VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Variation in Singapore English [electronic resource] : crosslinguistic influence from Chinese, Malay, and Tamil

As language change at the societal level usually begins with variation between individuals or sub-groups, a study of variation in Colloquial Singapore English will help advance our understanding of language change in contact settings. Studies of variation in contact languages are especially critical due to the variability that exists when people of diverse tongues come together. In light of current literature where variation is often overlooked in studies of contact varieties, the main aim of this study is to clarify the relationships between variation and other factors in Colloquial Singapore English. Colloquial Singapore English, a nativized variety of English that has its roots as a L2 learner variety, is the product of a multicultural and multilingual society. In a social setting in which speakers with different heritage languages interact extensively, a major source of variation in Colloquial Singapore English comes from the complex interplay of crosslinguistic influences with social and linguistic factors. The nature of Colloquial Singapore English is such that it allows us to explore issues in several fields of study -- sociolinguistics/contact linguistics (linguistic and social aspects of variation), second language acquisition (crosslinguistic influence), and studies on Singapore English.

Advisor: Rickford John R.
Sun Chao
Bayley Robert
Hakuta Kenji advisor. Thesis advisor
Vibe - 21st century assessment

In our new age of 21st-century-skills, collaboration and communication have been highlighted as skills which are essential to thrive in an unknown economic future (Griffin, McGaw, and Care, 2012). Vibe is a tool designed for late primary and secondary school classroom teachers, that measures student habits of collaboration and communication, and provides instructional guides when necessary. Vibe sees these skills as a learning goal -- an end unto itself -- and leverages the affordances of modern technology to collect and interpret formative data in a manner that reduces the time and attention demands on the teacher. The teacher is thus able to assess, give feedback, and plan her next steps in a data driven way - just as is done today in teaching traditional content knowledge.
Vibe takes the form of a set of student wearables paired with a visual interface (app) for the teacher and for student teams. Vibe’s biosensor technology measures student vocal participation and interaction. The teacher interface presents the data visually, in a manner that is easy to interpret and suggestions to help teachers facilitate effective collaborative work both real time and over time. The student group interface will encourage awareness of the collaborative process and support self assessment. Students will receive a select array of insights guided by the teacher.

Keywords: Collaboration
21st century skills
Assessment
Machine Learning
AI
Communication
Thesis
Virtual analog modeling of audio circuitry using wave digital filters [electronic resource]

The Wave Digital Filter (WDF) approach to discretizing electronic circuits has generated substantial interest in the Virtual Analog research community, which is attracted to the potential for systematic and modular simulation of vintage electronic musical instruments (e.g., synthesizers, drum machines) and audio effects (e.g., guitar amplifiers, distortion pedals). Unfortunately, traditional WDF techniques falter at the complexity of typical audio circuits, which contain complicated (non-series/parallel) topologies and multiple nonlinear devices (e.g., diodes, transistors, triodes). In this dissertation, I review classical WDF techniques and propose novel ways of systematically modeling circuits with complicated topologies and multiple nonlinearities. Throughout, the classic Bass Drum circuit from the Roland TR-808 serves as a motivating example and each of the four chapters contains a case study simulating a different one of its subcircuits. The first two chapters consider linear reference circuits. After deriving the standard WDF building blocks and demonstrating their use in a simulation of the TR-808 Bass Drum's output filter, I explain their substantial limitations in the context of modeling analog audio circuitry. To overcome these limitations, I introduce a novel Modified-Nodal-Analysis-based approach to creating WDFs from circuits with complicated (non-series/parallel) topologies and show it in action on several versions of the Bass Drum's central circuit (the Bridged-T Resonator). The next two chapters consider nonlinear reference circuits. I review the standard WDF technique for handling reference circuits with a single one-port nonlinear device, exemplified by a model of the TR-808 Bass Drum's Pulse Shaper subcircuit. In order to overcome the limitation to a single nonlinearity, I propose a novel approach that accommodates multiple nonlinearities and apply it towards a simulation of the full nonlinear version of the Bass Drum's Bridged-T Resonator. Together, these four case studies form a complete model of the TR-808 Bass Drum that almost exactly matches the behavior of the real circuit, demonstrating the utility of the classical WDF techniques combined with my proposed methods. Beyond this case study, the proposed methods enable the simulation of a huge class of audio circuitry that was previously beyond the scope of WDF modeling.

Keywords: Music.
Advisor: Smith Julius O. (Julius Orion) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Abel Jonathan (Jonathan Stuart)
Berger Jonathan
Virtual feedback on teaching using videos of teaching [electronic resource] : how teaching changes over time with consistent feedback

This research examines how teaching and learning evolved over the course of one school-year in classrooms where the teachers received written feedback on videos of their teaching through an online platform. The study is situated within a university-based teacher professional development program. Participants in the study included two subject-matter coaches and three high school English teachers working on improving one element of pedagogical practice: facilitating classroom discussion. Four videos from each teacher's classroom and all the written feedback comments provided on those videos were examined for the nature of feedback provided and the subsequent changes observed. The analytic scheme was developed from Feedback Intervention Theory and the vast literature on facilitating classroom discussion. Feedback comments to teachers were predominantly descriptive of teacher and student actions observed in the classroom, almost equally positive and critical, and suggested instructional strategies in majority of comments. The pedagogical focus of feedback to teachers, as well as particular instructional strategies to try, varied slightly across the three teachers. The teaching and learning evolved and improved within each of the teachers' classrooms over the course of the year in substantial and nuanced ways as teachers consistently employed the strategies suggested in the feedback comments and attempted to meet the goals of instruction in feedback. These findings offer insights for how the field conceptualizes feedback on teaching and how we study the feedback on teaching. Findings also have implications for how we provide feedback to teachers.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Borko Hilda primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Langer-Osuna Jennifer advisor. Thesis advisor
Lieberman Ann
Lotan Rachel A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Visualizing energy-relevant phase transitions within individual palladium hydride nanoparticles [electronic resource]

Alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar power offer a promising avenue towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, but suffer from intermittency. Methods to store energy produced during peak generation periods are among the most crucial advances necessary to enable growth of the renewable energy industry. Many storage systems, including electrical energy storage in lithium ion batteries and chemical energy storage in metal hydrides, rely on ion intercalation into nano-structured materials, inducing a phase change. However, the design rules governing champion nanomaterials for energy storage remain unknown, because it is challenging to directly visualize the phase transformation in-situ. In this dissertation, we examine the thermodynamics and reaction dynamics of nanoscale phase transitions induced by ion intercalation at the single particle level. As a model system, we focus on the palladium/hydrogen system, as it is among the oldest and most well-studied bulk hydrogen-storage systems. Pd nanoparticles undergo a phase change from hydrogen-poor alpha phase to a hydrogen-rich alpha phase. Using in-situ studies in an environmental transmission electron microscope (TEM), we examine the thermodynamics of single-crystalline and multiply-twinned nanoparticles and also follow the reaction in real time to gain insights into the transformation mechanism. First, we use electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) to monitor the thermodynamics of the hydrogenation process in single-crystalline particles, including nanocubes and prisms. We find that single nanocrystals absorb hydrogen over a very narrow pressure range and do not show phase coexistence at equilibrium, in striking contrast to studies performed on ensembles of particles. Next, we study multiply-twinned palladium nanoparticles to understand the influence of crystalline irregularities, such as defects and strain. In contrast to single crystals, these particles absorb hydrogen over a relatively wide pressure window and do not hydrogenate completely. EELS mapping, dark field imaging, and electron diffraction allow us to look inside individual nanoparticles, visualizing the local phase with sub-2 nm spatial resolution. We find that highly compressively strained regions exclude hydrogen and that individual crystallites uptake hydrogen at distinct pressures. Finally, we investigate the reaction dynamics of the phase transition, probing the reaction intermediates. Intriguingly, we find that nanoparticles self heal during the absorption process. We show how our work helps to unravel the mechanism of Li-ion insertion in battery electrodes or hydrogen absorption in state-of the-art metal hydride catalysts, and provides a platform to screen for champion nanomaterials in future energy storage systems.

Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Dionne Jennifer Anne
Salleo Alberto
Sinclair Robert (Materials scientist) advisor. Thesis advisor
Voices of enthusiasm [electronic resource] : the mobilization of revolutionary emotion in Soviet literature and culture

"Voices of Enthusiasm: the Mobilization of Revolutionary Emotion in Soviet Literature and Culture" explores how revolutionary emotions were thematized and voiced in early Soviet culture. Since antiquity, the concept of enthusiasm has been applied to phenomena ranging from solitary inspiration to the collective consciousness of congregations, reading publics, warring nations, and revolutionary societies. It was in the early years of the Soviet experiment that enthusiasm was first propagated by the state as a core element of civic virtue and as an emotional disposition necessary for the attainment of political consciousness and the creation of a socialist society. Labor enthusiasm emerged as a key concept during the First Five-Year Plan, when Soviet psychologists were tasked with putting forth a model of the human mind that would both account for its "dialectical" nature and justify the intensification of labor required for the regime's ambitious industrialization campaign. Enthusiasm gave voice to a deep-seated utopian dream shared by many contemporary thinkers: to use the conscious mind to co-opt the energies of the unconscious one. A literary history of this cultural project, Voices of Enthusiasm examines how Soviet artists and intellectuals shaped and were shaped by notions of revolutionary affect. This dissertation focuses on two early Soviet writers: Andrei Platonov, a self-described "proletarian poet" and land-reclamation engineer from the provinces, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, a fellow-travelling satirist from the Petrograd artistic intelligentsia. Platonov and Zoshchenko were masters of skaz, a "tongue-tied" narrative style that, as the author argues, was used by Soviet writers used to portray the mental life of the "ascendant" lower classes. "Speaking in tongues" offered them a literary model for orchestrating the emotionally fraught, individual voices of their contemporaries into a transcendent whole. In the resulting verbal grotesques, Platonov and Zoshchenko countered party slogans with more nuanced pictures of the varyingly intoxicating and traumatizing experience of revolution, imagining alternative paths to the ideological and affective "reforging" that the Soviet regime was imposing by force.

Keywords: Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Advisor: Freidin Gregory primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Greenleaf Monika
Safran Gabriella
Skakov Nariman
Volumetric optical coherence tomography vibrometry for the study of cochlear mechanics [electronic resource]

Sound is encoded within the auditory portion of the inner ear, the cochlea, after propagating down its length as a traveling wave. For over half a century, vibratory measurements to study cochlear traveling waves have been made using invasive approaches such as laser Doppler vibrometry. Although these studies have provided critical information regarding the nonlinear processes within the living cochlea that increase the amplitude of vibration and sharpen frequency tuning, the data have typically been limited to the surface vibratory measurements of the basilar membrane. This dissertation presents a new vibrometry technique, called volumetric optical coherence tomography vibrometry (VOCTV), which provides depth resolved displacement measurements at high speed inside a 3-D volume of tissue with picometer displacement sensitivity. The mechanics of the mouse cochlea is studied by imaging noninvasively through the surrounding bone to measure sound-induced vibrations of the sensory structures in vivo. Unique vibratory data from inner structures of the cochlea that could not be measured before provided clues to the unsolved questions of how such a complicated microstructure could transduce the complex input sound into neural information efficiently.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Bowden Audrey
Nishimura Dwight George advisor. Thesis advisor
Oghalai John S.
Weak universality of interacting particle systems [electronic resource]

In this dissertation we consider random growth phenomenon related to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation. We focus particularly on the weak universality of interacting particle systems. That is, under suitable scalings, a certain class of one-dimensional, weakly irreversible interacting particle systems converge to the KPZ equation. Our discussion emphasizes on both the inter- and intro-model universality. For the former, we derive the exact microscopic Hopf--Cole transformation for the 4-parameter family of Higher Spin Exclusion Processes (HSEPs) introduced by Corwin and Petrov (2016). This is done by exploiting the close relationship between Hopf-Cole transformation and duality. As the HSEPs sit above most of the known integrable models in the KPZ class, we thus obtain the exact microscopic Hopf-Cole transformation for all lower-level models. To demonstrate the weak universality, we further consider a particular weak scaling of the HSEPs, and show the convergence to the KPZ equation. This expands the relatively small number of systems for which weak universality of the KPZ equation has been demonstrated. As for intro-model universality, we analyze a class of non-nearest-neighbor exclusion processes and the corresponding growth models. Our approach is to exploit an approximate Hopf-Cole transformation, to which end we identify the main nonlinearity and eliminate it by imposing a gradient type condition. For hopping range at most 3, using the generalized transformation, we prove the convergence of the exclusion process toward the KPZ equation.

Keywords: Mathematics.
Advisor: Dembo Amir primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Papanicolaou George advisor. Thesis advisor
Ryzhik Leonid advisor. Thesis advisor
What can deep sequencing reveal about bacterial evolution? Diversity and dynamics in a biofilm [electronic resource]

This thesis explores the genetic variability of Synechococcus cyanobacteria found in a Yellowstone National Park hot spring with the aim of better understanding the evolutionary and ecological processes that give rise to bacterial diversity. The primary data used was deep, amplicon sequencing reads, and as these contain numerous sources of errors, the first chapter introduces an error model and a novel error correction algorithm. Using this algorithm, the second chapter describes statistical features of the diversity that suggest that this population is quasi-sexual — having a high rate of homologous recombination. The final chapter examines the diversity in greater detail, finding many puzzles and contradictory results, and ultimately concluding that this population reveals dynamics too rich -- a mixture of recombination, hitchhiking, deleterious mutations, epistasis, and dispersal in a meta-population -- to be adequately modeled by current population genetic theory.

Keywords: Applied Physics.
Advisor: Fisher Daniel
Doniach S. advisor. Thesis advisor
Holmes Susan
What is Community College For? An Analysis of President Obama's Discursive Framing of Community Colleges

Objective: The project of the thesis is to understand the social and political role community colleges play in the American higher education system through the policy commitments of President Obama’s administration, 2009-2016. To do this, I conduct an analysis of President Obama’s rhetoric about higher education and specifically community colleges in his State of the Union Addresses. Method: I borrow rhetorical analysis strategies from scholars who have previously studied the President’s discourse. From Robert Terrill’s analysis in Double Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, I borrow his practice of centering the discursive analysis on pre-selected political concepts like democracy and equality of opportunity. From Mark Ferrara’s work, Barack Obama and the Rhetoric of Hope, I borrow his tactic of chronological, close-readings, and his emphasis on identifying narratives commonly found in the American social imagination. Speech and Political Theory Analysis: When President Obama calls upon the United States Congress to help realize a free, public postsecondary system, specifically a zero-tuition community college system, he is advocating for what he labels, “the opportunity agenda.” In making his case, the President draws on a limited version of the philosophical principle of equality of opportunity for welfare. Two motivating factors drive Obama’s opportunity agenda: public and private interests. I conclude there is reason for thinking these interests overlap. Conclusions: Obama’s discursive framing of community colleges paints for us a world in which realizing equality of opportunity toward economic ends is a necessary process for fostering a healthy democracy. The President’s discursive framing of community colleges omits language describing the civic purposes of a community college education. The omission contributes to a stagnant, underdeveloped national narrative about the civic ends of higher education.

Keywords: community college
equality of opportunity
democracy
higher education
postsecondary
President Obama
Barack Obama
presidential discourse
political theory
philosophy of education
Thesis
Where Asexual and Queer Meet: Quotidian and Communal Experiences among Bay Area Queer Aces

This thesis examines the intersection of queerness and asexuality, particularly for people who identify as both asexual and queer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Asexuality is most commonly and most simply defined as not experiencing sexual attraction. I am here using “queer” to refer to the personal individual identity (how someone refers to themself), which can have meanings ranging from any non-normative sexual orientation to a particularly politicized kind of pansexuality to a synonym for gay or lesbian. During the summers of 2014 and 2015, when I conducted my research, I engaged with people online and in person in the Bay Area about how they defined asexuality and queerness and their experiences with different kinds of communities. My basic research question is: how do asexual-and-queer people, particularly in the Bay Area and also in certain online communities, think about, talk about, and experience these identities? In particular, how do they experience their queerness, and define queer identity more broadly? In my thesis, I discuss this question through three layers: how individual asexual-and-queer people experience their identities on (inter)personal levels, how asexual-and-queer community organizing is done online and in person, and how and with whom asexual-and-queer people form ties of solidarity across different identities. I will argue that asexuality offers a critical intervention into both mainstream queer discourse and dominant discourse in the U.S. more generally by decoupling rigorous associations of romance with sex and sex with liberation, and that greater acknowledgement of the diversity of attractions, desires, and ways of loving would tremendously benefit asexual people and society at large.

Keywords:  Department of Anthropology
queer
asexual
identity
community
Department of Anthropology
Thesis
Advisor: Malkki Liisa
Inoue Miyako
Why those who shovel are silent [electronic resource] : local labor, unrecognized expertise, and knowledge production in archaeological excavation

This dissertation examines the role that locally-hired laborers play in the production of archaeological knowledge through their involvement in excavation. Based on two years of ethnographic and oral history research at Petra in Jordan and at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, I demonstrate the expertise that site workers on these projects have developed from their years of participation in excavation. I use the visualization and statistical capabilities of social network analysis to systematically compare the workers' oral historical record to the site archives from the two sites, illustrating in which ways the two bodies of information overlap, conflict, or complement one another. Despite the evident professional knowledge and skills that locally-hired laborers at Petra and Catalhoyuk possess regarding archaeological finds, methods, and analysis, however, I argue that the economic realities of how archaeological labor is organized make it financially beneficial for local community members to disavow their privileged expertise about archaeological work. They are instead rewarded for pretending to know less, to be-- in their words-- "simple workers." In this dissertation, I contextualize this set of circumstances within the history of archaeology in the Middle East, showing how lasting colonial and Orientalist legacies and the way that they continue to structure archaeological labor relations impact the production of knowledge through archaeological excavation.

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Hodder Ian primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Porter Benjamin W.
Shanks Michael advisor. Thesis advisor
Voss Barbara L.