The following dissertation is a series of three essays in behavioral/experimental and labor economics: (1) Information Asymmetry in Job Search, (2) Minority Turnout and Representation under Cumulative Voting. An Experiment, and (3) Networks and Labor Mobility: A Study of LinkedIn Profiles in the Biotechnology Sector. Standard models of rational job search assume agents know the distribution of offered wages when deciding which jobs to accept. In Chapter 1, coauthored with Kai Zen, I test if incorrect beliefs about wages affect real-world job search behavior in a field experiment with 1100 senior-year undergraduate students in the graduating Class of 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley. Partnering with the Career Center, we present personalized information graphics on school-and-major-specific salary distributions to students in the treatment group. We first document novel evidence that even prior to labor market entry, errors exist in wage beliefs – some students overestimate the available distribution, while others underestimate the available distribution. Post-treatment, we find that students treated with correct information update their beliefs towards the truth, and this is reflected in changes in reservation wages. At the end of the school year, we find that in comparison to the control group, students who increased their reservation wage after treatment had higher total and base salaries conditional on employment, a result significant at the 5% level. However, these same students had a lower, but imprecisely estimated likelihood of being employed by June post-graduation. An opposite but symmetric effect occurred for students who decreased their reservation wage. Our results are consistent with job search models where workers with more optimistic expectations wait longer to accept a job, but accept higher wages. We compare our experimental estimates to simulated moments from the model and find that the mean experimental effect is close to the model in magnitude under reasonable parameters. Our paper suggests an economically important role for errors in beliefs about labor market conditions and shows the effectiveness of a light-touch information intervention on employment and earnings for first-time job seekers. Chapter 2, coauthored with Alessandra Casella and Jeffrey Guo, asks how an alternative voting system can increase the voter turnout and representation of minorities. Under majoritarian election systems, securing the participation and representation of minorities remains an open problem, made salient in the US by its history of voter suppression. One remedy recommended by the courts is the adoption of Cumulative Voting (CV) in multi-member districts: each voter has as many votes as open positions but can cumulate votes on as few candidates as desired. Historical experiences are promising but also reflect episodes of minority activism. We present the results of a controlled lab experiment that isolates the role of the voting rule from other confounds. Although each voter is treated equally, theory predicts that CV should increase the minority's turnout relative to the majority and the minority's share of seats won. Our experimental results strongly support both theoretical predictions. In Chapter 3, using LinkedIn profiles data on the biotechnology sector, it is possible to construct a measure of individuals' networks based on coworkers within the same firm and location. Exploiting such a measure, I intend to test the impact of network size on future employment in the biotechnology sector, which has frequent employee turnover due to unanticipated clinical trial failures. In doing so, I seek to answer the following question: Do larger or higher-quality networks cushion against negative employment shocks? According to preliminary evidence, connections help workers find jobs more quickly. Currently, the network measure is imperfect, the data set on which the preliminary results are based is small, and the assumptions underlying the statistical analysis can be questioned. However, all three limitations can be overcome. I highlight in this chapter the steps to be taken to do so.

¿El inmaterialismo de Berkeley niega la existencia de las cosas o ideas materiales? La presente investigación demostrará que, al contrario de lo que una lectura superficial puede dar a entender, el verdadero sentido del inmaterialismo de Berkeley no es la negación de los cuerpos o cosas materiales percibidos (ideas materiales), sino la negación de la sustancia material en sentido filosófico, la cual es afirmada por la doctrina contraria, el materialismo. En el primer capítulo se observarán ejemplos históricos de la malinterpretación del inmaterialismo berkeleyano según la cual este niega la realidad material del mundo y de los objetos en él, para poner en evidencia la falta de comprensión del concepto berkeleyano de idea y del concepto filosófico de materia que Berkeley niega, por lo cual es necesario aclararlos. Por ello, en el segundo capítulo serán aclarados los conceptos centrales de la filosofía de Berkeley y su vocabulario técnico, y en oposición a aquella malinterpretación, se explicará cuál es el verdadero sentido de su inmaterialismo con base en argumentos y en la evidencia textual de sus obras, concluyendo que no hay ningún problema en admitir la existencia de ideas materiales, como lo hay, en cambio, con la malinterpretación mencionada, que es contraria a su filosofía anti-escéptica y anti-representacionalista, así como al sentido común con el cual esta se corresponde.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Investments on multimedia technology enable us to store many more reflections of the real world in digital world as videos. By recording videos about real world entities, we carry a lot of information to the digital world directly. In order to store and efficiently query this information, a video database system (VDBS) is necessary. In this thesis work, we propose a structural, event based and multimodal (SEBM) video data model for VDBSs. SEBM video data model supports three different modalities that are visual, auditory and textual modalities and we propose that we can dissolve these three modalities with a single SEBM video data model. This proposal is supported by the interpretation of the video data by human. Hence we can answer the content based, spatio-temporal and fuzzy queries of the user more easily, since we store the video data as the way that s/he interprets the real world data. We follow divide and conquer technique when answering very complicated queries. We have implemented the SEBM video data model in a Java based system that uses XML for representing the SEBM data model and Berkeley XML DBMS for storing the data based on the SEBM prototype system.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 354-392).

The basis of my work represents a research focused on the problematic of native XML databases. The main goal is to draw comparison between the selected database systems in a sphere of user control and management of XML data. Database products are tested via XMark benchmark test using its XQuery queries and testing XML data. Final comparisons and recommendations for use are based on the concluding evaluation and findings. The results of research may improve orientation in solved problematics. They could help with the selection of a suitable database product to store XML data.

This diploma thesis aims at design and implementation of I:ZI Repository application. I:ZI Repository application provides management of data mining tasks and theirs results repository and functions for search in this repository. I:ZI Repository is a REST API build on top of Java EE technology, Berkeley XML database is used for storing data mining tasks. I:ZI Repository application was created based on XQuery search application. The application has completely new structure compared to XQuery search application, all functionality of XQuery search application is present in I:ZI Repository application. Possibilities of using more general search query was added into I:ZI Repository application as well as fuzzy approaches for searching and possibility of clustering search results. Enhanced logging of application activities aimed at logging incoming search queries and outgoing search results is a part of implementation. Results of application testing are included as well.

This dissertation examines the philosophical and spiritual beliefs that underpin William Blake’s account of the imagination, his objections to empiricism and his understanding of poetic language. It begins by considering these beliefs in relation to the idealist principles of George Berkeley as a means of illustrating Blake’s own objections to the empiricism of John Locke. The philosophies of Locke and Berkeley were popular in Blake’s society and their philosophical positions were well known to him. Blake and Berkeley are aligned against Locke’s belief in an objective world composed of matter, and his theory of abstract ideas. Both reject Locke’s principles by affirming the primacy of the perceiving subject. However, Blake disagrees with Berkeley’s theologically traditional understanding of God. He views perception as an act of artistic creation and believes that spiritual divinity is contained within and is intrinsic to man’s human form. This account of human perception as the creative act of an immanent divinity is further elucidated through a comparison with the twentieth-century existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty examines human experience as the functioning of an embodied consciousness in a shared life-world. While Merleau-Ponty does not make any reference to a spiritual deity, his understanding of experience offers a link between Berkeley’s criticisms of Locke and Blake’s own objections to empiricism. Through a comparative examination of Blake and Merleau-Ponty, the imagination is revealed to be the creative or formative consciousness that proceeds from the integrated mind-body complex of the “Divine Body” or “human form divine”. This embodied existence locates the perceiving self in a dynamic physical landscape that is shared with other embodied consciousnesses. It is this communal or intersubjective interaction between self and other that constitutes the experienced world. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the chiasm and his notion of flesh, discussed in The Visible and the Invisible, are applied to Blake in order to elucidate his belief in poetic vision and the constitutive power of language. The form and function of language are compared with that of the body, because both bring the individual experience of a perceiving subject into being in the world and facilitate the reciprocal exchange between the self and other. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Blake characterises the body and language as the living media of the imagination, which facilitate a creative exchange between a perceiving self and a shared life-world.

My dissertation examines mass movement and dancing choruses as forms that proliferated across national, political, and artistic boundaries during the interwar period. Bringing together diverse professional and amateur dance practices such as German movement choirs, American and Soviet pageantry, Busby Berkeley films, and early Martha Graham, I analyze how concepts of unity, precision, and futurity operated within the shared mass movement aesthetics but divergent politics of the United States, Germany, and Soviet Russia. While these forms have been examined by dance scholars as individual phenomena or in their national settings, there has been no full-length comparative study that encompasses this range of forms of dance and national and political ideologies. I argue that form does not predetermine a politics; rather, forms gain political significance through use and interpretation by artists and spectators with political and ideological perspectives—sometimes overt, sometimes implicit. Furthermore, the relationship among the individuals within a group and whether and how they relate to a leader is indicative of how the group participates in politics. I examine the development of German movement choirs and their association with political movements in Weimar and Nazi Germany; I pay special attention to the leftist movement choir activity of Martin Gleisner and Jenny Gertz, figures not well-known in English-language scholarship. I compare Soviet mass spectacles and American leftist dance, both of which were influenced by the Pageantry Movement, and argue that the artists’ political relation to the state impacted what kinds of futurity they could imagine. To argue that the precision chorus line was a site that produced and contested ideals of American womanhood, I bring together the Radio City Rockettes, the chorus in the all-Black film Harlem is Heaven (1932), and Busby Berkeley’s Dames (1934). Finally, I analyze Martha Graham’s all-female 1930s company alongside her political work Chronicle (1936) to discover connections between the company’s social visions and how the choreographed work implicated spectators in a collective future. My project contributes to the dance historical field by bringing together a broad range of artistic and cultural phenomena that are more often found within their national or genre boundaries. By connecting these sites of inquiry through archival research and analysis of textual and visual materials, I show that the political identity of a mass or chorus develops from the particular way that the individuals within the group relate to one another, to any leader present or imagined, and to the constituted outside of the group. In making these arguments, I seek to make dance history part of a larger social history of aesthetics and politics.

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