VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Racial Group Differences in School-Based Health and Social Services: An Exploration of the Role of Referral Routines

Given persistent racial disparities in access to health and social services, scholars and advocates have long argued that intensive school-based support programs are a critical condition for the success of disadvantaged students of color. Yet surprisingly little is known about the actual dynamics of service use across by race in educational settings. Data from school health programs in a large and diverse urban school district (n= 6,696 students served across 15 sites) indicate that the provision of services in schools improves access for many historically underserved groups of youth. However, racial disproportionalities observed in students' use of psychosocial interventions warranted further investigation. Drawing on institutional theory and research from special education, this study used archival, administrative, and survey data to examine racial group differences in service utilization and their relationship to school staff members' referral practices. Using multilevel modeling techniques, analyses of racial group differences in service use (n=8,466 students, 15 schools) remained significant after controlling for students' risk taking behaviors and demographic covariates. Black, Latino, Pacific Islander and Multiracial youth were all more likely to access their school health program than White or Asian youth. Referrals by teachers, administrators and school counselors were significantly associated with service use for Black and Pacific Islander youth only. Multinomial regression analyses of referral data (n= 690 referrals, 3 schools) revealed that school staff members were also more likely to refer Black and Pacific Islander students for emotional concerns. In contrast, they were more likely to refer Asian and White youth for social or relational issues, and Latino youth for substance abuse. This study is the first of its kind to examine the role of referrals in students' use of school health programs.

Advisor: Stone, Susan I
State-Driven Activism: Interest Mobilization in Brazil's AIDS Policy Sector

This study analyzes a new form of political mobilization in Latin America--in which social movements make aggressive policy demands on the state, even while relying on the state for financial support. This model of interest intermediation runs contrary to existing theories of social movements and interest groups, which predict that organizations will moderate their demands and activities as a consequence of state funding./nI explain the development of this new model of interest intermediation through an analysis of AIDS advocacy in Brazil, one of the most widely-acclaimed cases of sustained grassroots mobilization in Latin America. Through a combination of cross-temporal and subnational comparison, I show that this current pattern of interest mobilization developed in response to a new and understudied political actor in Latin American politics: activist bureaucrats. In the context of decentralized governance, in which local politicians administer most social-sector programs, reform-minded bureaucrats often find they have little control over the implementation of their progressive policies. In Brazil's AIDS policy sector, however, activist bureaucrats have ensured the successful implementation of their policies by developing allies outside the state: mobilizing civil society groups to monitor the actions of local politicians and pressure them to conform to national policy guidelines./nAIDS bureaucrats launched this grassroots-style campaign through two key mechanisms: (1) by providing resources and institutional opportunities for new civic associations to participate in the political arena, and (2) by supporting the endeavors of social movement leaders to mobilize new civic AIDS associations as political actors. As a result of this training and support, Brazil's civic AIDS organizations rely as much on contentious strategies for making claims on the state as they do on insider lobbying strategies. By showing how specific actors within a heterogeneous state can play a constructive role in interest mobilization, this dissertation provides a major refinement to the existing theories of social movements that emphasize autonomy from the state as key to effective demand-making.

Advisor: Collier, Ruth
Collier, David
The Economics of Patent Citations: Startup Commercialization Strategy, Value, and Success

This thesis examines the effect of the nature of a startup firm's underlying technological relationships, as measured by patent citations, on its commercialization strategy, likelihood of success, and value when successful. The innovation-lineage view of patent citations that has been articulated and explored in the literature to date has left several empirical puzzles and is insufficient for the task. I therefore propose and validate an economic view of patent citations. Using variation in whether a cited patent is in-term or expired at the time that a citing patent is applied for, I provide evidence that patent citations can and do convey economic information directly pertaining to a patent-holder's right to exclude. I then exploit whether citations are in-sector or not, and whether it is the number of cited owners or cited patents that explains meaningful variation in outcome measures, to uncover a fourth degree of heterogeneity in patent citations -- whether citations convey information about complements and substitutes. Using samples that almost comprise the population of successful startups and failed venture-capital-backed firms that experienced their liquidity event between 1986 and 2006, and a reference dataset of all U.S. patents from 1963-2006, I find that the economic information in patent citations is of first-order importance and that startups file for patents on technologies that are at least partly substitutes. Furthermore, my results are consistent with start-ups that achieve initial public offerings patenting more radical inventions and acting as a force for creative destruction. The substitution effect of some patents explains both why receiving more citations does not necessarily make patents more valuable and why positive value effects are more likely to be found in the tail of citation count distributions. Overall, the economic view provides richer information than the innovation-lineage view, has strong construct validity, and provides a foundation for further research using patent-citation-based measures.

Advisor: Katz, Michael L
Stuart, Toby E
Background Knowledge and Its Effect on Standardized Reading Comprehension Test Performance

An investigation of the relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension performance on standardized reading tests (the California STAR Test) was conducted with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade ethnic minority children from low-income backgrounds (N = 68). Predictor variables examined included perceived background knowledge (overall and topic-specific), GPA, basic literacy skills, reading self-concept, race and ethnicity, language background, gender, and grade level. Research questions addressed participants' familiarity with topics discussed in STAR test reading passages and about the predictive nature of participant rankings and ratings of passages, as measured by the Topic Familiarity Ranking Measure and the Topic Familiarity Rating Scale. Results indicated that background knowledge of passage topics had a significant positive association (p < .05) with reading comprehension performance for 30% of the CST passages, for seventh and eighth-grade participants. Hierarchical regression analyses conducted on three of the passages showed that between 7% and 16% of the variance in reading comprehension performance was accounted for by background knowledge, as measured by the Topic Familiarity Rating Scale.

Advisor: Pearson, P. David
The Making and Unmaking of Southeast San Francisco

The Making and Unmaking of Southeast San Francisco/nThis project historicizes the recent convergence of private and public development interests in Southeast San Francisco, a place that was once dismissed as too risky for investment. Emphasizing the importance of race and gender in this history, I ask how an unexpected story of urban change shifts our sense of possibility for San Francisco and, more broadly, for the future of the American city./nHistorically, the Southeast was the place where San Francisco cloistered industries and people that were unwelcome by the mainstream. After years of industrial concentration, the area became home to a naval shipyard that played a central role in World War II, and that drew in thousands of African American families to live and work. The residential character of today's Southeast was further shaped by waves of urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s and by the activism of African American women in the 1970s. Development plans that emerged in the late 1990s revealed that the poor, industrially polluted, and violence-ridden Southeast would be pivotal in formulating San Francisco's 21st Century growth patterns./nToday, the city is moving forward with a massive redevelopment plan for the Southeast under a partnership between the Redevelopment Agency and the Lennar Corporation, one of America's largest private homebuilders and a key player in the mortgage crisis. Lennar's Southeast is a largely poor yet racially diverse place, with a recent influx of Chinese-American and Latino families. Nested amid San Francisco's extreme real estate-driven wealth, the Southeast has a long history of alliances defined by political patronage./nIn sum, through three case studies that reveal interlinked histories, this dissertation unpacks the ways that the politics of urban development and racial exclusion shape places, even in apparently progressive regions like the San Francisco Bay Area. This work extends and contributes to conversations about the role of government in urban growth, the co-production of urban space and racial hierarchies, and the ways that race-class politics are shifting in the newly multi-ethnic context of the American city.

Advisor: Walker, Richard
Semi-parametric estimation of direct and indirect effects in the COMBINE (Combining Medications and Behavioral Interventions for Alcoholism) Study

The investigators of the COMBINE (Combining Medications and Behavioral Interventions for Alcoholism) Study aimed to determine whether naltrexone, a drug alleged to reduce cravings for alcohol, combined with a behavioral intervention (CBI) assumed to change stress and coping behaviors, improves drinking outcomes more than either alone. After 16 weeks, only naltrexone alone and CBI alone significantly increased percent days abstinent (PDA) in models controlling for baseline PDA and site of treatment administration. Unexpectedly, the naltrexone + CBI combination did not offer any advantage over either naltrexone alone or CBI alone./nTo understand moderating and mediating factors, and to help explain the Combination's lack of improvement over each monotherapy, controlled and natural direct effect analyses were performed using targeted maximum likelihood estimation (TMLE). TMLE offers several advantages over traditional direct effect analytic approaches such as double-robustness and allowance of treatment moderation by potential mediators. Cravings and stress were examined as theoretically informed mediators/moderators./nControlled direct effect results show that naltrexone, CBI, and the Combination all work best when cravings are high, while none work when cravings are low. Similarly, naltrexone and the Combination work better when stress is high. Natural direct/indirect effect results show that all three treatments' effects are at least partially mediated by cravings, and that craving reduction explains 47-63% of treatment effects. Furthermore, naltrexone appears to affect cravings earlier while CBI works later./nTaken together, the set of results suggests the possibility of a threshold effect; if naltrexone reduces cravings early on and CBI is not effective when cravings are low, then the Combination's lack of improvement over either monotherapy should not be surprising.

Advisor: Ahern, Jennifer
Contested Humanity: Blackness and the Educative Remaking of the Human in the Twentieth Century

The question of what constitutes "the human" has been of pivotal import since the rise of European modernity. While what it means to be human has been claimed to be a universal concept, the human has in fact been defined in ways that have been both narrow and exclusionary, especially in regards to race. The purpose of this dissertation, a work of intellectual history, is to understand how black educational thinkers have gone about the task of not only critiquing Eurocentric ideals of humanity, but also redefining what it means to be human. Because modernity and its ensuing Enlightenment focuses so centrally on the capacity to be educated and knowledgeable, or to reason, it becomes a crucial place for black educational thinkers to intervene. Thus, black educational thinkers pose a fundamental question: How do we go about the task of understanding, creating, and articulating notions of black humanity when the very language of humanity is based on a universal that excludes? I seek to understand how race has been rearticulated as a question of "the human" in the 20th century by critical theorists and movement intellectuals by focusing on the educational thought of three individuals: W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin. The historicity of these thinkers illuminates a specific intellectual tradition in the 20th century concerning the relationship between blackness, universality, and the human in the modern era. Together, they illuminate a larger concern--ranging from optimism to despair--over the status of black people in 20th century America and how this status relates to educational projects. This study is important for several reasons: it shows how historical and philosophical debates concerning the human have influenced educational theory and transformation, it allows us to think about how we go about educating persons based on race and/or cultural background, and it also provides the opportunity for scholars from multiple disciplines to consider how we can go about reconciling simultaneous commitments to diversity and the assertion of universal principles of human rights.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel H
"¡Chalinas a 20 Pesos!": Economic Ideas Developed Through Children's Strategies for Successful Selling In Oaxaca, Mexico

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the economic ideas of indigenous Triqui children between the ages of 5-15 who sell artisanal goods in Oaxaca, Mexico. I report findings from two studies that investigated (1) sellers' strategies for successfully selling goods, and (2) children's economic ideas linked to their selling strategies./nIn Study 1, I documented two recurrent problems that sellers found themselves in and the selling strategies they used to solve these problems through observations, home visits, shadowing of sellers, and interviews. The recurrent problems were (1) how to convince a customer to purchase a good, and (2) how to interact with a customer that attempted to bargain. Sellers used sales pitches as solutions to these predicaments, where they attempted to convince the customer to purchase the good at the stated price by emphasizing different aspects of the goods. Some sales pitches emphasized the currency price of the good, others emphasized the quality/esthetic of the good, and yet others emphasized the utility of the good./nTo better understand links between seller's engagement in recurrent problems and their developing economic ideas, I conducted systematic interviews with sellers (n=29) in Study 2. I sought to characterize children's economic ideas of exchange value (the value of goods in an exchange) and price setting through interview tasks involving fictional bartering and currency trades. I contrasted sellers' responses on the interview tasks with those of an age-matched control group of non-sellers (n=15). Findings revealed that sellers used price to determine the exchange value of goods more frequently than non-sellers. In contrast, some non-sellers assessed the exchange value of goods by referring to their own individual wants and needs, where goods were things to "own", not things to "sell", and therefore may not necessarily have a currency value. Sellers also revealed ideas about price setting that were based on rudimentary notions of profit./nThis study made visible the knowledge that a historically non-dominant group of children develop, and thus contributes to literature that seeks to provide an alternative to deficit models through investigation of development in non-traditional contexts.

Advisor: Saxe, Geoffrey B
Statistical phylogenetic methods with applications to virus evolution

This thesis explores methods for computational comparative modeling of genetic sequences. The framework within which this modeling is undertaken is that of sequence alignments and associated phylogenetic trees. The first part explores methods for building ancestral sequence alignments making explicit use of phylogenetic likelihood functions. New capabilities of an existing MCMC alignment sampler are discussed in detail, and the sampler is used to analyze a set of HIV/SIV gp120 proteins. An approximate maximum-likelihood alignment method is presented, first in a tutorial-style format and later in precise mathematical terms. An implementation of this method is evaluated alongside leading alignment programs. The second part describes methods utilizing multiple sequence alignments. First, mutation rate is used to predict positional mutational sensitivities for a protein. Second, the flexible, automated model-specication capabilities of the XRate software are presented. The final chapter presents recHMM, a method to detect recombination among sequence by use of a phylogenetic hidden Markov model with a tree in each hidden state.

Advisor: Holmes, Ian H
The Impact of High Stakes Accountability Systems and the New Performance Demands on Special Education Teachers' Attitudes, Beliefs and Practice

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) articulates the goal that all children can learn and are expected to achieve grade level academic proficiency by 2014. Based on theories underlying models of extrinsic motivation, the fundamental assumption and theory of action is that a system of rewards and sanctions will motivate teachers to focus on student learning and work harder. While the mandate that students with disabilities participate in large-scale, statewide assessment and reporting systems makes explicit the academic progress of students with disabilities, the primary measurement tool, standardized tests, were not designed with students with disabilities in mind. Consequently, the goals special education teachers are supposed to be striving for may or may not be suitable for their students - a population with presumably very different educational needs than students in general education./nThis in-depth study examines how accountability pressures and performance targets mandated for all students impacted a small number of special education teachers. While there is a considerable body of work investigating the effect of high-stakes assessment and accountability mandates on teachers in general education, generally, special education teachers' plight has been neglected. Although the mechanisms and underlying concepts for understanding teacher responses to accountability may be the same for general and special education, special education teachers are under a more accentuated strain, given the wide gap that often separates their students from the demanded norm./n/nThe study found that the special education teachers faced a true dilemma: across the spectrum of teachers contradictory solutions - some embraced the new demands, some rejected them - seemed equally untenable. A problem that cannot be solved turns into a dilemma that must be coped with. Each teacher in my study is unique in how he or she copes with the dilemma. The study reveals four salient dimensions: what teachers chose to see when they viewed the achievement gap; how they rationalized (or explained away) their agency or capacity in closing the gap; how they muddled through with instructional tactics to make the gap go away, regardless of their beliefs; and what they regarded and guarded, as fields of professional responsibility and autonomous decison making.

Advisor: Mintrop, Heinrich
Struts, springs and crumple zones: protein structures under force

In this dissertation, I describe studies on the folding and unfolding of several proteins using a combination of bulk solution spectroscopy and force denaturation experiments with optical tweezers. The three proteins, bacteriophage T4 lysozyme, E. coli ribonuclease H, and the D. melanogaster notch ankyrin domain, have distinct topologies that deLine their unfolding pathways by limiting or granting access to partially-­‐folded, high-­‐energy intermediates under force. Some of these states were previously unobserved; others were known, but these experiments allowed us to gain further information about their role in governing the proteins' response to force. Together, the results described here illustrate the power of single-­‐molecule force spectroscopy for isolating and characterizing kinetically important protein conformations that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to study.

Advisor: Marqusee, Susan
Optimal Search Algorithms for Structured Problems in Natural Language Processing

Many tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be formulated as the assignment of a label to an input. Often, the set of possible labels can be unmanageably large and even enumerating the set would be intractable. For example, the set of possible labels for machine translation might be the set of all sentences in the output language, which can in principle be infinite. Fortunately, these large label sets typically exhibit some kind of structure - that is, they are composed of smaller parts. Because they are composed of parts, it is possible to construct labels piece by piece. The problem of predicting such structured labels is referred to as structured prediction, and the process of incrementally constructing the best structured label(s) is called search./nIn this thesis, we consider problems for which it is feasible to perform exact or optimal search - that is, search that is guaranteed to find the best possible label according to some model. Many such problems can be formulated as a search for the best path in a weighted directed hypergraph. For example, monolingual parsing, bitext parsing, and syntactic machine translation can all be formulated in this way. We will discuss both known and novel algorithms that can find the best path without considering all hyperedges in the hypergraph, and hence can speed up search without sacrificing search quality. We will provide simplified proofs of correctness for these algorithms. We also propose two novel algorithms that permit extraction of the k-best paths instead of the single best. We compare these approaches both against exhaustive search, and against approximate search techniques which speed up search by sacrificing optimality guarantees.

Advisor: Klein, Dan