VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The JBS-associated E3 Ligase UBR-1 Maintains Synaptic Glutamate Homeostasis and Regulates Neurotransmitter Balance
Keywords: C. elegans
GOT-1
JBS
UBR-1
VGLUT3

Johanson-Blizzard Syndrome (JBS) is a rare, sometimes fatal autosomal recessive multi-systemic congenital genetic disorder, characterized by pancreatic exocrine insufficiency and mental retardation. JBS results from mutations in the gene UBR1, an E3 ubiquitin ligase that specifically targets proteins for proteasomal degradation. There are multiple UBR1 homologs in humans; however, mutations in UBR1 alone lead to JBS. Although it is known that loss-of-function mutations in UBR1 cause JBS, the cellular and molecular mechanisms through which UBR1 underlie normal or pathological development remain elusive. In this study, I describe the identification and characterization of UBR-1, the sole UBR1 homologue in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). In the first data chapter, I show that UBR-1 functions through a simple premotor interneuron circuit to regulate body bending during backward locomotion. I find that the absence of UBR-1 disrupts glutamate homeostasis, and further identified three components of a UBR-1-regulated signaling pathway - a glutamate metabolic enzyme GOT/GOT-1.2, a vesicular glutamate transporter VGlut3/EAT-4, and a glutamate-gated chloride channel GluCl/AVR-15 - all involved in glutamatergic synaptic transmission in this premotor circuit. These findings suggest that UBR-1 maintains synaptic glutamate homeostasis in this premotor circuit to control locomotion. In the second data chapter, I demonstrate a role of UBR-1-mediated glutamate homeostasis in GABAergic neurons. A simple GABAergic motor circuit controls C. elegans defecation. ubr-1 mutants exhibit defecation defects, coinciding with reduced activity of the GABAergic motor neurons, as well as reduced GABA signaling. I show that the reduced neuronal activity is augmented by removing the glutamate metabolic enzyme GOT-1, whereas reduced GABA signaling is rescued by removing the vesicular glutamate transporter EAT-4, both function in the GABAergic motor neurons. These findings implicate a requirement of UBR-1 in maintaining the balance between inhibitory (GABA) and excitatory (glutamate) neurotransmitters, and of glutamate homeostasis in regulating the activity of GABAergic neurons. Finally, I propose that dysregulation of glutamate homeostasis mediated by the functional loss of UBR1 may underlie systemic and neurodevelopmental defects in JBS patients.
The Neural Correlates of Impaired Insight into Illness in Schizophrenia
Keywords: Anosognosia
Illness denial
Insight into illness
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Psychosis
Schizophrenia

Impaired insight into illness is a common, but poorly understood feature of schizophrenia that contributes to medication nonadherence, poor treatment outcomes, higher rates of relapse and rehospitalization. Impaired insight into illness or anosognosia occurs in both schizophrenia and right hemisphere lesions due to stroke, dementia, and traumatic brain injury. In the latter conditions, anosognosia is thought to arise from unilateral hemispheric dysfunction or interhemispheric disequilibrium, which provides an anatomical model for exploring impaired insight into illness in other neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. To this end, we investigated the structural and functional neural correlates of impaired insight into illness in schizophrenia using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). First, we performed volume-based structural analyses of hemisphere asymmetry in participants with schizophrenia to explore the relationship between impaired insight and regional brain volume. Impaired insight into illness was associated with right
Filtered Out: LGBTQ Parents Engage with Special Needs Service Systems
Keywords: Disability
Gender
Parents
Service Systems
Sexuality
Social Work

Using ethnographic methods, this study started from the everyday activities and narratives of LGBTQ parents of children with 'special needs'. A critical approach to intersectionality was employed to consider how certain parents, children, and families are constructed as "different" or "not fitting" in particular settings and contexts, and what consequences follow (Crenshaw, 1991; Gibson, 2013). Fifteen parents and six key informants were interviewed, all of whom were based in the Greater Toronto Area. Methods used were drawn from institutional ethnography (Smith 2005) and discourse analysis (Gee, 2005; Riessman, 2008). The study found that special needs services systems operate to `filter out' potential service users at multiple points of contact, regardless of the intentions of individual providers or the written policies of organizations. Parents encounter interpersonal and text-based, procedural barriers that discourage, deny, and defer claims. As a result, parents do extensive `systemwork' to improve the chances that their children will receive needed supports, and to fill in the gaps when they do not.This institutional reliance on parental work and the resulting framework of competition means that what children and families receive is highly variable. Parents marshal whatever financial, social, and relational resources they have in support of their efforts. Often `going private' is the only or best means of being able to secure or augment public services, however only some parents have the financial means to do so. For parents and children with fewer resources and privileges, it is more difficult to avoid being filtered out. Parents reported particular vulnerabilities and strategies related to their LGBTQ identities as they navigated special needs services. Parent narratives reflected the ways that parents both contend with and reshape dominant ways of thinking about queerness and disability. The impact of dominant notions about `desirable' children and parents could not only be seen in parents' narratives and strategies, but also in their reluctance to engage with special needs systems. This discursive background is thus another means in which parents are filtered out. These findings have implications for users, researchers, and providers of special needs service systems, particularly those who want to make special needs service provision accessible and responsive to all.
Legal and Policy Implications for Early Childhood Professionals in Ontario's Kindergarten Programs
Keywords: early education (kindergarten and early childhood)
education law and policy
feminist legal analysis and gendered work
integrated early learning systems
integrated staff teams
professionalization

The integration of child care and early education systems has been driving staffing change in early learning environments globally over the past decade. Rationales for staff integration often include concurrent movements to professionalize and regularize the early childhood sector. The legal and policy implication of systems integration in Ontario includes the movement of a largely unionized private non-profit sector workforce into the realm of public education in Full Day Kindergarten (FDK). Ontario was the first jurisdiction in Canada to introduce a team teaching model comprised of a Registered Early Childhood Educator (RECE) and Kindergarten Teacher, bringing approximately 10,000 new RECEs into the public education sector. At the same time, the College of Early Childhood Educators was also established to develop standards of practice and provide public accountability for early childhood professionals.This thesis explores the new "professional" role of the RECE within the integrated FDK staff team in the education sector and the concurrent movement to professionalize and regularize the early childhood profession in Ontario. Through a series of four interrelated manuscripts that use a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches including feminist legal policy research and text analysis, this compilation thesis documents the legal and policy impact of FDK staffing policy, and how it has influenced the way the new professional RECE role in FDK is being developed through legislation, policy and practice. By conceptualizing professionalization as a site of struggle and using feminist legal and policy research perspectives to understand policy implementation, I describe ways in which policy makers can have a more meaningful impact through FDK program implementation at all levels, and disclose strategies on how the policy intent of a more professional status and role for RECEs in Ontario's education system can be realized.
Observation of the Higgs Boson Decaying to WW to Leptons and Neutrinos
Keywords: ATLAS Detector
Di-bosons
Higgs
High Energy Physics
Particle Physics

The search for the Higgs boson produced through gluon fusion and vector boson fusion and decaying to WW bosons is performed. The WW bosons subsequently decay to combinations of electrons, muons and neutrinos. The final states are accompanied by up to two jets. The search is performed using 25 fb^{-1} of data collected by the ATLAS detector in centre-of-mass 7 TeV and 8 TeV proton-proton collisions at the LHC. Comparing the collected data to Standard Model expectations, in which the Higgs boson is assumed to not exist, yields a 6.1 sigma excess at around a Higgs mass of 130 GeV and over a wide mass range. The significance is the same for a Higgs mass of 125.36 GeV, which is the Higgs mass determined by the Higgs to two photons and Higgs to two Z bosons searches. The vector boson fusion production process is observed with a significance of 3.2 sigma at a Higgs mass of 125.36 GeV. The ratio of the expected to the observed values of the total production cross section times branching ratio is 1.08 (-0.20, +0.22) at a Higgs boson mass of 125.36 GeV. When separated by Higgs production modes, this value is 1.01 (-0.25, +0.27) for gluon fusion, and 1.27(-0.45, +0.53) for vector boson fusion. The total cross sections for the gluon fusion and vector boson fusion processes are measured. The fiducial cross section for the gluon fusion process is measured in final states containing zero and one associated jets.
Negotiating School: A Narrative Study
Keywords: alternative education
home schooling
parenting
private schools
school choice
special education

Negotiating School is an investigation into the work of parents who adapted schooling to custom fit their child rather than simply depositing the child at the neighbourhood school and trusting the school to decide what to do. Following the methodology of narrative inquiry, this study analyzes the experiences of the author's family and seven other families as they dealt with school. This study identifies many strategies parents may employ as they navigate their child's schooling. This continuum of strategies starts with minor actions such as maintaining close communications with teachers to the radical move of quitting school altogether for unschooling. Although Negotiating School never intended to make any claim of generalizability, the strategies that emerged from the participant's stories seem to cover the territory of possible school negotiations available to parents. Initially, this thesis had in mind parents who sought a humanistic, child-centred education which would reflect their own intensive parenting style. However, as they told their stories, it became clear that some of my participants privileged traditional concerns, such as the quality of teaching, the coherence of the curriculum, and the conduct of the other students in the building. Regardless, the techniques of negotiating school served both ends of the educational spectrum, the progressive and the traditional. Without intending to, Negotiating School has taken on some features of a longitudinal study. Children I met in kindergarten are now in university. Experiments have played out. Some utopian hopes have taken a bad turn. But all my participants were school negotiators, intensely involved in their children's schooling.
Cognitive Modelling: A Case Study of Reading-to-write Strategy Instruction and the Development of Second Language Writing Expertise in a University English for Academic Purposes Writing Course
Keywords: academic literacy
cognitive modelling
reading-to-write
teacher modelling
think-alouds
writing instruction

This case study investigates how the teaching of cognitive strategies in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing course at a Canadian university occurs and relates to students' engagement in course writing tasks. While universities offer writing courses in order to improve academic writing skills, English Language Learners (ELL) may still be considered poor writers by mainstream standards. Perhaps the problem is not writing skill, but an ineffective linking of reading and writing strategic knowledge to the task at hand. Pedagogically interconnecting reading and writing skills reciprocally supports learner proficiency development, which may be enhanced by directly teaching awareness raising strategies. This doctoral study seeks to investigate the declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge of what a teacher actually does in the classroom. This instrumental qualitative case study took place in a 10-week EAP writing course. Data collection involved classroom observation, open-ended interviews, reflective questionnaires and retrospective think-aloud tasks of 6 focal students. Analysis of the classroom observations, stimulated recalls, interviews and end-of-term questionnaires were thematically analysed for links between observed teaching activities and student perceived awareness of learning. Taxonomies of teaching activities and learning activities incorporated five aspects of reading and writing behaviours. Teaching episodes are being analysed in one of three ways: Episodes of Raising Awareness (ERA), where teachers may only raise cognitive awareness by mentioning strategies for learning; Episodes of Strategy Explanation (ESE), where teachers explain and demonstrate the strategy; and Episodes of Cognitive Modelling (ECM), which entails the teacher verbalising by thinking aloud and demonstrating strategies as the expert. Student stimulated recalls were analysed as Episodes of Cognitive Learning (ECL). Analyses of the observations and the stimulated student recalls reveal results that link explicit teacher task modelling (ESEs and ECMs) by using think-alouds and demonstration to learner task awareness and strategy implementation. This study provides insights for researchers and educators across disciplines on the importance of the relationship between actively teaching cognitive strategies and how learners problem-solve or apply learning.
Importance of Working Collaboratively and Risk-taking with Digital Technologies when Teaching Literacy
Keywords: digital literacies
elementary teachers
literacy curriculum
multimodal practices
pedagogical risk-takers
teacher collaboration

As classroom landscapes and digital technologies are constantly changing, this qualitative research study investigated the challenges for elementary educators as they implement and sustain digital-based literacy practices. The perceptions of 15 participating elementary teachers, from rural and urban Ontario, Canada, as they reflected on their own teaching practices and curriculum planning involving literacy and digital tools, were explored through the lens of New Literacies (Coiro et al., 2008). The following research questions guided this study: a) What do teachers who use multimodal practices perceive as their teaching strengths? b) How do teachers describe their understanding of literacy and learning? c) How do teachers utilize digital technologies to support teaching and learning through multimodal methods? d) What types of environments support teachers to address the challenges of teaching with multimodal practices? Primary sources of data for this study were semi-structured interviews and the teachers' educational resources and documents, sourced to plan teaching and learning literacy activities, and collected and analyzed through a grounded theory approach. Findings suggest that the 15 teachers effectively integrate multimodal and digital tools and resources into their literacy curriculum, through supportive environments and peer collaborations. This shift in teaching and learning illustrated challenges with common technological and connectivity issues as well as finding space for professional development with Web 2.0 applications. The teachers experienced tensions when teaching through multimodal means, such as inequity of access to digital resource sharing and daily implementing digital tools in the elementary literacy curriculum. Constantly seeking out new ways to integrate digital technologies, tools and resources, while embracing the tensions of teaching digitally, these pedagogical risk-takers provided opportunities to further understand the importance and challenges of facilitating multimodal practices in the elementary literacy classroom.
Images of the Diversity Educator: Indian and Canadian Perspectives of Diversity Education in Teacher Education
Keywords: Canada
Comparative Education
Diversity Education
India
Preservice
Teacher Development

Increasingly, diversity education in initial teacher education (ITE) is identified as a global need in pluralist contexts. Recent policies in India and Canada make explicit commitments to addressing diversity and inclusion as part of teacher education reforms. Despite strong and growing policy recommendations, limited information is available on how ITE programs approach diversity education in practice. In response, I conducted a qualitative international comparative study of ITE programs in Ontario, Canada, and Delhi, India. The purpose of this study is to identify the similarities and differences of approaches to diversity education in ITE programs. The study analyzes six programs--three in Canada and three in India--that prepare novice teachers for diversity. I focus primarily on two of the programs and include the other four as context for the regional beliefs and practices in each country. Through interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis, I explore: a) participants' understandings of diversity education; b) program policies, structures and procedures; c) curriculum content and pedagogy; and d) the challenges of approaches to diversity education.The findings reveal that the approaches of both programs are framed by three images of the diversity educator--the affirmer, the conscious practitioner, and the social reformer--albeit in varying ways and with different emphases. The affirmer focuses on empowering students, reinforcing positive views of diversity, and building community in the classroom; the conscious practitioner on being mindful of diversity and aware of the implications of social issues on candidates' lives and practice; and the reformer on implementing diversity education curriculum for social reform. Each image highlights distinct conceptions of diversity, inclusion, professional knowledge, and social action.The images of the diversity educator offer a framework for comparative international inquiry on diversity education in ITE. They generate insights into how diversity education is approached in three ways: 1) as distinct forms based on sociocultural context, ITE participants' beliefs, and program practices; 2) as important opportunities for social action in education; and 3) as multiple forms simultaneously operating in a single ITE program. The images provide new directions on how to best understand and improve diversity education in ITE.
Character Sum Estimates in Finite Fields and Applications
Keywords: Character sums
Combinatorics
Finite fields
Number theory

In this thesis we present a number of character sum estimates for sums ofvarious types occurring in finite fields. The sums in question generally have anarithmetic combinatorial flavour and we give applications of suchestimates to problems in arithmetic combinatorics and analytic number theory.Conversely, we demonstrate ways in which the theory of arithmetic combinatorics can be used to obtain certain character sum estimates.
The Influence of Polymer Sequence on the Formation of Bulk-heterojunctions in Organic Solar Cells
Keywords: molecular ordering
nanostructure
organic solar cell
polymer sequence

The rapid development of polymer solar cell technologies has lead to the implementation of multi-chromophore polymer structures, such as donor-acceptor, block, or statistical polymers that provide better energy-gap tuning ability or spectrum coverage, but also make controlling morphology more complicated. We compare the morphology and solar cell device performance of two fullerene acceptor with diffident crystallinity, PCBM and ICBA, and two selenophene-thiophene copolymers that have the same degree of polymerization and composition, and differ only in their sequence (statistical vs. block copolymers). P3HS-b-P3HT spontaneously undergoes phase separation and P3HS-s-P3HT does not. P3HS-b-P3HT performs best when the intrinsic self-assembled nanostructure is the most perturbed. P3HS-s-P3HT does not undergo intrinsic phase separation, and vapor annealing can be used to optimize the polymer:fullerene morphology, where better nanostructure is well correlated with the best device. On the other hand, different fullerene structures not only have distinct morphology evolution, but also affect the self-assembly of polymers. Inspired by previous results, we also propose a "blocky" structure that incorporates selenophene into a donor-acceptor copolymer in order to improve molecular ordering.