VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Performance of Power and the Administration of Justice: Capital Punishment and the Case Review System in Late Imperial China

This study illuminates the spectacular rituals of Qing justice, the administration of capital punishment in particular, by focusing on the administrative, physical and performative work that made them possible. I approach this topic via a thematic history of the system of Autumn Case Review (sometimes called "the Autumn Assizes") in the 19th century. By considering government documentation from both local and central judicial authorities, I pay attention to the action that took place behind the scenes of execution in Qing China in order to both illuminate the paths that criminals and officials walked in the time between crime and punishment and to understand the lengths to which the Qing powers went to enact not blind, arbitrary, ritualized power but their own particular brand of justice. I argue that the purposes and values of the Qing death penalty are not simple, and that, when viewed through the lens of judicial administration, the late Qing can be seen as a complex and dynamic regime committed to performing both imperial power and imperial benevolence./nFollowing an introduction that places Chinese and Western interpreters of Qing justice in historical and theoretical context, chapter two describes the Case Review system in detail, outlining the flow of paperwork that made the emperor's review of capital cases possible. By looking at the unintentional death of prisoners, chapter three investigates one moment when this review system failed to either punish or release prisoners. Chapter four outlines the transfer of prisoners that helped on a quotidian basis to perform the empire's power and benevolence to an audience outside the bureaucracy. Chapter five considers the reduction and commutation of capital sentences in order to understand more clearly how the empire used un-executed criminals to emphasize the benevolent nature of its rule. Finally the conclusion returns to some of the historiographical questions that motivated this study to look at the way that Chinese punishment was perceived by Western (and some Chinese) critics at the beginning of the 20th century. Ultimately, I argue that the definition of justice in the Qing was based on a belief that punishment could be meted out properly, that benevolence was a constitutive part of that process and that the proper performance of the death penalty took place on and in many stages, stages that stretched well beyond the forbidding spectacle of the execution ground.

Advisor: Yeh, Wen-hsin
Regulation of motility, the cell cycle, and magnetosome formation in Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1

Despite their diminutive size and seemingly simple construction, bacteria lead remarkably complex lives. In order to fulfill their biological roles of growth and reproduction, they must integrate a wealth of information about their environment and, depending upon the suitability of the available conditions for survival, they can act to relocate themselves to more preferred locales. Doing so requires that bacteria be able to sense environmental stimuli and relay signals induced by those stimuli to various locomotive apparatuses. Once a cell has fulfilled its nutrient quota to support replication, cell division can occur. Cell division is also intricately timed and regulated in bacterial cells, which are now known to possess intracellular organization, cytoskeletal features, and, in some species, compartmentalization. Therefore, division of a bacterial cell must coordinate disassembly, reassortment, and segregation of these cell biological features. In this work, I investigate the connection between the cell cycle and bacterial organelle formation in the magnetotactic bacterium Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1. Magnetotactic bacteria, including AMB-1, are defined by their ability to synthesize chains of intracellular membrane-bounded magnetic minerals, which facilitate bacterial alignments with and responses to geomagnetic fields. To determine the role of the cell cycle in governing the production of these bacterial organelles, called magnetosomes, I disrupted homologs of regulatory factors known to control the progression of the cell cycle as well as polar organelle development in related Alphaproteobacteria. Surprisingly, mutants in the CtrA regulatory pathway were viable, indicating alternative mechanisms of cell cycle progression in AMB-1; in addition, magnetosome formation was also unaffected. Notably, motility was the only feature of AMB-1 disrupted by the CtrA pathway mutations. While subsequent studies to probe upstream regulators of motility in AMB-1 failed to yield additional insight, my results suggest a terminal role for CtrA in the transcription of flagellar biosynthesis genes. This role appears to be ancestral in the Alphaproteobacteria. Further, I have developed protocols which should enable future investigations of the cell cycle in AMB-1 and the temporal changes in gene expression which allow its progression. Preliminary studies indicate that genes involved in signal transduction and possibly magnetosome membrane formation vary their expression throughout the AMB-1 cell cycle. Continued investigation of the connections between the CtrA pathway, magnetosome gene expression, and the cell cycle may elucidate regulation of motility in magnetotactic bacteria and illustrate novel mechanisms of cell cycle progression in these unique organisms.

Advisor: Komeili, Arash
Ethnoengineering: Negotiating the Modern in a 'Culturally Appropriate' Government Program in Ecuador.

Ethnoengineering is a so-called culturally appropriate building method tested between 2002 and 2010 by the Ecuadorian government, among the country's poorest indigenous peoples and peasant communities. It was part of a 45 million dollar infrastructure building program named FISE III. Ethnoengineering sought to incorporate what it called the cultural particularities of an ethnic group into the process of rural infrastructural modernization, with an eye on general sustainability. In simple terms, the method proposed that modern + culture = sustainable./nBy closely studying the literature on the method, building plans and reports on its implementation, and the cases of 18 out of the 31 beneficiary communities, I focus on the negotiation of encountered visions about modernity. The modern was a contentious issue that often pitted FISE and the ethnoengineering supporters against comuneros or low-income villagers. While the former advocated for a building intervention privileging traditional technologies, the latter demanded conventionally modernist constructions. A total of 165 villages, out of the 196 that were proposed the approach, refused to take part in the project, and opposition existed even in those that accepted the intervention. As a general pattern, acceptance or opposition to the approach manifested along social class lines, with elite community members agreeing and comuneros opposing./nThe comuneros' challenge to ethnoengineering brings to the forefront the question of who advocates for keeping culture as a way to ensure general sustainability. As the case of ethnoengineering suggests, the advocacy of sustainable building (and of sustainability in general) is positional, as in being mediated by social class concerns--it is also constructed from a position of power as all that is good. Also, the issue of class positionality, as well as the fact that the comuneros' agency manifested in different ways, highlight the shortfalls of representing traditional ethnic communities that are beneficiaries of sustainable development interventions as homogeneous and monolithic. This is a thread that unites both the so-called green neoliberal approach, and its postcolonial criticism.

Advisor: AlSayyad, Nezar
The Bigger Picture: The Panoramic Image and the Global Imagination

Critiquing contemporary elisions of the digital and the global, this dissertation traces how the imagination of a "total view" has been mediated through the mutable concept, media technologies, and aesthetic formats of the panorama. It approaches the aspiration "to see the bigger picture" as a paradoxical desire inscribed within visual representation and embodied experience, and follows this desire through visual culture from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. It demonstrates how the panorama's formal ambition--to expand the frame of representation and coordinate multiple, discrete images into an overarching view--has resonated with ambitions of geo-political coordination, negotiating impacts of empire, industrialization, and globalization./nTracing the "bigger picture" from painting through photography, cinema, and digital media, this project shows how shifting strategies of panoramic representation correlate with shifting ideas of totality and coherence, and with ways spatio-temporal relationships are re-patterned through changing technologies of communication, circulation, and control. It contextualizes contemporary metaphors such as the network and database--which relate a global view with technologies mediating that view--within a longer tradition of figuring complex multiplicity, disjunct coordination, and possibilities of connection./nThis dissertation revisits the wrap-around panoramas now seen as precursors of virtual reality and the scrolling panoramas now remembered in relationship with cinema; but it corrects a blind spot in the history and theory of visual media by emphasizing how early photography was shaped by, and helped transform, expressions of the panoramic ideal. It considers photographic sets, stereoscopic panoramas, and other overlooked examples from the nineteenth century alongside contemporary artworks that blend photographic, cinematic and digital strategies. It recovers hybrid possibilities for visualizing multiplicity and relationality that emerged between the advent of photography and film, and which reappear today alongside potentials of digital technology and contemporary experiments in media art.

Advisor: Williams, Linda
Characterizing the Molecular Basis for mRNA Targeting and Destruction by the Kaposi's Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus (KSHV) Protein SOX

Lytic infection with gamma herpesviruses such as Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) and Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) results in a global depletion of cellular mRNA, which manifests in a general suppression of host gene expression, termed host shutoff. The importance of targeting cellular gene expression at the posttranscriptional level is highlighted by the observation that many changes in important cellular gene programs result in drastic changes in RNA stability. Hence, virus targeting of host gene expression at this level likely represents an efficient way to change the cellular environment into one the supports maximal viral production. In KSHV, the host shutoff phenotype is caused by virally encoded multifunctional nuclease, SOX, that is conserved throughout all gamma-herpesviruses. Here I provide detailed mechanistic insight into how SOX targets host messages to enact host shutoff activity in cells. I show that with in the cytoplasm, SOX specifically targets conserved mRNA features, which normally promote their efficient expression. Furthermore, I demonstrate that this mechanism of mRNA targeting is conserved across various other viruses, likely demonstrating an evolutionarily convergent strategy. Characterizing how viruses co-op specific cellular factors involved in gene expression will yield a better understanding of the signals that initiate activation of RNA turnover pathways needed for viral replication success.

Advisor: Glaunsinger, Britt
Exposing Malfeasance: Government Transparency in the Fifty States

This thesis contributes to our understanding of government corruption and the transparency laws designed to prevent and expose it. Specifically, it analyzes the political conditions under which we expect to see transparency laws emerge, the strength of the laws we expect under different mixes political power, and the economic and political effects that result from transparency laws. It analyzes three cases of transparency laws: whistleblower laws; bounty laws, in particular the false claims act; and campaign finance transparency laws. These laws vary in terms of the burden and risk assumed by individuals availing themselves of the information provided by the laws. It finds, using quantitative methods supplemented by expert interviews, that the high burden, high risk laws are passed for politically predictable reasons, though they are less likely to have an actual effect in terms of political or economic outcomes. Low burden, low risk laws, however, have a clearer impact./nIn addition to using large datasets on political advertising, county and local bond ratings and yields, and campaign finance disclosure laws, the project contributes original data on state-level whistleblower laws and local-level government corruption, as well as providing an update to existing data on state-level political competition.

Advisor: Gailmard, Sean
Systematic Techniques for Finding and Preventing Script Injection Vulnerabilities

Computer users trust web applications to protect their financial transactions and online identities from attacks by cyber criminals. However, web applications today are riddled with security flaws which can compromise the security of their web sessions. In this thesis, we address the problem of automatically finding and preventing script injection vulnerabilities, one of the most prominent classes of web application vulnerabilities at present. Specifically, this thesis makes three contributions towards addressing script injection vulnerabilities. First, we/npropose two techniques that together automatically uncover script injection vulnerabilities in client-side JavaScript components of web applications without raising false positives. Second, we empirically study the use of sanitization, which is the predominant defense technique to prevent these attacks today. We expose two new classes of errors in the practical use of sanitization in shipping web applications and demonstrate weaknesses of emerging defenses employed in widely used web application frameworks. Third, we propose a type-based approach to automatically perform correct sanitization for applications authored in emerging web application frameworks. Finally, we propose a conceptual framework for a sanitization-free defense against script injection vulnerabilities, which can form a robust second line of defense.

Advisor: Song, Dawn
The Ambivalence of Resistance: West German Antiauthoritarian Performance after the Age of Affluence

While much humanities scholarship focuses on the consequence of late capitalism's cultural logic for artistic production and cultural consumption, this dissertation asks us to consider how the restructuring of capital accumulation in the postwar period similarly shaped activist practices in West Germany. From within the fields of theater and performance studies, "The Ambivalence of Resistance: West German Antiauthoritarian Performance after the Age of Affluence" approaches this question historically. It surveys the types of performance that decolonization and New Left movements in 1960s West Germany used to engage reconfigurations in the global labor process and the emergence of anti-imperialist struggles internationally, from documentary drama and happenings to direct action tactics like street blockades and building occupations. The critical lens of performance allows me to examine what I call the antiauthoritarian structure of feeling: the felt sentiment of German New Left activists who prized the experience of political struggle for its potential to undo the authoritarian personality they believed themselves to have internalized as a result of growing up in Nazi and postwar West Germany. My study looks to the antiauthoritarian structure of feeling for what it can reveal about the world historical shift to late capitalism, by asking us to interrogate the dually defiant yet symptomatic character of activist practices in the postwar period. This requires examining the antiauthoritarian structure of feeling as not just critically resistant to historical conditions of the time, but also conditioned through them. How might we analyze German New Left critiques of high modernist culture and existing forms of worker organization as legitimating the postmodern and neoliberal restructuring of culture and labor? What does this suggest about the New Left's role in the reconfiguration of the labor process during the 1960s and 1970s? And in what ways did the antiauthoritarian structure of feeling anticipate the psychic habitus of late capitalism? Among the artists and activist groups studied include: Gruppe SPUR, Subversive Aktion, Kommune 1, Viva Maria!, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Weiss, Peter Stein, the SDS, and the Kultur und Revolution.

Advisor: Jackson, Shannon
Development and Applications of Advanced Electronic Structure Methods

This dissertation contributes to three different areas in electronic structure theory. The first part of this thesis advances the fundamentals of orbital active spaces. Orbital active spaces are not only essential in multi-reference approaches, but have also become of interest in single-reference methods as they allow otherwise intractably large systems to be studied. However, despite their great importance, the optimal choice and, more importantly, their physical significance are still not fully understood. In order to address this problem, we studied the higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) in the context of electronic structure methods. We were able to gain a physical understanding of the resulting orbitals and proved a connection to unrelaxed natural orbitals in the case of Moller-Plesset perturbation theory to second order (MP2). In the quest to find the optimal choice of the active space, we proposed a HOSVD for energy-weighted integrals, which yielded the fastest convergence in MP2 correlation energy for small- to medium-sized active spaces to date, and is also potentially transferable to coupled-cluster theory./nIn the second part, we studied monomeric and dimeric glycerol radical cations and their photo-induced dissociation in collaboration with Prof. Leone and his group. Understanding the mechanistic details involved in these processes are essential for further studies on the combustion of glycerol and carbohydrates. To our surprise, we found that in most cases, the experimentally observed appearance energies arise from the separation of product fragments from one another rather than rearrangement to products./nThe final chapters of this work focus on the development, assessment, and application of the spin-flip method, which is a single-reference approach, but capable of describing multi-reference problems. Systems exhibiting multi-reference character, which arises from the (near-) degeneracy of orbital energies, are amongst the most interesting in chemistry, biology and materials science, yet amongst the most challenging to study with electronic structure methods. In particular, we explored a substituted dimeric BPBP molecule with potential tetraradical character, which gained attention as one of the most promising candidates for an organic conductor. Furthermore, we extended the spin-flip approach to include variable orbital active spaces and multiple spin-flips. This allowed us to perform wave-function-based studies of ground- and excited-states of polynuclear metal complexes, polyradicals, and bond-dissociation processes involving three or more bonds.

Advisor: Head-Gordon, Martin P
Cortical mechanisms underlying verbal working memory

Verbal working memory refers to the limited-capacity store responsible for maintaining and manipulating task-relevant information in a verbal form over short time-periods. The cortical regions that underlie this type of memory can be dissociated into control and storage regions. Control processes may involve operations such as the identification and selection of relevant information and the assembly and initial execution of articulatory rehearsal programs. In contrast, storage regions are where the actual task-relevant information is rehearsed. Presumably, control and storage regions transfer information among each other within a functionally connected network./nTo study the cortical network formed during the delay period of a verbal working memory task, the first study was specifically designed to investigate functional connectivity. While the functional connectivity results counterintuitively led to a null result, it was demonstrated that middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and superior parietal lobule (SPL) were active during encoding and the start of the delay period, as well as at the end of the delay period, suggesting they were involved in control processes. In contrast, it was demonstrated that inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), premotor (PM) and Sylvian-parietal-temporal junction (area Spt) were active throughout encoding and the entire delay period, suggesting they were involved in storage/rehearsal processes./nIn a second follow-up study, results demonstrated that control regions MFG and SPL were not sensitive to manipulations in rehearsal rate, but exhibited non-linear memory load effects. Conversely, storage/rehearsal regions IFG, PM and area Spt demonstrated approximately linear rehearsal rate and memory load effects. Additionally, memory load effects were found to diminish through time in all areas, while rehearsal rate effects persisted through the entire delay period in storage/rehearsal areas. It was also revealed that rehearsal rate and memory load were confounded behaviorally as subjects strategically increased their rehearsal rate to manage an increased memory load, until the load became so great that their rehearsal rate began to decrease. It was also discovered that high capacity individuals have less activity in MFG, IFG and SPL, but more activity in PM./nIn a third study, substitute tasks were made for the encoding period (listen word) and delay period (subvocal rehearsal) of standard verbal working memory tasks and the timing and network properties of the active cortical regions were investigated. Results demonstrated that during the listen word condition activity in primary auditory cortex preceded area Spt, and that primary auditory cortex and area Spt formed a functional network. In contrast, during the subvocal rehearsal condition activity occurred first in PM, then in area Spt, followed by IFG. These three regions also formed a functional network in the subvocal rehearsal condition. Together these experiments provide novel insights into the cortical mechanisms underlying verbal working memory.

Advisor: D'Esposito, Mark