VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Pulang Kampung (Returning Home): Curcuits of Mobility from a Chinese Town in Indonesia
Keywords: Chinese Indonesians
Home
Indonesia
Mobility
Transnationalism
West Kalimantan

This dissertation explains some common cultural logics underpinning widespread mobility out of Singkawang, West Kalimantan, a majority Chinese Indonesian town in Indonesian Borneo. I focus on the primary domestic and international migrations taking place, and describe the concepts used to make sense of these sojourns. I study the mobilities of this Hakka Chinese Indonesian population in a context of current post-Suharto era politics, as well as the “diasporic” status of this community in relation to the discourses and developments of “rising China” and overseas Chinese transnationalism. Members of this community are influenced by these broader trends as they draw from their unique cultural resources in order to chart pathways into both real and imagined futures of prosperity. In Singkawang, the mobilities of the Chinese community are framed in terms of economic necessity and social mobility, which are talked about using the language of “becoming one’s own boss” and “looking for a better life”. These aspirations are constructed as the most important life goals, to the extent that other occupational possibilities become practically unimaginable. Private business ownership has become a hegemonic aspiration and is best understood not merely as a form of livelihood, but also as a kind of quintessential adulthood subjectivity intimately linked to one’s ability to attain social status within the community. Some people entertain fantasies of becoming cosmopolitan transnational citizens, but experience practical limitations in transforming these fantasies into realities overseas. In relation to these limitations, and in relation to the powerful draw of home (Ind. kampung halaman), sojourns ultimately reinforce a connection to the city of Singkawang. The desire to return is as strong as the compulsion to leave, because of strong affective bonds with the hometown. This dissertation describes the process by which people make and remake themselves in relation to space and place in a context of mobility. I argue that migrants must continually reevaluate their concepts of home and away, by coming to terms with the fact that the ways they have changed as people during the migration process have also changed the contents of their categorizations of home and away.
Intra-Cardiac Ultrasound Ablation And Treatment Monitoring
Keywords: Ablation
Cardiac
Catheters
MRI
Treatment Monitoring
Ultrasound

Cardiac ablation procedures in the ventricles of the heart have been a difficult challenge for electrophysiologists. The current procedural workflow of these procedures uses radio frequency ablation under X-ray guidance with little to no treatment monitoring. The current challenges associated with this minimally invasive procedure can be separated into three categories. The first challenge is that the current image guidance technique, X-ray, offers poor soft tissue contrast and deposits radiation dose into the patient and interventionalist. As a second challenge, treatment monitoring techniques are limited for cardiac ablation therapies. Current treatment monitoring includes temperature and force sensors. Lastly, radio frequency ablation does not have the ability to cause deep tissue or clinically relevant lesions in the ventricles. To address these challenges, an interventional MRI surgical platform for cardiac ablation therapies has been developed. This platform entails the use of therapeutic ultrasound, a treatment modality that has the potential to create clinically relevant lesions in the ventricles. The interventional MRI surgical platform will address the three specific challenges mentioned above. This begins with the development of MRI-compatible steerable ultrasonic catheters. Secondly, an MRI-based form of treatment monitoring has been developed that allows temperature information to be obtained from intra-cardiac radio frequency receivers. Lastly, a fully ultrasound method to both treat and acquire real-time ultrasound signals for treatment monitoring provides additional treatment monitoring information. Future work for this project is largely based on the additional safety and regulation compliance experiments needed to transition this work from a pre-clinical environment to a small-scale patient clinical trial. In addition, there are several MRI and ultrasound-based methods that could enhance the current treatment monitoring.
EFL Teaching in University Classrooms in Saudi Arabia: A Case Study of Instructors and Curriculum and Implementation for Language Learning
Keywords: case study
curriculum implementation
EFL taeching
language learning
Saudi Arabia
university classrooms

Literature has extensively documented the traditional conceptions of viewing teaching, learning, curriculum and implementation and recommends changing these traditional views for better teaching and learning outcomes. However; still some teachers view curriculum as a rigid document, learning as static, unalterable, and measurable by tests and teaching as transmitting knowledge and teachers as transmitter of prescribed knowledge. This thesis presents a case study of nine EFL instructors explaining the ways participating English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructors understand and implement the foundation year EFL university curriculum in Saudi Arabia and how their understanding impacts their implementation and language learning. This case study explains the factors affecting studentsâ learning through the eyes of the participating EFL instructors, the ways these EFL instructors re-imagine teaching and learning in the EFL curriculum at university, and the support needed for EFL instructors that would facilitate improved English teaching and learning. The rigid, hierarchical educational system and its effects on EFL in the foundation year as a result of its top-down organization, fixed curriculum, limited time, and poor outcomes were highlighted as factors that contribute to EFL teaching, learning, curriculum and implementation at university. The findings reveal that policy and power, voice and choice, culture, motivation, teacher learning, and resources are major factors that need reconsideration for improved EFL teaching and learning. One of the emerging considerations from this research is that participating EFL instructors need to rethink traditional, conventional conceptions of EFL curriculum, teaching, and learning at the university level in Saudi Arabia for improved teaching and learning outcomes.
Growing Past Ourselves: Toward a Pedagogy of Change through the Evolutionary Epistemology and Developmental Teleology of Charles Sanders Peirce
Keywords: Charles Sanders Peirce
epistemology
evo devo
philosophy of evolution
theory of mind
transactionalism

Charles Sanders Peirce defends an approach to thought in which mind and inquiry are subject to ongoing evolution through the process of interpreting signs. This dissertation examines one often-overlooked element of Peirceâ s semiotics, the role of evolutionary chance, in the growth and development of ideas. Further, it contrasts his evolutionary approach with the computational framework that is common in educational representations of learning used today. The Ontario Ministry of Education promotes "student-centred" teaching strategies, which are said to be tailored to the needs of diverse students. One such popular approach, Differentiated Instruction (DI), derives at least part of its understanding of intellectual diversity from Howard Gardnerâ s intelligence framework, Multiple Intelligence (MI) theory. MI theory suggests that intelligence is segmented into several distinct and universal computational modalities. However, studies in evolutionary biology support Peirceâ s more reflexive principles that intelligence does not reside in the brain as MI theory suggests, but is a process that occurs through the interrelation between an organism and its environment. This suggests that intelligence is highly individualized and subject to ongoing change and evolution. A challenge is presented that intelligence is more personal and less universal than the MI account allows, and further points to the limitation of certain kinds of research questions to account for the interconnectivity and individualism of ongoing evolution. In suggesting an inquiry framework in which ongoing evolution is acknowledged, I turn to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. Specifically, I look at his conception of the role of chance to defend an epistemology and teleology wherein living beings are not seen as growing along a fixed trajectory but pursue ends that change as they do. In light of this alternative evolutionary framework, teachers and researchers may change their role from one of mere stewardship, carrying students from one stage of understanding to the next in predetermined paths, to one of celebration, where student growth is fostered tentatively and in anticipation of new forms of knowledge that may be encountered in the classroom.
Taking It To The Streets: A Comparative Analysis Of Violent Victimization, The Victim-Offender Overlap, And The Victim-Fear Relationship Among School And Street-Involved Youth In Toronto
Keywords: comparative research
street youth
violent victimization

Research on violent victimization among youth has received a considerable amount of academic attention in recent years; however, this research has typically been conducted separately for conventional populations of school-based youth and at-risk populations of street-involved youth. Although it is generally assumed that the rates of violent victimization are higher among the street-involved youth, to date, research has yet to undertake a comprehensive and comparative analysis of these two populations. Without this research, the presumed differences between these two populations will remain untested, and an analysis of how the mechanisms operate similarly and differently between these two populations will remain largely unexplored. This dissertation project addresses this gap in the literature by undertaking a comparative analysis of violent victimization, the victim-offender overlap, and the victim-fear relationship among a comparable sample of school-based youth and street-involved youth. In general, the findings from this dissertation reveal that the street-involved youth are violently victimized at much greater rates than the school-based youth, and these differences cannot be explained away by the social-situational factors that are more abundant among the street-involved youth. While the factors predicting the victim-offender overlap appear to follow a similar pattern for both the school and street youth, the dangerous social context of life on the streets creates an environment where violence and victimization frequently co-occur. These high rates of violent victimization do not directly translate into a higher level of fearfulness of crime, however, as the street-involved youth report being less fearful on average than do the school-based youth. These results suggest that fearlessness may be a learned adaptation among the street-involved youth to survive life on the streets.
Dissecting the Genetics and Function of CD5+ B and invariant NKT cells using Congenic Lupus-Prone Mouse Strains
Keywords: Autoimmunity
B1a
B cells
Congenics
NKT
NZB

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a complex multisystem autoimmune disorder characterized by the production of antibodies to nuclear antigens. Congenic strains derived from lupus-prone mice have been extremely useful in determining the pathogenesis of this condition. These mice, which harbor selected genetic elements containing susceptibility loci, can be used to identify key pathways and immune networks involved in disease initiation and progression. Alternatively, these same models can be used to identify the role of suppressive regulatory cells involved in preventing disease. In this thesis, the role and function of CD5+ and invariant Natural Killer T (iNKT) innate lymphocytes were investigated in the suppression of disease in New Zealand Black lupus-prone congenic mice. Through adoptive transfer and knockout experiments, CD5+ B cells, but not iNKT cells, were shown to suppress autoimmunity by inhibiting the frequencies of proinflammatory T cell subsets. As these CD5+ B cells secreted IL-10, which has been shown previously to suppress disease, the role of this cytokine was further investigated through knockout experiments that highlighted its critical role in maintaining CD5+ B, iNKT, and Natural Killer cell homeostasis. Finally, the immunogenetic basis of impaired iNKT cell function in the congenic mouse strains was investigated, revealing a critical role for Ly108 in iNKT cell development and function. Collectively, these findings highlight the role of CD5+ B cells and iNKT cells in SLE pathogenesis and demonstrate the power of congenic animals to dissect the genetic basis of disease.
On the Range of the Random Walk Bridge on the Regular Tree
Keywords: Probability
Random walks
Tree

Consider a nearest neighbour random walk Xn on the d-regular tree Td, where d ≥ 3, conditioned on Xn = X0. This is known as the random walk bridge. We derive Gaussianlike tail bounds for the return probabilities of the random walk bridge on the scale of n1/2. This contrasts with the case of the unconditioned random walk, where Gaussian-like tail bounds exists on the scale of n. We introduce the notion of the infinite bridge, which is known to arise as the distributional limit of the random walk bridge. We also establish some preliminary facts about the infinite bridge. By showing that the Brownian Continuum Random Tree (BCRT) is characterized by its random self-similarity property, we prove that the range of the random walk bridge converges in distribution to the BCRT when rescaled by Cn–1/2 for an appropriate constant C.
Statistical Methods for Marker Discovery and Disease Risk Prediction Amid Unobserved Genetic Interactions
Keywords: Calibration
Cystic Fibrosis
Genetic Interaction
Joint Location and Scale
Levene's Test
Statistical Genetics

Many human traits, including Mendelian disorders, are now recognized to have complex genetic architecture, and demand innovative statistical approaches to identify the contributing genetic factors. Genetic interaction effects are widely believed to play an important role in the pathophysiology of such complex traits; however, many of these interactions remain undiscovered due to a lack of knowledge or collection of the relevant exposures, or feasibility in examining enormous numbers of interaction combinations. In this thesis, I explore two important consequences to statistical analysis amid unobserved genetic interactions. (1) Artificially induced variance heterogeneity across genotype groups for quantitative traits and (2) increased prediction bias at the extremes of risk for survival models. For both cases, I develop statistical methodology to address the corresponding limitations. For (1), I propose a joint location-scale testing (JLS) framework that simultaneously tests the null hypothesis of equal mean and equal variance between genotype groups, by aggregating association evidence from the individual location-only and scale-only tests, focusing on Fishers method of combining information (JLS-Fisher). I also extend Levene's test for variance heterogeneity and the JLS framework to analyze more complex data structures involving genotype/group uncertainty and dependent observations. For (2), I propose a new calibration test for Cox models that leverages additional power from biased risk estimates at the tails of risk distribution. The test aggregates martingale residuals for subjects from extreme high and low risk groups with a test statistic maximum chosen by varying which risk groups are included in the extremes. The methods developed in this thesis are evaluated alongside existing approaches through simulation studies. Data sets involving patients with cystic fibrosis and patients with type 1 diabetes are used to demonstrate that additional power can be gained from methods that account for potential missing interactions over conventional methods.
Acting Out(side) the Canadian Multicultural "Script" in Toronto's Ethno-cultural Festivals
Keywords: Dramaturgy
Ethno-cultural Festival
Multiculturalism
Performance
Performativity
Toronto

This thesis articulates the promising disruptions of the Canadian multicultural “script” that a Brechtian dramaturgy of ethno-cultural festivals critically practices, and also draws attention to the fissures in scholarship and in the official record through which these festivals often tumble into either obscurity or reductive characterisations. Within the framework of performance studies, this thesis adapts Bertolt Brecht’s dramaturgical approach to interrogate the ways in which Toronto’s largest ethno-cultural festivals—in particular, Toronto Caribbean Carnival Festival (1967-present), Toronto International Festival Caravan (1969-2002/2003), and the Taste of the Danforth (1994-present)—produce, perform, and negotiate the plurality of contrasting and contested meanings of the Canadian multicultural “script.” Enshrining the values of multiculturalism as part of the performance of Canadian identity, this “script” was developed in stages by the Canadian Government after the Second World War, and was institutionalised in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988). I employ Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, gestus, and historicisation to denaturalise and make visible the often unnoticed discourses of power, that shape the presentation of ethno-cultural identities at festivals, for further examination and questioning. In doing so, I illustrate that the ways in which they operate are not just fixed within understandings of the official multicultural “script,” but rather can, and do, change over time. Organised around three meditations of performativity, this thesis examines how material objects like food, physical and metaphoric spaces, and performing bodies at festivals create, perform, and present multicultural identities that play into normative understandings of the multicultural “script” as well as opening the possibility of their resistance through performance. In addition to the existing critiques of commoditisation at ethno-cultural festivals, my work on the performativity of food opens up a dialogue about the other ways that the multicultural “script” contributes to the management of diversity in the nation. Foregrounding the discursive practices of space at ethno-cultural festivals, my study illustrates the ways in which access to, or displacement or exclusion from, space is a performance of power. The performing body in ethno-cultural festivals has counter-hegemonic potential that can interfere and disrupt the safe representation and consumption of the multicultural “script” that discursively reinforce unequal power relations.
Exploiting Linguistic Knowledge in Lexical and Compositional Semantic Models
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence
Compositional Semantics
Computational Linguistics
Distributional Semantics
Lexical Semantics

A fundamental principle in distributional semantic models is to use similarity in linguistic environment as a proxy for similarity in meaning. Known as the distributional hypothesis, the principle has been successfully applied to many areas in natural language processing. As a proxy, however, it also suffers from critical limitations and exceptions, many of which are the result of the overly simplistic definitions of the linguistic environment. In this thesis, I hypothesize that the quality of distributional models can be improved by carefully incorporating linguistic knowledge into the definition of linguistic environment. The hypothesis is validated in the context of three closely related semantic relations, namely near-synonymy, lexical similarity, and polysemy. On the lexical level, the definition of linguistic environment is examined under three different distributional frameworks including lexical co-occurrence, syntactic and lexicographic dependency, and taxonomic structures. Firstly, combining kernel methods and lexical level co-occurrence with matrix factorization is shown to be highly effective in capturing the fine-grained nuances among near-synonyms. Secondly, syntactic and lexicographic information is shown to result in notable improvement in lexical embedding learning when evaluated in lexical similarity benchmarks. Thirdly, for taxonomy-based measures of lexical similarity, the intuitions for using structural features such as depth and density are examined and challenged, and the refined definitions are shown to improve correlation between the features and human judgements of similarity as well as performances of similarity measures using these features. On the compositional level, distributional models of multi-word contexts are also shown to benefit from incorporating syntactic and lexicographic knowledge. Analytically, the use of syntactic teacher-forcing is motivated by derivations of full gradients in long short-term memory units in recurrent neural networks. Empirically, syntactic knowledge helps achieve statistically significant improvement in language modelling and state-of-the-art accuracy in near-synonym lexical choice. Finally, a compositional similarity function is developed to measure the similarity between two sets of random events. Application in polysemy with lexicographic knowledge produces state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised word sense disambiguation.
An Ecogeographic Study of Body Proportion Development in the Sadlermiut Inuit of Southampton Island, Nunavut
Keywords: body proportions
ecogeography
growth
Inuit

This thesis explores growth status and body proportion development in past North American Arctic populations. Living in one of the most extreme environments on the planet, Arctic foragers provide an opportunity to explore how human morphological variation is shaped by growth and climate. The study focuses on the Sadlermiut Inuit, who lived on Southampton Island in Hudson Bay, Nunavut. This main sample is comprised of 111 juveniles and 160 adults (62 F, 52 M, 46 und). Comparative samples are derived from Northwest Hudson Bay, Point Hope (Alaska), and Greenland, and are comprised of 106 juveniles and 151 adults (76 F, 75 M). Growth status in four long bones is assessed by comparing the samples' tempo of growth to normative values from a modern North American sample. Body proportion development is assessed by calculating brachial index, crural index, and limb length relative to skeletal trunk height. Plots of index values versus dental age are assessed visually, and compared to results from the literature. Sadlermiut individuals who died as juveniles show a predominant pattern of growth faltering as compared to the North American tempo of growth. Most Sadlermiut juveniles who died in infancy either began life lagging in proportional growth, or fell behind quickly after birth. Most Sadlermiut juveniles who died later in childhood/adolescence had continued to falter in growth, indicating either insufficient, or a lack of, catch-up growth. This contrasts with Point Hope, which showed a broad range of growth outcomes: individuals with growth in line with the North American tempo, as well as individuals with lagging and accelerated growth. The analysis of body proportion development demonstrates that Sadlermiut infants exhibit a wide range of index values, and adult-type body proportions appear by early- to mid-childhood. Adult proportionality is achieved by most older Sadlermiut juveniles, despite a lag in linear growth. This demonstrates that linear growth is more environmentally labile, while body shape is more conserved. Moreover, the timing of body proportion development is consistent across samples from this study and the literature, suggesting a consistent pattern of growth with regard to body proportionality, regardless of latitude/climate and ultimate adult proportionality.