VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
On the Relations between Diet Violation, Self-perceptions and Attitudes, and Subsequent Dieting
Keywords: Diet goal pursuit
Dieting
Self-regulation
Self-regulation failure

Five studies examined the relations between diet violation and maintenance, diet-related self-perceptions and attitudes, and subsequent weight-loss goal pursuit. Using previous research in the areas of self-perception and eating regulation, we made several hypotheses. First, we hypothesized that diet-breaking behaviors should predict subsequent diet violation, whereas initially maintaining a diet should predict subsequent diet maintenance. Second, we hypothesized that diet violation should predict less positive views of the self as a dieter and less positive attitudes about dieting, whereas instances of diet maintenance should predict more positive or no change in self-views and attitudes about dieting. Finally, it was expected that self-perceptions and attitudes about dieting should predict subsequent diet-related goal pursuit and, moreover, that self-views and attitudes should mediate the relation between diet violation/maintenance and subsequent behavior. Additionally, we explored individual differences that may moderate the relations between diet violation, self-perceptions and attitudes, and subsequent behavior. In Studies 1 and 5, we found, contrary to our hypothesis, that diet violation predicted better weight-loss goal pursuit than did diet maintenance. In Studies 2 and 4, however, there was no significant relation between violation/maintenance and subsequent behavior. Studies 3 and 5 supported our hypothesis that behaving in diet-congruent ways predicted more positive self-views and attitudes about dieting, whereas behaving in diet-incongruent ways predicted more negative self-views and attitudes about dieting. This finding was not consistently found in our studies, however, because Studies 2 and 4 provided some evidence that diet-incongruent behaviors predicted more positive self-views and attitudes about dieting. Finally, the findings of Study 5 suggest that positive self-perceptions and attitudes may predict less subsequent likelihood of violation and that self-perceptions partially mediate the relation between diet violation and subsequent likelihood of violation. Study 5 also provided initial evidence that individual differences, such as perceived self-regulatory success, self-compassion, and diet valuation, may help to explain how diet violations influence subsequent behaviors, self-perceptions, and attitudes. Overall, the studies of this dissertation point to the complexity of the relation between diet violation, self-perceptions/attitudes, and subsequent behavior. In some studies, we found preliminary support for our hypotheses. The reasons behind contradictory findings are discussed.
The Metaphysics of Negative Action
Keywords: Agency
Negative actions
Omissions

Standard metaphysical theories of action assume that all actions are events. Such theories have trouble accommodating ‘negative actions’ – (intentional) omissions, refrainments, etc. – since these seem to be, not events, but absences thereof. We must apparently reject event-based theories, or deny that omissions and refrainments form any part of our agency. Some philosophers try to avoid the dilemma by distinguishing the category of action from the supposedly broader category of manifestations of agency. If ‘negative actions’ are not really actions, then the problem disappears. But this solution is illusory, since the distinction between actions and other manifestations of agency cannot be drawn in a satisfying way. The better solution is to reject the assumption that negative actions are mere absences, not events. We can do this on the grounds that negative action sentences, no less than ordinary ones, existentially quantify over events of certain kinds. Specifically, they quantify over events that play a certain role: x’s omission to φ, for instance, is not an absence of events in which x φ-s; rather, it is an event whose occurrence ensures that there is no φ-ing by x. This functionalist account of negative actions allows us to identify negative actions with ordinary, positive events: when x omits to φ, and so ensures that she does not φ, the event that plays this ensuring-role consists in the actual movement and position of her body. Negative actions are not negative in any metaphysically suspicious way. This account faces numerous objections from Leibniz's Law, since positive events and negative actions do not seem to share all of their properties – how can a negative action be identical to a positive event, when they have different locations, modal profiles, causal roles, etc.? Fortunately, such objections can be shown to be either invalid or unsound. My functionalist account of negative actions is thus metaphysically defensible, and stands as a powerful solution to the problem negative actions seemed to pose for event-based theories of action.
Examining Variation in Access to Long-term Home Care Services for Ontario Seniors
Keywords: Access
Home care
Nursing
Personal support
Utilization

Background: As Canadaâ s population ages, a greater number of seniors will require formal and informal care to remain in their homes. To effectively maintain seniors in their homes, equitable access to home care services is required. However, variations in access to these services have persisted in Ontario for decades. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine factors affecting access to long-term home care for seniors identified as at moderate risk of adverse outcomes and to determine whether variation in access to these services exists across Ontario. Methods: Administrative data were used to conduct a secondary analysis. A non-experimental design was employed. Factors associated with three dimensions of access to home care (propensity, intensity, wait time) were examined across four outcome categories: no home-based care, home-based nursing services alone, home-based supportive care services alone, and home-based nursing and supportive care services together. Results: Personal characteristics, caregiver characteristics and regional characteristics were found to affect all dimensions of access. Factors associated with propensity to receive services varied across outcome categories and included having a dementia diagnosis, dependence in performing activities of daily living, having a previous fall, previous health care utilization, and the region in which the patient resides. Similarly, factors associated with intensity of services were dependent on type of care received and included education, continence and living with a caregiver for nursing services and cognitive status, functional status, health status, and living with a caregiver for supportive care services. While, intensity of nursing services did not vary across regions, intensity of supportive care services was significantly different across the province. Factors affecting wait times included sex, functional status, health status, and receiving nursing care. Conclusions: Inequity in access to home care services persists across Ontario. Variation in propensity to receive services, intensity of supportive care services received, and wait times was evident across regions. Inequitable access to services could result in negative outcomes for those unable to access services. Equitable access to home-based care is vital to ensuring Ontario seniors are able to live and receive care in their preferred location, which for most seniors is at home.
Errors of Commission: Canada's Legacy of Indian Residential Schools
Keywords: Canada
Indian Residential Schools
Inuit
Labrador
Memory
Truth Commissions

This dissertation examines contemporary discourses of Indigenous trauma, healing, and reconciliation in Canada, and explores their social and political implications for Indigenous-settler and Indigenous-state relations. Drawing on twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, my study juxtaposes the proceedings of Canadaâ s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools with the lived experience of Inuit in Labrador, a region excluded from the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. My research responds directly to the Commissionâ s stated premise of creating a national memory of Indian residential schooling, in the hope that similar injustices will not recur, and problematizes these presumptions by making several interrelated arguments. Firstly, I show how Commission proceedings enact a pedagogy that pathologizes Indigenous anger and valorizes expressions of grief in the service of healing, in effect schooling survivors on the therapeutic nature of speech, and rescripting survivor testimonies to show evidence of reconciliation. Structuring truth-telling in this manner, I argue, hinders public recognition of the truths of survivor experience, and collective responsibility for their contemporary legacies. Secondly, I demonstrate that making Indian residential schooling the sole object of national redress obscures a broader range of colonial injuries with which it interlinks. I show how the residential school experience maps onto both older and ongoing colonial interventions, including missionization, forced community relocations, and continuing apprehensions of Indigenous children in the name of child welfare. These experiences demonstrate the recurrence of familial rupture, disruption in the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge, and ultimately, Indigenous peoplehood, underscoring that corrective interventions in Indigenous kinship are foundational to settler colonial governance. Thirdly, I explain how the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement severely constrains Indigenous self-government, and coincides with a rise in trauma-based mental health interventions that devolve responsibility for healing onto individual Inuit, creating a form of self-government through governance of the self. Ultimately, my central contention is that the assimilatory spirit of the residential schools endures through the proliferation of new modes of reschooling Indigenous peoples, and I argue for the need to analyze pedagogy as a tool of settler colonial governance, and as a constraint upon Indigenous life and self-determination.
Child-focused Psychosocial Interventions for Children and Adolescents with Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Keywords: ADHD
adolescents
children
interventions
psychosocial
systematic review

The purpose of this dissertation was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of previous studies that assess the efficaciousness of child-focused psychosocial interventions for children and adolescents with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The specific outcomes that were examined were internalizing and externalizing symptoms and behaviours, social skills, peer relationships, and family functioning. Although studies solely evaluating core ADHD symptom outcomes were not eligible, when provided in an eligible study, data for core ADHD symptoms (inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity) were extracted and analyzed. The aim was to provide clinicians with guidelines for treatment for children and adolescents with ADHD with specific associated symptoms, functional impairments, and comorbid disorders. In spite of identifying 26 studies that met criteria for this review, the data are insufficient to recommend, with confidence, any specific child-focused intervention to treat specific child problems. Results indicated that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), mindfulness training, and social skills training (SST) interventions do not meet the criteria outlined by the American Psychological Association for an intervention to be considered as a well-established or probably efficacious intervention (APA Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice, 2006). Nevertheless, there is some evidence that some of the child-focused psychosocial interventions described in this systematic review and meta-analysis are promising and, as a result, that future research with high quality studies is needed to investigate whether these interventions are efficacious. Individual CBT with simultaneous parent treatment might be promising for improving externalizing and internalizing symptoms, parent-child relationships, and core ADHD symptoms in adolescents concurrently on medication. Furthermore, mindfulness training shows promise in reducing peer relationship problems, internalizing symptoms, and ADHD symptoms of adolescents, and might foster better parent-child relationships. Finally, there is evidence from strong and moderate quality studies that SST interventions are associated with improvements in social skills knowledge and assertion in school-age children. In addition, when SST is offered with concurrent medications, parent treatment and teacher consultation, lower doses of medication are required to achieve the same effect on internalizing symptoms, ODD symptoms, social skills, and personal closeness in parent-child relations.
Connected Speech Processes and Lexical Access in Real-time Comprehension
Keywords: Eye tracking
Phonological variation
Place assimilation
Process priming
Speech perception
Spoken word recognition

Connected speech can entail variability in the production of speech sounds. This can in turn create ambiguity at the lexical level. For example, the word bean in â bean boxâ can sound like beam due to the phonological process of coronal-to-labial place assimilation. Previous studies have shown that listeners can perceptually compensate for place assimilation, but the extent of compensation, as well as the factors that guide this process, are a topic of ongoing debate. This thesis explores listenersâ compensation for place assimilation from several novel perspectives. One specific concern involves potential differences across the sound classes affected by place assimilation (nasal versus oral stops), and whether these sound classes show similar patterns of compensation when the triggering phonological context (i.e., a word-initial labial consonant following the assimilated sound) is or is not present. A second issue is the extent to which effects of compensation are observed for these sound classes in the early moments of word recognition, and a third consideration is whether the English lexicon is structured in a way that minimizes confusion. An acoustic analysis, two word identification experiments, and two experiments using an eye tracking methodology combined with a priming paradigm are used to examine the production and perceptual processing of unassimilated and assimilated word-final nasal and oral stops. A corpus analysis is also conducted to explore the structure of the lexicon with respect to the cases where place assimilation might result in lexical ambiguity. I demonstrate that complete compensation for assimilation may be less likely to occur than previously assumed. However, the phonological context information clearly plays a role in compensation for assimilation even when the degree of assimilation is very strong. Further, the results of priming manipulations suggest that the precise nature of compensation may vary across sound classes. Finally, the structure of the lexicon seems to reflect the potential for confusion that results from coronal-to-labial assimilation in nasal and oral stops. Together, the findings suggest that, in addition to general auditory processing, inferential mechanisms and the statistical patterning of sounds within the lexicon play important roles in facilitating the recognition of assimilated words.
Split Ergativity in Davani
Keywords: Split Ergativity Iranian Davani

This thesis examines the phenomenon of split ergativity in Davani, an endangered Iranian language spoken in southern Iran. The research is based on original field work. The complex ergative agreement system in Davani distinguishes between agents and objects in the past tense, with the affectedness status of the object also being a factor in the agreement patterning. A Minimalist analysis is proposed to account for the complex case-agreement patterns, in which absolutive is argued to be nominative, and ergative is an inherent case, assigned by v when selected by a past tense inflection. Davani clitics are argued to be the realization of phi-features on a functional head rather than doubled clitics. In addition, the case patterns of psych verbs are explored in three different verb classes. In the analysis of these verbs, experiencers are shown to be internal to VP, either merged in the spec of VP or as a sister to V. It is argued that the ergative marking on experiencers come from VPsych. Finally, an analysis of complex predicates and their interaction in Davani is presented in this thesis. The claim is that Davani complex predicates formed from a N+V are better analyzed as (partially) incorporated units rather than a combination of N+V. It is further argued that these units have a dual nature, in that they show properties of both syntactic and lexical units. Ergative agreement is used as a diagnostic to show that the nominal element of complex predicates is best analyzed as a non-specific object. This is based on the key assumption that the presence of an ergative marker depends on the presence of an object. The implications of Davani case for the structure of other complex predicates is also explored.
UT-OCL: An OpenCL Framework for Embedded Systems Using Xilinx FPGAs
Keywords: FPGA
OpenCL
reconfigurable computing
Shared Virtual Memory (SVM)
System-on-Chip (SoC)

The number of heterogeneous components on a System-on-Chip (SoC) has continued to increase. Software developers leverage these heterogeneous systems by using high-level languages to enable the execution of applications. For the application to execute correctly, hardware support for features and constructs of the programming model need to be incorporated into the system. OpenCL is a standard that enables the control and execution of kernels on heterogeneous systems. The standard garnered much interest in the FPGA community when two major FPGA vendors released CAD tools with a modified design flow to support the constructs and features of the standard. Unfortunately, this environment is closed and cannot be modified by the user, making the features and constructs of the standard difficult to explore. The purpose of this work is to present UT-OCL, an open-source OpenCL framework for embedded systems on Xilinx FPGAs, and use UT-OCL to explore system architecture and device architecture features. By open-sourcing this framework, users can experiment with all aspects of OpenCL, primarily targeting FPGAs, including testing possible modifications to the standard as well as exploring the underlying computing architecture. The framework can also be used for a fair comparison between hardware accelerators (also known as devices in the OpenCL standard), since the environment and the testbenches are constant, leaving the devices as the only variable in the system. This dissertation shows that the UT-OCL framework enables the exploration of a mechanism to efficiently transfer data between the host and device memory, a fair comparison for two versions of a CRC application and shows the trade-offs between resource utilization and performance for a device using a network-on-chip paradigm. In addition, by using the framework, the dissertation explores six approaches implementing Shared Virtual Memory (SVM), a feature in the OpenCL specification that enables the host and device to share the same address space. Finally, this dissertation presents the first published implementation of a pipe that is compliant to the OpenCL specification.
Automated Kidney Segmentation in 3D Ultrasound Imagery, and its Application in Computer-Assisted Trauma Diagnosis
Keywords: Automated Organ Detection
Computer-Assisted Medical Diagnosis
Computerized Segmentation of Kidney Shape
Medical Image Registration
Volumetric (3D) Ultrasound Imagery

Due to the limitations of emergency healthcare/technology, blunt abdominal bleeding causes a large number of preventable deaths each year. To save a trauma patient's life, a rapid diagnosis is required, which is not always available in emergency situations. This is the thesis of this PhD research that a computer-assisted algorithm based on 3D ultrasound imagery, as a portable imaging modality, provides a systematic solution to facilitate rapid diagnosis of trauma patients in emergency situations by first responders (ie. paramedics). 3D ultrasound imagery, which is a portable imaging system, is selected as the preferred imaging modality for trauma diagnosis, because it can be carried to the location of emergency situation. Therefore, by eliminating the need of moving an unstable patient to an imaging room, rapid trauma diagnosis is achievable. Compared to 2D sonography, 3D ultrasound imaging facilitates automated detection and localization of internal organs. This is essential, specifically in the sense that ultrasonographers are not always present at emergency situations. Hence, a computer-assisted solution is essential to guide first responders to perform trauma diagnosis using a 3D ultrasound device. An abdominal bleeding has a high tendency to align around the right kidney. The right-upper-quadrant view of sonography shows the entire kidney shape, and therefore, it is considered as the most relevant internal view to trauma diagnosis. Paramedics usually lack proper knowledge to find the right-upper-quadrant view, to detect the kidney shape, and to detect an internal bleeding using an ultrasound imaging device. Hence, computer-assisted algorithms are required to perform these tasks. The focus of this thesis is to introduce automated methods to detect and segment the kidney shape. The detected kidney shape will be used for two purposes: (a) it is used to calculate the ultrasound probe's misalignment with respect to the right-upper-quadrant view, which is used to guide the operator to move the probe toward the correct alignment on the patient's body; (b) the detected kidney shape is used to initialize the kidney segmentation process, and thereby, an automated kidney segmentation approach is achieved. The kidney segmentation output can be used to automatically detect an internal bleeding.