is fleeting, and any moment can only be experienced once. Re-watching a video, on the other hand, allows people to observe the exact same moment in time repeatedly. We propose that people apply their understanding of repetition in the real world to the replay context, failing to fully distinguish behavior that they merely observe again (through video replay) from that behavior being performed again in the exact same way. Ten experiments (N = 9,334) support this idea across a broad assortment of stimuli that includes auditions, dances, commercials, and public speeches. We demonstrate that re-watching makes a videotaped behavior appear more rehearsed and less spontaneous, as if the actor in the replayed video were simply precisely repeating the same set of actions. We rule out alternate explanations including repetition increasing accuracy of judgments, mere exposure leading to a positivity bias, and experimenter demand effects. These findings build on an influential literature showing that incidental video features like perspective or slow motion can meaningfully change how people judge the action of the video. Video re-watching may inadvertently shape judgments in contexts ranging from mundane to consequential. To understand how a video is going to influence its viewer, one will need to consider not only its content, but also how often it is viewed.

Advisor: Nelson, Leif
State Structure and Operator Dynamics in Quantum Many-Body Systems: from s-Sourcery to Strong Zero Modes

In this disseration we explore the structure and construction of certain quantum many-body states, as well as operator dynamics in quantum many-body systems. First, we detail the implementation of a new tensor network ansatz for many-body ground states based on adiabatically evolving a state to repeatedly double in size. Next, we extend the notion of `strong zero modes, ' edge-localized operators stable at infinite temperature, to operators localized to boundaries between systems. We then discuss efforts to numerically characterize scrambling, a strong form of thermalization, in the Sachdev--Ye--Kitaev model. Finally, we show that a states with large momentum splittings can be created via symmetric Bloch oscillations in two optical lattices being accelerated in opposite directions.

Advisor: Yao, Norman Y
Identification of genetic and epigenetic factors in autoimmune disease etiology and treatment response

Multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis are complex autoimmune disease of unknown etiology. Each are result of exposure to a combination of genetic and environmental risk factors. Effective treatments that reduce the rate that normal tissues are attacked by the immune system have been developed; however, the mechanisms underlying disease pathogenesis and treatment response are not completely understood. In this dissertation, I used a combination of epidemiologic, bioinformatic, and computational methods to study the role of gene and environmental interactions, the vitamin D pathway, and DNA methylation in multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Chapter one introduces the genetic, environmental, and epigenetic factors in multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Chapter two describes results from an investigation into gene and environment interaction between genetic risk factors and pregnancy for multiple sclerosis susceptibility finding no evidence for effect modification between genetic susceptibility and pregnancy. Chapter three uses mendelian randomization methods to identify evidence that variation in vitamin D receptor binding is associated with MS susceptibility. Chapter four shows that changes cell-specific DNA methylation are associated with response to treatment with methotrexate among treatment naïve rheumatoid arthritis patients.

Advisor: Barcellos, Lisa F
Gas Liquid Interface Studied by Molecular Beam Scattering From a Liquid Flat Jet

A newly designed molecular beam scattering apparatus that utilizes a flat liquid jet to study chemical reactions at the gas-liquid interface is reported. The flat liquid surface combined with a rotatable mass spectrometer that provides energetic, mass and angular selectivity allows for unprecedented insights into this highly relevant chemical interface. To provide a proof of feasibility for studying volatile liquid systems, experiments are performed on dodecane evaporation as well as dodecane as a scattering target for neon beams.In the first part of this dissertation, the evaporation of neon and dodecane from a neon-doped dodecane flat jet running inside vacuum is investigated. We demonstrate that it is possible to observe sensible velocity and angular distributions using this flat jet setup. The effect of near-surface vapor interactions with evaporating particles is observed by comparing dodecane and Ne evaporation, where both particles show different collision cross sections with the vapor. The angular distribution for both particles also follows the cosine distribution, which has been investigated in gas desorption from solid surfaces. Then, further exploration of neon scattering off the dodecane surface at varying incident translational energies and angles is performed. We demonstrate how the energy and angular sensitivity of our apparatus provides complete information to map out energetic processes at the liquid interface. Energy loss of the scattered neon atoms can be attributed to excitation of liquid surface modes and is well described by a “soft-sphere” kinematic model, from which we infer effective surface masses and total internal excitation from the collision during the collisional timescale. We believe that our results demonstrate the high potential of flat liquid jet scattering with regards to studying dynamics at the gas-liquid interface. By extending the experiment to water, which is planned for future experiments, we are opening up new experimental opportunities that are highly relevant to water-based catalysis and atmospheric chemistry.

Advisor: Neumark, Daniel M.
Random Matrices and Provable Algorithms for Approximate Diagonalization

In this thesis we study the computational problem of approximately diagonalizing an arbitrary complex, n⨉n matrix A in floating point arithmetic — that is, finding V invertible and D diagonal with ||A - VDV⁻¹|| ≤ δ||A|| for some desired accuracy δ>0. Our major contributions are the following./n(i) We prove that a randomized variant of the Spectral Bisection algorithm can approximately diagonalize any n⨉n matrix using O(Tₘₘ(n) log(n/δ) log n) arithmetic operations, on a floating point machine with O(log⁴(n/δ) log n) bits of precision, with probability 1 - O(1/n) — where Tₘₘ(n) is the arithmetic cost of numerically stable n⨉n matrix multiplication./n(ii) We prove that for every k = 2,4,8,... and B ≥ 1 there is a shifting strategy for the Shifted QR algorithm, S(k,B), which converges rapidly in exact arithmetic on every Hessenberg matrix H₀ with eigenvector condition number less than B (e.g. of the form H₀ = VDV⁻¹ with D diagonal and ||V||||V⁻¹||≤B). The resulting algorithm gives a sequence H₀,H₁,H₂,... of Hesssenberg matrices unitarily similar to H₀, and rapid convergence means: each iteration costs O(n² k log k + B^(16k⁻¹ log k)) arithmetic operations, and for any ω>0, it takes O(log(1/ω)) iterations to drive the smallest subdiagonal entry below ω||H₀||./n(iii) We prove that the shifting strategy S(k,B) can be implemented in floating point as a randomized algorithm, using O(k log(nB||H₀||/ωgap(H₀))) bits of precision (where gap(H) is the minimum eigenvalue gap, or the smallest distance between two eigenvalues of H), and succeeding with probability 1 - O(1/n). For any n⨉n matrix A, this can be used to give a randomized algorithm for computing the matrix D in the notion of approximate diagonalization above (e.g., the approximate eigenvalues a matrix δ||A||-close to A), using O(n³ log²(n/δ) poly(log(log(n/δ)))) arithmetic operations, on a floating point machine with O(log²(n/δ) log(log(n/δ))) bits of precision, again succeeding with probability 1-O(1/n)./nA crucial step along the way is a new result in random matrix theory: for any complex n⨉n matrix A and δ > 0, if G is an n⨉n matrix with independent, standard complex Gaussian entries, then with probability at least 1 - O(1/n), A + δG has eigenvector condition number at most n²/δ and minimum eigenvalue gap at least δ/n². We show similar results for random real perturbations of real matrices as well.

Advisor: Srivastava, Nikhil