VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Morphemes without Morphs: A Theory of Syntactic Arrangements and Phonological Processes
Keywords: cyclicity
exponence
Mirror Principle
morphemes
morphophonology
nonconcatenative morphology

The thesis presents the theory of Morphemes without Morphs (MWM). Words are argued to be made up of abstract items (morphemes), arranged into hierarchical structures; however, these items do not stand in a straightforward exponence relationship with phonological pieces. Abstract morphemes are visible in the phonology, and condition the application of base-altering morphological realization rules, assumed to be a subset of the ordinary rules of the phonology. Application of morphological realization rules requires the conditioning morpheme to be suitably local to the base; deletion of inner morphemes will cause more peripheral morphemes to become suitably local in the course of a derivation. Rules are extrinsically ordered, but the attestable orderings are highly constrained, due to the above considerations. A subset of rules is designated as cyclic, with such rules applying before the noncyclic ones; this conception of cyclicity allows the theory to account for classic Mirror Principle effects, which would otherwise pose a problem. The theory is applied to a range of morphological phenomena: mobile affixation, Mirror Principle violations, exceptional triggering in morphophonology, and others. Implications for the relationship between morphology and phonology are discussed; since MWM treats morphological realization rules as a kind of phonological rule, and since these rules are extrinsically ordered, a wider range of interactions between morphology and phonology is predicted than is usually assumed; it is argued that this prediction is borne out. The theory offers a straightforward solution to the problem of nonconcatenative morphology, while maintaining the hypothesis that the terminal nodes of syntactic structures are morphemes, not words. In contrast to current approaches that adopt the Concatenativist Hypothesis, this thesis takes the A-Morphous view that the phonological material of a word (segments, autosegments, etc.) cannot be divided into units with morphological affiliation—but crucially departs from this view in recognizing the existence of abstract morphological structure. The theory thus brings together schools of thought usually considered to be opposed: in its syntactic assumptions, MWM belongs to the “item-and-arrangement” camp of morphological theory; but in its phonological assumptions, the theory has decidedly “item-and-process” inclinations.
The Role of the Intestinal Immune System in Diet-induced Obesity and Insulin Resistance
Keywords: Diabetes
Gut Immune System
Immunometabolism
Insulin Resistance
Obesity

Chronic low-grade inflammation of metabolic tissues is thought to be a major driver of obesity related insulin resistance and metabolic disease. While changes to the immune profile in adipose tissue during obesity has been extensively studied, alterations to the intestinal immune system and the contribution of these cells to metabolic disease remain largely unknown. This thesis aims to elucidate the immunological changes within the intestine during obesity-related insulin resistance with focus on the adaptive component of the intestinal immune system. Indeed, our main findings indicated a shift towards a pro-inflammatory environment within the intestine during high fat diet feeding in mice mainly characterized by increased IFNγ producing Th1 and CD8+ T cells, and reductions in regulatory T cells and IgA+ B and plasma cells. Mechanistic interactions between diet, gut microbiota, intestinal barrier and the intestinal immune system were also explored to delineate the implication of the intestinal network on the overall manifestation of metabolic disease. Existing therapies for metabolic disease such as metformin and bariatric surgery protocols were shown to influence the immunological environment within the intestine, while gut-specific anti-inflammatory therapies, namely 5-aminosalicylic acid, demonstrated promise in ameliorating obesity-related insulin resistance in preclinical models.
Mate Searching and Choosiness are Shaped by Spatial Structure and Social Information in Western Black Widows
Keywords: Arachnology
Behavioural ecology
Chemical ecology
Mate searching
Sexual selection
Spider

The relative importance of different episodes of sexual selection for fitness varies with environmental and social context, so inferring the net effect of selection requires understanding how each mechanism operates in nature. Theory predicts that links between ecology, information availability, and mechanisms of sexual selection can have substantive effects on plasticity and behaviour, but these links are rarely demonstrated in the field. Using the western black widow, Latrodectus hesperus, I investigated how ecological factors including demography, OSR, and spatial structure influence male and female reproductive behaviour in the field, and how these are linked by chemical information. I found that the OSR is extremely male biased for most of the mating season, and this imposes strong selection on males to find females before rivals. Mate searching males use social information, likely encoded by chemicals on silk draglines produced by rivals, to efficiently locate females even in the absence of female sex pheromone. In the face of intense scramble competition over access to receptive adult females, I found that males commonly guard and mate with subadult females using a recently-described alternative reproductive tactic: immature mating. Success at this tactic requires contests with rivals, which likely favours different traits than does pure scramble competition over adults, and may help to maintain extreme variation in male size. Moreover, because subadults apparently do not produce volatile chemical cues that would allow males to locate them, the clumped spatial distribution of females in the field is a critical factor influencing the feasibility of immature mating; males only found subadults when there were signaling adults nearby. I also found that for females, proximity to conspecifics during development and early adulthood influences encounter rates with potential mates, such that some females risk remaining unmated in nature. Consequently, females adjust mate-choice decisions in response to chemical information about their local social environment; females in relatively isolated locations display decreased choosiness relative to females in close proximity to conspecifics. Together these studies provide insights into how mate competition and mate choice, key factors driving sexual selection, are related to the spatiotemporal distribution of conspecifics in a natural population.
Exploring the Influence of a Solution-focused Coaching Intervention on Coach Communication Skills and Athlete Self-actualization: An Action Research Study
Keywords: action research
coaching
cultural psychology
self-actualization
sport coaching

Abstract This action-research project, which involved a year long, humanistic communication intervention with a female interuniversity sport team, aimed to disrupt the dominant sport discourses that contribute to harmful coach behaviour, athlete compliance and docility. The research questions included: (i) Do solution-focused coaching skills improve the communication skills/behaviours of the coaches?; Are dominant coaching discourses interrupted? If so, how do these changes occur?; (ii) Does solution-focused communication influence the self-actualizing processes of these athletes?; (iii) Does the intervention appear to change team culture, and if so, in what ways? Using a case study design, a critical approach to thematic discourse analysis (Batel Castro, 2018; Braun Clark, 2006) and an interpretive comparative analysis (Fram, 2013, Thorne, 2000) was used to evaluate the effects of a solution-focused coaching intervention on coach learning and development, which was the purpose of this study. The effects were evaluated by their impact on team culture and the self-actualization processes of the athletes. Measures included coach learning sessions, weekly cycles of reflection, planning and action, audio recordings, observations, athlete interviews, written communication and artifacts. Through the perceptions of both coaches and athletes, the team culture transformed from disengaged to engaged, powerful team hierarchies were broken down and conversations became more inclusive, courageous and adult. The athletes’ ability to self-reflect, their agency, and personal insights were amplified. The performance of the team was enhanced. The findings of this collaborative study emphasize the utility of a humanistic, strengths-based approach to coach communication as a means of positively influencing athlete development and team culture. As such, it provides valuable information and insight that may contribute positively to our understanding of how to effectively influence coach learning and development, what constitutes coach learning and development, and the implications of emphasizing communication as a fundamental coaching skill.
New Tools for Evaluating Parallel and Heterogeneous Architectures
Keywords: Computer Architecture
Memory System
Performance Analysis
Performance Modelling

Computer architecture is entering its second golden age. The number of servers worldwide is estimated to be ten million. The number of mobile devices in the world now exceeds two billion. But with the decline of technology scaling, performance improvements from shrinking transistors has dwindled. The world now turns to innovations in computer architecture for increased performance. A fundamental aspect of computer architecture is evaluating tradeoffs between design points. Evaluating these trade-offs is becoming more difficult due to the increased complexity of the hardware and applications. Traditional methods for evaluation are useful but limiting. In this dissertation, we propose to remove these limitations by complementing traditional tools with two new ones: Rhythm and Mocktails. The traditional method of simulating parallel systems is limiting for two main reasons. First, only a small sample of a workload’s execution is considered. Second, the input to the application has been reduced in size by orders of magnitude. Rhythm removes these limitations by modeling only the key interactions between the application, system software, and hardware, producing performance estimates in seconds or minutes for full runs of a benchmark with realistic inputs. We validate the fidelity of Rhythm’s estimates to measurements of workloads running on two real systems. Rhythm helps architects gain valuable insights on the performance of parallel architectures in the early stages of design, guiding them toward the design points that should be evaluated in more detail. The rapid evolution of mobile computing has led to a significant degree of heterogeneity in the hardware. The heterogeneity stems from domain-specific accelerators, which limits academic research because these accelerators (and their workloads) are proprietary. Mocktails removes this limitation for architects exploring the memory hierarchy by statistically modeling the memory access behaviour of compute devices without making assumptions about the hardware or workload. We validate the fidelity of Mocktails experimentally for caches and main memory. Architects can use Mocktails in their simulations to mimic the behaviour of a compute device, making the tool a useful conduit between industry and academia.
Criminal Justice, Indigenous People, and Political Power in Canada
Keywords: Criminal justice
Impartiality
Indigenous law
Legitimacy
Punishment
Reconciliation

My dissertation contributes to the work of reconciling radically different justice concepts with a view to designing institutions that can be accepted as legitimate by Indigenous and non- Indigenous Canadians alike. The project is principally a work of political theory within Canadian politics, but it draws upon and contributes to literatures in political philosophy, empirical political science, criminology, and law. The central question of my dissertation is, how can criminal justice in Canada be rendered legitimate for Indigenous people? I argue that legitimate criminal justice is possible, but only if Canadian criminal justice practices are altered to incorporate fundamental insights from Indigenous theories of justice. Chapter two surveys the failures of Canadian criminal justice for Indigenous people, including overincarceration, underrepresentation on juries, the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and over- and under-policing. Drawing on Indigenous voices, I argue that these are symptoms of an underlying problem: the criminal justice system is not legitimate for Indigenous people. In the third chapter, I argue that the prominent liberal theories of legitimacy that undergird the Canadian polity cannot legitimate the Canadian constitutional framework or the institutions of criminal justice. Instead, criminal justice institutions must establish a form of freestanding legitimacy by deploying practices that themselves are acceptable to Indigenous people. In chapter four I make the case that a separate system of justice for Indigenous people cannot provide legitimacy. The lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians are sufficiently intertwined that justice problems would inevitably cross jurisdictional boundaries (defined territorially or by identity), leaving many caught in the other system. In matters of justice, separation cannot obviate the need for reconciliation. In chapter five, I work to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous understandings of a concept fundamental to Canadian justice: impartiality. I develop an inclusive model of impartiality implicit in Indigenous practices of circle justice that can supplement the Canadian model of impartiality as disinterestedness. In the conclusion, I note that the level of punitiveness of Canadian justice is unjustified, and a less punitive approach for all would open up more juridical and legal space for Indigenous approaches to justice.
Iwasawa Theory of Fine Selmer Groups
Keywords: Fine Selmer Groups
Iwasawa Theory
Number Theory

Iwasawa theory began as a Galois module theory of ideal class groups, initiated by Kenkichi Iwasawa as part of the theory of cyclotomic fields. In the early 1970s, Barry Mazur considered generalizations of Iwasawa theory to Selmer groups of elliptic curves (Abelian varieties in general). At the turn of this century, Coates and Sujatha initiated the study of a subgroup of the Selmer group of an elliptic curve called the fine Selmer group. The focus of this thesis is to understand arithmetic properties of this subgroup. In particular, we understand the structure of fine Selmer groups and their growth patterns. We investigate a strong analogy between the growth of the p-rank of the fine Selmer group and the growth of the p-rank of the class groups. This is done in the classical Iwasawa theoretic setting of (multiple) Zp-extensions; but what is more striking is that this analogy can be extended to non-p-adic analytic extensions as well, where standard Iwasawa theoretic tools fail. Coates and Sujatha proposed two conjectures on the structure of the fine Selmer groups. Conjecture A is viewed as a generalization of the classical Iwasawa μ=0 conjecture to the context of the motive associated to an elliptic curve; whereas Conjecture B is in the spirit of generalising Greenberg's pseudonullity conjecture to elliptic curves. We provide new evidence towards these two conjectures.
Essays on International Trade and Market Power
Keywords: International Trade

This thesis contains three papers exploring topics related to international trade and market power. In Chapter 1, I develop a quantitative model of international trade in which firms have endogenous market power in both product and labor markets that depends on their sizes in those markets. I use the model to evaluate the importance of accounting for oligopsony power on firm-level outcomes, welfare, the distribution of aggregate income, and the gains from trade. I calibrate the model to Indian plant-level data and import data for manufacturing sectors. I find that oligopsony causes small decreases in welfare but large decreases in aggregate real wages compared to perfect competition in labor markets. Trade increases large firms’ labor market power. Additionally, the welfare gains from trade are larger with oligopsony but the real wage gains from trade are smaller. Chapter 2, which is based on joint work with Stephen Ayerst, Faisal Ibrahim, and Swapnika Rachapalli, examines how technology embodied in traded goods generates spillovers across countries and sectors that increase aggregate growth. Using patent citation data from the United States, we construct a knowledge input output (IO) table and compare it to the production IO table. We use these IO structures and data on bilateral sector-level trade flows to measure embodied technology in imports. We show that increases in this measure are positively associated with increases in sectoral innovation expenditures. We build a quantitative model of firm-level innovation and trade with knowledge spillovers and calibrate it to trade and production data. We find that spillovers are an important contributor to growth, particularly in developing countries. Chapter 3 investigates how the strength of intellectual property rights affects firms’ make-or-buy decisions for specialized input purchases. I study a model of vertical integration and outsourcing in which a firm and an input supplier have asymmetric information about the supplier’s ability to use the firm’s knowledge capital outside of the relationship. I show that under outsourcing some relationships break down in equilibrium, which causes ex-post inefficiencies. When intellectual property rights are weak, increasing their strength may not reduce these inefficiencies unless the increase is large enough.
Parental Involvement in the Education of Their Adolescents with Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Keywords: achievement
ADHD
adolescents
parental involvement
parental self-efficacy
parenting stress

The goal of this dissertation was to examine parent involvement in the education of their adolescent children with ADHD. The three studies were informed by aspects of two theoretical models (Hoover-Dempsey Sandler, 2005; Ryan Adams, 1995) that identify motivational and contextual factors that influence parental involvement, parent involvement behaviors, and parent and child factors that predict children’s academic achievement. Study 1 compared parents of adolescents with and without ADHD with regard to their involvement in their adolescents’ learning, study 2 explored the relationship between maternal and paternal self-efficacy and involvement behaviors with adolescents’ academic achievement, and study 3 examined the contribution of adolescents’ and mothers’ characteristics associated with maternal self-efficacy for supporting their adolescents’ learning. Method: The sample comprised 108 families with adolescents 13 to 18 years of age (58 ADHD, 50 non-ADHD). Parents reported on the psychological and contextual factors linked to their decision to become involved in their adolescents’ learning, their parental involvement behaviors, their parenting stress and their own ADHD symptoms. Adolescents reported on their perception of their parents’ involvement behaviors. Adolescents, their parents and teachers completed measures assessing adolescents’ inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, oppositional behaviors, learning problems, and academic achievement. Results: Both mothers and fathers of adolescents with ADHD reported lower self-efficacy to support their adolescents’ learning than parents of typically developing adolescents. Mothers of adolescents with ADHD, but not fathers, were less supportive of their adolescent children’s learning and had lower aspirations for their children than mothers of typically developing adolescents. Mothers’ self-efficacy and involvement behaviors did not predict adolescent academic achievement. Paternal self-efficacy, supportive involvement behaviors and aspirations were associated with higher academic achievement only in adolescents with ADHD. Mother-reported adolescent oppositional behaviors predicted maternal self-efficacy and this relationship was mediated by maternal parenting stress. The results partially support the theoretical models that informed the research. The findings highlight the role of parental self-efficacy. They suggest that fathers’ involvement in the learning of their adolescent children with ADHD is an important factor in enhancing the adolescents’ achievement, and that maternal involvement is influenced by their adolescents’ oppositional behaviors, their self-efficacy, and their parenting stress.
Numerical Model of Magnetostriction and Lorentz Force Mechanisms in Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers
Keywords: EMATs
Guided Ultrasonic Waves
Hysteresis
Loretnz
Magnetostriction
NDT

In this thesis, a successful development of a numerical model of magnetostriction and Lorentz force mechanisms in Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers (EMATs) for nondestructive evaluation of steel components is presented. A Periodic Permanent Magnet Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (PPM-EMAT) scanner is designed and a prototype scanner is built for identifying corrosion defects that feature at least 20% wall-loss on ¼ "-thick mild steel plates. A sequence of experimental measurements is performed to evaluate the peak amplitude of the Shear Horizontal (SH) waves received from defect-free plates while the scanner moves in various directions on the surface of the sample plate. Scanner movement parallel to the direction of SH wave propagation led to an average of +/-20 % change in the received wave amplitude when the transmitter motion is towards/away from the receiver. This increase/decrease in amplitude remains intact even when scanner motion is stopped. Published models of PPM-EMAT transduction mechanisms are primarily focused on the Lorentz force coupling mechanism. These models ignore nonlinear magnetic behaviours of the steel samples and they cannot explain the source of asymmetrical coupling force distribution due to the scanner motion. A model is developed to evaluate the contribution of all transduction/reception mechanisms to the SH wave generation/reception of a stationary PPM-EMAT scanner operating on a mild steel plate. The PPM-EMAT transmitter, SH wave generation/propagation, and the PPM-EMAT receiver are modelled separately using a semi-analytical approach. The effects of the scanner motion are studied by including the magnetic hysteresis caused by the PPM array movement to the plate’s properties in the Finite Element Method (FEM) model of the magnetic fields. Model results demonstrated that the magnetostriction contribution to SH wave generation is approximately 55 % of the Lorentz mechanism for our EMAT configuration. The Lorentz mechanism is found to be insensitive to the scanner motion, while magnetostriction experiences a spatial displacement with respect to the Lorentz coupling mechanism in the transmitter EMAT. The new model results are consistent with the general behaviour of the experimental system.