VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Rhetoric of Constitutional Reform in Latin America: An Empirical Assessment

In this work, the author offers a new perspective of the Constitutional Reform in Latin America in the period of 1980-2000. Between those years, almost every single Latin American country reformed (totally or at least substantially) their national constitution. This reform period has been seen, in the traditional literature, as characterize for the adoption of reforms based on the “public interest”, with a combination of free-market and wealth rights which was optimal for development. The author, instead, proposes that the reform was implemented based in rhetoric that trumps the debate, independently of if these interests coincide or not with ideologies of the “left” (progressive rhetoric) or of the “right” (sometime identified with some parts of the “rule of Law” rhetoric of the World Bank often called the “Washington Consensus”)./nIn the first part of the investigation, the progressive rhetoric arguments are presented, both in theory and applied to a specific case (higher education regulations). In the sec-ond chapter, the constitutional reform is studied focused in the case of Peru. It is im-portant to note that Peru has largely been considered the Latin American country that most adopted the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal ideology, therefore, its study seems particularly important. In the third chapter, the scope is extended to the whole region, where the author reviews the economic chapters of each Latin American constitution, before and after the reform. At last, he attempts to answer the question: How an “optimal” constitution looks? In doing that, rather than trying to designing a universal constitution for the region, he offers some parameters of what can be regarded as opti-mal norms, so it can help future constitutional reform endeavors in the region or else-where.

Advisor: Yoo, John
Screen Printed MRI Receive Coils

The widespread use of MRI has created a demand for high quality images for current and emerging applications. High quality images are currently acquired by using application specific receive coils that fit close to the patient’s body to produce high signal to noise ratio. These coils are manufactured using traditional printed circuit board fabrication technologies that produce large heavy coils that do not suit some applications very well. In particular, two areas that have not been able to take advantage of the current receive coils are pediatric imaging and MR guided high intensity focused ultrasound therapy due to size, weight, and thickness constraints. These two areas would benefit greatly from the high quality imaging provided by purpose-built lightweight and thin receive coil arrays. One way to achieve a very lightweight and thin coil is to fabricate it from solution using printed electronics. Here for the first time, advances in solution-processed fabrication techniques have allowed lightweight, thin, and flexible receive coil arrays to be made for these applications./nIn this thesis the development of printed MRI receive coils is discussed, covering fabrication, characterization, and implementation. An entirely printed approach is used to create single element receive coils that are characterized and tested on 1.5 T and 3 T clinical systems. The materials used to fabricate the coil components are identified as a main avenue for improvement. A fully printed proof-of-concept array is made to demonstrate feasibility and is used to image a volunteer on a 3 T clinical system. Coils are optimized with components made from high quality flexible substrates to make better performing printed coils and arrays. These printed arrays are compared to commercially available arrays on several phantoms as well as on a volunteer on a 3 T scanner./nIn addition to creating coils for standard clinical imaging, several coils and arrays are optimized for use in an high intensity focused ultrasound interventional MRI. Coil materials are evaluated for acoustic transparency, stability in water, safety, and electrical quality. The optimized coils are used to evaluate image quality as well as to characterize the system level of acoustic transparency. An 8-channel coil array is used to characterize image quality on a volunteer. To show a system level proof-of-concept on an interventional MR system, optimized arrays are used to track ultrasonic heating inside phantoms and ex-vivo tissue./nOverall, the characteristics of the printed coils described in this thesis enable a new generation of coils design for both traditional and emerging applications.

Advisor: Arias, Ana C
Lustig, Michael
Sniper's Lake: Music for Dance

In September 2014 I began collaborating with choreographer Miřenka Čechová and director Petr Boháč of Spitfire Company on a new dance production called Sniper’s Lake. We started with a conversation about the body. Miřenka, who was working with refugees at the time, was searching for a physical language based on running and its variations: escape, endurance, direction, exhaustion; also fear, joy, energy, purpose. She chose six dancers from Prague, Berlin and Oslo to work with over a period of five months. Her choreography emerged gradually during that period, at first from the dancers’ bodies and personalities, and later on from their dynamic as a group of individuals entirely new to one another./nThe music emerged in parallel. I chose an ensemble of six clarinets to interface with the dancers, and spent two months in Prague and Pilsn watching the rehearsals unfold while composing the first sketches. The relationship between the dance and the music was constantly in flux during that period. In some sections (like Tides) the music was the catalyst for the movement, while in others (like Loops) the music mirrored the dancers’ gestures. Miřenka’s guiding principal was the form: the dancers were to physically overexert themselves during the first thirty minutes of the performance without reaching a resolution. To achieve this progression, I decided to focus on cyclical events rather than on linear time. At the heart of each event is a cyclical rhythm that unfolds musically, then visually. These events, in turn, constitute the four sections of Part 1 of the score for Sniper’s Lake./nPart 2 presents itself in a more narrative form. Much of the sound is produced live by the dancers as they begin to explore the stage’s physical barriers: contact mics are placed on the backdrop screen, allowing them to excite the surface with their body and voice. The notated portion of part 2 consists of loose arrangements of source materials given to me by Miřenka: an iso-polyphonic folk song from Albania, and a spoken rhythmic representation of Swan Lake’s ‘Danse des petits cygnes.’ In the context of the performance, these short, rather flexible, musical sentiments serve as references to the act of escaping in its many forms./nSniper’s Lake was premiered at Bærum Kulturhus in Sandvika, Norway, on March 26th 2015.

Advisor: Campion, Edmund
Dying, Economized. Palliative Care and the U.S. Moral Economy of Death

Dying, Economized is a sociological account of the intersection between morality and economics in U.S. end-of-life care. It is based on ethnographic and historical analyses of hospice and palliative care—a new medical subspecialty, which has transformed the U.S. way of dying and is today the main designated discipline treating dying and potentially dying patients. The dissertation analyzes the emergence of end-of-life care as a professional, moral, and economic field and the efforts of the clinicians active in this field to reconcile the tensions it engrains. The first part (chapters 1-3) explains how in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s clinicians, economists, and policymakers began thinking of dying as a social problem: they argued that the dying were treated with inappropriate and costly medical interventions, which posed serious ethical and economic challenges. The hospice and palliative care solution to these challenges, which has gained much influence since the 1960s, is to economize dying, both medically and financially: to restrain the medical ambition to prolong life at all costs, nurture a culture that accepts death, and by that control spending. The second part (chapters 4-5) draws upon an ethnographic study that I conducted in three California palliative care services and on in-depth interviews with clinicians of various professions and specialties, whose work pertains to the treatment of dying patients. This part analyzes how palliative care clinicians negotiate the tension between the effort to economize dying and the ethical inclination to respect patients’ wishes. Through this mixed-methods approach, the dissertation illuminates how expertise defines the relationship between moral and economic life in one of the most ethically challenging areas in modern medicine.

Advisor: Fourcade, Marion
On Legitimacy: How the Prison-Labor Complex Changes with the Political Terrain in China

The dissertation is centered on the dispute over the prison-enterprise dichotomy in the discourse of CCP administration and the scholarly discussion resulted from the financial crisis of the Chinese prison system in 2003. The official statements and the relevant studies by Chinese scholars have demonstrated their endogenous limitations that the prison system in China needs to be either in the form of combination of prison and enterprise or in the form of their separation for adapting itself to the tremendous shift in the state’s economic structure. Instead, setting off from a viewpoint of the school of punishment and society, the dissertation aims to take the historical, economic, legal and political parameters into consideration and then to unveil the full picture of penal labor camps in the Chinese socialist society./nThe dissertation employs a historical institutionist approach as the main theoretical backbone, trying to clarify the formation and development of the carceral mechanism from an economic point of view and to match the carceral strategies utilized by the state with the CCP regime’s legitimation plans in different periods of time. The dissertation finds that the prison system functioned with other social institutions as a massive social control mechanism in the pre-reform age; its orientation of special state-owned enterprise and its usage of forced labor as punishment made itself a prison-labor complex that allowed it to stand the following grand transformation in the economic structure. When in the post-reform era the prison system moved towards three distinct directions: its economic role was emphasized, its organization was restructured for the economic adjustments, and it underwent a large-scale legal reform. Finally, the dissertation finds that these changes of the prison system over time can be placed on the trajectory of the CCP’s legitimation plans when the CCP regime faced crises in different periods.

Advisor: Simon, Jonathan
Geometry, topology, and response in condensed matter systems

Topological order provides a new paradigm to view phases of matter. Unlike conventional symmetry breaking order, these states are not distinguished by different patterns of symmetry breaking, instead by their intricate mathematical structure, topology. By the bulk-boundary correspondence, the nontrivial topology of the bulk results in robust gapless excitations on symmetry preserving surfaces. We utilize both of these views to study topological phases together with the analysis of their quantized physical responses to perturbations./nFirst we study the edge excitations of strongly interacting abelian fractional quantum Hall liquids on an infinite strip geometry. We use the infinite density matrix renormalization group method to numerically measure edge exponents in model systems, including subleading orders. Using analytic methods we derive a generalized Luttinger's theorem that relates momenta of edge excitations./nNext we consider topological crystalline insulators protected by space group symmetry. After reviewing the general formalism, we present results about the quantization of the magnetoelectric response protected by orientation-reversing space group symmetries. We construct and analyze insulating and superconducting tight-binding models with glide symmetry in three dimensions to illustrate the general result. Following this, we derive constraints on weak indices of three dimensional topological insulators imposed by space group symmetries. We focus on spin-orbit coupled insulators with and without time reversal invariance and consider both symmorphic and nonsymmorphic symmetries./nFinally, we calculate the response of metals and generalize the notion of the magnetoelectric effect to noninteracting gapless systems. We use semiclassical dynamics to study the magnetopiezoelectric effect, the current response to elastic strain in static external magnetic fields.

Advisor: Moore, Joel E
Paul Valéry and the Poetics of Attention

This dissertation is about how we pay attention to poetry. Paul Valéry’s work in/nparticular is famous for asking us as readers to attend to a kind of language that isn’t/nalways resolvable into any one idea, any one meaning. His poems speak, though that/nspeaking doesn’t always give way to a something-said. In this project, I ask— if poetry/nfalls shy of what it stands to say, what does it mean to hear it? What is this listening/nthat falls so beautifully shy of what we stand to hear, and meaningfully so?/nOver four chapters, I explore what it looks like to attend to what we cannot/nresolve: be it the purely possible, the liminal, or the ever-emergent. Attention, I argue,/ntakes many shapes: waiting, listening, weariness, even sleep. I show that these forms of/nattention constitute the experiential flipside of Valéry’s purely formal poetic language./nIndeed by entering his poetics from the standpoint of embodied experience, we realize/nthat the unresolvedness of his work is not synonymous with the difficulty of its less-than-/nrepresentational language. As a whole, then, this project countervails the/nwidespread tendency to see Valéry’s work as a mere harbinger of the 20th-century’s/npreoccupation with the procedures of language, an approach that so often elides the/nspecificity of the poet’s relationship to the sensual world of lived experience.

Advisor: Guerlac, Suzanne
Dynamics of transcriptional silencing in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Eukaryotic cells package designated regions of their DNA into a condensed structure referred to as heterochromatin. By doing so, they preserve integrity of both the genome and the epigenome, as heterochromatin represses recombination and transcription at loci where such activities would be undesirable. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, heterochromatin represses transcription at the silent mating-type loci, HML and HMR. Although the heterochromatin structure is dynamic and subject to perturbations such as DNA replication, all analyses to date have classified HML and HMR as transcriptionally inert. Therefore, either the mechanism of silencing compensates for fluctuations in the heterochromatin structure and flawlessly reassembles each cell cycle, or there are transient losses of silencing that underlie a hidden, dynamic dimension to heterochromatic repression./nTo test whether RNA polymerase ever gains access to the silent mating-type loci, I used Cre-loxP recombination technology to devise a genetic assay whereby transient transcription of a cre reporter at HML would trigger a permanent, recombination-based switch from RFP expression to GFP expression. By recording short-lived events of HML::cre expression with the Cre-Reported Altered States of Heterochromatin (CRASH) assay, I found that approximately 1/1000 cells lost silencing per cell division. Consistent with this observation, measurements I made by single-molecule RNA FISH indicated that transcription of HML was rare, yet detectable, and limited in the number of RNA molecules that could be synthesized before silencing was re-established. These approaches revealed dynamics of silencing that had escaped detection by all previous measurements./nI used the CRASH assay to identify several genetic and environmental factors that modify the dynamics of heterochromatic repression. Whereas Sir2 is the only member of the sirtuin family of NAD+-dependent deacetylases previously shown to have a role in silencing at HML, I uncovered roles for two additional sirtuins. I showed that one of these sirtuins, Hst3, helped stabilize silencing through the deacetylation of acetylated lysine 56 on histone H3. In addition, I identified effects of histone gene dosage, SIR gene dosage, ploidy, and various environmental conditions on the stability of silencing. Quantitative analyses of these phenotypes were streamlined through the development of software that detects and compares patterns of differential gene expression in yeast colonies./nThe sensitivity of the CRASH assay also revealed that the stability of silencing at HML differed between the two mating types of haploid cells. This mating-type effect depended on the activity of the recombination enhancer, a DNA element centromere-proximal to HML that was previously described for its role in directing the pattern of mating-type switching. I showed that this locus acted in cis to destabilize silencing at HML in a mating-type specific manner. Thus, the recombination enhancer was moonlighting as a long-range regulator of gene expression, the first such element identified in yeast.

Advisor: Rine, Jasper
Dissecting the Role of Nucleosomes in Transcription and the Application of CRISPR/Cas9 Technology

In the 43 years since the first observation of nucleosome core particles as beads on a string, our understanding of the relationship between nucleosome structure and its function in living cells has made giant strides. Despite this progress, many questions remain unanswered regarding the role of nucleosomes in transcription initiation, and their interaction with the core transcriptional machinery. Here, I present my progress on addressing the role of TAF1 recognition of acetylated histone H4 tails, and its effect on transcription initiation and start site selection. Preliminary results suggest that H4 acetylation may play a role in start site selection./nOne remarkable advancement in technology that will undoubtedly help answer remaining questions in chromatin biology is the repurposing of the prokaryotic CRISPR-Cas system to edit eukaryotic genomes with exquisite precision. Ironically, a tool that may shed light on complex eukaryotic chromatin interactions was evolved in a prokaryotic environment. My work with in vitro nucleosomes positioned me to address whether Cas9 is capable of engaging nucleosomal DNA. Both in vitro and in vivo analyses done in collaboration with Max Horlbeck and Jonathan Weissman at UCSF suggest that nucleosomes pose a strong barrier to Cas9.

Advisor: Tjian, Robert
Topological types of Algebraic stacks

In developing homotopy theory in algebraic geometry, Michael Artin and Barry Mazur studied the \'etale homotopy types of schemes. Later, Eric Friedlander generalized them to the \'etale topological types of simplicial schemes. The aim of this paper is to extend further these theories to algebraic stacks. To achieve this goal, we exploit the derived functor approach of \'etale homotopy types by Ilan Barnea and Tomer Schlank, and use Daniel Isaksen's model category structure on pro-simplicial sets.

Advisor: Olsson, Martin
Adaptive Learning Algorithms for Transferable Visual Recognition

Understanding visual scenes is a crucial piece in many artificial intelligence applications ranging from autonomous vehicles and household robotic navigation to automatic image captioning for the blind. Reliably extracting high-level semantic information from the visual world in real-time is key to solving these critical tasks safely and correctly. Existing approaches based on specialized recognition models are prohibitively expensive or intractable due to limitations in dataset collection and annotation. By facilitating learned information sharing between recognition models these applications can be solved; multiple tasks can regularize one another, redundant information can be reused, and the learning of novel tasks is both faster and easier./nIn this thesis, I present algorithms for transferring learned information between visual data sources and across visual tasks - all with limited human supervision. I will both formally and empirically analyze the adaptation of visual models within the classical domain adaptation setting and extend the use of adaptive algorithms to facilitate information transfer between visual tasks and across image modalities./nMost visual recognition systems learn concepts directly from a large collection of manually annotated images/videos. A model which detects pedestrians requires a human to manually go through thousands or millions of images and indicate all instances of pedestrians. However, this model is susceptible to biases in the labeled data and often fails to generalize to new scenarios — a detector trained in Palo Alto may have degraded performance in Rome, or a detector trained in sunny weather may fail in the snow. Rather than require human supervision for each new task or scenario, this work draws on deep learning, transformation learning, and convex-concave optimization to produce novel optimization frameworks which transfer information from the large curated databases to real world scenarios.

Advisor: Darrell, Trevor
Inside in the City: Domestic Space in the Literature and Film of Weimar Berlin

This dissertation explores the relationship between domestic interiors and urban exteriors in Weimar literature and film. Interiors have been neglected in scholarship about Weimar Großstadtliteratur (big-city literature); scholars have focused on the street scene and the psychological effects of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and commodification. While many architecture and design theorists of the time engaged with interiors as part of a plan to modernize and thus create a new city—and society—the interiors they imagined for the Neues Wohnen (New Dwelling) are conspicuously absent from contemporary novels and films. One finds instead interiors like those of the previous century./nI argue that the persistence of nineteenth-century interiors in novels and films about Weimar Berlin uncovers the tensions inherent in modern city living. The expectation of what it was like to “live” in the fictional home differs from the New Dwelling of “real-world” homes. Despite their differences, both ways of dealing with modernity seek understanding and control of the urban environment. Whereas the architects of the New Dwelling strive to control modern city life through construction, the fictional imaginary explores the many ways in which the city controls and is controlled by its dwellers./nIn order to explore these approaches to modern living, I will present close readings of a corpus of Berlin novels and films from the Weimar Republic, focusing on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz; Erich Kästner’s Fabian; Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen; Phil Jutzi’s Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück; and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? My readings of these films and novels will be tested and informed by a study of manifestos and articles written by avant-garde architecture theorists including Le Corbusier, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Erich Mendelssohn, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius./nMy dissertation will nuance the topography of space that has been allotted to the modern German big-city novel and film by expanding the understanding of what it means to “dwell” in the city. More broadly, this dissertation will contribute to discourses on urban space during the first quarter of the twentieth century, leading the focus (momentarily) away from skyscrapers, department stores, traffic-jammed streets, and crowded sidewalks. This study will reflect on past German writers’ and filmmakers’ understanding of interior space and their critique of thoroughly modern urban dwelling habits with an eye to the present global obsession with minimalism, micro-housing, and smaller urban footprints.

Advisor: Kaes, Anton