VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Using Autobiographical Narratives to Examine Successful and Unsuccessful Socialization Experiences
Keywords: Development
Narrative Analysis
Parenting
Socialization

The goal of socialization is to have children accept parental values while simultaneously integrating them into their own sense of self. Ultimately, successful socialization is marked by behaviours that are internally driven rather than externally controlled. Researchers studying this process have often relied on using questionnaires in an attempt to uncover which parental behaviours facilitate internalization. Findings have shown that children are more likely to internalize parental values when parents model positive values, comfort during times of distress, use inductive discipline in response to misbehavior, engage in appropriate discussions, and respond to reasonable requests. However, it has recently been suggested that qualitative measures, such as autobiographical narratives, are ideal for studying how life events have been processed. Autobiographical narratives provide insight into which features of socialization are recalled as significant. For this reason, autobiographical narratives were used in the current study. The primary goal was to determine if the ways individuals recall socialization experiences reflect what has already been established using more traditional methods. Several features of socialization were considered, including, whether some values occurred more often in successful experiences, whether learning occurred across a variety of different domains, and whether some components of domains lead to higher internalization than others. Further, combinations of domains were also investigated. Autobiographical narratives of 474 emerging adults were analyzed. Participants provided two narratives, 1) a time when their caregiver was successful at teaching them a value and 2) a time when their caregiver was unsuccessful at teaching them a value. A domains-of-socialization framework was used to conceptualize socialization. Although several findings aligned with previous research, when narratives were used as the outcome measure, some novel findings occurred. Notably, lessons that pertained to being grateful for what you have and where you came from occurred more in successful experiences compared to unsuccessful experiences. Also, learning through participation/observation alone was associated with higher meaning making than when participation was accompanied by a discussion. Finally, no unsuccessful socialization experiences were reported to occur through modeling; thus learning through observation alone seems to be an effective, yet subtle, socialization technique that frequently lead to value internalization.
Assessing Occupational Exposure to Flame Retardants and Plasticizers using Silicone Passive Samplers and other Measurement Methods
Keywords: Flame retardants
Occupational exposure
Plasticizers
Silicone passive samplers

Occupational exposure to the complex mixtures of semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs), including flame retardants (FRs) and plasticizers, used in personal care products and electronic and electrical equipment is a serious concern. This thesis documents occupational exposure to FRs and plasticizers in e-waste facilities and nail salons using silicone passive samplers and other measurement methods, including dust collection and active air sampling. The thesis advances the understanding of the use of silicone passive samplers for measuring SVOC exposure in personal exposure monitoring and assessment. Three silicone passive sampler configurations (brooches, wristbands and armbands) accumulated detectable amounts of FRs and plasticizers within a relatively short deployment time (~8 hours) in both e-waste and nail salon environments. Among these samplers, silicone brooches showed the strongest correlations with active air samplers for most compounds. The correlations between brooches and active air samplers were stronger in e-waste facilities than in nail salons. This thesis found that silicone brooches and wristbands can be useful for indicating internal exposure to SVOCs with relatively long biological half-lives, like decabromodiphenyl ether (BDE-209), but their uses for compounds with relatively short half-lives, like organophosphate esters (OPEs), is unclear. Overall, results suggest that silicone brooches and wristbands are valuable screening tools for qualitative exposure studies, but are not reliable for quantitative exposure measurement. The thesis contains the first reports of FR and plasticizer exposure at elevated levels in Canadian e-waste recycling facilities and nail salons. Higher exposures via air and dust to FRs were found in formal e-waste facilities in Ontario and Quebec compared to previous studies in formal and informal facilities across the globe. E-waste workers in an Ontario facility were exposed to FRs in respirable particles, raising concerns for worker health in e-waste environment. Exposure to some OPEs in nail salons at relatively high levels was an unexpected finding as these chemicals are known to be FRs and have not been reported to be used in personal care products. Results presented here call attention to FRs and plasticizers exposure among workers in e-waste facilities and nail salons where these chemicals are, largely, not addressed by current occupational exposure limits.
Conquering Creoles: Power, Transculturation, and the Limits of Empire in New Spain, 1521-1625
Keywords: Colonialism
Criollos
Empire
Mexico
New Spain
Transculturation

This dissertation examines conquering creole consciousness through the voluminous pastoral and ethnographic writings of Mota y Escobar (1546-1625), a first-generation elite criollo of Hispanic descent, who served as Bishop of Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia (1598-1607) and Tlaxcala-Puebla (1608-1625). His generation, the first of the conquistador descendants, believed themselves entitled to extend and naturalize conqueror power as a form of perpetually inheritable privilege, in order to continue the construction of empire and cement their own place within it. Mota y Escobar’s cohort enjoyed the returns of their parents’ and grandparents’ institutionalization of Hispanic domination but experienced the Crown’s efforts to claw back the mercedes (rewards) that undergirded this naturalization. Mota y Escobar’s writings exemplify the ways in which creole power was made through transcultural agents who used Iberian epistemological constructs alongside distinctly novohispano goals, desires, and affect to assert their natural right to rule the colony. As mobile and strategic cultural agents, these creoles banded together around a sense of entitlement as the legitimate inheritors of New World wealth and power, and as the most effective conquerors, creators, and interpreters of New World order. Bearing out Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz’s vision of New World cultural transformations as processes of exchange, loss, and creation (transculturation), this dissertation shows criollo power as articulated and negotiated through colonial bureaucracy, reproduced through the rhetoric of whiteness, and managed through the practices of slavery, patronage, and wealth accumulation. It highlights Mota y Escobar’s efforts as a transcultural agent to communicate his sense of his place in the imperial structure using a language that moved flexibly between what was European and what was novohispano. To naturalize Hispanic control, power had to be made and remade constantly in the colony of New Spain, and conquering creoles like Mota y Escobar laboured to transform and translate European cultural codes into novohispanoorder. Conquering creoles revelled in their domination and marginalization of other racialized groups in New Spain, all the while romanticizing the criollo relationship to colonial space. A detailed examination of a member of this generation helps illustrate the logic of violence upon which criollismo was built.
Re-imagining the World: Sanctity and Materiality in the Vitae of Sixth-century Gaul
Keywords: Gaul
Hagiography
Late Antique
Materiality
Medieval
Vitae

In the sixth-century, Gaul was undergoing a prolonged negotiation about how its communities should function, framed in terms of divine materiality, and it survives to us today in the period's most popular stories about itself: the Vitae of its saints. This thesis argues that hagiography in post-Roman Gaul was an arena in which updated frameworks for making sense of the world were put forward, and that a significant part of that undertaking was the establishment of a legitimizing logic for specific social structures and political arrangements. This was accomplished by identifying specific points of intersection between the divine and the material in order to establish tangible, particular points of meaning in an ontologically shifting world. The relationship between sensible material and story is socially produced but nonetheless deeply real by virtue of its ability to represent—make present—those stories as an embodied experience through Vitae that reveal themselves to be complex texts emerging from a cultural milieu steeped in the conventions of homiletics and exegesis.Four roughly contemporaneous Vitae form the thesis’ source material. The first two are monastic: the Vita patrum Iurensium, which narrates the founding of a monastic community through the lives of three of its first abbots, and the Vita abbatum Acaunensium, which describes the refounding of the monastery of Agaune by Sigismund of Burgundy. The remaining two texts take an urban setting, more episcopal than monastic in focus: the Vita of Amator, an early bishop of Auxerre, and that of Genovefa of Paris,a complex figure who straddled the categories of holy virgin, Roman aristocrat, and even perhaps (albeit never explicitly) urban bishop. This selection of texts, reasonably contemporary with one another, is contained enough to allow a robust exploration of each, while still diverse enough to offer a glimpse of the deep complexity and variety of hagiological projects that were at work in the world-defining project this thesis aims to explore.
Disquisitions on quantum-enhanced polarimetry
Keywords: Polarimetry
Polarization
Quantum optics
Sensing and metrology

It takes some convincing to realize that light has a polarization degree of freedom, as our eyes are usually ignorant of light's polarization. Since overcoming this hurdle of intuition, polarization has become a fantastic resource that can be easily manipulated both physically and mathematically, opening the door to a wide variety of applications. We have only recently begun to appreciate how many more doors are opened by the quantum mechanical degrees of freedom inherent to optical polarization. One use of optical polarization is for polarimetry: measuring the changes in light's polarization after it interacts with a material is an excellent procedure for nondestructively probing the characteristics and composition of the intervening material. More sensitive measurements require brighter probe light; however, sufficiently intense light will begin to destroy the sample being probed. In this thesis, we seek to provide more sensitive polarimetry without resorting to bright beams of light. Tailoring the quantum properties of various states of light has been shown to increase their usefulness for other estimation protocols and we show how to extend this paradigm to quantum enhancements in polarimetry. We begin by finding the quantum states underlying classical polarization. Each particular set of classical polarization properties corresponds to a large variety of quantum states. Next, we establish quantum descriptions of classical polarization transformations corresponding to arbitrary Jones and Mueller matrices, including quantum mechanical insights into the distinction between processes that can and cannot be described by Jones matrices. We propose candidates for the most likely quantum states underlying classical decompositions into polarized and unpolarized fractions, carefully inspecting how these quantum states behave under polarization transformations. This language allows us to inspect quantum-enhanced sensing in the multiparameter context of polarimetry. We show the dramatic possibilities for quantum enhancements in any metrological scenario that is mathematically equivalent to a rotation, of which polarization rotations are a primary example; in contrast, we also show most attenuating and depolarizing polarization transformations to forbid such dramatic enhancements. Finally, we discuss polarization and its generalizations in the context of generating quantum entanglement via linear optics. These applications serve as mere examples of the usefulness promised by light’s quantum polarization degrees of freedom.
Nonlinear Wave Propagation in High Frequency Ultrasound Imaging
Keywords: B/A
high frequency
nonlinear wave propagation
safety standards
thermal effects
ultrasound imaging

The existing safety standards for diagnostic ultrasound devices were developed for low frequency systems (1 to 10 MHz) under the assumption that nonlinear effects are negligible. However, the standards are now being used for relatively high frequency systems (up to 70 MHz); nonlinear effects are increasingly evident as the working frequency f0 is increased. The main goal of this project is to determine if the coverage of nonlinear effects in safety standards in terms of thermal and non-thermal effects is adequate for equipment with f0>10 MHz. To achieve this goal, a practical variation to the finite amplitude method for determination of B/A is proposed, and the values of B/A are measured from 2.25 to 20 MHz for water. It is shown that there is no statistically significant variation with f0 for the value of B/A. The appropriate value of B/A in tissue is used as input to a nonlinear pulse propagation model in the time-domain. The total heat deposition pattern due to ultrasound absorption is then calculated and used as input to a bio-heat model. The maximum peak-rarefactional pressure is also extracted from the nonlinear pulse propagation results and used to calculate the Mechanical Index MI. We propose a slight modification to MI to solve the inconsistencies associated with the coverage of nonlinear effects in MI. A modification is also required in the existing upper limit for the hydrophone calibration bandwidth to ensure that the fundamental component is fully captured at high frequencies.The thermal results show that strong higher order harmonics can significantly increase the local heat deposition rate. However, at the same time, they lead to an increase in the rate of axial and radial heat conduction, thereby reducing the net impact on the steady-state temperature rise. Also, the effect of higher order harmonics can be significant on the temperature rise at the focal point, while the maximum temperature rise always occurs close to the skin surface. We conclude that current safety standards are adequate in assessing thermal effects in B-mode imaging at high frequencies despite ignoring the extra heat deposited by higher order harmonics.
Identité professionnelle et rôle des enseignantes et des enseignants dans les écoles de langue française en Ontario
Keywords: French Canadian Culture
French Language Education
Minority Language Education
Ontario Education
Professional Identity
Teacher Identity

In addition to transmitting academic knowledge and socializing students, teachers working in a linguistic minority context must be a linguistic and cultural model for these young people. Their task is complex and comes with many challenges not faced by their counterparts in English-language schools. This research aims to understand how teachers in French-language schools in Ontario perceive themselves personally and professionally. Based on the life stories of seven teachers, we are interested in exploring how their rapport to identity will have an influence on how they perceive their role in fulfilling the mandate of French-language schools, particularly with regard to the transmission of French language and culture, given the close link between personal and professional identity. Analysis of the results reveals that teachers understand their role as agents of linguistic reproduction, but have a poor understanding of their role in the transmission of French culture. Despite the many policies and initiatives implemented by the government to support their work and help them fulfill the mandate of French-language schools, teachers tend instead to interpret their role according to their representations of their own linguistic and cultural identity, as well as their representations of the culture of expression, interpreted according to a traditional and folkloric vision of this notion.
From Safe to Safeguarding: Conceptualizing and Advancing Safe Sport
Keywords: human rights
safe sport
safeguarding sport

The following dissertation sought to understand how sport stakeholders conceptualize and experience safe sport and to elicit their recommendations to advance safe sport, a movement that has emerged in response to cases of athlete maltreatment. To-date, the related literature indicates there is no universal definition of safe sport and thus, prevention and intervention initiatives differ; further, these initiatives are not necessarily empirically or theoretically driven. In Study 1, a constructivist grounded theory was employed, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty-three stakeholders in sport to elicit views of the meaning of the term safe sport. The findings revealed commonalities among the participants’ interpretations, specifically pertaining to the prevention of and intervention in incidences of physical, psychological, and sexual harm. Additionally, some participants’ interpretations expanded beyond the prevention of harm to include the optimisation of the sport experience, characterized by the promotion of positive values and human rights. In Study 2, an interpretive phenomenological analysis was used to explore equity-deserving athletes’ understanding and lived experiences of safe sport. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven athletes of diverse intersectional identities. The findings suggest that athletes from equity-deserving groups experience verbal and non-verbal forms of discrimination in sport and questioned whether safe sport was an attainable outcome for them. Moreover, athletes with visible, under-represented characteristics (e.g., Black, physical disability) perceived themselves as more vulnerable to unsafe sport experiences compared to athletes who could hide elements of their identity (e.g., gay athletes). Finally, Study 3 was a constructivist grounded theory that utilized semi-structured interviews to explore thirteen sport administrators’ perspectives of advancing safe sport. The participants recommended that sport organisations establish a universal framework of safe sport, design and implement education, implement and enforce policies, establish independent monitoring and complaint mechanisms, and conduct research to ensure advancement strategies are current and applicable. The current dissertation contributes to the growing body of safe sport literature by recommending that conceptualizations and advancement strategies of safe sport, which tend to be focused on the prevention of harm, extend to the promotion of human rights in sport through safeguarding.
Acoustic Assessment of Sleep Apnea and Pharyngeal Airway
Keywords: Machine Learning
Obesity
Pharyngeal Airway
Sleep Apnea
Ultrasonography
Vowel Sounds

Sleep apnea is a chronic respiratory disorder that is characterized by recurrent reductions in breathing during sleep. The gold standard diagnosis of sleep apnea is an overnight sleep study with polysomnography (PSG), which is expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, questionnaires are used for screening of sleep apnea during wakefulness, but they are highly subjective and do not provide the assessment of pharyngeal airway anatomy. This thesis presents acoustic technologies to diagnose sleep apnea during sleep and to assess the pharyngeal airway dimension during wakefulness. To diagnose sleep apnea during sleep, we recruited 69 individuals who underwent full-night PSG in the sleep laboratory. Simultaneously with PSG, we recorded the tracheal breathing sounds and respiratory-related movements with a microphone and an accelerometer, respectively. We developed a novel machine-learning algorithm utilizing random forest and logistic regression; and achieved 90% accuracy in detecting sleep apnea. We also identified each respiratory event with over 80% accuracy in patients with severe sleep apnea. Furthermore, we utilized deep convolutional networks to use breathing sounds and distinguish the two major sleep apnea types, obstructive and central events, with 84% accuracy. These algorithms can be used in a wearable device for monitoring sleep apnea. To assess the pharyngeal airway during wakefulness, we investigated vowel articulation and acoustic features of vowel sounds. To measure the pharyngeal airway effectively during vowel articulation, we used ultrasonography. We have shown that ultrasonography can be effectively used to measure the dimensions of the pharyngeal airway and the dimensions are different between individuals with and without sleep apnea. Furthermore, we have shown that patients with sleep apnea have had less variation in the pharyngeal airway dimension, which can be interpreted as less tongue movement than control groups while articulating vowels. Moreover, we have shown that the vowel sound features can estimate the pharyngeal airway dimension with high accuracy. These algorithms can be used for developing a vowel-based assessment of sleep apnea. Overall, the results of these studies showed the promise of breathing and vowel sounds to assess the pharyngeal airway and monitor sleep apnea.
Identifying the Anatomical Layout and Molecular Properties of the GABAA Motivational Switch in the Ventral Tegmental Area
Keywords: Drug dependence
Gap Junctions
Motivation
Opiates
Reward
Ventral Tegmental Area

The motivation to seek natural reinforcers and drugs can transform over time from a form of pleasure-seeking to a form of relief-seeking. This shift from a positive reinforcement-based motivation to a negative reinforcement-based motivation is a hallmark of several substance use and eating disorders. Our group has demonstrated a double dissociation wherein the former motivational state is mediated by the tegmental pedunculopontine nucleus (TPP), while the latter is mediated by mesolimbic dopamine (DA). In this thesis, I demonstrate the functional role that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and connexin-36 (Cx36)-containing gap junctions play in this switching mechanism. Specifically, I show that intra-VTA infusions of BDNF produce a drug-dependent and withdrawn phenotype in otherwise drug-naïve animals and that lentiviral knockdown of the BDNF receptor, TrkB, prevents the manifestation of opiate dependence and withdrawal. I also show that Cx36 is necessary and sufficient for opiate dependence susceptibility, as evidenced by my finding that intra-VTA infusions of the pharmacological blocker, mefloquine, result in a reversion of opiate-dependent and withdrawn (ODW) rats to a drug-naïve state, that conditional knockout mice lacking Cx36 in GAD65+ cells are perpetually drug-naïve, and that viral-mediated rescue of Cx36 in VTA GABA neurons is sufficient to restore susceptibility of those mice to opiate dependence. These studies further characterize the GABAA switch that is causally linked to maladaptive drug-seeking.