VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
On the Cloak of Kings: Agriculture, Power, and Community in Kaupo, Maui

When British explorers first arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1778, they inadvertently became witness to a society in the final stages of a transition from chiefdom to archaic state. This dissertation tracks the sociopolitical changes in the district of Kaupō, Maui, to understand how this region moved from a marginal hinterland to become the seat of Maui’s royal power. Through analyses of archaeological remains, broad spatial surveys, rich oral tradition, and environmental conditions, Kaupō’s history offers insights into the processes through which sociopolitical centralization fundamentally alters society from the largest scales of hierarchical organization and landscape modification down to the daily practices of the common people./nAt the threshold between chiefdoms and established state societies, archaic states provide a new framework through which to examine the rise of social complexity. Through Kaupō, this work improves understanding of archaic states by examining the sociopolitical influence on a peripheral community as surrounding structures became increasingly complex. While traditionally referred to as a marginal community, the district suddenly came to prominence in the early 18th century as Maui’s sixth king, Kekaulike, chose it as his royal seat. With this single move, Kaupō became home to the island’s elite, and by European contact was a dominant district featuring an intensified agriculture system, a palace, and two lines of major temples bounding the region./nWhile Kaupō is absent from oral traditions prior to the arrival of Kekaulike, I demonstrate that many of the structures and institutions associated with the 18th century king actually had their antecedents hundreds of years prior. Extensive remote analyses, survey, excavation, and chronometric dating show that a system of ritual structures was established in the 15-17th centuries, creating a network of monumental architecture proscribing the agriculturally productive core. Combining these data with later oral traditions and historical documents from the 1800s, I argue that this region was highly organized and administered by local elites from the chiefly center at Mokulau. This area was later the home of Kekaulike, along with other notable, historical aliʻi, as it had long been the center of Kaupō’s sociopolitical power, and thus offered the arriving king an established base. Ultimately, multiple lines of evidence point to Kaupō as a far more important area than previously imagined, positioning it as a critical location in the development of Hawaiian statehood.

Advisor: Kirch, Patrick V
Essays in Financial Intermediation

This dissertation consists of two chapters that concern financial intermediation. Many shadow banks rely heavily on bank-sponsored private credit and liquidity support instead of government guarantees. Bank capital regulation cannot be effective without explicitly considering these facilities. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I use a continuous time model with maturity mismatch and bank moral hazard to study the impact of credit and liquidity guarantees on bank capital structure. I focus on a particular type of shadow banking called asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP). When banks provide credit guarantees to ABCP conduits, assuming that the validity of the guarantees is ensured by rating agencies, the commercial paper becomes risk free and is always priced at par. Rolling over the commercial paper is thus costless, so that frequently rolling over the short term ABCP to fund long term assets---a maturity mismatch---has no impact on bank value. Regulators can eliminate a bank's moral hazard by imposing a simple capital ratio requirement. However, the capital ratio requirement is no longer valid if banks use liquidity guarantees in their ABCP conduit funding because the funding maturity becomes important. Moreover, a liquidity guarantee becomes as costly as a credit guarantee when the maturity shortens. Using Moody's ABCP conduit data, I confirm that shorter ABCP maturity causes the bank's return to be more sensitive to the conduit credit loss. Thus, when banks have significant exposure to a liquidity guarantee, the search for a single appropriate risk weight is futile. More sophisticated tests, such as model-based tests are not only necessary but also have to be carried out under stressed scenarios./nThe second chapter studies the current London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). Recent investigation reveals banks might have manipulated the London Interbank Offer Rate (LIBOR). With banks concern about derivative position, net interest income and signaling effect, the equilibrium reporting strategy is a monotonic non-linear function of borrowing cost. Current trimming mechanism cannot block tacit collusion: when banks benefit from lower LIBOR, tacit collusion leads to downward biased LIBOR quotes. Signaling effect causes further depressed LIBOR. Equilibrium submissions do cluster together, as people have observed from the data. Comparative statics suggest LIBOR bias spikes during the crisis, due to more dispersed borrowing costs and consumers' less confidence in banks. I propose a direct and \emph{ex ante} budget balanced LIBOR fixing mechanism. Finally, by calibrating the model to the ratio of dispersion among banks' LIBOR submissions to their CDS spreads, I come up with an initial estimation, which matches practitioner's opinions back in 2008, about LIBOR bias during the recent crisis.

Advisor: Wallace, Nancy E.
Parlour, Christine A.
Planning Abu Dhabi: From Arish Village to a Global, Sustainable Arab Capital City

The overarching objective of this research project is to explore and document the urban history of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It is organized as a comparative study of urban planning and design processes in Abu Dhabi during three major periods of the city’s development following the discovery of oil: (1) 1960-1966: Sheikh Shakhbut Bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s rule (2) 1966-2004: Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s rule; and (3) 2004-2013: Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s rule. The intention of this study is to go beyond a typical historical narrative of sleepy village-turned-metropolis, to compare and contrast the different visions of each ruler and his approach to development; to investigate the role and influence of a complex network of actors, including planning institutions, architects, developers, construction companies and various government agencies; to examine the emergence and use of comprehensive development plans and the policies and values underlying them; as well as to understand the decision-making processes and design philosophies informing urban planning, in relation to the political and economic context of each period. The project is informed through archival research, spatial mapping, and key informant interviews. It attempts to uncover the underlying foundations of the development of Abu Dhabi by situating the city within a theoretical framework that engages the debates and writings of several theorists on globalization, oil economies in the Arab Gulf, urban governance and planning institutions, and urban design.

Advisor: Macdonald, Elizabeth S
Imaging and Control of Defects and Electronic Transport Pathways in Semiconductor Nanomaterials

Solution processed materials, such as organic molecules and semiconductor quantum dots (QDs), have been widely explored for large area electronics and optoelectronics applications, such as field effect transistors (FETs), solar cells, photodetectors, LEDs, etc. Compared to the traditional crystalline/polycrystalline semiconductors (Si, GaAs, etc.), these novel devices have the advantage of being low-cost and flexible. However, a major limitation in device performance is the significant amount of unintentional defects that are believed to hinder charge transport and induce electron-hole recombination, detrimental to optoelectronic devices. The chemical origin of these defects is largely unknown, and is difficult to characterize. One major goal of my PhD research is to investigate the nature of the defects in solution processed semiconductor materials, and to control the defects and doping for improving the large area electronic/optoelectronic device performance./nSemiconductor QDs can be viewed as “artificial atoms” that can form “artificial solids” when assembled together. By controlling the QD size, shape, surface chemistry, and the way QDs are connected or fused together, we are able to design the artificial QD solids to have the desired electronic functionalities. These materials are typically viewed in a coarse-grained way as electronically homogeneous, for the ease of understanding the electrical properties using traditional semiconductor theory. However, in the presence of various possible defects, the electronic structure and charge distribution can be inherently heterogeneous, which may have a dominant effect on the transport properties. Therefore, the other important goal in this thesis is to microscopically image the charge transport pathways, and to control them for device applications./nOur technical approach is using scanning probe-based microscopy and spectroscopy, to characterize the materials and devices. With the obtained novel mechanisms, we go back to engineer the properties to achieve high efficiency devices. Specifically, we developed a technic to use Kelvin probe force microscopy to probe the surface potential of an FET channel, from which the density of in-gap states (IGS, electronic states inside the band gap) are extracted. Using this technique and other complimentary characterization tools, we probed the IGS in a thiophene-based organic FET and PbS quantum dots, and attribute their origin to hydroxyl and molecular oxygen species, respectively. We also imaged the charge percolation pathways of PbS QD solids and CdTe polycrystalline films made by sintering CdTe nanocrystals, and found novel impurity conduction and grain boundary assisted conduction mechanisms. Mesoscale engineering of percolation pathways further lead to ultra-high gain CdTe photoconductors, where the high gain comes from the heterogeneous dopant distribution and high mobility in the grain boundary.

Advisor: Salmeron, Miquel B
Alivisatos, A. Paul
From Copper to Conservation: The Politics of Wilderness, Cultural and Natural Resources in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve

The majority of literature on parks and people has criticized U.S park establishment for kicking people out of protected areas (Jacoby 2003, Chase 1987, Cronon 1996). The consequences of imposing the U.S. model for parks and wilderness has most often been examined in the context of under resourced countries focusing on the impact of native societies within that landscape (Neumann 1998, Solnit, 2000, Brockington, Duffy and Igoe 2008, Dowie 2009). My dissertation extends prior park scholarship by examining the opposite: What happens when people are allowed to remain living within a designated wilderness area and national park in a “first world” setting? In 1980 the National Park Service began the trials of managing what historian Theodore Catton referred to as “inhabited wilderness.” Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) establishing more than 100 million acres of federal land in Alaska as new or expanded conservation areas, doubling the national park system and tripling the amount of land designated as wilderness. The ANILCA compromise set the legislative framework for federal land managers to balance the national interest in Alaska's scenic and wildlife resources with the acknowledgement of Alaska's distinctive rural way of life, legally recognizing the ongoing interaction between people and nature. Using Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve as a case, I examine the history and politics of wilderness management, natural and cultural resource management, including subsistence. Combing approaches in political ecology and environmental history, I evaluate whose voices have had the most influence in shaping these policies, and the extent to which various park residents have benefited from an “inhabited wilderness.” Informal interviews, participatory observation, and archival research, examine these processes. Employing an analytic strategy that evaluates the interaction of the local and national narratives about national park management, I pay particular attention to how narratives have changed over time. Implications for managers, and future research are discussed.

Advisor: Finney, Carolyn
Unmaking the Bomb: Waste, Health, and the Politics of Impossibility at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation

This dissertation explores the politics of waste, health, and remediation at Washington State's Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The most contaminated nuclear site in the nation, Hanford is engaged in the largest environmental cleanup in human history—legally required to implement protective measures that will remain effective for 10,000 years. Informed by eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and more than 100 in-depth interviews with Hanford workers, managers, and area residents, this project explores how nuclear remediation is made possible despite its inherent uncertainties. Through four empirical chapters, I make the case that nuclear waste is not socially inert, but distinctly productive. Just as above-ground weapons testing produced the official script for American nuclear disaster with its televised detonations and duck-and-cover drills, I argue that the contemporary spectacle of remediation works to re-define the terms of nuclear citizenship and national security in the face of the nation’s enduring waste. Thus, cleanup projects at former weapons sites like Hanford articulate a new social contract for nuclear threat in the post-Cold War era—one that defines the conditions of “livable” exposure and “acceptable” contamination, highlighting particular hazards while rendering others invisible.

Advisor: Kosek, Jake
The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire in Africa

This dissertation is a study of British theater, publishing, and broadcasting in East and West Africa from the 1930s to the 1970s. Although traditional histories of the British Empire stop in the 1960s I argue that a cultural version of empire gained momentum during colonial independence and persisted for decades after. While historians of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East have studied the reinvention of empire after 1919 through international mandates and development regimes, they have ignored the cultural project that was vital in giving new forms of legitimacy to British imperialism. During the 1930s Britain introduced broadcasting services, publication bureaus, and film units into its African colonies under the rubric of colonial development. Over the following decades an increasing number of British organizations became involved in projecting Britain’s influence and the English language through theater, radio, and mass-produced print. The organizations ranged from official institutions, such as the Colonial Office and the British Council, to non-state forms of overseas representation, such as the BBC and Oxford University Press. As the colonies moved closer to independence, British interventions in theater, publishing, and broadcasting collided with anti-colonial pressures abroad and at home; yet, these particular forms of British representation persisted beyond independence into the postcolonial period./nIn short, Britain used the domain of culture to maintain its imperial influence after the end of formal political control. My study looks at the cultural work of a variety of forms of mass media, and I use Africa – a central locale of the decolonizing British Empire and the late Cold War – to examine its role. Africa’s postcolonial public sphere was shaped by the cultural project of late empire not least because it engaged a variety of African agents and agencies who in turn sought to make cultural imperialism history. My larger project, therefore, leads to thinking about the cultural politics of the contemporary world and how the West continues to reach global audiences today.

Advisor: Vernon, James
Mobilizing Food Vending: Rights, Communication Technology and Urban Space in the American City

Throughout US history, street food vending has rarely been considered an improvement to modern society or its capitalist economy. However, beginning in 2008, a new generation of mobile food vendors serving high quality, inventive foods became popular among affluent populations. This project investigates the contemporary shift in the American food vending industry using ethnographic and data-driven methods to unpack vendors’ operational strategies and their social and economic roles in shaping the public realm of cities. This research investigates four US cities and considers vendors’ unique social, technological, and mobile operations as well as the ways in which they navigate and challenge top-down planning practices. In Los Angeles, California, both loncheras and new wave food trucks chart parallel paths and encounter resistance in ways that respond to different social and cultural environments. In the San Francisco Bay Area, private and public sector interests align to create a robust industry of food truck markets at the expense of food vendors’ long-term autonomy. In contrast, food vending in Portland, Oregon’s artisan economy exemplifies a rare food cart democracy characterized by bureaucratic ease and impassioned local actors. Finally, Charlotte, North Carolina’s more recent vendor growth relies on consumer education and strong vendor activism to resist and reconfigure regulatory pressures. In each of these cities, the project examines the ways “new wave” vendors alter conventional notions of urbanism both socially and politically. This study offers new insights into the ways food vendors support sustainable local economies and contribute to the public realm of cities while shaping regulatory policy from the bottom-up. Understanding the dynamics of mobile food vending is important for urban planners and policy officials whose policies and plans will govern the future growth of the industry and for the vending public who help sustain a progressive industry at the local level.

Advisor: Crawford, Margaret
Mobile Reactive Systems over Bigraphical Machines - A Programming Model and its Implementation

In this dissertation we address the problem of bridging reactive programs and mobile computing machinery embedded in physical spaces with dynamic structure. We propose the BigActor Model as a bridging model between programs and logical-space models. The BigActor model [1] combines Hewitt and Agha's Actor model [2] for specifying concurrent reactive programs with Robin Milner's Bigraphical Model [3] for specifying the location and connectivity of the computing machines. The BigActor Model makes location and connectivity first-class citizens in distributed machines. This is analogous to another bridging model, the von Neumann machine, which makes first-class citizens of memory, instructions, and their sequentiality. The BigActor Programming Language (BAL) is an implementation of the BigActor Model. It has a runtime system named the BigActor Runtime System (BARS)./nThe BARS targets an abstract machine (bigraphs). The abstract machine has to be realized on a physical space of mobile and distributed computing machines. The realization is produced by the Logical-Space Execution Engine (LSEE), which bridges bigraphs with the physical space. The Logical-Space Runtime System (LSRS) extends BARS with LSEE so that programs written in BAL can seamlessly execute over physical spaces./nThe second part of this dissertation is concerned with the formalization and implementation of the interactions between logical spaces and physical spaces. First, we approach this problem formally, by introducing the logical-space computing semantics. In logical-space computing, spatial agents operate over logical-space models while the runtime system is in charge of interacting with the physical space. We presented an implementation that follows the logical-space computing semantics. The LSRS uses the LSEE to generate logical-space models using bigraphs. The physical space is modelled using polygons defined using GPS coordinates. The spatial agents are bigActors. Our implementation programs robots and sensors in logical-space to execute an oil-spill monitoring exercise in the Atlantic. BigActor programs execute over BARS, which interacts with physical spaces through the LSEE. LSEE executes over the Robot Operating System (ROS) - an open-source middleware for robotics./nThe physical machinery used in the demonstration consisted of one Air Force UAV, three ground control stations, four drifters that broadcast their position using AIS, and one Navy vessel equipped with a small speedboat. The Portuguese Navy emulated the oil-spill by releasing 100kg of popcorn in the ocean.

Advisor: Sengupta, Raja
Physical Considerations of the Organization of Inclusions in Lipid Bilayer Systems

Lipid bilayers, along with embedded inclusions such as cholesterol and proteins, constitute a biological membrane—the interface between a cell or organelle and its environment. Understanding the structure of a biological membrane and the physical principles responsible for the organization of membrane inclusions is crucial to understanding the processes that occur on the surface of a cell or organelle such as inter-cellular signaling, immune synapse processes, exo- and endocytosis, and membrane fusion. In this work, we study the organization and effect of inclusions in a lipid bilayer using statistical mechanics principles and large-scale molecular simulations./nIn the first part of this work, we propose a generic physical force for the assembly of inclusions in lipid bilayers—the orderphobic effect. Inspired by modern theories of the hydrophobic effect, this force is governed by the physics of the first-order phase transition between the ordered (i.e., solid-like) and disordered (i.e., fluid) phases of lipid bilayers. We show the existence and nature of this force using coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations, and demonstrate the lateral assembly of two model proteins, or ‘orderphobes’, within a lipid bilayer. The effect is powerful and operates at nano- to mesoscopic scales, and could be a potential explanation for the clustering of proteins in a biological membrane./nIn the second part of this work, we focus on hydrophobic inclusions within the lipid bilayer that give rise to organelles known as lipid droplets. These droplets, earlier thought to be passive stores of hydrophobic material in an otherwise aqueous cytosol, have now been implicated in various metabolic diseases. Since the growth and behavior of nascent droplets is sub-microscopic, little is known about the details of this process. We construct a computational framework that allows for a lipid reservoir to study asymmetric inclusions in a lipid bilayer such as the lipid droplet. Further, we identify key stages in the growth and budding of this organelle.

Advisor: Smit, Berend