VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Family Study: Assessment of the Incidence, Etiology, Circumstances and Familial Risk for Sudden Cardiac Death and Aborted Sudden Cardiac Death in Young Individuals
Keywords: Epidimiology
Family History
Incidence
Sudden Cardiac Death
Sudden Death
Young Individuals

Background: Recent reviews have highlighted our lack of information on the incidence etiology and circumstances of sudden death (SD) in the young, particularly the distribution of underlying disorders, preventable triggers, and identifiable familial predisposition to fatal arrhythmias. Methods: This study had 3 parts: (1) the development and (2) implementation of a novel, comprehensive methodology to capture all SDs and aborted SDs (both cardiac and non-cardiac) in a defined geographic area, (3) followed by a feasibility study with a case control design. We utilized a prospectively collected, population-based registry of all out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs) in the Greater Toronto Area, to identify patients from 2009-2012. The retrospective study included cases that were OHCAs ages 2-45, treated or untreated, died or survived and we reviewed all available data for each case and adjudicated an etiology. In the feasibility study, included cases were presumed cardiac, treated OHCAs ages 18-65. Two relatives per patient were interviewed regarding symptoms prior to the arrest, cardiac history, and family history of sudden cardiac death (SCD). Two sets of control patients were administered the same questionnaire as cases. Results: We identified 656 SCDs ages 2-45 over a 4 year period, with an overall annual incidence rate of 3.97 per 100,000 persons. We report a high autopsy rate, with a shift towards ischemic heart disease as the predominant underlying etiology in adults ages 35-45, from structural heart disease and sudden unexplained deaths in children. Adults experienced their SCDs more frequently at home and at rest than did children, and most reported new symptoms in the day preceding their event. Our feasibility studies demonstrated that it is viable to obtain a reliable family history of SCD and major cardiac risk factors from both cases and controls using a self-developed survey. Conclusions: By using a validated comprehensive population based registry of consecutive cases to identify all eligible patients, in combination with a novel classification methodology, large sample size, and multiple sources of data, we were able to better describe the nature and scope of the problem of sudden cardiac death within a young, urban Canadian population.
International Structure, Cooperation, and Sovereign Debt Crises: The Brazilian Debt Restructurings of 1898, 1931, and 1983
Keywords: Brazil
Debt Crises
International Political Economy
International Relations
Sovereign Debt

In this dissertation, I offer three main contributions to the literature on sovereign debt. First, I make the case for a structurally-oriented perspective on debt crises. The social institutions that comprise the finance and production structures of the international economy act as conduits for the transmission of crises from developed countries to the periphery of the system, as they increase the relative scarcity of capital through mechanisms such as capital and trade flows. I argue that defaults and moratoria are thus better understood as reactions to the relative scarcity of capital at the international level and not as opportunistic strategies adopted by utility-maximizing politicians who want to avoid the costs associated with repayment. Second, I reevaluate the relationship between debtors and creditors and how they cooperate. I argue that they cooperate by means of positive-sum debt restructuring processes whose results fall within a continuum between full repayment and full repudiation. In other words, cooperation is based on a compromise and not on the enforcement of the original terms of debt contracts by creditor countries or the creditors themselves. Finally, I offer a deeper and more nuanced analysis of the role that the structural power of creditors and creditor countries play in the sovereign debt market, and I argue that they shape the social arrangements that regulate their relationship with debtor countries. I support my claims with qualitative historical studies of three past cases of Brazilian moratoria and debt renegotiations - the Funding Loans of 1898 and 1931, and the Financing Program for 1983.
Design of Novel Endoscopic Suction Grasping and Superelastic Surgical Clips Based on a Novel Model of Thin Collagenous Tissue
Keywords: Endoscopic
Medical Devices
Nitinol
Surgery

Current endoscopic manipulation and sealing techniques are ineffective at large puncture repair, fistula closure, and anastomosis in tubular organs. For manipulation, the working channel of the endoscope is unavoidably small and thus so are the conventional graspers which can be passed through them. Small grasping jaws cannot distribute force widely enough to apply large forces without tearing tissue, thereby limiting the applied pulling force. Additionally, the surface of tubular organs is smooth, concave, and lubricated, making conventional grasping difficult or requiring hooked jaws that further damage the tissue. Endoscopic tissue sealing is currently accomplished by mechanical clips which protrude into the lumen from the organ wall when deployed and become a possible obstruction when placing several clips to seal larger openings or when performing an anastomosis. To address these clinical needs, a novel suction grasper and a superelastic, self-closing surgical clip were developed, characterized, and optimized. Additionally, to properly design the grasper and clip, a novel model of the esophageal wall that can be used for puncture and bearing force, in addition to the traditional stress-strain behaviour, was developed and validated. The tissue model was constructed using a bottom-up approach and validated against ex-vivo testing. The bottom-up approach was accomplished by examining the concentrations of each of structural components of tissue (collagen, elastin, muscle) and arranging them according to histological findings. For the superelastic, self-closing clip, the metallurgy of nitinol was reviewed and used to devise a single-step manufacturing process which would optimize the strain limit and closing force of the material. Next, the optimal diameter of clip and wire were set taking the opening force, material elastic limit, and bearing force on the tissue into account. Lastly, grasping force from suction was characterized for hole size, number, and distribution and suction force was compared against puncture force. Histology was performed to assess for tissue damage from suction grasping during clip application in vivo.
Intergenerational Transmission of Alcohol Use in Adolescents: Drinking Motives as a Potential Mediator in a Child Welfare Sample
Keywords: adolescent
alcohol
coping
drinking
intergenerational
motives

The association between parent and offspring alcohol use is well supported. The present study extended previous research (Muller Kuntsche, 2011; Van Damme et al., 2015) that found that drinking motives mediate this association in the general population by examining the pathway in a sample of severely maltreated child welfare-involved adolescents. The present study investigated whether the association between parental alcohol problems and adolescent alcohol use was mediated by the extent to which adolescents reported coping motives for drinking, and whether that mediation was moderated by the amount of time youth had spent in the care of child protective services. Participants were 302 (58.3% female) Canadian youth aged 14-19 (M 15.86, SD 1.01) in the care of child welfare (28% had been in care for 10 years or more), part of the Maltreatment and Adolescent Pathways (MAP; See Wekerle, Leung, Goldstein, Thornton, Tonmyr, 2009) longitudinal study. Participants completed measures assessing their current alcohol use (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test; AUDIT-C; Dawson, Grant, Stinson, Zhou, 2005), coping motives for drinking (Drinking Motives Questionnaire, Revised; DMQ-R; Cooper, 1994), and mother and father alcohol problems (single alcoholism item, Short Michigan Alcohol Screening Test-Family; F-SMAST/M-SMAST; Crews Sher, 1992). Models were tested using a path analytic framework with the PROCESS macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2013). Results were examined separately for three groups: (a) the full sample; (b) drinkers only; and (c) male and female drinkers. The rate of alcohol use (55%) was low in the present sample relative to the norm. Results suggest that the association of fathersâ history of alcohol problems with offspring alcohol use is largely indirect, through coping motives, in youth who are in the care of child welfare (b = .082, 95% Bootstrapped CI [.024, .133], κ2 = .126, full sample). When examined by gender, the mediation held for female, but not male, adolescent drinkers. Analyses did not provide evidence of moderation of the indirect effect by time in care, suggesting that the mediation by coping motives of the relationship between paternal alcohol problems and female adolescent alcohol use is not contingent on time spent in care.
Three Essays in Macroeconomics
Keywords: childcare cost
female labor supply
financial friction
gender wage gap
human capital
resource misallocation

This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 studies a life-cycle pattern of female labor supply (hours per woman) in Japan. It exhibits an "M" shape with the second peak lower than the first one. Employing a micro-data set, I show that the pattern can be understood as a result of labor supply behavioral differences across different types of women and demographic composition changes along the life cycle. I then build a life-cycle model featuring transitions between heterogeneous types of women, human capital accumulation and childcare cost. The calibrated model accounts for the aggregate pattern well. Counterfactual experiments suggest that narrowing gender wage gap would have a larger positive effect on female labor supply than lowering childcare cost, a result mostly explained by the human capital channel. Chapter 2 studies the links between idiosyncratic distortions and potential aggregate losses. Under the economic environment of Restuccia et al. (2008) (RR), I characterize analytically the mappings from distortions to total factor productivity (TFP) and other aggregate measures. Using these mappings, I explain in a unified way three features emerged from RR's numerical experiments, where endogenous exit of firms is assumed away and distortions are restricted so as to have no impact on capital accumulation. Additionally, I explain why these features disappear when distortions affect capital accumulation. I then extend RR's study by introducing the endogenous exit margin and find that various aggregate losses can respond to this margin quite differently. Chapter 3 studies financial frictions and resource misallocation in China's manufacturing sector. I emphasize two aspects of the financial frictions in the Chinese context. One is credit discrimination: Unproductive state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have easy access to credit while productive non-SOEs are credit constrained. The other is that the credit constraint faced by non-SOEs is much tighter than those in financially developed countries. Using a firm-level data set, I find that a potential 24% TFP gain can be achieved if the credit constraint faced by non-SOEs is at a level similar to the one in the US, and that 53% of the gain can be attributed to improved allocations between SOEs and non-SOEs.
Music as Gestural Narrative: An Analysis of Video Recordings of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Op. 109
Keywords: Beethoven
embodied cognition
gesture
narrative
Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major
Op. 109
video analysis

Western music scholarship tends to privilege the notion of music as text, rather than music as performance. Furthermore, even in performance research, the focus is typically on the listener’s perception of music, while the performer’s experience during performance often does not receive adequate attention. Informed by the perspective of embodied cognition, this dissertation introduces the concept of “gestural narrative” and investigates its viability for performance research from the performer’s point of view. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on the concepts of “gesture” and “narrative”, exploring their relevance to the examination of the performer’s embodied experience of music. As a preliminary case study, I consider how Chopin’s Second Ballade could be interpreted as a gestural narrative. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 109 is the focus of Chapters 2 to 6. While Chapter 2 offers a detailed score-based analysis of the sonata as a gestural narrative by identifying salient gestures and outlining how the evolution of these gestures articulates a narrative archetype across the entire piece, Chapters 3 to 6 provide thorough video-based observational analyses of performances of Op. 109 by Chairat Chongvattanakij, Claudio Arrau, Daniel Barenboim, and Glenn Gould, discussing the extent to which each of the four performances can be interpreted as following the gestural narrative proposed in Chapter 2. While Chapter 2 is informed by traditional music theory and recent scholarship in music and narrative, Chapters 3 to 6 draw on Laban Movement Analysis and Paul Ekman’s research on facial expression to provide a working framework for understanding the dynamics and possible meanings of each performer’s gestures. Moreover, for the performances by Arrau, Barenboim, and Gould, observational analysis is supplemented by the consultation of various documents about and by these performers, as I aimed to establish an empathic connection with each performer in order to experience his performance from his perspective. Chapter 7 summarizes the research results and draws conclusions about music as gestural narrative.
Non-pilot Protection of the HVDC Grid
Keywords: Fault Location
High Voltage Direct Current Transmission
HVDC Grid
Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC)
Power System Protection
Voltage-Sourced Converters

This thesis develops a non-pilot protection system for the next generation power transmission system, the High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) grid. The HVDC grid protection system is required to be (i) adequately fast to prevent damages and/or converter blocking and (ii) reliable to minimize the impacts of faults. This study is mainly focused on the Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) -based HVDC grid since the MMC is considered as the building block of the future HVDC systems. The studies reported in this thesis include (i) developing an enhanced equivalent model of the MMC to enable accurate representation of its DC-side fault response, (ii) developing a realistic HVDC-AC test system that includes a five-terminal MMC-based HVDC grid embedded in a large interconnected AC network, (iii) investigating the transient response of the developed test system to AC-side and DC-side disturbances in order to determine the HVDC grid protection requirements, (iv) investigating the fault surge propagation in the HVDC grid to determine the impacts of the DC-side fault location on the measured signals at each relay location, (v) designing a protection algorithm that detects and locates DC-side faults reliably and sufficiently fast to prevent relay malfunction and unnecessary blocking of the converters, and (vi) performing hardware-in-the-loop tests on the designed relay to verify its potential to be implemented in hardware. The results of the off-line time domain transients studies in the PSCAD software platform and the real-time hardware-in-the-loop tests using an enhanced version of the RTDS platform indicate that the developed HVDC grid relay meets all technical requirements including speed, dependability, security, selectivity, and robustness. Moreover, the developed protection algorithm does not impose considerable computational burden on the hardware.
Naming Particulars: A Thirteenth-Century Debate on Whether Individuals Have Proper Names
Keywords: Cognitive Theory
Epistemology
Metaphysics
Proper Names
Semantics
Thirteenth Century

This dissertation is about a debate that occurred in thirteenth-century philosophy over an apparently bizarre question: Can individuals really have proper names? While scholarly studies have appeared previously on philosophers in the fourteenth century who discussed this question (most notably John Buridan), I show that the question was widespread in the thirteenth century and involved many participants. Historically, I offer the first comprehensive account of how the thirteenth-century debate over the possibility of proper names arose. I argue that it was instigated by Michael Scot’s translation of the Metaphysics and perpetuated by tensions within the new Aristotelian metaphysical and cognitive theories of the 1230’s-1260’s. Philosophically, I offer a detailed analysis of the arguments on both sides of the question, presenting and explicating over 15 arguments for and against proper names, in texts by eight different philosophers: Richard Rufus of Cornwall, Adam Buckfield, Geoffrey of Aspall, Robert Kilwardby, Pseudo-Kilwardby, Roger Bacon, Siger of Brabant, and Richard of Clive. The questions I ask are the following. First, how was it theoretically possible to doubt the nameability of individuals? To answer this question, I look at the medieval traditions in the language arts. Specifically, I argue that Boethius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Perihermeneias provide criteria for what counts as a nomen or “name” in a philosophical sense, but those criteria specifically exclude words that might otherwise be regarded as nomina or “nouns” in a grammatical sense. Granting this distinction, I then ask the second question of the thesis: On what reasonable grounds might a philosopher think that a name of an individual is merely a grammatical “noun” rather than a genuine philosophical “name”? Here the answer seems to be that individuals cannot be named as such because they cannot be understood as such. I investigate two broad motivations in the arguments: (a) human cognitive faculties are not equipped to grasp the individual as such, and (b) individuals are unknowable in themselves because they are composites of matter (which is unknowable) and form (which may be knowable, but which may also be common to many individuals).
Function and Diversity of Sex Pheromones in Representative Species of the Black Widow Spiders (genus Latrodectus, Araneae: Theridiidae)
Keywords: Latrodectus
mating decisions
sex pheromones
sexual selection
speciation
spiders

Understanding causes and consequences of signal diversity can give insight into how individual fitness is affected by communication, and how this relates to processes from species diversification to mate preferences. During my PhD, I first examined functional divergence in sex pheromones in widow spiders (Theridiidae: Latrodectus), focusing on six species representing different clades and biogeographic regions. I tested the hypothesis that divergence in sex pheromones was predicted by phylogenetic divergence (measured as CO1 sequence dissimilarity). I showed that the most distantly related of my focal species responded only to pheromone extracts from the silk of conspecifics; whereas males from the other species also responded to extracts from more closely related heterospecifics, and, as predicted, male response and genetic divergence were negatively correlated. Next, focusing on two focal Latrodectus species with different mating systems, I showed that males can use sex pheromones alone to discriminate among females of different feeding conditions. Interspecific differences in male discrimination suggested that preferences may arise from benefits of avoiding risky matings with potential cannibals, rather than from seeking fecund, well-fed females. Finally, I examined one Latrodectus species with a recently-demonstrated, novel male mating tactic (mating with immature females), asked whether the tactic is likely to be costly for females, and whether it affects female mate-attraction tactics (pheromone production). I found no cost of immature-mating for females in terms of fertility, fecundity or longevity. Moreover, I showed that immature-mated females do not produce sex pheromones after moulting and so would not attract additional mates after moulting, unlike recently- moulted females that are unmated. My research shows how sex pheromone function varies among species and individuals with different ecologies and mating behaviours, and how this may affect individual fitness and mating decisions, yielding intriguing new insights into how sexual signals are affected by speciation and sexual selection.
Targeting Clinically Viable Protein-Protein Interactions via Rationally Designed Small Molecule Inhibitors
Keywords: Brain Cancer
Oncology
Protein Protein Interactions
PTP1B
Small-molecules
STAT3

Malfunctions in the tightly regulated network of Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) are the basis for numerous malignancies such as cancer. Novel protein targets that are critical components of this network and key in preserving cellular homeostasis are important targets for discovery of new therapeutics. This thesis explores the components required for the engineering of small-molecule inhibitors to target key disease-driving PPIs. The first section focuses on designing inhibitors against the oncogenic, Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription 3 (STAT3) protein. First, a pharmacopore model was developed to inspire the synthesis of suitably functionalized 2,6,9-hetero-tri-substituted purines. Numerous candidates from this library displayed cancer-cell specific potency and high affinity to the STAT3 protein. Despite promising activity in vitro, the analogs displayed poor cell permeability leading to the development of a second generation of prodrug and bioisosteres to address these drawbacks. In a separate study, we investigated the optimization of a previous lead STAT3 inhibitor for targeting STAT3 in Brain Tumor Stem Cells (BTSCs). Prodrug and bioisostere analogs were prepared of the key carboxylic acid, as well as salicylic acid mimetics and evaluated for STAT3 binding and cellular activity. A new lead, SH-04-54 (ACS Med Lett, 2013), was identified which exhibited Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) permeability, potently controlled glioma tumor growth, and inhibited pSTAT3 in vivo. The potent activity of this inhibitor led to its entry into preclinical trials as an anti-cancer agent. Finally, the last part of this thesis focuses on PTP1B, a member of the large PTP family of proteins found to be overactive in diabetes and neurodegenerative disorders. First, a screen of a library of compounds identified a number of potent salicylic acid based inhibitors with promising single digit µM activity. A second generation of disalicylic inhibitors were synthesized and new, more selective and potent inhibitors have been identified.