VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Ontario's Retirement Homes and Long-Term Care Homes: Policy Implications for Care Services, Funding and Governance Regimes
Keywords: funding
governance
long-term care homes
ontario
policy instruments
retirement homes

Abstract Purpose: The Province of Ontario is experiencing substantial growth in the seniors’ population requiring care, with capacity, cost and regulatory pressures across all settings. This study compares long-term care homes (LTCHs) and retirement homes (RHs), significant residential care alternatives for seniors in Ontario, regarding pricing, levels of care and availability of services, in the context of different government funding and regulatory oversight. Attention is given to the way owners of homes shape their services in response to prevailing policy instruments and other environmental factors. Methods: The research uses an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, with a first phase involving the analysis of quantitative data regarding LTCHs and RHs, and a second phase involving qualitative (interview) data from key informants. The first phase informs the interview questions for the second phase, with integration occurring after Phase 2. Results: Substantial overlaps exist in the characteristics of the two resident populations (LTCHs and RHs), which are most evident among the population of seniors requiring high levels of care and support. However, the two sectors are funded and regulated differently, which affect how services are delivered. Most care costs in LTCHs are publicly funded, while residents in RHs generally cover these expenses personally. Equity of access issues arise from shortages of beds in LTCHs and limited government funding for care services in RHs. LTCH owner strategies are affected by excess demand for beds and by regulatory instruments that limit profit for care and accommodation. With RHs, more flexible owner strategies are evident for care levels, pricing and location. However, without public funding, availability and affordability of RHs to the resident suffer and owner strategies focus on areas of higher income, population density or community infrastructure. The two sectors are also regulated differently in respect of care standards, security and enforcement. Conclusions: Policy instruments influence the features of residential care service offerings by shaping how the owners of seniors’ residential care offer services, with important consequences regarding access to those services. Policy instruments play an important part in determining the availability and affordability of seniors’ residential care, and consistency of governance.
An Exploratory Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Outpatient Group Treatment of Adolescents
Keywords: acceptance and commitment therapy
adolescents
anxiety
community hospital outpatient clinic
depression
group-based treatment

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a transdiagnostic therapeutic approach that has proven effective for a wide range of psychiatric disorders with adults. There is some evidence suggesting the effectiveness of group-based ACT with adolescents, but the research is limited. This dissertation aims to expand on previous research of group-based ACT with adolescents experiencing heterogeneous anxiety and/or depressive psychiatric disorders in a community hospital outpatient setting. The research consists of two studies using a mixed-methods approach to examine the utility and participants’ experience of group-based ACT. The first study utilized a quantitative methodology to explore treatment effects on symptom amelioration and the therapeutic processes underlying ACT. Seventy-two adolescents participated in this preliminary investigation, and completed outcome and ACT-related process measures at pre, post and three-month follow-up (3MFU) intervals. Repeated measures ANOVAs and pairwise comparisons revealed significant reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms from pre to post, and further significant reductions in symptoms post to 3MFU. There were significant changes in the therapeutic processes of acceptance/defusion, mindfulness and committed action. An investigation of mechanisms of change revealed that change in particular ACT process measures was related to reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms. The second study utilized a qualitative approach to explore adolescents’ experience and better understand the utility of group-based ACT to corroborate and potentially expand on Study 1 results. A subset of 10 adolescents from Study 1 participated in semi-structured interviews at post and 3MFU. Interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed themes of usefulness of treatment, improvements attributed to ACT, non-ACT factors, barriers to treatment use, and treatment within a group context. All participants reported ACT to be a beneficial treatment for emotional difficulties and behavioural functioning, with a few indicating that other factors, in addition to ACT, contributed to improvements. Overall this mixed-methods evaluation provides support for the utility of group-based ACT as a transdiagnostic treatment approach with adolescents. Firm conclusions could not be drawn, however, due to the exploratory nature of this investigation and lack of control or comparison group. Future research is warranted comparing ACT group treatment to control and existing treatments with a similar population across multiple contexts.
Numerical characterization of high-frequency flow fluctuations in intracranial aneurysms
Keywords: cardiovascular flows
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
Hemodynamics
Intracranial Aneurysms
shear-thinning rheology

Rupture of intracranial aneurysms (IAs), saccular outpouching of blood vessels, can lead to death or permanent disability in majority of the patients. Hemodynamic forces are thought to play a key role in the process, but, currently, can only be estimated through computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations of patient's cerebrovasculature. IA flows have conventionally been considered laminar and stable; however, recent studies highlighted the presence of high-frequency flow fluctuations consistent with clinical evidence — a discrepancy attributed to conventional use of low-order CFD. The goal of this doctoral thesis was to investigate the nature and characteristic of these flow fluctuations, and its prevalence in IAs. Towards that goal, we performed the first mesh, time, and solver refinement study to investigate the isolated impact of each modelling choice (Chapter 2). With 320-fold increase in mesh size, 25-fold increase in time-steps, and considering both a low-order solver and a high-order solver, we found that solver choice had a relatively higher impact on hemodynamics compared to other modelling assumptions. Finding of these flow fluctuations also meant rethinking the conventional assumption of Newtonian rheology for blood. As a first step, we performed a controlled numerical experiment on an idealized stenotic vessel for Re=500-1000, which suggested that shear-thinning non-Newtonian rheology caused a delay of 10% in the critical Reynolds number (Chapter 3). We later investigated the practical impact of these findings on IA hemodynamics (Chapter 4). These findings suggested that assumption of shear- thinning rheology had a negligible impact, particularly when compared to effects of low-order solvers. Due to limitations of current hemodynamic metrics in quantifying flow fluctuations, we proposed a frequency-based (Chapter 5). Using this tool and aforementioned findings, we performed high-resolution simulations of 19 IAs to characterize and investigate the prevalence of flow fluctuations (Chapter 6). Through proper orthogonal decomposition, we showed that, depending on the patient, a wide range of spectra exists, some with high concentration of energy in higher modes. We also found that approximately half of IA aneurysms are ‘turbulent-like and 30% can have cycle-to-cycle fluctuations. Further investigation is needed to establish the clinical impact of these flow fluctuations in IA rupture.
A Moral Persuasion: The Nazi-Looted Art Recoveries of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, 2002-2013
Keywords: art-restitution
looted art
plunder
provenance
recovery
spoliation

In 1937, under Gestapo orders, the Nazis forced the Düsseldorf-born Jewish art dealer Max Stern to sell over 200 of his family’s paintings at Lempertz, a Cologne-based auction house. Stern kept this fact a secret for the rest of his life despite escaping from Europe to Montreal, Canada, where he settled and became one of the country’s leading art dealers by the mid-twentieth century. A decade after Stern’s death in 1987, his heirs (McGill University, Concordia University, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) discovered the details of what he had lost, and how in the post-war years Stern travelled to Germany in an attempt to reclaim his art. To honour the memory of Max Stern, they founded the Montreal-based Max Stern Art Restitution Project in 2002, dedicated to regaining ownership of his art and to the study of Holocaust-era plunder and recovery. This dissertation presents the histories and circumstances of the first twelve paintings claimed by the organization in the context of the broader history of Nazi-looted art between 1933-2012. Organized into thematic chapters, the dissertation documents how, by following a carefully devised approach of moral persuasion that combines practices like publicity, provenance studies, law enforcement, and legal precedents, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project set international precedents in the return of cultural property. The dissertation reveals how the Max Stern Restitution Project used a self-generated methodology to recover works of Nazi-looted art from both private and public collections in countries including Spain, the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. It addresses how in just over a decade, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project became one of the world’s leading advocates in the reclamation of Nazi-era spoliated art and an authority on the subject of a judicious approach toward cultural property.
Air Quality Impacts of Vehicle Emissions on the Urban Environment: Real-World Emission Factors and Capturing the Fleet Signal
Keywords: air quality
emission factors
traffic-related air pollutants
ultrafine particles
urban environment
vehicle emissions

Human exposure to vehicle emissions and traffic-related air pollution is a major concern with the increasing population living near major roadways and in urban areas. Although there has been a growing interest in near-road measurements and deployment of near-road monitoring networks, isolating and quantifying vehicle emissions from these measurements have always been a challenge. Emission factors has proven to be a method that is invaluable in targeting vehicle emissions while normalizing for the effects of local dilution and dispersion. Algorithms were developed to automatically capture and calculate emission factors from exhaust plumes from vehicles. The individual plume emission factor method utilized high time resolution measurements and provided insight on inter-fleet emission dynamics and trends, providing mean emission factors for the downtown Toronto on-road fleet, co-emitted pollutants from various emitter groups, relative contributions from heavy emitters, and compared well with real-world emission factors from past studies. Additionally, discrepancies were observed between past laboratory and the measured real-world emission factors, with differences upwards of an order of magnitude for the more dynamic pollutants such as particle number concentration. Temporal variation in emission factors were also observed diurnally, weekday vs. weekend, and seasonally, where influences were found to be from changes in fleet make-up, fuel composition, and ambient conditions. A simplified daily-integrated emission factor method was subsequently applied to nearly two years of continuous measurements made at three near-road sites with varying site and fleet characteristics, as well as different meteorological conditions. Emission factors proved to be a useful metric in normalizing the site differences, and provided insight on inter- and intra- fleet emissions characteristics.
Chaucer's French Sources â Literary and Codicological Play and the Author's Persona
Keywords: Authorship
Chaucer
Fourteenth-century French poetry
Manuscripts
Narrative persona

This dissertation studies the ways that Chaucer and his French contemporaries, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Oton de Graunson, and Eustache Deschamps, craft poetic authority. They do so in relation to the books that convey their writing and literary reputations to their audiences. Chaucer, translating the work of these French poets, reacts to the constructions of authority he finds in medieval sources, in manuscripts, and in a scribal culture in which the transmission of texts can be unpredictable. I argue that Chaucer adapts Machaut's pseudo-autobiographical narrative voice in his own poetry. He responds to a contrast evident in manuscript culture between the single-author codex — for example, surviving books of Froissart's poetry, Paris, BNF f.fr. 830 and 831 — and the ubiquitous miscellany, a contrast that seems to operate along gendered and poetic as well as codicological lines. Chaucer adapts the poetic form of Graunson's "Cinq Ballades" to ensure that his "Complaint of Venus" circulates as a single piece, unlike some copies of his source text. Finally, I argue that Deschamps invites Chaucer to participate in a cross-Channel exchange of invective, one that is part of a bookish and literary tradition. The main argument of my dissertation is that Chaucer puts ideas about books into play in his poetry. He imagines manuscripts as forms for literature and as forms for authority, like the way the disordered aesthetic of the Canterbury Tales creates — ironically — a work of literature resembling a single-author manuscript: a collection of works by one author that circulates intact. Chaucer's investigation of bookish forms is playful, but it also has high poetic stakes: for Chaucer, as for his French contemporaries, play locates the poet in an authoritative literary tradition and secures his future renown.
The Hagiography of Nāṣir-i Khusraw and the Ismāʿīlīs of Badakhshān
Keywords: Badakhshan
Central Asia
Hagiography
Ismailism
Nasir-i Khusraw
Pamir

This dissertation examines Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlī hagiographical texts written between approximately the late 16th and the late 20th centuries in their socio-political context. It analyses the narratives by drawing attention to how their authors expressed ideals, values, beliefs, practices, and concerns through the medium of hagiography. Unlike much previous scholarly work on the Badakhshānī hagiographical tradition, which dismisses this substantial body of valuable material as entirely “fictional,” and, therefore, useless as a source of “historical” information, the present study approaches the data in a novel manner, and analyses it for clues about the ideological, polemical, apologetic, pedagogic, moral, and didactic concerns of Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlīs. This dissertation focuses on the hagiographies of Nāṣir-i Khusraw (d. after 462/1070), the celebrated Persian Ismāʿīlī thinker, poet and missionary. Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlīs, a minority Central Asian Muslim community concentrated primarily in the Afghan Badakhshān Province and Tajik Gorno-Badakhshān Autonomous Oblast, revere Nāṣir-i Khusraw as the founder of the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī tradition, calling their religious tradition the daʿvat-i Shāh Nāṣir, or “Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s summoning.” Upon analyzing the persistent and transient elements of Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s portrayals in Badakhshānī hagiographies of the said period, this dissertation concludes that, although Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s sanctity takes an “idealized” form in the hagiographies, it was never fully solidified or standardized, but was constantly negotiated between the hagiographers and the narratives about him. What the sources say about Nāṣir-i Khusraw changes throughout the period under study. Hagiographies of the Soviet period differ from those written by the pre-Soviet Ismāʿīlīs in motives and agendas, in their selection of the material, and in their views on sanctity. In the earliest sources, produced in the 16th century, Nāṣir-i Khusraw is represented as a Muslim wrongly accused of unbelief and as a person with ambiguous sectarian affiliations. In the hagiographical works created in the early 18th century, he emerges as a great Shīʿī saint on par with the last Twelver Shīʿī Imām. In middle hagiographical works composed between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, he is presented as a foundational figure and a great saint in the service of the Ismāʿīlī Imām, whom he followed. The late sources, written in the Soviet period, present him as a saint championing the rights of ordinary people and an opponent of oppressors. The dissertation argues that this difference in the representation of Nāṣir-i Khusraw in the hagiographical sources is related to the dictates of the changing historical environments to which the writers responded.
Examining the Processes by Which Multiple Forms of Intergroup Contact Predict Prejudice in Daily Life
Keywords: Attitudes
Intergroup Contact
Intergroup Relations
Media
Prejudice

Intergroup contact theory posits that interaction with outgroup members should improve our attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole. However, contact with outgroups is rare, even in diverse communities. One form of contact that might be particularly useful for improving intergroup attitudes would be contact with outgroups through mass media. Indeed, people spend several hours a day consuming media, and mass media have become more diverse over the last few decades, offering many opportunities for people to have contact with outgroups. The goal of the present research was to examine how daily experiences of intergroup contact through social interaction (direct contact) and exposure to outgroups in mass media (media contact) relate to intergroup attitudes. In Study 1, a 1-time diary survey was used to examine whether direct social interaction with outgroup members and exposure to outgroup members in the media would predict attitudes toward these groups. Moreover, I had participants respond to several items to determine the mechanisms explaining these relationships. I found that intergroup contact did indeed occur more through media than direct social interaction. Importantly, the relationships of direct contact and media contact with attitudes toward ethnic/racial outgroups were explained by different mechanisms. Moreover, I found that these relationships were moderated by group status (minority or majority), such that many of them were only significant when considering contact with minority group members. This provides initial evidence that intergroup contact through media and direct social interaction each uniquely predict intergroup attitudes in daily life, but that the processes through which they do differs as a function of the type of contact and the status of the target group. In Study 2, I used an experience sampling design, which required participants to answer surveys throughout the day over a 5-day period. The goal of this study was to better ascertain how the quality of contact experiences moderates these relationships. Study 2 partially replicated the findings from Study 1, but found that quality played an important role in determining whether each form of contact would improve attitudes. Altogether, these studies provide important information about how we can optimize the effectiveness of multiple forms of intergroup contact.
Overlap, Identities, and Expectations: Explaining Challenges to Cohesion in Security Communities
Keywords: cohesion
expectations
governance
ontological security
security communities

This dissertation asks why there are recurrent challenges to cohesion in security communities (SCs) in international relations. Each of the three papers provides a specific part of the answer to this question. Focusing on SCs and the balance of power (BOP), the first paper juxtaposes two common ways of governing security relations between actors in international relations and describes the repertoires of practices that they are based on. A process-based understanding of SC and BOP suggests that they may overlap. We explain why that is the case and identify different types of overlap (temporal, functional, spatial, and relational). Challenges to cohesion may arise in cases where SC and non-SC practices coexist. The second paper focuses on the process of identification in SCs. It does so by bringing together the literatures of ontological security, recognition, and security communities. A revised ontological security view suggests that security communities need to not only continually reinforce a sense of “we-ness” but also recognize members’ distinctiveness. This tension leads to struggles for recognition during which actors employ different strategies: adoption, reform, denial, or exit. I show how struggles for recognition can help explain challenges to cohesion in security communities, and I illustrate how my argument may help adjudicate the debate about the state of transatlantic relations after the end of the Cold War. The third paper conceptualizes security communities as governance mechanisms that include but also may go beyond the routinization of peaceful conflict resolution: Members of a security community “do things together;” they exhibit collective intentionality – which can be inward as well as outward oriented. I argue that collective intentionality gives rise to different kinds of expectations: I develop an analytical framework for understanding the interplay of predictive and prescriptive expectations among members of a security community and its effects on the cohesion of the community. Somewhat counterintuitively, I suggest that managing expectations is particularly challenging in security communities because of the problem of complacency, the likelihood of resentment, the expectation of forgiveness, and the problem of recognition needs. Taken together, my arguments imply that stable cooperative inter-state relationships can only partially rely on structural conditions for their maintenance: Supposedly stable ‘material’ and ‘ideational’ structures do not exist outside of or separate from the continuous political process of struggles for recognition and expectations management.