VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Healthy Enclaves or Isolated Neighborhoods? Understanding the Role of Racial Residential Segregation on the Health Status of Asian Americans Implications for Research, Policy, and Practice

Racial residential segregation is known to affect the social, physical, and mental well-being of segregated minority groups in the United States. Racial residential segregation creates different exposures to a variety of resources that enhance health, including economic opportunity and access to health-promoting resources such as grocery stores and parks. Racial residential segregation also increases exposure to adverse conditions such as crime, alcohol, and toxic air pollutants. Few studies examining the relationship between segregation and health have focused on Asian Americans. However, data show that several Asian Americans groups experience considerable racial residential segregation, and are now the fastest growing population in the country. Furthermore, high-degrees of segregation have enabled political power in Black communities as a mechanism to counter the negative effects of isolation. Much less, however, is known about the effects of segregation on the political and social capital of Asian Americans and its benefits to health. Further research is needed to test the complex association between residential segregation, its mechanistic pathways, and overall health status of Asian Americans./nIn this three-paper dissertation, I ask 1) What are the potential mechanisms by which racial segregation is associated with self-rated physical and mental health status among Asian Americans in the United States? 2) How does social capital and political empowerment, moderate the association of racial segregation and self-rated mental health status among Asian Americans? 3) How can building political empowerment be utilized by public health departments to address the effects of racial segregation and the health of Asian Americans? Paper #1 examines the empirical evidence of the association between residential segregation and Asian American health by critically reviewing the literature with a relational geography lens, and is one of the first papers to examine this literature. Paper #2 empirically tests the role of residential segregation on health status of AAs and the moderating roles of social capital and collective political participation. To do so, I employ multilevel modeling methods using the California Health Interview Survey (2011-12). Paper #3 studies the role of political empowerment in addressing segregation and health, and utilizes comparative multi-site case-study design, key informant interviews, participant observations, and document reviews that to review in California counties with high Asian-white residential segregation. Specifically, I document examples of collective political empowerment, and discuss the role of health practitioners--particularly those employed at local health departments--in building political empowerment as a health promotion and equity strategy.

Advisor: Nuru-Jeter, Amani
Seeing Green: Speculative Urbanism in the Green Economy

As the twenty-first century begins, climate change has become an urban problem. Global urban networks and institutions such as the World Bank point to cities' energy demand and major greenhouse gas emissions share. Simultaneously, they frame cities as a critical source of environmental solutions, through green building, energy efficiency retrofitting, "smart" infrastructure, and other transformations of twentieth century urban geography. And critically, they argue that innovative cities can make these changes profitable, and thereby help propel a technological revolution in advanced capitalism: the development of a "green" economy. Amidst the economic turmoil that followed the 2008 financial collapse, many public and private institutions took up the idea of green economic development as a pathway to economic recovery and twenty-first century accumulation./nIn this study, I critically examine the crisis-era development of green economic ideas in the United States, particularly in cities like San Francisco. I focus on new forms of value and unconventional resources being developed for the green economy, from energy efficiency to the "green-ness" of buildings. I examine how the federal government and cities hope to harness this value for transformative economic development, and how financial institutions and real estate developers are pioneering distinct visions of the profits to be made from environmental change and/or its mitigation. Critical resource geography and political economy/ecology offer important theoretical windows into green economic development. I consider how critiques of market environmentalism developed to analyze rural resource extraction can be expanded to analyze a new urban resource geography. I use methods such as surveys of industry and policy literature, participant observation at conferences, historical research, and analysis of financial instruments./nI find that financial institutions and major real estate developers have become driving players in urban greening, even as green collar jobs organizers won governmental support for more economically redistributive visions. Finance is helping transform green building and retrofitting from a niche sector into mainstream real estate and urban development practice, aided by new "green" financial instruments. Simultaneously, financialization threatens to make green urbanism increasingly speculative and exclusionary, and delimits more ambitious federal programs to promote green manufacturing and mass employment.

Advisor: Wallker, Richard
Theatre, Calvinism, and Civil Society in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh and Geneva

Over the course of eighteen months in 1756 and 1757, theatre crises, large-scale debates about the morality of the stage, erupted in both Edinburgh and Geneva. Traditionally, these debates have been explained away as examples of Calvinist anti-theatricality. This dissertation argues, however, that this understanding is inaccurate. Beyond the fact that there was no consistent tradition of Calvinist anti-theatricality in the early modern period, taking such a narrow view of the theatre crises undermines their importance. The theatre debates of 1756 and 1757 must be understood in the context of the Enlightenment and changing notions about the relationship between the Calvinist church and civil society. The theatre symbolized the birth of civil society and the end of a particular brand of Calvinism. When the eighteenth-century debates about the stage are understood only as examples of "Calvinist anti-theatricality," though, this importance is lost. This project remedies the current gap in scholarship by demonstrating that these debates were not simply about the theatre; they were about the fate of Calvinism in an increasingly polite, enlightened society.

Advisor: Laqueur, Thomas
On extremizers for certain inequalities of the k-plane transform and related topics

This dissertation is concerned with determining optimal constants and extremizers, functions which achieve them, for certain inequalities arising in harmonic analysis./nThe main inequality considered is the $L^p$-$L^q$ inequality for the $k$-plane transform. It was shown in cite{C84} that the $k$-plane transform is a bounded operator from $L^p$ of Euclidean space to $L^q$ of the Grassmann manifold of all affine $k$-planes in $R^d$ for certain exponents depending on $k$ and $d$. Specifically, for $1leq qleq d+1$ and $p=frac{dq}{n-d+dq}$ there exists a finite positive constant $A_0>0$ such that/n[/n|T f|_{L^q(M)} leq A_0 |f|_{L^{p}(R^d)}./n]/nExtremizers of the inequality have previously been shown to exist when $q=2$ by Baernstein and Loss cite{BL97}, when $k=2$ and $q$ is an integer, also in cite{BL97}, when $k=d-1$ and $q=d+1$ by Christ cite{C11}, and when $q=d+1$ for general $k$ by Drouot cite{D11}. In each of these cases, $f_0(x)= (1=|x|^2)^{frac{-(d-k)}{2(p-1)}}$ is an extremizer. When $q=2$ cite{BL97} or $k=n-1$ and $q=d+1$ cite{C11} this extremizer has been shown to be unique up to composition with certain explicit symmetries of the inequality./nChapter ref{chap:exist} contains two proofs that when $q$ is an integer, there exist extremizers, functions which achieve equality in the inequality with the sharp constant./nChapter ref{chap:unique} extends Christ's uniqueness result for the endpoint case from $k=n-1$ to general $k$. In particular, we show that for $q=d+1$ for $kin[1,d-1]$, the extremizing function is unique up to composition with affine maps. This is achieved by modifying the methods of cite{C11} to apply to functions which are only assumed to be measurable $L^p$ functions (rather than smooth $L^p$ functions)./nChapter ref{chap:smooth} shows that when $q$ and $frac{1}{p-1}$ are both integers, all extremizers are infinitely differentiable. This involves a family of weighted inequalities for the $k$-plane transform and the analysis of a nonlinear Euler-Lagrange equation./nChapter ref{chap:IBL}, considers the related question of extremizing $n$-tuples of characteristic functions for certain multilinear inequalities of Hardy-Riesz-Brascamp-Lieb-Luttinger-Rogers type. Extremizing $n$-tuples are characterized in a special case. This chapter is joint work with Christ.

Advisor: Christ, Michael
Essays in Development Economics

This dissertation consists of three chapters, which study issues of development within the context of China and India. The first two study the causes and consequences of one of the most important historical events in 20-th century Chinese history, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The third chapter reports findings from a field experiment focused on studying the role of self control in chronic illness management./nIn Chapter 1, I investigate the determinants of political violence during the Cultural Revolution in rural China. With its purported goals of tackling inequality and forestalling a ``capitalist restoration,'' the decade of 1966-1976 witnessed widespread violence, much of it directed towards the educated elite. Using a unique county-level dataset on collective killings, coupled with original economic data collected from archives of regional gazetteers, I investigate the reasons why some regions experienced high levels of violence, while others did not. Empirical results show that the extent of violence is positively correlated with male/female gender ratio, as well as agricultural output at the time of conflict, while being negatively correlated with ethnoliguistic fractionalization./nIn Chapter 2, I investigate the economic legacies of the Cultural Revolution in rural China. Building on the work from Chapter 1, I study the extent to which this historic event yielded different trajectories of development across regions in China. To address endogeneity concerns, I control for pre-revolution outcomes and exploit transitory shocks to agricultural income during the period of violence as an instrument. Empirical results show that more revolutionary regions were slower to industrialize, had lower levels of education and per-capita output. These effects are large in magnitude, detectable more than thirty years later, and in some cases begin to decline at longer time horizons. Trust-based informal lending appears to have been adversely affected, while the timing of policy reforms does not./nIn Chapter 3, we study the issue of self control in the context of chronic illness management. In particular, we construct a simple model of preventive health behavior under present-biased time preferences, and show how beliefs about future time preferences (sophistication, partial naivete, and perfect naivete) affect how agents are predicted to use, under-use or misuse different types of commitment contracts. We propose a type of commitment contract that has the potential to benefit not just sophisticated agents, but also naifs. We conduct a field experiment in northern India, to evaluate the effectiveness of these contracts at increasing the share of patients who actively manage their hypertension by visiting a doctor regularly. Preliminary analysis reveals (i) the commitment contracts have a meaningful impact on preventive care utilization and (ii) that even with commitment contracts preventive health care utilization could still be substantially increased.

Advisor: Miguel, Edward
Compton Image Reconstruction Algorithms and Demonstration Across Multiple Devices: From the Lab to the Field

Compton cameras image gamma-rays in the range from hundreds of keV to several MeV and are useful for a range of applications including astrophysics, contamination remedia- tion, medical imaging and nuclear security. The data acquired from Compton cameras needs to be inverted to recover the desired gamma-ray distribution in space and energy using reconstruction algorithms. The focus of this work is the process of converting measured Compton camera interaction data into gamma-ray images via such methods. Several ap- proaches are covered, including filtered back-projection and iterative methods. This work makes advances in each of these approaches both theoretically and through demonstration measurements. Some of these methods are optimized for real-time imaging./nWorking in the Applied Nuclear Physics group at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and in Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley provided a unique opportunity to analyze data from three different Compton cameras. This provided a cross device perspective that ultimately made the imaging algorithms developed for one system more robust for another. Having this perspective also made it more clear which factors of the image reconstruction algorithms were essential. Using these different systems, techniques are described to analyze the quality of data that can be collected from a Compton imaging system. The three imaging systems cover a variety of semiconductor materials: Si, CdZnTe and HPGe. These devices range from lab development platforms to a small compact Compton camera device. The compact device, called HEMI, was taken to Fukushima, Japan and flown on a remote control helicopter to map the cesium contamination. The results from that measurement are detailed and shown./nAnother focus of this work is sensor fusion with auxiliary data sources, which include visual cameras, depth cameras, GPS and IMU sensors. This is used to expand the number of reconstruction dimensions. This also provides contextual information for the gamma- ray intensity reconstruction and can be used to overcome some limitations with gamma-ray imaging, such as inherent low count rates. This approach of sensor fusion is demonstrated with lab measurements and the measurement taken in Fukushima, Japan.

Advisor: Vetter, Kai
Quantifying Turbulence Phenomena in Nature Using Novel Quantitative Imaging Techniques

Turbulence is an important and ubiquitous phenomena in fluid mechanics that underpins many natural processes. For environmental engineers, turbulence is especially critical to understanding the fate and transport of contaminants in nature. Reliable calculations by transport models of the spread of substances introduced into the atmosphere or into the water supply requires that the physics of turbulent motions be captured with high fidelity. Whereas analytical and numerical approaches to describing turbulence can often be intractable and computationally prohibitive, quantitative imaging methods can provide valuable insights into both the phenomenology of turbulence and the interactions with its surroundings. This dissertation describes a series of research projects based on experimental observations of turbulent motions and their affect on natural processes. First, the development of a field-ready, quantitative-imaging tool capable of capturing the complex, three-dimensional turbulent motions most responsible for turbulent mixing is described. Second, a study on the dynamics of momentum transfer across the air-water interface within a vegetated wetland using the newly developed tool is described. Lastly, an experiment using high-speed cinematography to examine the kinematic response of hummingbirds navigating a complex, turbulent flow is described.

Advisor: Variano, Evan A
Millimeter-Wave/Terahertz Circuits and Systems for Wireless Communication

The ubiquitous use of electronic devices has led to an explosive increase in the amount of data transfer across the globe. Several applications such as media sharing, cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT), big-data applications demand high performance interconnects to achieve high data rate communication. The mm-wave/terahertz band offers several gigahertz of spectrum for high data rate communication applications. This thesis explores millimeter-wave/terahertz circuits and terahertz systems for various applications in CMOS technology. Some of them include links for personal area networks, wireless backhauls, chip to chip communication (short-range) links in form factor constrained devices (wireless in a box) and also for long-range high-speed communication (using phased arrays or lenses)./nIn particular, this research explores the feasibility of millimeter-wave/terahertz systems and also the performance of critical blocks such as power amplifiers. A linear power amplifier is designed in a deeply scaled technology node (28 nm) and the various challenges in the design process are discussed. The performance is validated using measurement results and compared across various technology nodes. Non-linear millimeter-wave switching power amplifiers are also explored due to their high efficiencies and a prototype is fabricated to verify the modeling and simulation results./nThe ideas and modeling strategies from the individual blocks are used in the design of mm-wave/terahertz transceivers. Simple modulation schemes such as on-off keying, binary phase shift keying and quadrature phase shift keying are used for transmission of data. Two transceiver prototypes with different transmitter and receiver architectures are fabricated in bulk CMOS technology. The system level considerations and architecture choices are discussed. Theoretical analysis of critical blocks with design choices are explained along with their implementation details. The system level measurements from the two transceivers confirm the feasibility of such links at millimeter-wave/terahertz frequencies. The work from this thesis demonstrates the world's first fully functional link at frequencies greater than 200 GHz in CMOS technology.

Advisor: Niknejad, Ali M
The Extraordinary Everyday: Contemporary Literature and Art from Viet Nam and the Diaspora

This dissertation examines late twentieth and early twenty-first century poetry, prose, documentary films and photography by Vietnamese and overseas Vietnamese authors and artists born in the 1960s and 70s, near the end of the war in 1975. I argue that brevity, ephemerality, and a preoccupation with the quotidian in these works constitute a radical and sociopolitically significant break from the dominant modes and motivations of war generation narratives in Viet Nam, the United States and France that sensationalize war suffering and problems of postwar recovery, migration and assimilation. Yet far from eschewing the political, as some critics have judged, the young authors and artists in my study insist that "politics need to begin elsewhere, with some experience of the profound otherness of the everyday," to quote Bill Brown on Virginia Woolf. They employ more modest artistic forms and objects of aesthetic attention, milder narrative tones and affects, and gentler ways of seeing and being in the world in order to counter the violence that the previous generation felt compelled to evoke. This deceptive banality represents direct and deliberate social and political engagement similar to the "depth of the superficial" described by Maurice Blanchot in postwar France. It melds the aesthetic and the sociopolitical by instructing us to observe apparently frivolous or ordinary gestures and events that take on salutary meaning in the wake of death; it obscures and comprises the spiritual effects of war and (neo)colonization, urbanization and globalization--grossly, "modernization"--in Viet Nam and abroad. My reading offers a comparative metric against which we might evaluate a politics of form in work that follows after grand historical trauma by individuals who inherit that trauma from previous generations, or who are the bearers of what Marianne Hirsch has termed "postmemory." I wish to contribute importantly to our understanding of postwar aesthetics as well as to studies of literature and culture in Asia Pacific, Asian American, and French and Francophone contexts.

Advisor: Zinoman, Peter
Tansman, Alan
Progress Toward the Kopsia Family of Indole Alkaloids and The Synthesis of Fused Pyrroles and Dihyrdoazepines via Intramolecular Cyclopropanation and Rearrangement

Chapter 1. An overview of multi-drug resistance (MDR) and the possibility of small molecule tools to elucidate the biological mechanism of MDR are outlined. The Kopsia family of natural products related to lapidilectine B is introduced, and previous synthetic efforts are discussed. Two synthetic strategies and the progress made toward the natural product are detailed. In the first route, the tetracyclic core of these molecules is accessed through a Friedel-Crafts type acylation. The second route employs an Ugi four-component coupling to introduce all the carbons found in the core of the natural product and accesses the tetracycle core in three ways./nChapter 2. Rh-bound trimethylenemethane (TMM) variants generated from the interaction of a Rh-carbenoid with an allene have been applied to the synthesis of substituted 3,4-fused pyrroles. An overview of the synthetic variants of TMM is given and access to rhodium carbenoid centers from 1,2,3-triazoles is discussed. A range of allenes bearing different substituents is tolerated in this reaction. The pyrrole products are useful starting points for the syntheses of various dipyrromethene ligands./nChapter 3. A method for the direct formation of dihydroazepine derivatives from 1-sulfonyl-1,2,3-triazoles possessing a tethered diene is reported. Discussion of aza-Cope rearrangements and cyclopropanation from the decomposition of 1,2,3-triazoles into metallocarbenoids is given. The methodology involves an intramolecular cyclopropanation of an α-iminocarbene, leading to a transient 1-imino-2-vinylcyclopropane intermediate which rapidly undergoes a 1-aza-Cope rearrangement to generate fused dihydroazepine derivatives, mechanistic support is provided./nChapter 4. The methodology described in Chapter 2 for the synthesis of substituted 3,4-fused pyrroles has been applied to a synthesis of the natural product cycloprodigiosin, which demonstrates antitumor and immunosuppressor activity. A history of the prodiginine family of natural products is given. The modes of action and the role of structure in regards to cycloprodigiosin's antitumor activity are also discussed.

Advisor: Sarpong, Richmond