VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Living with Uncertainty: The Experiences of Parents and Children When a Parent is Living with and Dying from, Advanced cancer
Keywords: advanced cancer
children
palliative care
parents
psychosocial oncology
qualitative

Living with Uncertainty: The Experiences of Parents and Children When a Parent is Living with and Dying from, Advanced cancer Gabrielle Erica Pitt Doctor of Philosophy, 2017 Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work University of Toronto Abstract Advanced cancer and its progression and treatment deeply affect members of a family, especially the children. The limited research contends that the complexities of advanced cancer and the anticipated loss of a parent result in greater psychosocial vulnerability for children, compromising their well-being (Beale et al., 2004; Bugge et al., 2008; Christ, 2000). Conducted at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario, the purpose of this interpretive research was to investigate the experiences of parents and children six to eighteen years coping with a parent living with, and dying from, advanced cancer. This study focused on the meaning children and parents ascribe to this time of uncertainty, in addition to aspects such as emotional security, and the role of parents in understanding, and ameliorating, potential effects to children. Seven families participated in the study (seven parents with advanced cancer, four children, and four well parents). A review of the existent literature was presented thematically, and demonstrated critical gaps and meagreness of the research. The theoretical framework encompassed social constructivism and sociocultural theory, in addition to the relational theories of attachment and intersubjectivity. Aspects of neurobiology underpinned the framework. Each facet of the framework was situated within the context of children and parents coping with advanced cancer and anticipatory loss. A theoretical model depicts this framework. Hermeneutic interpretive phenomenology was the methodology incorporated in this study. The primary method of data collection was semi-structured interviews with children and parents separately. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al., 2009) guided the data analysis and interpretation. Results of the study are presented as a discussion of the themes, illustrated in an accompanying map. A review of the findings in relation to the research questions, the empirical literature, and theoretical framework reveals potential contributions of this research. This study concludes with implications for scholarly knowledge, social policy, social work education and practice, and recommendations for future research. Results of this research will advance the understanding of the experiences of parents and children, inform social work education and practice, and facilitate the development of interventions promoting positive outcomes for children and families.
Address Translation Optimizations for Chip Multiprocessors
Keywords: Address Translation
Translation Lookaside Buffers

Address translation is an essential part of current systems. Getting the virtual-to-physical mapping of a page is a time-sensitive operation that precedes the vast majority of memory accesses, be it for data or instructions. The growing memory footprints of current workloads, as well as the proliferation of chip multiprocessor systems with a variety of shared on-chip resources create both challenges and opportunities for address translation research. This thesis presents an in-depth analysis of the TLB-related behaviour of a set of commercial and cloud workloads. This analysis highlights workload nuances that can influence address translationâ s performance, as well as shortcomings of current designs. This thesis presents two architectural proposals that both support our thesis that TLB designs and policies need not be rigid, but should instead dynamically adapt to the workloadsâ behaviour for a judicious use of the available on-chip resources. The Prediction-Based Superpage-Friendly TLB proposal leverages prediction to improve energy and utilization of TLBs by allowing translations of different page sizes to coexist in a set-associative (SA) structure. For example, a 256-entry 4-way SA TLBpred achieves better coverage (7.7% less Misses Per Million Instructions) compared to a slower 128-entry fully- associative TLB. It also has the energy efficiency of a much smaller structure. This design uses a highly accurate superpage predictor that achieves a 0.4% average misprediction rate with a meager 32B of storage. The Forget-Me-Not TLB (FMN) proposal utilizes the existing cache capacity to store translation entries and to thus reduce TLB-miss handling latency. A per core private 1024-entry direct-mapped FMN reduces the average L1-TLB miss latency across all simulated workloads by 31.4% over a baseline with only L1-TLBs. Conversely, a dedicated 1024-entry 8-way SA L2-TLB reduces it by 24.6% and causes, in some cases, performance degradation. We further propose an L2-TLB bypassing mechanism to address this challenge.
Microfluidic Techniques to perform more Physiologically Relevant Bone Flow Experiments
Keywords: Co-culture
Mechanobiology
Microfluidics
Osteoclasts
Osteocyte

Mechanical stimulation of bone has often been used to prevent and/or treat various bone mass disorders. Osteocytes, as the major bone mechanosensory cell, are critical in regulating these disorders through the expression of factors that control bone homeostasis. The current methodology to study how fluid mechanostimulation of osteocytes regulates other cells in vitro is through the use of parallel plate flow chambers (PPFCs). In these studies, osteocytes are seeded on glass slides and loaded into PPFCs. Flow is applied to the osteocytes, and conditioned medium is collected, which can then be applied to the other cells being investigated. However, this methodology lacks real-time and direct signaling between the cells, and loses low half-life signal interactions. Additionally, these large PPFCs lack dimensional physiological relevance, and are non-viable for primary osteocyte studies. These limitations, however, can be mitigated through the use of microfluidics and/or co-culture. In this thesis, we present microfluidic techniques to significantly improve the physiological relevance of in vitro osteocyte flow experiments. First, we developed a microfluidic co-culture device to investigate mechanoregulated osteocyte-osteoclast cross-talk. Specifically, we demonstrated that unstimulated osteocytes create an environment that is preferential for osteoclast precursor aggregation and differentiation. Furthermore, we observed increased osteocyte mechanosensitivity in co-culture with osteoclasts. Next, we investigated how platform dimensions and forces applied to the cells, independent of shear stress, can affect osteocyte mechanosensitivity. We determined that this sensitivity was due to differences in flow rates and drag forces applied to the cells. Finally, we fabricated a microfluidic pump that was capable of applying physiologically relevant oscillatory fluid flow and inducing osteocyte intracellular calcium responses within microchannels. This work highlights the need to translate osteocyte mechanobiology studies to more dimensionally/biochemically relevant platforms using microfluidic technologies. As well, this work has already led to the development of in vitro platforms investigating osteocyte mechanical regulation of bone metastasis.
Food as a Dangerous Product: The Promise of Private Law for Public Health
Keywords: Diet-related chronic diseases
Duty to warn
Food products
Obesity
Product liability
Public health law

Obesity and diet-related chronic diseases are a critical public health problem facing Canadians. Interventions aimed at improving diet and the overall food environment have had limited success, and as a consequence, many have suggested an increased use of legal tools, including litigation. This project examines the potential of the duty to warn, part of product liability law, as a strategy for addressing obesity and other diet-related chronic diseases. To this end, the project proceeds in two parts. Part one project examines the potential of tort law to be used to address public health problems. It begins by establishing the congruence between tort law and public health, and suggests that there are potential benefits of public health litigation for obesity prevention. This sets the foundation for part two, which argues that Canadian jurisprudence clearly establishes that food manufacturers have a duty to warn consumers about the risks associated with consuming food products. Part two examines key aspects of a tort claim based on a failure to warn, namely, the duty of care, standard of care, and factual causation. It sets out an approach to failure to warn cases that is consistent with general principles of negligence law, but that is sensitive to the particularities of a failure to warn case. This project establishes that food manufactures are required to provide warnings that are consistent with the standards of adequacy as set out by the Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Buchan v Ortho Pharmaceutical. Buchan, which has been affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada, sets out explicit criteria for determining adequacy, including prohibitions against collateral efforts to negate or neutralize warnings. It is clear that food manufacturers are neither fulfilling their obligation to provide warnings nor adhering to the Buchan standard. This project concludes that food manufacturers should be held accountable for this failure.
Onco-proteogenomic exploration of variant peptide detection in disease models and clinical specimens
Keywords: Mass spectrometry
Onco-proteogenomics
Precision medicine
Proteogenomics

This thesis describes the efforts of integrating nucleotide sequencing results with mass spectrometry-based proteomic results to identify variants predicted from sequencing and being expressed at the proteome level within a proteogenomic framework. Specifically, the study was carried out in three levels. The first was a proof of concept study to demonstrate the feasibility of variant peptide detection in clinical specimens and reveal intrinsic strengths and weaknesses of the onco-proteogenomic pipeline. Subsequently, sequencing-predicted variants were tracked at the proteome level in cancer cell lines and breast cancer tissues. The results from both homogeneous and heterogeneous cell populations reveal the proportion of sequencing-predicted variant peptides detected at the proteome level, how different variant calling filtering criteria from sequencing raw data and alternative ways to search for variant peptides influence this number, a correlation between transcript abundance and variant peptide detection and how the translated mutant versions of the proteins may influence the observed phenotype. Overall, the results of the present dissertation provide promising evidence that the combination of the well-established sequencing technologies and the excellent capabilities of state of the art mass spectrometry instruments can effectively detect variant peptides in clinical specimens and that this approach has the potential to be optimized to harness its full potential and realize precision medicine translational applications.
Photochemical and Photothermal Reduction of Carbon Dioxide for Solar Fuels Production
Keywords: Catalysis
Photochemical
Photomethanation
Photothermal
Reverse Water Gas Shift Reaction
Solar Fuels

Abstract Catalytic conversion of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to value-added chemicals and fuels powered by solar energy is envisioned to be a promising strategy to realize both energy security and environmental protection. This work demonstrates that earth abundant, low cost nanomaterials based on silicon and iron can be used to harvest both light and heat energy from the sun to reduce CO2 and generate solar fuels. Herein, we have demonstrated that ruthenium supported ultra-black silicon nanowires can drive the Sabatier reaction both photochemically and photothermally where both incident photons absorbed by and heat generated in the black silicon nanowires accelerate the photomethanation reaction. This allows the reaction to be activated at ambient temperatures removing the need for external heating that could cause sintering, mechanical degradation and eventual catalyst deactivation and therefore improves the overall energy efficiency of the process. Additionally, we have shown that the rate of photomethanation is greatly enhanced when highly dispersed nanocrystalline RuO2 is chemically deposited onto the black silicon nanowires support. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that other silicon structures such as three-dimensional silicon photonic crystals can be used as an efficient support for CO2 hydrogenation. Unlike other insulating supports, these silicon nanostructured supports are particularly attractive for solar-powered catalysis because, with a band-gap of 1.1 eV, they can potentially absorb 80% of the solar irradiance. Moreover, they exhibit excellent absorption strengths and low reflective losses across the entire solar spectral wavelength range of the ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared portion of the solar spectrum. Finally, we demonstrated a comprehensive comparative study of the physical, electronic, and photocatalytic properties of ironoxyhydroxide (FeOOH) polymorphs by studying the extent of methylene blue photodegradation. This work led to the transformation of these FeOOH polymorphs into magnetite (Fe3O4) which effectively reduced CO2 to CO via the reverse water gas shift (RWGS) reaction.
Embodied knowing and measured deficits: Whose knowledge counts in adult literacy?
Keywords: adult literacy
Disability Studies
Embodied knowledge
measurement and assessment
narrative inquiry
New literacy studies

My dissertation examines the (dis)connections between current policy about the meaning and measuring of literacy and learning and the self-knowledge of adult basic literacy learners. In particular, it explores the importance of reclaiming learning as an embodied process in adult literacy education. Drawing on concepts from New Literacy Studies and Disability Studies my thesis explores how the prevailing norming practices in adult literacy policy discourse objectify and shame learners, treat them as bodies of deficiency, and obscure the embodied process of learning. I use Narrative Inquiry approaches that bring together my lived experience as a literacy practitioner and personal learning in critical feminist studies to examine learner experiences and the power relations embedded in teaching and learning. My fieldwork explores how adult literacy learners understand themselves and how they make meaning of their own literacy and learning. I contrast these embodied ways of knowing with the objectifying knowledge constructs used for measuring adult literacy within current policy structures and texts, and explore the impact of the gap between them.
Preclinical Evaluation of TEX101 Protein as a Male Infertility Biomarker and Identification of its Functional Interactome
Keywords: Biomarkers
Human Reproduction
Interactome
Male Infertility
Testis expressed protein 101

TEX101 is a testis-specific cell surface protein expressed exclusively in the male germ cells, and it was previously suggested as a biomarker for the differential diagnosis of male infertility. Molecular function of TEX101 is not known, but previous studies demonstrated that murine TEX101 was a cell membrane chaperone, essential for fertilization. In this work, we employed quantitative proteomic strategies to investigate the clinical and the functional aspects of human TEX101 protein. To facilitate translation of TEX101 into clinic, we first developed and optimized an immunoassay for TEX101 measurement in biological fluids. We then evaluated the performance of TEX101 ELISA in 805 seminal plasma samples of fertile, sub-fertile, and infertile men. We demonstrated the clinical utility of TEX101 to evaluate vasectomy success, to stratify azoospermia forms and subtypes, and to predict the success of sperm retrieval in patients diagnosed with non-obstructive azoospermia. To gain insights into human TEX101 function, we employed mass spectrometry approaches to investigate the physical and the transient TEX101 interactome. Co-immunoprecipitation-mass spectrometry revealed a testis-specific complex TEX101-DPEP3 which was validated by hybrid immunoassay in testicular tissues and spermatozoa. In addition, we discovered a TEX101 rs35033974 homozygous knockdown model, which carried a missense variation leading to near-complete protein degradation. We then performed global proteomic analysis of TEX101 knockdown spermatozoa, and we identified the transient interactome of TEX101. New knowledge on TEX101 will provide insights into reproductive biology, facilitate better diagnostics of male infertility, contribute to rational selection of assisted reproduction treatments, and offer new protein targets to develop non-hormonal male contraceptives.
Belonging to Lake Nipissing: Knowledge, Governance, and Human-Fish Relations
Keywords: Environmental governance
Fisheries
Indigenous geography
Indigenous knowledge
Indigenous law
Lake Nipissing

Fishing constitutes an essential relation through which Nipissing peoples belong to Lake Nipissing. Belonging in and through human-fish relations is an affective, embodied, and dynamic relation. It is a reciprocal relation that expresses an Anishinaabe cosmology and rich knowledge and governance traditions. The diverse ways that Nipissing peoples belong to the lake are not represented in provincial fisheries policy and dominant epistemic frameworks; on the contrary, current provisions for Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge, ecosystem-based management, and Aboriginal partnerships preserve what Douglas Harris calls the legal capture of fish. In this dissertation, I write beyond the question of how Indigenous Knowledge Systems can improve Canadian fisheries management to center the diverse ways that Nipissing peoples value fish, know the lake, and enact their laws. Theorizing with difference, with that which seems contradictory and fragmented, my research performs important bridging work. Drawing on Nipissing and Anishinaabe theories and embodiments of power, change and transformation, my work seeks to interpret the efforts by Nipissing First Nation members to maintain relations with a hotly contested resource in a deeply challenging historio-legal environment.
Towards an Integrated Model of Athletic Cognition - The Representational Shift Hypothesis
Keywords: athletic cognition
data feedback
expertise
human performance
mental representation
skill acquistion

This exploratory study sought to situate athletic cognition within an integrated theoretical framework, the Representational Shift Hypothesis (RSH). Developed by the author, the RSH attempts to integrate the research and phenomenology of athletic cognition, including both the “hard” aspects of athletic cognition such as motor learning and control, attentional focus, cognitive load and performance, and the “softer” aspects such as affect, motivation and sense of self-capacity and control. A similar “mental representational” model, the RSH, posits that athletic cognition is the result of an embodied integration of the sensory, perceptual, knowledge, motoric and affective components supporting athletic performance, and that the holistic representations that underlie the athlete’s performance and self-conceptions undergo synchronized shifts. These shifts are necessarily episodic, reflecting the neural consolidation required to encode new skills, knowledge and affect. A longitudinal repeated measures exploratory study was conducted to determine if support for the RSH could be determined during the execution of a stable athletic task, stationary cycling. A broad range of cognitive, affective, and motoric execution data were collected during each session, utilizing both established and study specific self-reported inventories, automated performance data collection, and gaze tracking to assess attentional focus and cognitive load. Statistical and observational analyses were conducted to determine if synchronous shifts in the chosen measures could be determined, and their degree of synchronicity. Results provided mixed support for the RSH. While changes in inventory scores for self-efficacy, self-regulation and motivation did not show significance, the predicted trajectory of decreasing cognitive load over sessions, coupled to increasing fixation percentages on a decreasing number of data feedback points was partially expressed. Correlation and observational analyses of the data suggest some synchronization in shifts across measures, and a potential marker for representational shift was identified. The implications for additional research are discussed, including the potential for establishing empirically derived markets for skill acquisition and their role in supporting dynamically adaptive training systems.
Excess Heart Disease Risk Associated with Arthritis in the Canadian General Population
Keywords: Arthritis
Heart Disease

This thesis, through three manuscripts, aims to clarify to what extent arthritis may be an independent risk factor for developing heart disease in the general population, underlying mechanisms of the relationship, and who may be most at-risk. Manuscript 1 is a systematic review and meta-analysis of population-based studies that estimated risk of incident myocardial infarction (MI) associated with five major types of arthritis. Results showed that MI-risk was consistently increased across arthritis and was partially explained by a higher prevalence of traditional heart disease risk factors in each type of arthritis. Knowledge gaps from the review were used to inform subsequent secondary analyses of the longitudinal Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS) with 16-years of follow up. Manuscript 2 used discrete time survival analysis with time-varying lagged predictors to estimate effects of arthritis on first heart disease event occurrence. Potential variations by age, sex and activity limitation were examined. Results showed that arthritis was independently associated with incident heart disease in all women, with more marked risk in women who also reported activity limitation, but only in men with activity limitation. Manuscript 3 used a novel approach to estimate potential mediating and moderating effects of activity limitation in the arthritis-heart disease relationship and possible differences by obesity and sex/gender in the same longitudinal health survey as manuscript 2. Results showed the proportion of heart disease risk explained by activity limitation varied between men and women, and between obese and non-obese women. Activity limitation explained nearly all of the heart disease risk associated with arthritis in men (90%), most of the heart disease risk in obese women (54%), and part of the heart disease risk in non-obese women (23%). Overall, the thesis results are important for increasing public and healthcare-provider awareness of excess heart disease risk generally associated with arthritis, highlighting sex/gender disparities, and identifying activity limitation as a modifiable intermediate target for prevention strategies to help reduce heart disease risk in people with arthritis.