VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Searching for the Decay of 229m Th

The existence of a low energy excited state in 229<\super>Th was first postulated in 1975. The energy of the state was revised over the years from less than 100 eV in 1975, to 3.5 ± 1.0 eV in 1994, to 7.8 ± 0.5 eV in 2009, among others. Despite this progress, the decay of the state has never been observed, and the half life is unknown. While no measurement described in this dissertation was successful in these experiments either, many areas were searched and exclusion plots were produced. Measurements included looking for the internal conversion electron from the isomer, as well as any possible γ emission. 229m<\super>Th was produced via the α decay of 233<\super>U, and the recoiling 229<\super>Th was collected on a catcher. Short time scales were probed using an α coincidence measurement that was sensitive from tens of nanoseconds to almost a millisecond. Intermediate time scales used a mechanical shutter that was sensitive from 2 milliseconds to a few seconds. Longer time scale measurements moved the catcher from the source to the detector, and were sensitive from a few seconds to a few days. The proper function of the system was confirmed by measuring 235m<\super>U, which generated new results for the variation in its half life based on catcher material.

Advisor: Norman, Eric B
The Logic of Kleptocracy: Corruption, Repression, and Political Opposition in Post-Soviet Eurasia

This dissertation asks why some non-democratic regimes give political opponents significant leeway to organize, while others enforce strict limits on such activities. I examine this question with reference to two in-depth case studies from post-Soviet Eurasia: Georgia under President Eduard Shevardnadze and Kazakhstan under President Nursultan Nazarbayev. While a non-democratic regime was in place in both countries, opposition was highly tolerated in Georgia, but not allowed in Kazakhstan./nI argue that these divergent policies can be traced to variation in the predominant source and pattern of state corruption in each country. In Georgia, the primary source of rulers' illegal income was society itself, which created incentives for the government to tolerate political opposition. In this pattern of corruption, illegal income flowed into the state from society in the form of bribes, and then upward within the state. Private citizens made informal payments to state officials, who in turn were required to channel a percentage of the proceeds to their superiors and to political rulers. This pattern created a state that was dependent on society. Consequently, the elites were constrained: the government was more likely to tolerate political opposition in an effort to continue amassing private profits. In contrast, in Kazakhstan, political leaders faced a dramatically different set of incentives. Rulers embezzled natural resource wealth, which were outside of citizens' control. As a result, government officials could pursue unpopular policies--including aggressive repression against opposition groups--without jeopardizing the flow of illicit profits./nThese findings contribute to the growing literatures explaining variation among non-democratic regimes and the sustainability of non-democratic rule. By tracing this cross-national variation to differences in state corruption, this study moves beyond the literature's current focus on how authoritarian rulers spend resource wealth to sustain authoritarianism. Rather, I emphasize how the variation in the sources of illegal wealth--and its profound effect on the autonomy of state elites vis-à-vis society--influences the regime.

Advisor: Wittenberg, Jason
Fish, Michael S.
Beat Cops and Battlegrounds: American Policing in Counterinsurgency

In counterinsurgencies, what causes insurgent violence to decline? Through an in-depth examination of US Marine Corps units operating over time in Ramadi, Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and Garmsir, Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom), this dissertation argues that a particular approach to waging counterinsurgency at the tactical level, referred to here as a dynamic force disposition, is responsible for causing a downward trend in insurgent violence. Such an explanation overrides common accounts of downward trends in insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as the Awakening and the surge.

Advisor: Weber, Steve
Molecular Gas in Early-type Galaxies

This thesis explores the relationship between molecular gas and early-type galaxies (ETGs). Specifically, I explore how molecular gas behaves and is configured in a complete sample of morphologically selected elliptical and lenticular galaxies. I also highlight a case study where molecular gas is being expelled and its host is rapidly transitioning from starforming to quiescent./nI first present the Combined Array for Research for Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA) ATLAS3D CO imaging survey of 30 nearby CO-rich ETGs which, when combined with archival data, creates a catalog of 40 ETGs with available CO imaging within the context of the ATLAS3D survey. I examine the distribution of the morphologies of the molecular gas within these systems, and correlate them with other properties of the host galaxy, such as color and environment membership./nFollowing the molecular gas observations from both CARMA and the Submillimeter Array, I present molecular gas data for nearby field galaxy NGC 1266, which hosts a massive molecular outflow that is being driven by a central AGN. I present the properties and energetics associated with the system, and hypothesize about the driving mechanism. I compare the outflow in NGC 1266 to other known outflowing molecular systems and argue why NGC 1266 is unique./nFrom photometric observations from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as radio continuum observations from the Very Long Baseline Array, I present evidence that NGC 1266 is in a special phase of evolution, likely in a key part of the transition from being a blue starforming galaxy to a quiescent, red sequence galaxy. I argue that NGC 1266 should be considered a poststarburst galaxy, and explain why it is essential that searches for such transition objects find NGC 1266 analogs.

Advisor: Heiles, Carl
Building Japan: Technology as a problem-space for Veridiction, Jurisdiction, and Subjectivation.

This research is an attempt to examine elements in the classic relations of state actors to the agency of the individual through the medium of technology development and deployment. The chapters analyze discourses surrounding the notions of `the state' and `technology' as fields for exploration of the Foucaultian problematizations of veridiction, jurisdiction, and subjectivation. Specifically, how have these two poles interacted in practices of `truth telling', governance, and the formation of citizen and ethnic identities./nIn particular, the task at hand is to think about the deployment of technology in the configuration of affect in relation to an identity, `the Japanese'. Japan had started as a place of liminality in the research: the non-West modern, that didn't quite fit the mold of so many classical narratives of modernity. But as my inquiry continued the questions turned more sharply towards an investigation of practices of affect and subjectivity. `What part did technology play in the development of a Japanese state identity?' gradually transformed into a montage of narratives in which the technical simply met the subjective, and the questions emerged from this meeting. For example, what is the force exerted by a practice of memory of the atomic bomb upon an idea of peace? And, in the representation of a national disaster what narrative tropes are invoked and hazarded in the contest of the `national experience'?/nI select a series of technological developments spanning three centuries of Japanese history and utilize the historical narrative as a space for raising these questions as they emerge and are articulated/argued about by the actors involved, as well as by the `second-order observers': the historians and social philosophers that mark and delimit the field of `Japanese history'.

Advisor: Rabinow, Paul
Optical Injection Locking of Vertical Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers: Digital and Analog Applications

With the rise of mobile (cellphones, tablets, notebooks, etc.) and broadband wireline communications (Fiber to the Home), there are increasing demands being placed on transmitters for moving data from device to device and around the world. Digital and analog fiber-optic communications have been the key technology to meet this challenge, ushering in ubiquitous Internet and cable TV over the past 20 years. At the physical layer, high-volume low-cost manufacturing of semiconductor optoelectronic devices has played an integral role in allowing for deployment of high-speed communication links. In particular, vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL) have revolutionized short reach communications and are poised to enter more markets due to their low cost, small size, and performance. However, VCSELs have disadvantages such as limited modulation performance and large frequency chirp which limits fiber transmission speed and distance, key parameters for many fiber-optic communication systems. Optical injection locking is one method to overcome these limitations without re-engineering the VCSEL at the device level. By locking the frequency and phase of the VCSEL by the direct injection of light from another laser oscillator, improved device performance is achieved in a post-fabrication method./nIn this dissertation, optical injection locking of VCSELs is investigated from an applications perspective. Optical injection locking of VCSELs can be used as a pathway to reduce complexity, cost, and size of both digital and analog fiber-optic communications. On the digital front, reduction of frequency chirp via bit pattern inversion for large-signal modulation is experimentally demonstrated showing up to 10 times reduction in frequency chirp and over 90 times increase in fiber transmission distance. Based on these results, a new reflection-based interferometric model for optical injection locking was established to explain this phenomenon. On the analog side, the resonance frequency enhancement was exploited for millimeter-wave radio over fiber communications. Experimental demonstration of 4 Gb/s data transmission over 20 km of fiber and 3 m of wireless transmission at a 60 GHz carrier frequency was achieved. Additionally, optical injection of multi-transverse mode (MM) VCSELs was investigated showing record resonance frequency enhancement of > 54 GHz and 3- dB bandwidth of 38 GHz. Besides these applications, a number of other intriguing applications are also discussed, including an optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) and wavelength-division multiplexed passive optical networks (WDM-PON).Finally, the future of optical injection locking and its direction going forward will be discussed.

Advisor: Chang-Hasnain, Conne J
Decolonizing Copyright Law: Learning from the Jamaican Street Dance

In this ethnographic study I examine the significance of music-making in Jamaican society in the light of the increasing interpenetration of law and technology with cultural practices. I center the local institution of the "street dance" as the heart of Jamaicans' musical practices. Grounded in a historical analysis of musicking - the active practice of engaging with music - in Jamaica and in the Jamaican diaspora, this study reveals how Jamaica's colonial past and present shapes musicking's cultural, political and economic significance in Jamaican life. Most specifically, Jamaican music-makers' collaborative and repetitive practices, that draw on and reinforce shared cultural history, contradict current local and international copyright law./nCopyright law relies on historically and culturally specific assumptions about the practice of creativity, and requires specific institutional context in order to function. But what relation do those assumptions and institutions have to the interests and traditions of music-makers? And how does that relationship change in the context of increasingly globalized copyright law that is increasingly and intimately enforced through globally networked technology?/nThrough social history and ethnographic data generated by interviews, participant-observation, musical analysis, I reveal how Jamaican musicking practices are creative, productive, and rewarding for individual Jamaicans as well as for communities. I focus especially on the Jamaican poor who dominate Jamaican musical authorship, and who rely on alternate normative systems that shape both their creative practices and their understandings of ownership, control, and the distribution of money deriving from music. I map Jamaican music-makers' engagement, resistance, and reinterpretation of copyright law concepts, and provide an analysis of music-making that reveals how copyright is informed by colonial assumptions that Jamaican practices can sometimes resist and subvert. Drawing on the impressive cultural contributions of Jamaican music-makers to Jamaican and global music culture, which derives from their specific practices (including those that contradict copyright), I offer a critique of copyright informed by a concern for substantive equality, centered on the needs of the Jamaican poor who dominate music-making and offer a corrective theoretical framework for analyzing policy and music-making in the digital era.

Advisor: Luker, Kristin
Structured Estimation In High-Dimensions

High-dimensional statistical inference deals with models in which the number of parameters $p$ is comparable to or larger than the sample size $n$. Since it is usually impossible to obtain consistent procedures unless $p/n \to 0$, a line of recent work has studied models with various types of low-dimensional structure, including sparse vectors, sparse and structured matrices, low-rank matrices, and combinations thereof. Such structure arises in problems found in compressed sensing, sparse graphical model estimation, and matrix completion. In such settings, a general approach to estimation is to/nsolve a regularized optimization problem, which combines a loss function measuring how well the model fits the data with some regularization function that encourages the assumed structure. We will present a unified framework for establishing consistency and convergence rates for such regularized $M$-estimators under high-dimensional scaling. We will then show how this framework can be utilized to re-derive a few existing results and also to obtain a number of new results on consistency and convergence rates, in both $\ell_2$-error and related norms./nAn equally important consideration is the computational efficiency in performing inference in the high-dimensional setting. This high-dimensional structure precludes the usual global assumptions---namely, strong convexity and smoothness conditions---that underlie much of classical optimization analysis. We will discuss ties between the statistical inference problem itself and efficient computational methods for performing the estimation. In particular, we will show that the same underlying statistical structure can be exploited to prove global geometric convergence of the gradient descent procedure up to \emph{statistical accuracy}. This analysis reveals interesting connections between statistical precision and computational efficiency in high-dimensional estimation.

Advisor: Wainwright, Martin J
Control of Strand Scission by Type IIA Topoisomerases

Topoisomerases are a family of essential enzymes that disentangle chromosomes and manage DNA supercoils, and are targets of a broad class of successful antibiotics and anticancer therapeutics. The type IIA topoisomerases operate by a complex ATP-dependent strand passage mechanism in which the enzyme transports one DNA segment through a transient, enzyme-mediated break in a second DNA segment. To understand the mechanism of DNA cleavage by type IIA topoisomerases, I used a suicide DNA substrate to crystallize the DNA binding and cleavage core of the enzyme covalently bound to DNA through its active-site catalytic tyrosine. The crystal structure revealed that type II and IA topoisomerases employ a novel variation of canonical two-metal ion phosphoryl-transfer chemistry to achieve DNA cleavage. Additionally, the suicide DNA substrate enabled me to determine the first structure of a fully-catalytic type IIA topo II-DNA-nucleotide complex. The structure revealed the overall doubly-domain swapped architecture of the enzyme. This organization produces an unexpected interaction between the bound DNA and a conformational transducing element in the ATPase domain, which is critical for both DNA-stimulated ATP hydrolysis and global topoisomerase activity. The data indicate that the ATPase domains pivot about each other to ensure unidirectional strand passage and that this state senses bound DNA to promote ATP turnover and enzyme reset. Lastly, the DNA-bound structure of one of the two human topo II isoforms, topo IIα, underscores the coupling between the DNA cleavage active site configuration with both metal ion occupancy at the cleavage center, as well as the dimerization status of a key dissociable interface over 50 Å away. The structure also highlights amino acid differences in the drug-binding pocket between the two human isoforms that could serve as differentiating features for developing more selective anti-topoisomerase agents. The work presented in this dissertation helps to explain years of biochemical studies, unifies many elements of topo II mechanism and its control by allostery, and has implications for both understanding large ATP-dependent DNA-remodeling molecular machines as a whole, as well as understanding the means by which small molecules target these enzymes for clinical benefit.

Advisor: Berger, James M
End of the Line: Reassembling the Legacy of NUMMI, The American Middle Class in the Era of Globalization and Recession

The Fremont California-based NUMMI plant was long considered a model of high-skill, high-productivity manufacturing, as the facility produced some of the highest quality vehicles in the world for almost three decades until its closure in 2010. I argue that NUMMI's success was due to its collective bargaining agreement because it leveraged workers' fullest effort and skill because it ensured them job security, a living wage, and protected them from capricious management. The presence of a union and a collective bargaining agreement mandated that workers avoid disputes with management and collaborate with managers on streamlining production in exchange for compensation and related guarantees and ensured smooth, consistent and high quality work./nSome interpreted NUMMI's closure in 2010 as a referendum on union-supported wages, health care benefits and pensions at General Motors. My research shows that General Motors' failure was due primarily to financial problems, poor managerial decisions, rises in health care costs, undesirable product lineups and overinvestment in trucks and SUV's. General Motors also played a conspicuous role in the financial meltdown through its subsidiaries. General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) financed hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-based assets of suspect credit quality that helped create this multi-trillion dollar mortgage-backed asset market that collapsed in the global meltdown of the financial sector in 2008./nI argue that NUMMI and case studies from other automotive plants show that, despite a recession and global competition, lowering the wages of American workers and slashing their benefits undermines key sources of American competitive strength and represents the incorrect policy posture for the American economy.

Advisor: Shaiken, Harley
Omi, Michael
Effects of Orthographic Depth on Literacy Performance: Reading Comprehension Difficulties Across Languages

Orthographic depth, the degree of spelling-to-sound consistency in each language, has been hypothesized to affect the ease and effectiveness with which children learn to read (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987). This linguistic factor has been found to have such a powerful effect on the beginning reading process that readers of English (the deepest alphabetic orthography) are estimated to take two and a half years longer to master basic decoding and word recognition skills than the majority of readers of other alphabetic orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). Although the link between orthographic depth and reading acquisition has been well established, there is little to no research examining this relationship beyond the third grade. As a result, it is widely assumed that by fourth grade, reading is the same in all languages. However, because another body of research has established the ongoing and mutually supportive relationship between word reading and reading comprehension throughout development (e.g., Kintsch, 1998; Perfetti, 2007), the current study sought to challenge this assumption by investigating the long-term role of orthographic depth in reading comprehension performance. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was employed to examine subsets of data that include representative samples of typically developing fourth-grade and 15-year-old readers of alphabetic languages from the 2006 Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the 2009 Program for International Study Assessment (PISA). Findings provide tentative indication that by fourth grade, the role of orthographic depth is diminished for competent and skilled readers. However, the poorest 10 to 25% of readers appear to be continually challenged throughout development when there is a greater degree of ambiguity in their script. In contrast, even when students are below average in their ability, they may enjoy the long-term benefits of reading in a shallow orthography. The implications of this study are wide-ranging and include: accounting for orthographic differences in models of reading comprehension, providing more resources for the lowest performing readers of deep orthographies throughout schooling, and acknowledging that reading comprehension instruction and assessment may not be comparable across languages.

Advisor: Cunningham, Anne
Structural Characterization, Manipulation, and Properties of Graphene Membranes

Graphene, an ideal two-dimensional membrane, has interesting electronic, optical, mechanical, and thermal properties originating from its unique one-atom-thick honeycomb-lattice structure. Reliable synthesis processes for large-area high-quality graphene have recently been developed, which opens up the capacity for many interesting applications. However, various synthesis-related structural inhomogeneities are still present in large-area graphene and have important implications on graphene's various properties./nVarious transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques are employed to study suspended graphene membranes at micrometer and atomic scales. Atomic-resolution TEM and electron diffraction analysis are utilized to perform structural investigations of graphene. Notably, various one-dimensional defective structures including grain boundaries and folds in graphene are studied./nOn the other hand, the structural manipulation of graphene provides another way to tailor the graphene's properties. Various structural engineering approaches are pursued including fold control, artificial stacking, tearing, Joule heating, and nanomanipulation. The modification of related properties is investigated with electrical measurements, Raman spectroscopy, electron microscopy, and theoretical calculations.

Advisor: Zettl, Alex K.