VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Peacebuilding Citizenship Education in a Muslim Majority Context: Challenges and Opportunities in Bangladeshi Public Schools
Keywords: Citizenship Education
Conflict Curriculum
Conflict Transformation Education
Peace-Building Education
Students' and Teachers' Understandings
Teacher Development

Globally, many young citizens are disengaged from constructively transforming conflicts and affirming just peace (Kassimir Flanagan, 2010). In Bangladesh, lived experience of polarized political affiliates’ and others’ violent engagement in conflicts often contributes to many citizens’ avoidance of formal politics (Riaz Raji, 2011). Schools can help to reduce––or to reproduce––those patterns of violence and citizen disengagement (Davies, 2011). Dialogue, in educational settings, about lived social and political conflicts and potential solutions—in relation to their own identities and contexts—may help citizens to develop peace-building capacities (Lederach, 1995; McCauley, 2002). This doctoral thesis studies opportunities and challenges for peacebuilding citizenship education embedded in the existing curriculum of Bangladesh, juxtaposed with selected students’ and teachers’ concerns and understandings about selected social conflicts and what people can do about them in their own contexts. Research methods involved document analysis and focus groups with young adolescents and with teachers, in girls’ and boys’ public schools in two cities. Bangladeshi curriculum mandates analyzed in this research do offer opportunities for studying various social conflicts. However, participating teachers’ implemented curriculum tended to ignore multiple viewpoints about human rights and governance conflicts. Participating students and teachers had difficulty identifying social-structural dimensions of the conflicts that they or their families had not directly experienced. All participants were familiar with patterns of direct harm, and sometimes also identified some cultural dimensions, as they described parties and their viewpoints in conflicts that mattered to them. Religious moral factors were prominent in how they described causes and escalators of these conflicts. Beyond suggesting individuals’ religious moral correction, very few participants showed familiarity with democratic problem-solving options that could reduce violence and transform these social conflicts. Thus, in this Muslim-majority context, participants understood the dimensions and solutions of social conflicts in religious-moral terms: Islam provided the vocabulary with which participants talked about mutual responsibility, justice, and the possibilities of peace. The thesis argues that classroom opportunities for critical analysis of multiple viewpoints and of available options to solve social and political conflicts—including their religious dimensions—would increase participants’ opportunities for citizenship learning and peacebuilding engagement.
Thermodynamic Characterization of Tetraplex DNA Structures
Keywords: DNA
G-quadruplex
i-motif
Nucleic Acids
Polyelectrolyte Effect
Thermodynamics

The role of counterion condensation as a dominant force governing the stability of DNA duplexes and triplexes is well established. In contrast, the effect of counterion condensation on the stability of G-quadrupex conformations is poorly understood. Unlike other ordered nucleic acid structures, G-quadruplexes exhibit a specific binding of counterions (typically, Na+ or K+) which are buried inside the central cavity and coordinated to the O6 carbonyls of the guanines forming the G-quartets. While it has been known that the G-quadruplex-to-coil transition temperature, TM, increases with an increase in the concentration of the stabilizing ion, the contributions of the specific (coordination in the central cavity) and nonspecific (condensation) ion binding have not been resolved. In the first part of the work performed in this dissertation, we used G-quadruplexes formed by four different sequences derived from the human telomeric region, c-MYC, and VEGF genes to separate the two ionic contributions. We studied the change in TM of preformed G-quadruplexes following the addition of nonstabilizing ions Li+, Cs+, and TMA+ (tetramethylammonium). Our data suggest that the stabilizing action of cations on the G-quadruplex conformation is, primarily, due to the central ions which act as specifically bound ligands. Nonspecifically bound (condensed) counterions may slightly stabilize the G-quadruplex conformation or exert no influence on its stability (human telomeric G-quadruplexes) or may strongly destabilize it (c-MYC and VEGF). After investigating the salt effect in G-quadruplexes, the latter part of the thesis project was devoted to understanding the folding/unfolding transitions of i-motif, a distinct tetraplex structure formed by c-rich complementary sequences of G-quadruplexes.We described the pH-induced folding/unfolding transitions of i-motifs formed by c-MYC sequence by a linkage thermodynamics-based formalism in terms of three pKa’s of cytosines, namely, an apparent pKa in the unfolded conformation, pKau, and two apparent pKa’s in the folded state, pKaf1 and pKaf2.
Unified Lower Bounds for Monotone Computation
Keywords: boolean circuits
circuit complexity
complexity theory
proof complexity
span programs

Razborov introduced an elegant rank-based complexity measure for proving lower bounds on the monotone formula complexity of boolean functions. Later work by Gal showed that Razborov's rank measure also provides lower bounds on monotone switching networks, which measure space complexity, and monotone span programs, which are an elegant complexity measure that have connections to cryptography. Despite this, the only lower bounds known for the rank measure are the original n^log n bounds for function computable in NP due to Razborov. In this thesis, we give a new analysis of the rank measure; in particular, connecting it to the Nullstellensatz degree from propositional proof complexity. This ultimately allows us to ``lift'' Nullstellensatz degree lower bounds to rank measure lower bounds in a generic way, and using this lifting theorem we are able to prove a variety of new lower bounds in monotone complexity theory, as well as obtaining new proofs of many old lower bounds. To prove our results we introduce several technical tools which we hope will have other applications. In particular, we introduce a new algebraic complexity measure called the algebraic gap complexity which is crucial in our reductions, as well as a generic way to transform multilinear polynomials into matrices such that the rank of the matrix can be directly calculated from the monomials in the polynomial (this generalizes an earlier result of Sherstov.
Pathological Factors Combine to Cause Hyperexcitability in Primary Afferent Neurons: Implications for Nociceptive Sensory Processing
Keywords: Chloride
GABA
Hyperexcitability
Pain
Sensory systems
Somatosensation

Hyperexcitability in primary afferent neurons is necessary and sufficient to cause many forms of chronic pain. Several molecular changes have been linked to primary afferent neuron hyperexcitability, but developing better pain therapies remains challenging because most molecular changes have been studied in isolation. I investigated how hyperexcitability relies on combinations of molecular changes. First, I addressed an important feature of primary afferent neuron hyperexcitability wherein spiking pattern switches from transient spiking to repetitive spiking during sustained somatic depolarization. I measured the susceptibility of neurons to switch their spiking pattern by applying a virtual sodium conductance (g_Na ) using dynamic clamp. Second, I investigated how the switch from transient to repetitive spiking (i.e. a change in intrinsic excitability) interacted with changes affecting inhibitory synaptic input onto primary afferent neurons. GABA-mediated paradoxical excitation requires a combined shift in the GABA reversal potential (E_GABA) and a change in intrinsic excitability. Third, I addressed whether the required combination of changes, initially demonstrated with dynamic clamp recordings in the soma, is necessary for GABA-evoked spiking at the central axon terminals of primary afferent neurons. From this work, several conclusions can be drawn: Pathological changes (e.g. inflammation or elevated extracellular potassium) do not individually convert the spiking pattern. The summation of the individual effects is necessary for the net pathological change to cause hyperexcitability. Small neurons (corresponding to unmyelinated fibers) are more susceptible than large neurons (corresponding to myelinated fibers) to becoming hyperexcitable. However, because inflammation had a larger effect in the latter, both cell types become equally susceptible to switch to repetitive spiking under inflammatory conditions. The co-occurrence of a depolarizing shift in E_GABA and an increase in intrinsic excitability is necessary to enable GABAergic transmission, which normally has inhibitory effects, to paradoxically evoke spiking in primary afferent neurons. Neither factor on its own can enable paradoxical spiking. GABA-evoked spikes can be initiated at the central axon terminals and propagate antidromically towards the periphery. Spikes evoked by GABA at the central axon terminals, like in the soma, require a combined change in intrinsic excitability and E_GABA.
Building Nations, Making Youth: Institutional Choice, Nation-State Building and the Politics of Youth Activism in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania
Keywords: African Politics
Development
Nation-State Building
Youth Activism

This dissertation explains why, while societies in both postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania were undergoing similar socioeconomic and demographic pressures during the initial decades of independence (1961-1989), university students’ responses to these changes strikingly diverged across these two cases. Eschewing explanations of youth activism that prioritize socioeconomic or demographic variables, this study opts for a historical institutional explanation, situating these divergent trajectories of student activism within broader histories of postcolonial nation-state formation. My analysis reveals that the different institutional choices and arrangements, which undergirded Kenya and Tanzania’s respective nation-state building strategies, harnessed and channeled the energies of young people (i.e. university students) into systems of power in significantly different manners, legitimating and de-legitimating certain forms of political participation and violence among youth in the decades following independence, with lasting implications. The first part of this study explores the historical origins of divergent strategies of nation-state building in Kenya and Tanzania, explaining institutional origins primarily in relation to societal constraints that confronted these new African regimes on the ground at independence. Here I argue that distinctive colonial political economies and institutional architectures produced different spaces of possibility for these countries’ respective postcolonial nation-state building projects. Part II examines how these distinctly configured states opted to incorporate the university and its students into their nation-state building projects differently. In Kenya, the relationship between the state and university students was marked by the ruling party’s unwillingness to institutionalize party control over the university throughout the 1960s and 1970s, enabling university students to organize and operate politically on campus beyond the realm of state or party control. As a result, when students became increasingly discouraged by the authoritarian political direction of the ruling party during the 1980s, levels of protest, unity and anti-regime sentiment within this group reached their height. In Tanzania, the TANU state utilized a different set of co-optative institutional implements in managing their university students. As a result of these institutional strategies, the Tanzanian state was better prepared to manage and limit overt student dissert during the decade of the 1980s, because the state had effectively usurped university students’ organizational autonomy.
Spatio-temporal and class-imbalanced data analytics in healthcare
Keywords: classification
clustering
influenza
neural_networks
radiotherapy
spatio-temporal

Data analytics promise to deliver value to industries by providing historical insights that can drive the future decisions. However, depending on the characteristics of the data, machine learning models are not always accurately generalizable. For example, the well-studied problem of overfitting can arise as a result of small sample sizes. We worked on two problems in the healthcare industry, where the high dimensionality of the state space, coupled with the rarity of training samples poses challenges to the applicability of general methods to those specific problems. In the first problem, we used temporal flu activity from multiple locations in Ontario, and showed that depending on the surveillance variable under study, spatial and temporal models can each exhaust the limited amount of spatio-temporally recorded data more efficiently than the other, and predict surveillance variables more accurately as a result. In the second problem, we used a clinical dataset of radiotherapy treatment plans, whose quality is labelled by clinicians as acceptable or unacceptable, and developed an automated quality assurance system. Due to limitations in recording unacceptable plans, there is a severe class imbalance in labels that requires special learning treatments. We investigated two classification approaches, namely a class-specific learning for binary classification and a one-class learning for anomaly detection that both benefit from an adaptive resonance learning scheme that can adapt to long-term trends in labelling behaviour.
A Phonetic Examination of Rhotics: Gestural Representation Accounts for Phonological Behaviour
Keywords: Articulatory Phonology
Brazilian Portuguese
Phonetics
Phonology
Sorbian
Speech Perception

There is phonological evidence that rhotics form a natural class of sounds (Walsh-Dickey, 1997). However, the articulatory and acoustic properties that are common across all rhotics have been difficult to identify (Lindau, 1985; Ladefoged Maddieson, 1996), creating a disconnect between phonetics and phonology. This thesis argues that the natural class of rhotics is united through articulatory and acoustic-perceptual characteristics. Five studies were conducted: an acoustic examination of Upper and Lower Sorbian uvular (/ʀ ʀj/) and alveolar rhotics (/r rj/), two ultrasound studies of the uvular rhotics in Upper Sorbian, an ultrasound study of variably realized rhotics ([ɾ ɻ ɹ ʁ χ]) in Brazilian Portuguese, and a perceptual study of rhotics by native English speakers. The rhotics in Sorbian and Brazilian Portuguese all differ in place/manner configurations but were found to be united by the occurrence of a tongue root gesture coordinated with a tongue tip or body gesture. These findings are consistent with previous studies of rhotics which show a secondary pharyngeal constriction (Delattre, 1971; Sproat Fujimura, 1993). The articulatory findings suggest that the synchronic variation and diachronic changes of rhotics in Brazilian Portuguese result from the manipulation of the settings of the tongue gestures in the underlying representation. Palatalization in Upper Sorbian revealed antagonistic gestures for rhotic articulation and secondary palatalization, suggesting that rhotics’ avoidance of secondary palatalization is related to tongue root constraints (Kavitskaya, Iskarous, Noiray, Proctor, 2009). The perceptual experiment revealed an underlying similarity in perception between the rhotics examined, /r ɻ ʀ/. The perceptual similarities were interpreted as the result of a similarity in F2. The perceptual similarity is also argued to be the reason why large rhotic inventories are cross-linguistically avoided and for the reason the cross-linguistic distribution of rhotics and laterals is also different. Inventories with more than 2 rhotics and no laterals do not exist, while inventories of laterals up to and including 6 different segments and no rhotics, do exist (Maddieson, 1984). This disparity between the two types of liquids is argued to be related to the perceptual difficulty associated with identifying rhotic segments across place and manner differences.
Song and Wind in Canada: The Impact of Arnold Jacobs’s Teaching on Canadian Tuba Pedagogues
Keywords: Arnold Jacobs
Brass Pedagogy
Canadian Tuba Teachers
Jonathan Rowsell
Song and Wind
Tuba Pedagogy

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of Arnold Jacobs on the pedagogical approaches of prominent tuba teachers in Canada. Nine tuba teachers from different Canadian universities participated in this study. Each participant was interviewed digitally using Skype or FaceTime and asked nine questions designed to understand their personal pedagogical approach and how it relates to Arnold Jacobs. These questions cover important pedagogical ideas including sound concept, breathing, articulation, and embouchure. Arnold Jacobs is considered to be one of the most influential brass pedagogues in history. His method of teaching, referred to as Song and Wind, is a pedagogical concept frequently implemented in contemporary applied tuba teaching. The interview findings of this study demonstrate that the Arnold Jacobs legacy is very present in Canadian tuba pedagogy. The approaches to articulation and sound concept demonstrated by the interview subjects are consistently Jacobs inspired. The approaches to breathing and embouchure, however, are much more varied. Although these elements are not as tightly embedded in the Jacobs pedagogical approach, the results of the study demonstrate that the majority of the interview subjects are fully aware of the ways in which their current approaches have been adapted.
Essays on Technology in Finance and Market Design
Keywords: Blockchain
Latency
Market quality
Market structure
Over-the-counter market
Transparency

I develop information-based theoretical frameworks to (i) explain empirical patterns found in the finance literature, and (ii) provide empirical and policy implications related to recent changes in the technology and the market structure of financial markets. The first chapter explains how the over-the-counter market can coexist with easily acces- sible exchanges, and examines the US Dodd-Frank Act and the EU’s MiFID II. The second chapter explains the recent trend of higher market quality, and reconciles the finding that high frequency traders increase liquidity with the finding that the HFTs reduce institutional traders’ profits. The third chapter analyzes how transparency due to blockchain adoption may affect market quality.
Parametrizing topological Ramsey spaces
Keywords: Combinatorics
Parametrized Ramsey theory
Ramsey theory
Sacks forcing
Topological Ramsey Space

We prove a general theorem indicating that essentially all infinite-dimensional Ramsey-type theorems proven using topological Ramsey space theory can be parametrized by products of infinitely many perfect sets. This theorem has applications in several known spaces, showing that certain ultrafilters are preserved under both side-by-side and iterated Sacks forcing. In particular, the well-known result of 'selective ultrafilters on the natural numbers are preserved under Sacks forcing' is extended to the corresponding ultrafilters on richer structures. We also characterize ultrafilters in topological Ramsey spaces in an abstract setting. The technique of combinatorial forcing is crucial in the proof of the general parametrization theorem, and ultra-Ramsey theory plays an important role in the applications.
Assessing Forest Tree Communities and Assisted Migration Potential in Toronto’s Urban Forest as a Result of Climate Change
Keywords: Climate Change
Global Climate Models
Species Distribution Modelling
Urban Forestry

Projected climate change in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada area could greatly alter tree composition within the urban forest. Investigating biological change as a result of climate change is complicated due to the variability among climate model outputs and non-climatic influences on local vegetation. This study approaches the issues of composition change in tree species in Toronto through three interdependent studies. The first study is a comparison of Global Climate Models (GCMs) available through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports, AR4 and AR5 respectively. Using a performance metric based on how well the GCMs simulate climate relative to observation, GCMs GFDL-CM3, IPSL-CM5A-LR and MPI-ESM-LR were determined to provide the best Canada-wide coverage for annual average temperature and precipitation changes. The second study correlates a series of biologically-relevant climatic variables to tree distributions of 134 North American trees east of the 100th meridian. The geographical absence or presence of a species was correlated to concurrent climate data, creating a species' climate envelope. Using climate projections from an ensemble of the GCMs GFDL-CM3, IPSL-CM5A-LR and MPI-ESM-LR for the year 2050, a suite of statistical regression and machine-learning techniques were used to predict a likelihood of suitability of trees in the Toronto area based on the derived climate envelopes. While the dominant beech-maple communities are largely projected to stay intact, future climate suitability is likely to shift away from conifers and northern hardwoods into more southerly deciduous trees. The third study evaluates using projected tree suitability whether an assisted migration through the translocation of tree species would be effective in the Toronto area. Of particular interest is the increasing climate suitability that likely will be beneficial to Ontario’s Species at Risk trees. However, the conservation of Ontario’s Species at Risk trees cannot be based solely upon projections of climate, a vulnerability assessment conducted in this study indicate that current pest and diseases threats coupled with and the loss of genetic diversity are also cause for concern.