VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The culture of confession
Keywords: Philosophy

This thesis considers analyses of confession in continental philosophy, and interprets examples of confession in film and literature in light of these philosophical texts. There are three main objectives to this study: the first objective is to refute common notions about confession such as that it is an innate impulse or psychological need, that it reveals the truth of a pre-given subject, and that it function as a form of psychological catharsis. Instead it is argued that confession as we know it is a uniquely modern product of disciplinary power and that it serves to fix identities rather than to relieve minds of their memories. The first part of this thesis therefore pieces together and supplements Foucault's writings on confession in order to sketch a genealogy of what he calls the "confessing animal." These chapters aim to show that confession is a contingent rather than a transhistorical compulsion. and that it is often constraining rather than liberatory of confessing subjects. The second objective of this thesis is to consider the relation between confessor and confessant not only according to what Foucault calls the "axis of power," but also according to the "axis of ethics." While for Foucault the "axis of ethics" concerns relations with the self, ethics will here be taken as a relation of responsibility for the other. The confessional other will therefore be considered insofar as she is called upon both to listen and to respond. This concern for the ethical aspects of the confessional relation bring discussions of Hegel, Derrida, and Lévinas into dialogue with Foucault. The third and final objective of this thesis is to explore both discursive and non-discursive alternatives to confession, including silence, non-confessional autobiography, and political and artistic practices.
Where men are for sale: caribbean male representations and western female identities through sex tourist narratives
Keywords: Sex tourism, Caribbean Area
Sex tourism
Travelers, Sexual behavior
Travelers, Caribbean Area
Women travelers, Sexual behavior
Women travelers, Caribbean Area
Sex-oriented businesses, Caribbean Area
Men, Social conditions
Men, Caribbean Area
Gender identity, Caribbean Area

This thesis explores the practice of “female sex tourism” in the Caribbean where Western female tourists travel to the region for the purposed of engaging in sexual encounters with local men. I argue that through these arrangements, Western women are able to construct dominant and desirable identities through the sexualization and racialization of the Caribbean male body. By analyzing two texts written by Western female authors, Lucretia Stewart and Terry McMillan, who describe the female tourist/male local relationship in the Caribbean, I examine the means by which both principal female characters come to know themselves through their sexual relationships with Caribbean men.
Hardware-in-the-loop simulation for a research uninhabited aerial vehicle control
Keywords: Drone aircraft, Control systems

In this thesis, a multi-objective control for a research uninhabited aerial vehicle is presented. Using the eigenstructure assignment approach, a flight controller is developed to meet multiple design specifications during a flight mission. The controller is implemented into a digital control system with commercial off-the-shelf actuators. Real-time simulations and hardware-in-the-loop experiments are performed to verify the feasibility of this design. In addition, a comparative analysis of different digital implementation are made. The Kalman filter is further employed to improve the performance of the digital control system.
An examination of psycho-social conditions under which provincially sentenced women offend
Keywords: Females offenders, Social conditions
Females offenders, Ontario
Recidivism, Ontario
Females offenders, Rehabilitation
Females offenders, Ontario
Females offenders, Psychology
Females offenders, Ontario

Findings from this study support previous research that emphasizes the need for a gender responsive framework in understanding women's offending as well as the importance of examining 'dynamic' factors in women's offending. Results point to the role of victimization, substance abuse, poverty, marginalization and its long-term impact on mental health and women's capacity for survival. Implications for women's abilities to overcome these barriers in their successful re-integration into the community are discussed as well as the need for addressing these issues in designing correctional programs and policy. This study investigated psychological and social conditions under which provincially sentenced women offend. It examined women's present day life circumstances (i.e. economic disadvantage, current addictions, adult victimization, employment, and unstable housing and social support), psychological functioning (i.e. coping styles, self-efficacy, attributional style, mental distress), attitude to crime, historical factors (criminal history, childhood victimization) and their influence on women's offending. Findings demonstrated that women offenders were doing significantly worse on various aspects of psychological functioning and mental health compared to women in the general population and recidivists were experiencing significantly greater problems in areas of social support, adult victimization, addictions and poverty than first time offenders. Overall, women offenders did not appear to demonstrate procriminal attitudes, however, significantly more recidivists had histories of juvenile offending, problem avoidance styles as well as slightly more procriminal attitudes than first time offenders. 'Higher rate' offenders demonstrated significantly more problems with current addictions, unemployment, poverty and histories of juvenile offending. Psychological functioning, difficult life circumstances and experiences of historical disadvantage were factors that explained higher rates of offending in the group of 'higher rate' offenders. Experiences of historical disadvantage and difficult life circumstances explained diverse aspects of psychological functioning including low self-efficacy, use of problem avoidance as a coping style, mental distress and pessimistic attributional style. Results also demonstrated that for recidivists poverty was a salient factor in re-offending.
Capacity to consent to treatment in adolescents with anorexia nervosa
Keywords: Teenage girls, Psychology
Informed consent (Medical law)
Teenage girls, Diseases
Anorexia nervosa, Psychological aspects

Overall, healthy adolescents demonstrated decision-making skills that were superior to adolescents with anorexia nervosa, regardless of the context of the decision (e.g., medical versus psychiatric). Furthermore, adolescents with anorexia nervosa were significantly less able to reason about treatment for their own illness than they were for hypothetical illnesses. These findings are discussed in terms of their clinical implications. Over the last three decades, the rights of children and adolescents to exercise autonomy in the consent process have expanded. In Ontario, the Health Care Consent Act stipulates that everyone, regardless of age or diagnosis, should be considered capable to make his or her own treatment decisions. Clinical encounters with patients with anorexia nervosa have brought forth challenging ethical and legal issues surrounding the capacity of these patients to make their own treatment decisions, owing largely to the cognitive distortions that are part of the diagnostic criteria for the disorder, as well as serious and potentially life-threatening complications of treatment refusal. The current study compared the ability of adolescents with and without anorexia nervosa to make treatment decisions about hypothetical illnesses, presented in the form of vignettes. Adolescents with anorexia nervosa were also assessed with regards to their decision-making skills for their own illness. In addition, the relationship between cognitive and maturity of judgment variables and the ability to make a treatment decision was examined. The results suggest that adolescents who are hospitalized for anorexia nervosa appear to be less mature than healthy adolescents with regards to responsibility, a component of maturity of judgment. The adolescents with anorexia nervosa were no different from healthy adolescents on the remaining cognitive or maturity of judgment variables.
Knowledge discovery in databases of web use: data mining for informetric and behavioral models of information seeking on the World Wide Web
Keywords: Internet users
Data mining
World Wide Web, Use studies

The present study investigates the World-Wide Web use of knowledge workers in an organizational environment. The goal was to gain a baseline understanding of corporate Web use and to develop informetric and behavioral models of browsing and searching the Web. Data describing Web access was primarily collected through custom-configured internet firewall software at a large corporation comprising over 1500 individual Web users for a period of 35 days. Three models from Informetric research were applied to analyze the Web use of study participants. The Web use data collected shows that individual Web users can be categorized by their frequency of use similar to a Lotka's law-like pattern of activity. Discernible clusters of predominantly used Web sites relevant to the entire study organization of Web users were also found, similar to Bradford's Law of Scattering which is traditionally used to identify clusters of influential journals in a scientific domain. Moreover, a related distribution was found in the aggregate popularity of unique Web pages accessed that show a Zipf-like distribution of overall Web use at the study organization. A general behavioral model of Web use incorporating modes of information seeking and Web browser moves was also tested by analyzing the Web use activities of the study participants. Follow up interviews and on-site observation provided additional context. Results suggest a multi-modal use of the Web with significant effort devoted to both undirected and conditioned viewing of Web resources that involved behavior such as chaining and browsing moves, seen as following links to explore information on a particular Web site. Additionally, prevalent searching modes were noted that included heavy monitoring and extracting of Web-based information, such as frequent visits to Web pages of interest and comprehensive searches using Web search engines. This behavioral model serves primarily to provide a framework for identifying and understanding the activities that influence Web use. It may also serve as a model for future comparison of Web use studies, as well as provide insights for designing both Web information resources and applications to access them. This work represents an exploratory investigation into the Web use behaviors of an organization of knowledge workers. The amount of data collected in the study and subsequently analyzed using Knowledge Discovery in Databases techniques has also yielded new ideas about analyzing Web usage data. The results of this dissertation suggest that there are both informetric and behavioral models that can be combined to describe Web use in an organization with the potential for enhancing Web access technologies, knowledge work and overall Web interaction for all Web users.
Hustling to host: everyday practice, pedagogy and participation in British Virgin Islands tourism
Keywords: Tourism, British Virgin Islands
Tourism, Social aspects
Tourism, British Virgin Islands
Social change, British Virgin Islands

By reconceptualizing tourism in the British Virgin Islands as a site of political and pedagogical struggle, this qualitative inquiry explores the complex and contradictory structures and practices embodied in tourism formation. In approaching tourism from a host perspective, I intervene in the dominant economic benefits and paradise promotion discourses, to focus on critical questions about the entanglements of power, knowledge, desire, representation, and identification. It has become normal for local enactment of tourism to be framed from the guest perspective, often to the exclusion or avoidance of a focused reading of what it takes, or what it means to construct the leisure product represented globally as “Nature's Little Secrets.” I argue that the hegemonic discourse and pedagogy of tourism production has not adequately considered the usefulness of historical contingencies, multiple subjectivities, and ordinary agency in its appeal for participation. For an alternative rendering, I include the perspectives of twelve participants who operate within and on the edge of the vibrant and turbulent terrain of tourism. Their stories, like their practices refute any simple or singular notion of them as happy natives, cultural dupes, or unknowing subjects. By drawing on the performative and protean tactics essential to their negotiation of possibility beyond mere survival, I appropriate the vernacular concept of hustling. This figuration enables me to theorize how local participants in the small, informal, marginalized, or little explored sectors of the industry strive to make meaning of their sense of place, belonging, and value in the whole tourism dynamic. In opening new dialogical space for advancing the interdisciplinary study of cultural formation in diverse learning sites and among different engaged groups and individuals, this thesis aims towards connecting and expanding the discursive fields of performative agency and public pedagogy for effecting more inclusive and meaningful participation.
Gentlemen bankers, politicians and bureaucrats: the history of Canadian Bankers Association, 1891-1924
Keywords: Banks and banking, History
Banks and banking, Canada

This is a history of the Canadian Bankers Association, a Canadian trade association unlike any other. Its origins are linked to deficiencies in Canada's Bank Act, 1871 and policies distancing the federal government from demands for assistance from weak banks and their victims—depositors, note holders and investors. Bank failures in the 1870s and 1880s added weight to calls for safer banks and more government regulation, pressure many bankers feared would cause reforms undermining the flexibility the Bank Act allowed them to exercise in their day to day business. A small number of prominent bankers avoided this danger by proposing a fund all banks would to contribute for the protection of note holders. They also suggested a bankers' association to guard the interests of the fund's contributors and ultimately the public. When bankers launched their organization, it had specific, yet unwritten, obligations to the federal government. It was supposed to make banking safer and, under pressure from the finance department, limit competition for deposits, a business the government was involved in through its Post Office and Dominion Savings Banks. This thesis will trace the role of the CBA between 1891 and 1924 and show it was anything but a “cozy cartel,” as some scholars have alleged. Competition and rivalry divided Canadian bankers and produced a feckless trade association that could do little to meet calls from governments and those that elected them for safer banks. For Canadian bankers and their association, failure soured relations with politicians and sowed the seeds of public cynicism, leaving a legacy that has shaped the way Canadian governments make bank policy.
Aircraft wing anti-icing system: modelling, integration, and validation
Keywords: Aerodynamics, Mathematical models
Airplanes, Ice prevention
Airplanes, Wings
Heat, Transmission

Aircraft wings are vulnerable to ice accretion during flight due to high exposure to on-coming air. This may cause disruption to the aerodynamics of the aircraft's lifting surfaces and pose a threat to aircraft safety. For most civil aircraft, a thermal anti-icing system is introduced to transmit engine hot bleed air into the leading-edge's surface to maintain surface temperature above the icing condition. The overall system involves thermal, pneumatic and control disciplines and their interactions make it a challenging task in systems design and analysis. Recently the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) has initiated research in developing an integrated aircraft wing thermal anti-icing control and simulation system for engineering analysis of temperature distribution prediction, control design, tuning and sensitivity studies. This thesis, as part of the above research initiative, presents the pneumatic development, system integration, and validation with a demonstration using an example aircraft wing anti-icing system.
Nurses of Influence: a paradigm of leadership
Keywords: Nurse administrators, Ontario
Leadership in women, Ontario

In the increasingly commercial world of health care delivery, senior nurse administrators are challenged to promote the patient care agenda and endorse the often conflicting corporate mandate of health care organizations in which they work. For many, their position in the patriarchal administrative hierarchy of these organizations depends upon adopting the dominant organizational culture. However, there are some who resist abandoning a deeply rooted nursing identity. They successfully create a caring counter-culture within the organization. From this location, these nurses, who I refer to as 'Nurses of Influence', advance the patient care agenda and also champion the caring contribution of nursing within that agenda. Throughout my study, I became more conscious of the history of exclusionary practices that compromise the true application of holistic caring within the nursing discipline itself. As a result, my research took a turn toward critical feminism and incorporated a commentary on the inclusionary ethno-racial mentoring practices of Nurses of Influence that seek to nurture future nursing leaders of diverse ethnicity and racial backgrounds. The purpose of this study was to explore the situated lived experiences of a small sample of Nurses of Influence using qualitative methods to analyze how they weave nursing's caring culture into their administrative practice. My research suggests that they navigate oppressive androcentric organizational power structures creating what I call a feminist counter-culture that embodies nursing's caring perspective. From early in their careers, they promote connectiveness, reciprocal respect, and empowerment of self and others. They develop inclusive structures, such as mentoring networks, that represent nursing's holistic philosophy as well as promote the use of power amongst their nursing colleagues. Key informants in my study attribute Nurses of Influence with a significant degree of credibility grounded in their many years of clinical practice and the attainment of advanced theoretical nursing knowledge. This credibility facilitates the active participation of Nurses of Influence in various political arenas in order to cultivate nursing's caring counter-culture that is so often devalued by the dominant health care system.
Changing professional perspectives: co-constructing stories about an elementary school principal and a teacher educator's personal experience across decades
Keywords: Elementary school principals, Professional relationships
Elementary school principals, China
Elementary school principals, Attitudes
Elementary school principals, China
Teacher-principal relationships, China
Community and school, China
Experiential learning
Self-perception

This narrative inquiry takes place over four years in Hong Kong and focuses on how an elementary school principal's professional perspectives are shaped by personal experiences over a few decades. Personal and professional stories are co-constructed by re-examining the personal experiences between the participant and the researcher through participation in the context of school and community. The researcher begins the inquiry with an experienced principal, a personal friend for over 20 years, who devotes his professional life to the school and the community. Long-term participant observation in the school and community context, and intensive ongoing discussion and sharing between the participant and the researcher, lead the researcher to use “peeling the onion” and “kaleidoscope” as metaphors to describe this inquiry. Besides the participant and the researcher, other people volunteer to participate in the inquiry. Stories and anecdotes are shared and co-constructed by the people in the community. Their participation brings the researcher to see the inquiry as a “parade.” Stories told are regarded as different lenses, helping the researcher and participant to understand and analyze their professional development. Through sharing and reflection, people involved in the inquiry develop new meanings of and perspectives on their own learning and education. At the end of inquiry, the participant and the researcher see the inquiry as a rejuvenating process which will take them on new paths in their future professional development. Through this inquiry, the researcher demonstrates how narrative reveals sources of knowledge about teaching and teacher development. The powers generated by narrative in this inquiry are emancipation, mutual benefit, empowerment, evolvement, and rejuvenation, which allow teachers to grow and change their personal and professional perspectives in a world of rapid globalization. Since little narrative study has been done in a Chinese cultural setting like Hong Kong, this thesis offers a distinctive uniqueness.