VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Private Knowledge, Public Tensions: Theory Commitment in Postwar American Linguistics
Keywords: linguistics
history of science

Propelled by a desire to understand natural language, American linguists of the postwar period brought the tools of the era to bear on the study of syntax: computer science, math- ematical graph theory, and even Cold War strategy. Three syntactic theories were enun- ciated, each trying to untangle the mysteries of our ability to form and use sentences. These theories interacted on a nearly daily basis, inﬂuencing and challenging each other through the s. By the end of the decade, one had established clear dominance: Noam Chomsky’s theory, developed at . Combining contemporary history of science tools with linguistics-speciﬁc concepts, this study explores the dynamics of the syntactic theory- choice debates from  to . I argue that these debates can only be fully understood through a conﬂuence of four themes: explanation, pedagogy, knowledge transmission, and lay linguistics. Together, these themes explain how linguists selected and evaluated theories, how students were trained to think about and use syntax, how ideas and people spread across the United States, and how academic theories played out in peripheral disci- plines. They also resolve the central paradox running through this study: how did Noam Chomsky’s theory – a theory whose proponents valued the private transmission of un- derground knowledge and actively prevented outsiders from accessing research – spread across the country and gain a majority of supporters? By paying particular attention to the ideas and problems which mattered to the linguists of the time, this study presents a critical and novel history of postwar American linguistics. In doing so, it rectiﬁes the lack of a balanced, historically-informed account of the discipline. What little literature exists on the history of syntax in America bears the imprint of Whig interpretations: it omits the rival syntactic theories which competed with Chomsky’s theory, the technical linguistics debates of the period, and pedagogy and the training of young linguists. Most impor- tantly, it cannot account for the paradox of private knowledge. This study contributes to our historical understanding by both providing the ﬁrst history of science based investiga- tion of postwar American syntax and showcasing a powerful way of investigating theory development, theory choice, and theory change.
Gait and Working Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease, Aging and Small Vessel Cerebrovascular Disease
Keywords: Alzheimer's Disease
aging
Gait
working memory
dual-tasking
small-vessel disease
subcortical hyperintensities
White Matter disease
walking
treadmill
overground
MRI

This thesis first explored the effects of concurrent spatial attention and working memory task performance on over-ground gait in healthy young and older adults. It then compared over-ground gait parameters and working memory performance in mild Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and normal controls (NC) and investigated costs of dual-tasking on working memory performance and cadence during treadmill walking at preferred walking speed in the two groups. Furthermore, it explored these differences in AD and NC groups in relation to their subcortical hyperintensities (SH) that were rated using standardized scales on MRI. Reaction times and accuracy on working memory performance measures were collected under single and dual task conditions. Over-ground gait parameters were measured on an automated walkway. Costs of dual-tasking on gait parameters and working memory performance were measured at a constant velocity on a treadmill. The hypotheses that working memory influences gait performance and that a higher SH burden negatively influences over-ground gait and costs of dual-task conditions, were supported in a series of experiments. Gait slowed down while performing working memory and spatial attention tasks in young and older adults. Patients with mild AD, compared to NC, had a slower gait velocity, shorter stride length and lower cadence on the walkway. When the two groups were subdivided into higher and lower SH groups based on their median SH score, the NC group with lower SH burden walked significantly faster with a higher cadence and a longer stride length than the other three groups. Lastly, a higher SH burden negatively influenced working memory performance in NC while in mild AD patients, it had negative influences on adaptive changes in gait while dual-tasking. These results suggest that, in dual-task condition, SH interfere with processing speed in NC and on gait in AD. These findings provide new insights in to tradeoffs during dual tasking in relation to cerebrovascular disease. This has ecological implications because of the prevalence of small vessel disease in aging and dementia, may impact on predicting falls in AD.
Existence of Critical Points for the Ginzburg-Landau Functional on Riemannian Manifolds
Keywords: partial differential equations
Ginzburg-Landau

In this dissertation, we employ variational methods to obtain a new existence result for solutions of a Ginzburg-Landau type equation on a Riemannian manifold. We prove that if N is a compact, orientable 3-dimensional Riemannian manifold without boundary and γ is a simple, smooth, connected, closed geodesic in N satisfying a natural nondegeneracy condition, then for every ε > 0 sufficiently small, ∃ a critical point uε ∈ H1( N; [special characters omitted]) of the Ginzburg-Landau functional [special characters omitted] and these critical points have the property that Eε(uε) → length(γ) as ε → 0. To accomplish this, we appeal to a recent general asymptotic minmax theorem which basically says that if Eε Γ-converges to E (not necessarily defined on the same Banach space as Eε), v is a saddle point of E and some additional mild hypotheses are met, then there exists ε 0 > 0 such that for every ε ∈ (0, ε0), Eε possesses a critical point u ε and limε→0 Eε (uε) = E( v). Typically, E is only lower semicontinuous, therefore a suitable notion of saddle point is needed. Using known results on [special characters omitted], we show the Ginzburg-Landau functional E ε defined above Γ-converges to a functional E which can be thought of as measuring the arclength of a limiting singular set. Also, we verify using regularity theory for almost-minimal currents that γ is a saddle point of E in an appropriate sense.
Empirical Essays on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Welfare
Keywords: Poverty
Inequality
Social Welfare

This thesis consists of three empirical chapters related to distributional outcomes, such as poverty and inequality, in three different contexts. Chapter 1 outlines a class of statistical procedures that permit testing of a broad range of multidimensional stochastic dominance hypotheses. We apply the procedures to data on income and leisure hours for individuals in Germany, the UK, and the USA. We find that no country first-order stochastically dominates the others in both dimensions for all years of comparison. Furthermore, while in general the USA stochastically dominates Germany and the UK with respect to income, in most periods Germany stochastically dominates with respect to leisure hours. Finally, we find evidence that bivariate poverty is lower in Germany than in either the UK or the USA. On the other hand, poverty comparisons between the UK and the USA are sensitive to the subpopulation of individuals considered. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the evolution of income inequality in Vietnam between 1993 and 2006. We construct consistent estimates of annual household income using five nationally representative household surveys. Our main finding is that Vietnam’s rapid growth was accompanied by a reduction in inequality between 1993 and 2002 and an unchanged level of inequality between 2002 and 2006. We find that strong growth in employment income and robust growth of cropping income played an important role in decreasing rural inequality, while the growth of wage income and the stagnation of household business income similarly contributed to the reduction in urban inequality. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of the 2001 U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement on provincial poverty level in Vietnam. My main finding is that provinces that were more exposed to the U.S. tariff cuts experienced faster decreases in poverty between 2002 and 2004. I subsequently explore three labour market channels from the trade agreement to poverty alleviation. Provinces that were more exposed to the tariff cuts experienced (1) increases in provincial wage premiums for low-skilled workers, (2) faster movement into wage and salaried jobs for low-skilled workers, and (3) more rapid job growth in formal enterprises.
Recasting Troy in Fifth-century Attic Tragedy
Keywords: Greek Tragedy
Troy
Trojan War
Identity
Trojan Women

This thesis examines the characterization of Trojans in fifth-century Attic tragedy with a particular focus on their ability to shed light on the contemporary Athenian sense of identity. I argue against the notion that Trojans are displaced Persians, for they maintain a strong connection to their mythological heritage. The evidence I present draws on fifth-century Attic tragedies but also on the Iliad, iconography, and fragmentary tragedies. My discussion of passages from the Iliad creates a context for interpreting Trojan characters in fifth-century tragedy by establishing the tradition that tragedians could draw on as the background against which to set their Trojan characters. The iconographic evidence similarly adds depth to the project by stepping away from a textual focus to create a wider understanding of how Trojans were visually conceptualized. The fragmentary tragedies provide a tantalizing glimpse into the portrayal of Trojan men, who are otherwise almost entirely absent from tragedies. As a result, my discussion of tragedy focuses on Trojan women, and I suggest that they are representatives of an idealized culture designed to evoke an idealized sense of Athenian cultural identity. I examine Euripides’ Andromache to compare the portrayal of Spartans, contemporary fifth-century Athenian enemies, with that of Trojans to demonstrate the differences between them. Following that, I address the gendered nature of the aftermath of the Trojan War by focusing on one particularly feminine theme in each of three plays: exchange in Andromache, nostalgia in Trojan Women, and mourning in Hecuba. Finally, I discuss the role played by class in considering Trojan characters. Only Euripides’ Orestes presents a (male) character who was a slave in Troy before the fall, and this provides an excellent opportunity to contrast the treatment of that character with the treatment of the royal Trojan women. The purpose of this examination of Trojan characters is to demonstrate that there was an intellectual curiosity about them and their role in contemporary society. I argue in favour of a sympathetic treatment of Trojan characters, or more specifically, against the notion of a “Phrygianization of Troy,” and restore to the Trojans their own unique identity.
Stylizing Lives: Selected Discourses in Instrumental Music Education
Keywords: music education
discourse
Foucault
philosophy
instrumental music
band

As a social practice, being part of the school band stylizes our lives—individually and collectively. The pedagogical band world, a world made up primarily of school and university wind bands, is in many ways similar to the world of community/civic bands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on an examination of professional discourses, however, I argue that processes of institutionalization have altered the nature of music making via band participation. The pedagogical band world, like other bounded worlds, operates according to what Michel Foucault calls “regimes of truth”—the regulative norms that delimit what can be said and done. The specific ways in which the subject is fashioned, in other words, are a function of the truths we endorse about ourselves and, in the present case, about music making. Studying the discourses in the disciplinary practice of large ensemble (band) music making is of paramount importance for music educators to better understand the effects of disciplinary practices. Employing a conceptual framework based on the work of Michel Foucault, the following question guided this inquiry: “What ‘regimes of truth’ are fashioned in school music (bands) discourse, how did they come to be, and what are their potential effects on the subject?” Methods from the field of corpus linguistics were used to concordance the journal of the Canadian Band Association, 1978-2008. Concordance lists were used to introspectively examine each occurrence (approximately 25,000 in total) of a downsampled set of words related to subject formation in order to generate statements making truth claims. While there is no mistaking that a primary goal in music education discourse is to foster a “love of music,” this investigation suggests the kind of musicality fashioned in today’s pedagogical discourse has become a relationship to music (based on the study of music; music as something to know) rather than the kind of relationship fashioned in band participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which I describe as a relationship with music (music as something to do).
Governing Immunization in Canada
Keywords: public health
public policy
immunization
Canada

Modern immunization’s role in health systems is threefold: it is simultaneously a pharmaceutical product, a personal health care intervention, and a public health measure, each constituting a distinct, yet overlapping set of governance arrangements. This thesis examines immunization policy change and governance at the federal-provincial interface over the last decade (1997-2008) in Canada, situated against broader trends in public policy and public health. The research is based upon a case study design and a discursive approach to policy analysis, using documentary sources, supplemented with archival information, direct observations, and decision-maker informants. Over time, structures and instruments used to deal with immunization at the federal-provincial interface have undergone adaptation. New decision-making structures include the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Pan-Canadian Public Health Network; new instruments include the National Immunization Strategy, accompanied by targeted federal funding. Consistent with other sectors, however, the decade also witnessed an ongoing emphasis on fiscal prudence, risk-based regulation, and informal networks to accomplish policy goals. This thesis concludes that effective federal governance and lasting policy change for immunization requires resolution of two major tensions in the policy ideas underlying national processes. First, the interpretation of federal authority over matters of national concern remains ambiguous. While the National Immunization Strategy reflected dominant ideas around equitable access to vaccines and a broad conception of the federal sharing community, persistent gaps, particularly linking national-level decisions, financing, and delivery, have reinforced the existing notion of the appropriate degree of federal influence for immunization, rather than expanding it. Second, an increasing focus on personal security dimensions of immunization amid structural changes intended to address public security concerns is in tension with a situation that predisposes the state to avoid an unjust application of compulsory measures rather than to protect from harm those individuals who consent freely to immunization. Immunization in Canada requires a new paradigm that expands the notion of the state’s role in prevention as it applies to immunization, that addresses specific needs for protection in the life of the individual, and that reasserts the importance of strong, substantive, and sustained federal contributions to matters of national concern.
Stochastic Control of Time-varying Wireless Networks
Keywords: Wireless Networks
Control of Wireless Networks
Time-varying networks
Resource Scheduling
Rate allocation
Resource Allocation
Time-varying Channels
Cognitive Radio Networks
Dynamic Population

One critical step to successfully integrate wireless data networks to the high-speed wired backbone is the design of network control policies that efficiently utilize resources to provide Quality of Service (QoS) to the users in the integrated networks. Such a design has remained a challenge since wireless networks are time-varying in nature, not only in terms of user/packet arrivals but also in terms of physical channel conditions and access opportunities. In this thesis, we study the stochastic control of time-varying networks to design efficient scheduling and resource allocation policies. In particular, in Chapter 3, we focus on a broad class of control policies that work based on a pick-and-compare principle for networks with time-varying channels. By trading the throughput for complexity and memory requirement, these policies require less complexity compared to the well-investigated throughput-optimal Generalized Maximum Weight Matching (GMWM) policy and also require only linear-memory storage with the number of data-flows. Through Lyapunov analysis tools, we characterize the stability region and delay performance of the studied policies and show how they vary in response to the channel variations. In Chapter 4, we go into further detail and consider the problem of network control from a new perspective through which we carefully incorporate the time-efficiency of underlying scheduling algorithms. Specifically, we develop a policy that dynamically adjusts the time given to the available scheduling algorithms according to queue-backlog and channel correlations. We study the resulting stability region of developed policy and show that the region is at least as large as the one for any static policy. Finally, motivated by the current under-utilization of wireless spectrum, in Chapter 5, we investigate the control of cognitive radio networks as a special example of networks that provide time-varying access opportunities. We assume that users dynamically join and leave the network and may have different utility functions, or could collaborate for a common purpose. We develop a policy that performs joint admission and resource control and works for any user load, either inside or outside the capacity region. Through Lyapunov Optimization techniques, we show that the developed policy can achieve a utility performance arbitrarily close to the optimality with a tradeoff in the average service delay of admitted users.
Sex and Cyberspace: The Internet in the Sexual Lives of Men Who Have Sex With Men
Keywords: HIV/AIDS
Internet
HIV prevention
sexual risk

The Men, Internet, and Sex with Men Study was a qualitative inquiry into how men who have sex with men (MSM) use the Internet in their sexual lives. The study responds to calls for HIV prevention to become more resonant with men’s online experiences. Men’s use of the Internet in their sexual lives was explored through structural interactionist and social risk theories. The study was a focused ethnography, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 23 MSM from the Greater Toronto Area. The sample included men aged 20 to 61, from a variety of sexual orientations (gay, bisexual, and heterosexual) and HIV statuses. Data analysis focused on the contextual aspects of men’s use of the Internet for sexual purposes and their sexual risk behaviour. This study focused on how men’s use of the Internet for sexual purposes was situated within and influenced by the contexts of their use. The participants’ online experiences were socially-situated from the outset: men saw the Internet as a “solution” to challenges in their sexual lives; their online interactions were structured by online rules of engagement and discourse from the offline gay community; and their sexual risk behaviour was mediated by social context and sexual interactions. The participants’ stories revealed the existence of an online subculture for sex seeking. Men also talked about the links between their online and offline experiences, where the Internet played a role in developing their sexuality but could also foster isolation and addiction. The men emphasized the importance of online HIV prevention and offered suggestions on how prevention more generally might be improved. The Internet holds both promise and pitfalls for HIV prevention. The findings from this study underline the need for prevention efforts that focus on individual- and structural-level prevention which can respond to men’s experiences both online and offline.
Refactoring-based Requirements Refinement Towards Design
Keywords: Requirements Refactoring
Requirements Refinement
Requirements to Architecture
Architecting Requirements
Requirements to Design
Software Architecture
Requirements Engineering
Software Engineering

Building systems that satisfy the given requirements is a main goal of software engineering. The success of this process relies largely on the presence of an adequate architectural design. Traditional paradigms deal with requirements separately from design. Our empirical studies show that crossing the boundary between requirements and design is difficult, existing tools and methods for bridging the gap inadequate, and that software architects rely heavily on experience, prior solutions, and creativity. Current approaches in moving from requirements to design follow two schools. One is architecture-centric, focused on providing assistance to architects in reuse. The other is requirements-centric, and tends to extend established development frameworks and employ mappings to transition from requirements to architecture. Jackson indicates that clear understanding of requirements (the problem) is crucial to building useful systems, and that to evolve successfully, their design must reflect problem structure. Taylor et al. argue that design is the central activity in connecting requirements and architecture. Nonetheless, existing approaches either overlook underlying structure of requirements or design considerations. This dissertation presents a novel theory enabling requirements structuring and design analysis through requirements refinement and refactoring. The theory introduces a refinement process model operating on four abstraction levels, and a set of refactoring operators and algorithms. The method works in small, well-guided steps with visible progress. The theory provides a basis for designers to analyze and simplify requirement descriptions, remove redundancy, uncover dependencies, extract lower-level requirements, incorporate design concerns, and produce a system decomposition reflecting the underlying problem structure. A design built on top of this decomposition is better suited for evolution than one created without explicit structural analysis. The theory is validated on an industrial-sized project, wherein a suitable system decomposition is produced and a comparison made to a conventionally-devised solution. Examples demonstrate that the theory handles changes incrementally. It is explained how the theory addresses the existing challenges in going from requirements to design and supports fundamental software engineering principles. The method is assessed against common validation criteria. The approach is compared with prominent related work.