VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Multilingual Education in Classrooms with Multiple Mother Tongues: A Case Study of Pedagogical Possibilities
Keywords: Minority Language Education
Multilingual Education

This dissertation describes a collaborative action research project undertaken with Grades 1 and 2 children and parents from two Adivasi communities in a multiple-language classroom in a remote area of Odisha, India. The children came from Santali, Ho, and Odia home language backgrounds but were taught in Odia, the dominant state language. Classroom interactions were observed over a 7-month period in order to understand how students and teachers negotiated the teaching of academic content and initial reading skills. The study built on the extensive research that has emerged in recent years supporting mother-tongue based multilingual education (MTBMLE) in countries as diverse as Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines. These studies have provided evidence for cross-linguistic interdependence and transfer of conceptual and academic skills across languages. However, these initiatives were implemented in contexts of linguistic homogeneity involving children from a single mother tongue, whereas the majority of the classrooms in Odisha have children from multiple linguistic backgrounds. In addition to classroom observations, data were gathered by means of interviews with eight parents, two teachers, and five students. These interviews took place both before and after the creation by parents of a multilingual children’s book in Ho, Santali, and Odia. The interviews with parents and teachers prior to the creation of the book focused on participants’ own educational experiences, their linguistic identities, and their views on medium of instruction in education. The interviews after the community book creation project focused on these issues and how participants’ perspectives were affected by the inclusion of the two Adivasi languages in the book and in classroom instruction. The student interviews were conducted after the book was used within the classroom and focused on the impact of this initiative on their attitudes towards their home languages and the dominant school language. The findings of the study suggest a positive impact of a community created multilingual storybook on the parents, the students and the community. The project demonstrated that the multilingual repertoires of parents can be used as a powerful resource for implementing multilingual education in linguistically diverse Adivasi contexts.
The Epigenome through the Lens of the Transcriptome and How it Regulates Tumour Development in Cancer
Keywords: Cancer
Computational biology
Epigenomics
Genomics
HPV
Machine learning

Battling complex human disease requires deep understanding of the disease etiology at the molecular level. Recent international collaborations provide a multitude of datasets assessing changes in DNA at the single-nucleotide resolution, chemical modifications such as cytosine methylation, protein binding to DNA such as transcription factors (TFs), and gene expression for a variety of patient samples and cell lines. Getting the most out of these datasets, however, requires methods which address technical difficulties and provide valuable biological insights. Assessing cytosine methylation through sequencing or arrays, to date, remains the most widely used assay for investigating the epigenome. The experimental procedure, however, changes the nature of the DNA assembly that the sequencing reads could map to. In this dissertation, I will propose a solution and provide publicly available datasets to allow researchers use DNA methylation assessments properly. Identifying TF binding sites remains an important challenge in epigenomics. The available assays, such as ChIP-seq, however, require a large amount of cells not always available from patient tissues. For decades, researchers have relied on the sequence preference of TFs instead of directly assessing TF binding. In this dissertation, I will show that relying solely on TF sequence preference will bring many false negative findings as well as previously reported false positive findings (futility theorem). I propose a solution, Virtual ChIP-seq. To predict TF binding, Virtual ChIP-seq uses as input the data of two assays which require only minimal tissue: RNA-seq and ATAC-seq. These assays assess the transcriptome and the accessible chromatin, respectively. For certain TFs, Virtual ChIP-seq predicts cell-type–specific DNA binding with high accuracy. I provide predictions of Virtual ChIP-seq for binding of 36 TFs in 31 human tissue types as a public resource. In the last part of this dissertation, I investigate the transcriptome and epigenome in a specific group of tumours: squamous cell carcinomas infected with human papillomavirus (HPV). I found that HPV integration into the host genome modifies the local host epigenome and transcriptome, possibly because of a conserved CTCF binding site within its 8 kbp genome. This dissertation introduces publicly available tools that allow the research community better assess the epigenome and it also enhances our understanding of how HPV contributes to tumourigenesis.
Symphony No. 2
Keywords: Chorale
Humoresque
Kundalini
Mode
Persian
Symphony

Symphony No. 2 by Daniel Mehdizadeh Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition Graduate Department of Music University of Toronto © Copyright by Daniel Mehdizadeh 2020. Abstract Texture: One aspect of my approach is concerned with canonic layering of the various instruments and voices; I have explored these techniques throughout my doctoral degree and have further developed this method of layering (of motives and sustained notes) to create supporting texture throughout the symphony. Orchestration: I have abstained from the use of extended techniques to effectively showcase my ability to write concisely for the standard symphony orchestra. I have aimed for balance and clarity. This includes a clear approach to the canonic textures. Rhythmic development: One aspect of my music is to make use of ostinati patterns. I have been working toward breaking away from such habits, and to explore a continuous strain of rhythmic variation and development. I believe that this avoidance of ostinati grants me rhythmic independence. This symphony represents my attempt to synthesize these opposing rhythmic devices. Harmony: I have utilized my synthetic mode (the multi-tonic1 mode) along with Western traditional harmony, to ????nd a balance and a common-ground between the two. My multi-tonic mode has further set grounds for motivic variation, as well as harmonic structure. Motivic development: My dissertation utilizes a uni????ed motivic development throughout the entirety of the symphony. This includes secondary motives and “new” ideas all of which have been derived from the initial motif, which is rather simple and child-like in nature. Motivic contrast is often initially presented in a traditionally Western art music fashion and can subsequently be restated in the light of my mode. Form: This symphony is in 3 movements; fast-slow-fast. Within each movement the approach of through-composed has been employed. 1 Mehdizadeh, Daniel. (2018). Modality in Mehdizadeh. DMA Research Paper 2 of 2, submitted as partial ful????llment of the DMA in Composition Comprehensive Examinations, University of Toronto.
Significance of Expression of Immunomodulatory B7 Family Members B7-H3 and B7-H4 in Epithelial Ovarian Cancer
Keywords: B7 family
epithelial ovarian cancer
tumor microenvironment

Thus far, ovarian cancer has had low response rates to immunotherapy despite strong evidence that the immune system is able to mount an anti-tumor response. Further investigation into the tumor microenvironment of epithelial ovarian cancer will facilitate the development of more effective immunotherapies. This thesis focuses on characterizing the tumor immune microenvironment using flow cytometry, histology, and genomic analyses. I have focused on investigating the expression patterns of B7-H3 and B7-H4, two members of the B7 family of immunomodulatory proteins as these molecules are being investigated as potential immunotherapeutic targets. In Chapter III of this thesis, it was found that B7-H3 was commonly expressed on the cell surface of tumor, stromal, and immune cells. Stromal cells expressed higher levels of B7-H3 than tumor cells, and this differential expression could be used to identify tumor and stromal cells by flow cytometry. The tumor-to-stroma ratio was calculated using differential B7-H3 expression and differences in the immune infiltrate associated with tumor-stroma ratio were assessed. A higher tumor-to-stroma ratio was associated with greater proportions of CD8+ T cells expressing high levels of PD-1, higher CD16 expression on monocytes, and higher PD-L1 expression on antigen-presenting cells. In Chapter IV of this thesis, B7-H4 expression in epithelial ovarian cancer was evaluated. Unlike B7-H3, B7-H4 expression was restricted to the tumor cell compartment and was not expressed by stromal cells. While B7-H4 was frequently expressed in the tumor cell cytoplasm, membrane-bound expression was less frequent. Genomic analyses revealed that B7-H4 expression was strongly correlated with expression of CXCL17, a monocyte chemoattractant. Further, tumors with high B7-H4 expression had higher frequencies of infiltrating APCs but did not have increased frequencies of infiltrating T or B cells. This work provides valuable information about the expression patterns of B7-H3 and B7-H4 on the tumor, stromal, and immune cells in epithelial ovarian cancer. We have performed a comprehensive analysis of the immune infiltrate in relation to expression of B7-H4 or the tumor-to-stroma ratio of tumors. Taken together, this detail of the tumor immune microenvironment provides context that can inform the potential therapeutic uses of B7-H3 and B7-H4 targeting agents in ovarian cancer.
The Intellective Touch: A Phenomenology of Digital Modernism
Keywords: Digital Culture
Marshall McLuhan
Media Ecology
Modernist Aesthetics
Phenomenology

This dissertation re-examines the methods of existential phenomenology and media ecology by situating both within the aesthetics of “digital modernism,” which, following the media scholar Marshall McLuhan, I employ as an “anti-environment” to reveal the psychic and sensory attitudes engendered by the digital media environment. Drawing on McLuhan’s reading of the cultural environment constituted by electric media as – what the media ecologist Walter Ong famously labeled – “secondary orality,” I argue that the environment constituted by digital media is more profitably understood as “secondary literacy,” a term that Ong employed but did not develop. In contrast to the “secondary orality” of the electric environment, which, according to both Ong and McLuhan, retrieves the psychic attitudes associated with pre-literate tribalism, I characterize the “secondary literacy” of the digital environment as retrieving the psychic attitudes associated with ancient Greek and medieval manuscript literacy. Through contextualizing the interpretive attitudes of Husserl’s phenomenology and McLuhan’s media ecology within the primary literacy of medieval manuscript culture, I argue that both may function as important theoretical lenses, through which the attitudes of digital secondary literacy can be uncovered. On the basis of this theoretical integration, through which I analyze the artistic work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Christopher Alexander, and Anton Webern, I re-evaluate McLuhan’s use of modernist aesthetics as an anti-environment to the electric environment so as to position modernist aesthetics as an anti-environment to the digital environment.
'Bringing Visibility to Disability': Rethinking Childhood Disability Online
Keywords: computer mediated communication
critical disability studies
disability
identity
paediatric rehabilitation
video-sharing

Digitally mediated social environments have become important stages for the negotiation of everyday life, and have fundamentally changed the way people interact, communicate, and perform identity. This qualitative study employed a case study methodology to critically explore how disabled youth can use new media technologies as platforms for constructing and communicating identity. Oriented by Goffman’s dramaturgy and critical disability studies, the investigation looked at videos that were posted on a disability-specific video sharing site between 2010 and 2014. The institutional discourses underpinning the website were explored using a frame analysis of a subset of 20 videos created for promotional purposes by the sponsoring institution or designated as winning entries in an annual contest. A critical discourse analysis considered the performative responses of disabled youths in 30 other videos that provided autobiographical, first-person accounts and in-depth interviews conducted with one of the video creators. The objectives were: i) to illuminate how disabled youths’ presentations of self both shape and are shaped by dominant knowledge and power structures regarding disability and ability, and ii) to critically explore the multiple effects of video sharing technologies for shaping understandings of disability in the public sphere. The findings highlighted how disabled youth managed an idealized impression of self through practices that reproduced, resisted, or disrupted dominant disability and ableist discourses. While the videos exposed how dominant discourses may be internalized by youth, they also legitimized and brought visibility to alternate ways of being that were unconstrained by normative ideals or underpinned by binary constructions of disability/ability. Video sharing can give youth who are frequently unheard an opportunity to provide an account of self in the public domain that asserts their existence and value in ways that might not be possible in face-to-face interactions. The findings suggest that online interactional spaces can play a role in shaping understanding about disability, and can offer disabled youth a means to influence interactions and understandings about themselves, their bodies, and their worlds.
Innovation and Commercial Information: A Delicate Balance
Keywords: "confidential information"
"employment law"
"trade secrets"

Canadian law concerning trade secrets and confidential information fosters innovation by achieving a delicate balance between employer and employee interests. The rich doctrinal landscape allows for a flexible approach to the scope of protection together with a thoughtful analysis of the underlying relational expectations of the parties. The balance of interests achieved fosters innovation by protecting commercial information while concurrently facilitating labour mobility. Criminal legislation, which transfers the cost of prosecution to the state, eliminates some subtleties of case law and threatens severe sanctions, would dampen innovation by upsetting the balance of interests in favour of employer-plaintiffs. This effect has been illustrated by empirical studies of the impact of fluctuating American legal protection of commercial information on employee mobility and innovation. Until such time as there is clear evidence that civil remedies are inadequate to protect the socio-economic order of Canada, the urge to invoke criminal sanctions should be rejected.
Courageous Leadership for Social Justice: Perceptions and Experiences of Veteran School Leaders
Keywords: Courage
Educational Leadership
Social Justice

Abstract The inscription of courageous social justice practice in educational leadership is deeply embedded in the everyday struggle to advance just education and educational spaces. Despite the robust and controversial history of education, there is little research pertaining to the role of courage. This dearth is perplexing in light of the many socially just-minded school leaders who have persistently enacted numerous overt and discreet forms of social justice activism to shape the quality of education in an unsettling social order. A critical constructivist theoretical approach was used to explore how educational leaders employ courage to promote social justice. Based on qualitative interviews with 12 educational leaders, this research explores the perspectives of individuals who see courage as an indispensable value in their professional careers. Leaders’ approaches to social justice, their understandings of courage, the role of courage in their pursuit of socially just endeavours and the challenges which participants believe enmesh the assignment of leading courageously for social justice are addressed. Educational leaders’ acts of courage for social justice are informed by four interrelated themes: 1) Social Justice as a Particular Social Ideal, 2) The Intentional Nature of Everyday Courage, 3) The Emboldening Influence of Courage in Leadership and 4) Challenges to Employing Courage in School Leadership for Social Justice. Specific challenges are: Realities Surrounding Bureaucratic and Relational Tensions, Issues of Governing Authority, Issues of Trust, Issues of Conversational Incivility and Fear to Act on New Insights. In response to the afore-mentioned aspects, participants appeal to new school leaders to cultivate a courageous mindset. The appeal includes: 1) Resisting the Exceptionality Impulse, 2) Resisting Retreat and the Passion for Self-Distrust, 3) Resisting Uninformed (Gut) Leadership and 4) Being Faithful to the Bigger Picture. Keywords: Educational Leadership, Social Justice, Courage
Assisting with API Design through Reusing Design Knowledge
Keywords: Application Programming Interfaces
Automated Software Design
Knowledge Bases
Non-Functional Requirements
Recommender Systems
Software Architecture

With the rise in software ecosystem initiatives, developing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has become an increasingly common practice. One main concern in developing APIs is that they expose back-end systems and data towards clients. This exposure threatens critical non-functional requirements, such as security of the back-end systems, performance of the provided services, and privacy of the communications with clients. Although dealing with non-functional requirements during software design has been long studied, there is still no framework to specifically assist software developers with addressing these requirements in APIs. In this thesis, we introduce Rational API Designer (RAPID), an assistant that provides consultation about designing non-functional requirements in the architecture of APIs. We have equipped RAPID with a broad range of expert knowledge about API design, systematically collected and extracted from the literature. The API design knowledge has been encoded as a set of 156 catalogues using the Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) language, a multi-valued logic commonly used for describing non-functional and functional requirements of software systems. RAPID uses the API design catalogues in a step-wise refinement and selection procedure to arrive from a given requirement, to a set of design alternatives, to a final suggestion for a given API design specification. Seven well-experienced developers have blindly evaluated accuracy of RAPID’s consultations over seven different cases of API design and on providing design guidelines for thirty design questions. The results of evaluation show that RAPID’s recommendations meet acceptable standards of the majority of the evaluators 73.3% of the time. Moreover, analysis of evaluators’ comments suggests that more than one-third of the unacceptable ratings (34%) given to RAPID’s answers are due to valid but incomplete design guidelines. We thus expect that the accuracy of the consultations will increase as RAPID’s knowledge of API design is extended and refined. Software developers can use RAPID to receive design suggestions generated through reusing the knowledge of experts, or to add their own knowledge of API design to RAPID for future use of their peers.
Characterization of Novel Substrates of the Tankyrase and RNF146 Destruction Complex and Mechanisms of its Regulation
Keywords: ADP-Ribosylation
Poly-ADP-Ribose Polymerases
post-translational modification
Tankyrase

Poly-ADP-ribose is a post-translational modification that was first described over 50 years ago as a polymer derived from nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide or NAD. Since then, a family of 17 enzymes responsible for generating Poly-ADP-ribosylation or PARylation post translational modification has been identified and characterized. A unique member of this family of enzymes, called Poly-ADP-ribose Polymerases (PARPs), are Tankyrases. There are two mammalian Tankyrases, Tankyrase 1 and 2, whose domain organization include ankyrin repeat clusters which mediate enzyme-substrate interactions and a SAM domain which regulates oligomerization of Tankyrase into large macromolecular complexes. Tankyrases bind to proteins through a ‘RxxxxG’ peptide motif which facilities these proteins to undergo PARylation. A subset of Tankyrase substrates are recognized by an E3 ligase, RNF146, which facilities protein degradation through PARylation dependent ubiquitylation. The studies summarized in this thesis have focused on the identification of new proteins targets involved in the Tankyrase:RNF146 degradation pathway and investigates how Tankyrase PARylation is regulated through FIH dependent hydroxylation. I have identified SH3BP5 and SH3BP5L as new Tankyrase substrates that are targets of RNF146. I have shown that both substrates are guanine exchange factors for the small GTPase Rab11a. I have defined the minimal catalytic core of SH3BP5/L and shown it to be composed of a novel two α-helix GEF domain. My work has demonstrated that SH3BP5 and SH3BP5L are both required for optimal activation of Rab11a in epithelial cells during lumenogenesis and that their activities are repressed by Tankyrase-mediated PARylation. RNF146 regulates Rab11a activity by controlling Tankyrase protein abundance, marking the first time that RNF146 has been described as antagonistic towards Tankyrase function. I have demonstrated that FIH-mediated hydroxylation of Tankyrase affects the ability of substrates to bind to the ankyrin repeat clusters and inhibits autoPARylation and substrate PARylation yet does not affect protein degradation. Since PARylation dependant degradation is unaffected, it suggests that hydroxylation could affect the degradation independent functions of Tankyrase.
The Shock and Awe of the Real: Political Performance and the War on Terror
Keywords: Afghanistan War
Iraq War
Islamophobia
Performance Studies
Theatre Studies
War on Terror

This dissertation offers a transnational study of theatre and performance that responded to the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond. Looking at work by artists primarily from Arab and Middle Eastern diasporas working in the US, UK, Canada, and Europe, the study examines how modes of performance in live art, documentary theatre, and participatory performance respond to and comment on the power imbalances, racial formations, and political injustices of these conflicts. Many of these performances are characterized by a deliberate blurring of the distinctions between performance and reality. This has meant that playwrights crafted scripts from the real words of soldiers instead of writing plays; performance artists harmed their real bodies, replicating the violence of war; actors performed in public space; and media artists used new technology to connect audiences to real warzones. This embrace of the real contrasts with postmodern suspicion of hyper-reality—which characterized much political performance in the 1990s—and marks a shift in understandings of the relationship between performance and the real. These strategies allowed artists to contend with the way that war today is also a multimedia attack on the way that reality is constructed and perceived. The dissertation traces the historical antecedents of these aesthetics in postmodern criticism of prior generations of political performance and shows how these artists struggled to discover new aesthetic strategies to criticize war, racism, and violence.