VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Ethiopia's 2005 reform of its law on abortion: agenda-setting, advocates, and implementation

In 2005, Ethiopia enacted a rare reform, liberalizing abortion law as part of the overhaul of its Penal Code. Unsafe abortion is one of the three leading causes of maternal mortality in low-income countries. However, few countries have reformed their laws to permit safer, legal abortion, and medical associations typically avoid reform advocacy. The three studies presented in this dissertation examine the political origins and theoretical implications of this unusual reform in Ethiopia, as well as the roles of health providers and their medical societies in reform and implementation. The first study describes the political history of the reform and assesses the utility of theories of agenda setting. The second study explores why, counter to theoretical expectations and empirical accounts, a medical society actively supported reform of national law on abortion. Finally, as laws in resource-poor countries are often weakly implemented, the last study looks at midwives' roles in implementation by assessing what underlies their decisions about abortion service provision. Data for the three studies are drawn primarily from fifty-four interviews conducted in 2012 with obstetrician-gynecologists and governmental and non-governmental actors involved in, or familiar with, Ethiopia's reform. The other data sources were a 2013 survey of midwives (n=188) at a national professional meeting and 12 interviews with third-year midwifery students. The first study finds that the liberalization of the law on abortion was facilitated by the ruling party and its receptiveness to reform, civil society actors collaborating closely with government, the "open windows" offered by the vehicle of the Penal Code reform and the momentum of reforms to improve women's status. This suggests that agenda setting theories focusing on national rather than international actors conform better to Ethiopia's reform process. The unusual medical society participation in the reform process was motivated by obstetrician-gynecologists' personal and organizational commitments to reducing maternal mortality as well as organizational and political circumstances that relaxed or removed constraints on policy involvement. The study of midwives' attitudes about implementing reform found that most (72%) were willing or possibly willing to provide abortion services, and that this willingness was positively related to attitudes toward abortion, knowledge of the law and past provision of medication abortion. Willingness to provide services was negatively related to their number of years as a midwife and religiosity. Interview data suggest complex dynamics underlying these results, including conflict between strong professional norms and personal religious beliefs. These findings can deepen our knowledge of policy-making processes in Sub-Saharan Africa and give insight into how medical professionals participate and understand their roles in policy making and in implementing controversial health policies.

Advisor: Keller, Ann C.
Inside Insight, Opportunities for Meaning, Empathy and the Obstacles of Stress: An Exploratory Study and Pilot Training Among Juvenile Justice Officers.

Prior research indicates that human service care providers experience especially high levels of chronic workplace stress and burnout compared to workers in other professions. Chronic workplace stress is linked to a variety of poor physical and mental health outcomes. There has been significantly more research to assess and support human service care providers in education, social welfare, and health care than providers working in law enforcement such as the population considered in this case study: juvenile justice officers, JJOs. In particular, there has been little prior research on juvenile justice officers (JJOs), who have the difficult job of working closely with incarcerated youth populations./nThe intended contributions of this study are: (1) developing a descriptive baseline understanding of stress among an important and understudied population of human service care providers, (2) exploring human service care provider workplace stress through a new lens of empathy and meaning and (3) piloting a training to reduce stress with a focus on facilitating empathy and meaning. This research is carried out over three phases./nThe promising insights from the case study and pilot analysis include strategies to support JJOs finding meaning in their workplace. These strategies are achieved through creating opportunities for building relationships and empathy with youth and coworkers, improving the system for communication and positive feedback with management and teaching emotion regulation, mindfulness and empathic communication to improve individual coping skills.

Advisor: Stone, Susan I
Halpern, Jodi
Developing Spin Devices for Logic and Memory Applications

Due to increasingly pervasive computation hardware, energy efficient electronics has gained much research and development attention. One approach toward this goal is to use spintronics, which leverages the spin degree of freedom of electrons. The fundamentally smaller energy dissipation from flipping spins instead of moving charges may lead to overall more efficient devices. This is in part due to the ability to retain information without any power as well as smaller amounts of Joule heating./nIn this dissertation, we focus on a subset of spin logic devices known as nanomagnetic logic. Using a variety of modeling techniques and experimental imaging techniques, we investigate the performance of these devices in terms of speed and reliability. We also use optical techniques to investigate a spin-charge coupling mechanism known as the Spin Hall Effect. This effect is a very power-efficient way to switch nanomagnets and has obvious applications to both spin logic and memory. While spin logic devices still face many challenges, spin memory devices have become fairly feasible. With the rapid pace of innovation in this field, the outlook for spin devices in general is promising.

Advisor: Bokor, Jeffrey
The Politics of Collaboration: Producing Restoration Knowledge and Practice in the Feather River Headwaters

This research project situates a long-term collaborative effort to restore headwaters meadows within the political, institutional, and historical contexts that have shaped relations of power over watershed resources in the Feather River region. The study addresses a need in the literature for more nuanced studies of the ways that collaborative environmental governance takes shape within and engages these contexts and what the implications are for resource control and access. Using a grounded approach, informed by several bodies of theory from governance, political ecology, and science and technology studies, the project first locates collaboration as part of an ongoing history of resource politics in the United States and then identifies three key loci where collaboration catalyzed renegotiations of politics and power in the Feather River case. These loci are 1) the collaborative production of restoration knowledge and practice in response to both biophysical and social conditions of the watershed, 2) the development of new policy frames that enabled members of the headwaters community to challenge the invisibility of watersheds in California water supply policy and make new political claims against historically powerful downstream interests, and 3) the participation of the U.S. Forest Service, which facilitated collaborative restoration projects and efforts to increase the visibility of headwaters but declined to take on more controversial policy changes. Taken together, these findings portray a complex relationship between collaboration, power, and politics. Knowledge production and policy reframing were important sources of power that grew from collaboration. Although limited by the durability of long-standing relations of resource control in wider institutional and political contexts, collaboration created power for headwaters actors to effect innovative restoration solutions and motivate wider policy changes with benefits to headwaters communities and ecosystems.

Advisor: Gilless, J. Keith
Transposon-Based Tools for Enhancing Protein Function

Multi-domain proteins are a common and essential component of the cellular proteome and contribute complex functions that single domains cannot achieve. The field of protein engineering uses sophisticated techniques to modify proteins for a given purpose, but generally focuses on single domains without consideration of the protein's overall topology. In this work, we set out to develop tools that enable the high-throughput sampling of different domain connections. A novel method of random transposon-mediated domain insertion was devised, which efficiently created large plasmid libraries of domain fusions. The utility of this method is first demonstrated with insertions of circularly permuted GFP into maltose-binding protein, coupled with fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), to isolate biosensor proteins that are allosterically regulated by maltose. We next demonstrate the generality of this method by constructing a pool of functional dCas9 variants with insertions of a PDZ protein-protein interaction domain. Ultimately, these dCas9 variants may prove useful as a scaffold for the recruitment of engineered proteins to specific sites in the genome. These successful protein-engineering efforts illustrate the advanced functions possible with multi-domain constructs and how this transposon-based insertion method can facilitate the creation and study of this new class of synthetic proteins.

Advisor: Savage, David F
Tullman-Ercek, Danielle T
Revolutionizing the Antique: Ingres and Artistic Community in Napoleonic Rome, 1803-1817

French painters working in Napoleonic Rome were faced with a quandary: how were they to render and interpret the Antique they had been sent to emulate in a newly French city, despoiled of its canonical treasures? In this changed landscape, artists such as Ingres, Blondel, Heim, and Géricault looked to newly excavated Ancient artifacts and sites, to the "restoration" of Ancient Roman monuments by their fellow pensionnaires at the Villa Medici, and to the Roman popolo as descendants of the Ancient Romans to recast the Antique from a traditional Beaux-Arts model to a radically non-canonical, Rome-specific Antique.

Advisor: Grimaldo Grigsby, Darcy
Heat Transfer in Graphene and Anisotropic/Nonlinear Systems: Experimental and Theoretical Studies

Various modern devices involve highly anisotropic materials. For example, Bi2Te3 is used in thermoelectrics, and graphene finds broad applications ranging from microelectronics to optoelectronics. The heat transfer in these materials can deviate significantly from classical isotropic transport theory. Nonlinear thermal devices have also drawn a great deal of attention for such applications as thermal regulation of building envelopes, and thermal protection of delicate components in electrical hardware, spacecraft thermal shielding, and satellite radiators./nIn this thesis, heat transfer in nonlinear devices and anisotropic materials, in particular graphene, is investigated using both experimental and theoretical methods. Measurements on graphene sheets encased by silicon dioxide layers show the strong effect of the encasing oxide in disrupting the thermal conductivity of adjacent graphene layers, leading to more than one order of magnitude suppression as compared to the freely-suspended graphene experiment reported in literature. Modeling thermal properties of anisotropic materials reveals an unexpected guideline to engineer heat transport: due to phonon focusing effects, in many cases the heat transfer can be enhanced by reducing a phonon velocity component perpendicular to the transport direction. Finally, a nonlinear thermal diode, based on a new mechanism exploiting asymmetric scattering of ballistic energy carriers by pyramidal reflectors, is demonstrated experimentally. Experiments underline that all thermal rectifiers require nonlinearity in addition to asymmetry.

Advisor: Dames, Chris
Re-Assembling Ghana: Diaspora and Innovation in the African Mediascape

The notion of the "network society" has been used to describe world relations since the wide adoption of mobile phones and the Internet at the start of the 21st century. Against this narrative of a seamless global, and democratizing information system, I argue that tech users operating from the Global South interact with information technology via asymmetrical positions of connection, participation and production. For nations such as Ghana (West Africa), whose engagement with the West includes historic and contemporary waves of diaspora, the opportunities and failures of new networking technologies remain poignant. In this dissertation, I document the cyberculture practices of Ghana's "digital diaspora" and homeland "activist developers" who are overcoming this network divide through the use of "tactical" new media. In this work, I emphasize the importance of innovation (novel techniques and practices) over technology (construed narrowly as objects and scientific processes) for the social science of technology. Using ethnographic methods and interviews, I interacted with lay and professional innovators in physical locations (San Francisco, Chicago, Amsterdam, and Accra and Kumasi in Ghana) and via online media (Twitter, message boards, blogs, mobile devices and apps). These digital practices of the translocal resist the enduring notions of Africa as a place devoid of technological innovation, and thus outside of modernity. The documented practices of bricolage, local adoption and relativist invention all re-assemble the social imaginary of Ghana for the contemporary era, and reflect a politics of agency and representation within a growing African mediascape.

Advisor: Laguerre, Michel S.
Burrell, Jenna
Climate and the productivity, health, and peacefulness of society

Mounting evidence that the global climate is changing has motivated a growing body of work seeking to understand the likely impacts of these changes on economic outcomes of interest. This dissertation studies the effects of variation in climate on three different outcomes: agricultural productivity in the United States, HIV in Africa, and human conflict around the world. Along with the co-authors on these papers, I find that both short- and long-run increases in temperature are harmful to agricultural productivity in the US, that increased exposure to drought increases HIV prevalence in rural parts of Africa, and that increases in temperature and extreme rainfall are associated with substantial increases in a variety of types of human conflict. These findings have implications both for our understanding of the economics of disease and conflict, and for how much societies might be willing to invest in emissions mitigation and adaptation in the face of future climate change.

Advisor: Auffhammer, Maximilian
Miguel, Edward
Modeling, Design, and Prototyping of a MEMS Piezoelectric Permanent Magnet Current Sensor with Vibration-Canceling

As the electric power grid incorporates an increasing number of renewable energy sources and large, variable loads, better electricity monitoring at increased resolution becomes essential. Simultaneously, the rise of wireless sensor nodes, a.k.a. "motes," has made larges-cale, low-power data collection increasingly-feasible. The existing technologies for AC current sensing, however, are less than optimally-suited for this sort of application; current transformers are large and bulky, and most proximity-based magnetic field sensors consume too much power for extended operation on batteries. In the work that follows, we will explore the modeling, design, prototyping, and testing of a new, novel type of proximity-based current sensor that is both small and ultra-low-power./nBy using a pair of interconnected piezoelectric cantilevers with permanent magnets mounted on their free ends, it is possible to sense AC current by proximity while simultaneously rejecting ambient mechanical vibrations. Starting from an analytic system-as-a-circuit model, a design strategy is implemented using dynamic range as a primary figure of merit to develop an aluminum nitride, MEMS-based candidate sensor. Primary production of this candidate design is completed by MEMSCAP Inc, and final assembly and integration of the designs is completed at UC Berkeley./nUsing the 11 mm-long MEMSCAP-produced aluminum nitride dies and two 750-micron magnets, a dual-cantilever current sensor with a sensitivity of 6.41 mV per gauss has been produced. Due to non-idealities in fabrication, this output voltage is less than originally modeled but still close to the design target of 7 mV per gauss . The vibration-cancellation technique functions as-intended for frequencies below 150 Hz or above 185 Hz. Proof of concept testing of this technique is demonstrated for 1-35 A of 60 Hz AC current with the sensor in proximity to a vibrating motor generating 50 mG of 120 Hz sinusoidal acceleration.

Advisor: Wright, Paul K
Detailed characterization of the earliest events in protein folding

A major goal in biology is to understand how the amino acid sequence encodes all aspects of a protein's structure and dynamics. A protein spends most of its time in its fully folded native state but it also transiently populates high-energy, partially folded states. These high-energy states can be important for function and regulation, in addition to their importance to protein folding (the process by which a protein folds to its native state from the fully unfolded state). Together, all of these conformational states and the dynamics within and between them constitute a protein's energy landscape. Only by fully characterizing protein energy landscapes of model systems can we make progress on understanding all of the information encoded in an amino acid sequence. The present work makes a significant contribution to this effort by providing a detailed characterization of the high-energy, partially folded states that are most difficult to access - those populated earliest in protein folding - for an important protein folding model system, ribonuclease H (RNase H).

Advisor: Marqusee, Susan
American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855

This dissertation combines literary study, cultural history, and critical bibliography to examine the development of a specific literary genre in the early United States, from the Federalist era to just prior to the onset of the Civil War. I argue that the social and cultural impact of biography occurs not solely through literary narrative but also through the materiality of the printed book. Ideology, in other words, is transmitted through literary artifacts via what we traditionally define as the "text," but textual meanings are mediated through paratexts, book bindings, paper, typography, presswork, page design, and illustration. Using archives, documents, financial records, and correspondence related to the early U.S. book trade, I recover the social thought of printers and booksellers as they understood the role of the printed book in fostering cultural nationalism. Combining the methods of book history and bibliography with conceptual frameworks developed by Benedict Anderson and Pierre Bourdieu--on the imagined political community and the field of cultural production, respectively--the dissertation focuses throughout on the specificities of primary source materials to make a methodological contribution to literary and cultural history./nFrom 1800 onwards the printed book was a media technology that could unify Americans through the collective reading of national biography, even as the specificities of book formats and the range of printed materials subtly reinforced class divisions within American society. With the rise of urban environments and the penny press in the 1840s, I further demonstrate that biographical pamphlets tied to P.T. Barnum's American Museum helped foster a critical discourse within U.S. print culture about the rise of a culture industry. Furthermore, by 1848 many biographical texts combined narrative with illustration to shape public perception regarding the U.S.-Mexican War. Using publisher's records along with evidence of the subscription book trade, I argue that texts about the Mexican War linked the sites of combat and military life in Mexico with American cities, small towns, and the private domain of the bourgeois home. I conclude with two investigations of how biography helped structure modalities of literary authorship in the mid-nineteenth-century. In Israel Potter (1855), Herman Melville wrote a literary biography that was both a meditation on the challenges and failures faced by authors in a depersonalized publishing environment as well as a coded reflection on how his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne used the genre of biography to secure political and financial success through writing the Life of Franklin Pierce. My second investigation of authorship involves the publication history of Evert A. and George Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855), a literary anthology that offered authoritative capsule biographies of writers in the American tradition.

Advisor: Mascuch, Michael
Dissecting the molecular mechanisms of the ClpXP protease, one molecule at a time

The cell is a fundamental unit of life, and in order for survival, maintaining a stable intracellular enviroment is crucial. ATP-dependent protease complexes regulate protein quality and abundance to ensure homeostasis in the cell. They use chemical energy to power processes necessary for regulating the intracellular environment including protein unfolding, polypeptide translocation, and targeted degradation of abnormal and short-lived regulatory proteins./nClpXP, a well-studied ATP-dependent protease complex from Escherichia coli, is an assembly of homohexameric ClpX coaxially stacked onto a barrel-shaped protease ClpP. ClpX utilizes the energy from ATP hydrolysis to bind the appropriately tagged polypeptide substrates, denature and translocate them into the degradation cavity of ClpP. There have been long-standing questions in the field, specifically whether ClpX can generate force to unfold proteins, how do the six ClpX subunits communicate, and coordinate their ATPases cycles to generate force./nOptical tweezers are used as a powerful single-molecule technique to characterize the mechanochemical properties of biomolecules in the nanometer and piconewton range. After a decade of research, we have developed a novel optical tweezers assay to monitor ClpX as it binds, unfolds and translocates various green fluorescent protein (GFP) fusion substrates in real time under a range of ATP concentrations./nWe characterized the general properties of the motor, which are described in chapter 2. From the analysis of these single-molecule trajectories, we have determined several unique properties of the motor previously undetectable in bulk. First, ClpX can generate up to 20 pN of force to translocate and unfold proteins, eventually being stalled in movement as the opposing force approaches 20 pN./nWe subsequently explored the communication within the hexameric ring of wild-type ClpX at various ATP, ADP, and Pi concentrations. Our results, described in chapter 3, provided the first direct evidence of a force-generation mechanism and that the phosphate release is coupled to the force-generating step of ClpX. We demonstrated that two to four subunits of the ClpX hexamer actively participates in bursts of translocation and that between the translocation bursts, the motor has a mean constant dwell duration independent of ATP concentration. Our analysis revealed defined a new archetype of motor coordination, which is critical as a fail-safe mechanism to prevent the motor disengagement from its substrate.

Advisor: Bustamante, Carlos