VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Citation, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Works of Andrew and Nora Lang
Keywords: Andrew Lang
Authorship
Children's literature
Citation
Nora Lang
Victorian literature

This dissertation argues that the representations and practices of authorship in the works of Andrew Lang (1844-1912) and Nora Lang (1851-1933) emblematize this literary couple’s struggles to define the nature of literary creativity and, by extension, to determine whose creative efforts are worthy of acknowledgment. Chapter One reveals the importance of adaptation to Andrew’s definition of creativity by considering the relationship between his first book, Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: With Other Poems (1872), and three texts that shaped his conception of authorship: Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03), E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), and Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Chapter Two focuses on the three-year period (1887-90) during which Andrew, now a well-established man of letters, deployed his own authority to defend his friend H. Rider Haggard against charges of plagiarism. I focus on three of his creative works that claim adaptation is a necessary precondition of origi-nality: He (1887), a parody of Haggard’s She (1887); “From Mr. Allan Quatermain to Sir Henry Curtis” (1890), an epistolary yarn wherein Haggard’s hero rescues the Stranger from Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm (1883); and The World’s Desire (1890), Lang and Haggard’s co-authored sequel to the Odyssey. In Chapter Three, I illustrate the ways in which this same insistence on the communalization of literary materials, and folk- literature in particular, paradoxically obscures Nora’s responsibility for the popular Fairy Book series (1889-1913). Nora’s work is, I demonstrate, consistently represented as domestic labour rather than authorship by Andrew’s prefaces, advertisements for the series, and contemporary reviews. Chapter Four examines her resistance to this misrepresentation. I focus on The Strange Story Book (1913), arguing that the volume’s seemingly eclectic contents — a short biography of the recently-deceased Andrew, appropriated Tlingit legends, and stories of gender- nonconforming and adventurous women — indicate both Nora’s participation in and challenging of the model of author-ship promoted by her husband. Both Langs’ works, I conclude, have much to tell us about the literary, political, and ethical valences of citation.
A Theory About Indigenous Taxation Powers
Keywords: Indigenous Peoples
Northwest Coast
Taxation
Taxation Powers

This paper proposes that taxation powers are culturally specific constructs by analyzing the content and underlying values, social organization, customs and institutions determining how Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Northwest Coast communities) understand taxation and exercise their taxation powers. The first chapter examines the non-monetary socio-economic organization of Northwest Coast communities to determine whether or not these communities practice taxation and exercise taxation powers. The second chapter analyzes, from a tax law perspective, the socio-economic characteristics of Northwest Coast communities to identify the criteria of legitimacy, limits and principles that inform how these communities understand taxation and exercise taxation powers. The final chapter explains why the emergence of market economies and monetary exchanges has not changed how Northwest Coast communities understand taxation and exercise taxation powers and explains how Northwest Coast taxation systems function according to kinship values, organization, customs and institutions.
A Tale of Two Metaphors: A Narrative Take on the Canadian Constitution
Keywords: Canada
Constitution
Law
Litterature
Metaphor
Narrative

This essay sheds light on the fundamental role that metaphors and narratives play in shaping how we talk, think, and argue, about the Constitution. Specifically, it makes the case that Canadian constitutional law is fashioned, to a large extent, by two competing types of metaphors: dynamic and static. Each of these categories, the essay seeks to show, stands for a different conception of the Constitution and, as such, influences the types of stories we tell about it. Each sustain, as the two case studies illustrate, dominant narratives about the Constitution, narratives whose structure essentially corresponds to the archetypal birth and rescue stories. The idea behind this essay is that, insofar as narratives and metaphors influence our cognition and help us reason about ideas and concepts ―a great part of our work as jurists― we would be wise to pay attention to them. Cet essai souligne le rôle fondamental que jouent narratifs et métaphores en façonnant la manière que notre Constitution est conceptualisée, discutée, et débattue. Plus précisément, l’essai soutient que deux importantes catégories de métaphores, statiques et dynamiques, sont au cœur du droit constitutionnel canadien. Chacune de ces catégories représente une vision différente de la Constitution et, en tant que telle, elle influence le type d'histoires que nous en racontons. Chacune soutient un narratif particulier, un narratif qui renvoie, en règle générale, soit à la « naissance » ou au « sauvetage » de notre texte fondateur. L'idée derrière cet essai est que, dans la mesure où les narratifs et les métaphores influent sur notre cognition et nous aident à raisonner dans l’abstrait, une grande partie du travail juridique, nous serions avisés de leur prêter une plus grande attention. C'est, en somme, un appel à une prise de conscience narrative.
The Performance of Canadian History: The Work of Historical Interpreters, Animators, and Re-Enactors
Keywords: Canada
historical interpretation
living history museums
museum theatre
public history
re-enactment

Abstract This dissertation argues that living history is, in fact, a theatrical genre despite its practitioners’ insistence that it is not, and that this theatricality is a direct result of its originating from a well-funded, deeply-researched government program. Although there have been several significant studies about Canadian living history in the last thirty years, scholarship on living history is mostly American; therefore, I start with an assessment of the genesis, nomenclature, and literature of living history to clarify that both a theatrical and, critically, a Canadian perspective is missing from the field. Next, I analyze the uniquely Canadian living history tropes that arose from the development of the Louisbourg Method in the 1960s and use a scenographic and dramaturgical evaluation to codify the method’s innate theatricality. I further develop my theatrical assessment by discussing the paradoxical anti-theatricality of recreational re-enactors. Their rejection of theatricality not only robs them of a useful tool for telling historical stories, but also unintentionally re-enforces some of the more harmful aspects of re-enactment (war games for old white men) by rejecting creative ways to include non-canonical bodies and histories. Finally, I consider the uneasy alliance between living history and its various stakeholders in a discussion about the precarious position in which living history in Canada currently finds itself. Aspects of this problem include: untangling conflicting objectives arising from having multiple historical authorities at one site, co-opting living history methods to sell non-historical commodities, and reliance on commercialism to generate income. I conclude that the positive implications of living history performances are undone when the support of research and development, an original tenet of the Louisbourg Method, disappears. The lack of resources has led to a greater reliance on mismatched sponsorships and non-historical but crowd-pleasing activities which dilute or even threaten the performance and reception of Canadian history.
Improving Out-of-hospital Cardiac Arrest Outcomes and Automated External Defibrillator Placement Guidelines through Optimization and Predictive Modeling
Keywords: Automated External Defibrillator
Emergency Medical Services
Machine Learning
Optimization
Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest
Public Health

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is an often fatal, time-sensitive emergency event. OHCA survival decreases significantly for every minute without treatment. Defibrillation, an effective means to resuscitate OHCA victims, can be safely delivered by untrained bystanders using an automated external defibrillator (AED). The dissemination of AEDs in public areas for bystander use has been shown to reduce the time to defibrillation and triple OHCA survival. However, bystander AED use and OHCA survival remain low despite the increasing amount of resources dedicated to AED placement. Identifying the limitations of existing AED network design and exploring new strategies for AED deployment are crucial to ensure efforts and resources spent on AED placements directly translate to improved OHCA outcomes. To address these questions, this thesis focuses on increasing the understanding of spatiotemporal OHCA risk and developing novel tools to improve the assessment and design of AED networks, using optimization and machine learning techniques, with the ultimate goal of increasing bystander AED use and OHCA survival. Specifically, we analyzed AED placement guidelines, existing AED networks, bystander response records, and real OHCA patient data from Toronto, Canada, and Copenhagen, Denmark and identified limited temporal AED accessibility as a key factor responsible for low AED use rates. Motivated by this finding, we developed a spatiotemporal AED placement optimization model that maximizes spatial and temporal AED accessibility. We showed our model reverses the effects of limited temporal AED accessibility in both Toronto and Copenhagen, two vastly different cities with distinct geographies, populations, and EMS systems. This demonstrated the effectiveness and generalizability of our optimization approach. To validate the clinical value of our optimization model, we developed a novel in silico trial framework that computationally evaluates AED networks in a real-life deployment situation. Using this framework, we conducted two in silico trials and established the superiority of optimization approaches to current practices and established placement guidelines, which represent the gold standard of evidence-based AED placement recommendations, in improving estimated OHCA outcomes. In conclusion, our findings identify the importance of temporal AED accessibility, data-driven AED placement optimization models, and centralized decision making in improving AED use and OHCA survival.
Anti-CRISPRs and CRISPR-Cas: Characterization and Biotechnology
Keywords: Anti-CRISPR
Bacteriophages
CRISPR-Cas
Gene regulation
Genome editing

Abstract Bacteria and phages (bacterial specific viruses) have been undergoing an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, whereby bacteria evolve mechanisms to inhibit phage infection and phages evolve mechanisms to evade bacterial defenses. Consequently, there are several mechanisms used by bacteria to inhibit phage infection. These include inhibiting phage adsorption, restriction modification systems, and the more recently discovered CRISPR-Cas immune systems. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR) loci together with their accompanying CRISPR-associated (Cas) genes form the only known bacterial adaptive defense mechanism that effectively protects against the transfer of mobile genetic elements (MGEs) such as bacteriophages. CRISPR-Cas systems use an RNA-guided nuclease to bind and cleave foreign DNA, presenting a powerful barrier to phage infection. This strong evolutionary barrier led phages to evolve small protein inhibitors of CRISPR-Cas called anti-CRISPRs. In the first section of my work, I characterize the structure, function, and mechanism of action for an anti-CRISPR that inhibits the type I-E CRISPR-Cas system of Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain 4386. I show that beyond simply inhibiting the CRISPR-Cas system, anti-CRISPR AcrIE2 converts the CRISPR-Cas system from a DNA degradation complex to a transcriptional regulator. This modification suggests that anti-CRISPR proteins may function to do more than simply inhibit CRISPR-Cas targeting. Although CRISPR-Cas systems are a manifestation of the evolutionary arms race between bacteria and phages, CRISPR-Cas systems have also been used for genome editing in various organisms for research purposes. Considering this previous work, I developed a type I-E and type II-A CRISPR-Cas genome editing system to manipulate the genome of different P. aeruginosa strains for research. In the second section of my work, I discuss the methods I developed to efficiently edit the genome of P. aeruginosa. My work on genome editing in P. aeruginosa has and will allow for the development of new P. aeruginosa mutants for research purposes. Collectively, my work provides insight into the evolutionary interactions between phages and bacteria in the context of CRISPR-Cas and anti-CRISPRs. Moreover, it provides a genome editing tool for future P. aeruginosa studies.
The Structure of Alkali Silicate Glasses and Melts: A Multi-spectroscopic Approach
Keywords: alkali silicates
atomic structure
glasses
Raman spectroscopy
X-ray absorption spectroscopy

The structure of alkali silicate glasses and melts is investigated using a multi-spectroscopic approach. Raman spectroscopy is used to characterize the local to intermediate range order within the glasses. We show that the distribution of rings varies as a function of composition, with 3-membered rings gaining importance with increasing alkali content. We apply a newly developed model for the tting of the high frequency envelope related to SiO4 symmetric stretch vibrations of Qn species. These ts are interpreted using the idea of modifier bound bridging oxygen. The proportions of the different Qn species vary with alkali concentration with Q4 species breaking down to form lower order Qn species with increasing alkali content. The Q2 peak appears at increasingly higher concentrations of M2O with increasing cation size. This leads us to believe that cations with a higher charge density cluster more readily than cations with a lower charge density. At the 20 mol. % composition we see a change in the silicate network, as shown by the absence of a Q4 peak and the proportion of 3-membered rings. The unique behaviour of lithium was investigated using X-ray absorption near-edge structure spectroscopy. We conducted experiments on a variety of lithium-bearing salts, minerals and glasses (LS: lithium silicate and LMS: lithium alkaline-earth silicate glasses) in order to characterize the lithium bonding environment. The Li K-edge position depends on the electronegativity of the element to which it is bound. The intensity of the first peak varies, depending on the existence of a 2p electron and can be used to evaluate the degree of ionicity of the bond. Crystalline lithium metasilicate has a sharp, strong intensity absorption edge whereas the lithium silicate glasses all have a weak intensity edge feature, similar to that of lithium carbonate. The area of the absorption edge peak increases with the lithium content of the LS glasses. The LMS glasses edge peak changes drastically depending on the alkaline-earth present. The peak area of the LMS glasses decreases with increasing charge density from barium to magnesium. We believe that the presence of Mg leads to more covalent-like Li-O bonds.
Polars Africains et Enjeux de Justice
Keywords: Crime
Fiction
Justice
Polar
Polarovelle
Policier

Cette thèse traite des enjeux de justice dans la fiction criminelle en Afrique subsaharienne francophone. Elle examine plus précisément les questions terminologiques (1), les problématiques inhérentes à la nouvelle criminelle (2), le caractère participatif de la criminalité en postcolonie (3) et la concurrence de légitimité à laquelle se livrent justice d’État et entités non étatiques (4). La nature protéiforme de la fiction criminelle a conduit les critiques à une certaine généralisation terminologique. Voilà pourquoi, dès le premier chapitre, la thèse questionne des expressions telles que « roman policier » aujourd’hui considérées comme des évidences alors qu’elles ne tracent pas toujours efficacement les contours d’une littérature qui n’a jamais dérogé à son engagement à dire le crime, mais qui s’est si souvent éloignée de la police. L’expression « roman policier » fait en plus l’impasse sur l’existence au sein de la fiction criminelle, en Afrique notamment, d’un important corpus de nouvelles criminelles qui traitent des questions sociétales avec une efficacité qui n’est en la matière pas celle du roman criminel. C’est la raison pour laquelle le deuxième chapitre est consacré à la nouvelle criminelle. Le troisième chapitre utilise le néologisme criminofiction (fiction criminogène) pour établir le fait que l’environnement postcolonial secrète le crime en abondance et contraint de ce fait les personnages à la violation des lois. Cette abondante criminalité débouche sur une concurrence de légitimité entre un État postcolonial délinquant et des individus – ou des entités non étatiques – auxquels les populations font appel. Des exemples de vengeance pure et de vindicte populaire se multiplient dès lors, comme le montre le quatrième chapitre. En définitive, la thèse établit que dans la fiction criminelle postcoloniale la justice s’émancipe des canons de légitimité en vigueur dans le droit dit positif, ces canons qui sont également à l’œuvre en métropole.
Modeling Neotropical Ecosystems during the Last Glacial Maximum
Keywords: biodiversity
ecology
palaeoecology

Rich biodiversity and biogeochemical significance has long motivated research on Neotropical ecosystems, though regionally-focused modeling studies remain relatively sparse and limited in scope. Three individual projects were performed to address potential issues in the modeling of Neotropical ecosystems in past and present contexts with particular emphasis on the Last Glacial Maximum. The first project was focused on discerning the effects of low atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature on the carbon exchange of a well-watered tropical forest using a canopy-scale ecophysiological model. The radiative transfer regime and canopy energy balance were used to interpret the effect of environmental variables on carbon fluxes, as well as the reproduction of an observed phenomena where leaf temperature drops below air temperature. The second project was an analysis of a four-year data set of ecosystem fluxes designed to assess the seasonal patterns of carbon uptake and the impacts of drought from a tropical dry forest site in Santa Rosa National Park, Costa Rica. A hyperbolic light response function was used to partition net ecosystem exchange into gross primary productivty and ecosystem respiration, while extracting estimates of ecosystem-level photosynthetic radiation and saturated rates of uptake. Bursts of carbon dioxide were observed at the onset of the rainy season suggesting the occurrence of the `Birch Effect' within tropical dry forest ecosystems. The third project was a regional-scale modeling study of vegetation cover in the Neotropics during the Last Glacial Maximum, focusing on the individual and interactive effects of fire and low carbon dioxide on biome distribution and tree cover. Inclusion of fire and the effects of low carbon dioxide improved agreement with pollen records and suggest the past prevalence of grassier, more open ecosystems. Modeling evidence was found to support the existence of hypothesized routes and barriers to dispersal during the Last Glacial Maximum, bolstering theories of range expansion and diversification over Pleistocene climatic oscillations.
Barriers to Access to Breast Reconstruction in Ontario
Keywords: Access to Care
Breast Cancer
Breast Reconstruction

Background: Breast reconstruction (BR) surgically restores the breast mound and provides long-term quality of life benefits. Despite these benefits, BR fails to be consistently integrated as part of the treatment of breast cancer (BC) patients, in part due to inequitable access to BR. Methods: I first performed a systematic review of the literature to comprehensively summarize the known barriers to BR. Access was defined as “the degree of fit between the [patient] and the system”. The access to care framework by Penchansky served as mid-level theory to inform this research. Then, in order to extend knowledge of barriers to BR access in Ontario, I performed semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders (BC patients as well as providers and administrators responsible for the delivery of BR) to explore their perceptions of BR access. Qualitative descriptive methodology guided this research. Results: The systematic review identified 99 articles published between 1996 and 2016 discussing barriers to BR access. Barriers were related to the six Penchansky access to care domains: accessibility, availability, awareness, affordability, acceptability, and accommodation. Interviews with 28 patients, 22 clinicians and 8 administrators (58 total) revealed two novel barriers to BR access in Ontario. Barriers were lack of BR acceptability to patients and lack of interprofessional collaboration among physicians. For BC patients, the main barrier to BR access was their lack of acceptability of the procedure. Although patients could recognize the value of BR, many felt judged when thinking or selecting to undergo BR. These negative perceptions of BR as a “vain” or “cosmetic” procedure could impact access to BR. For providers, ineffective interprofessional collaboration amongst the interprofessional BC team was perceived as a barrier to BR delivery. No clearly identified clinician leader as well as tensions regarding the role of plastic surgeons negatively influenced collaboration. Without effective collaboration between physicians, the delivery of BR could be adversely affected. Conclusions: This research improves our understanding of barriers faced by BC patients when attempting to access BR. Future studies that engage with key stakeholders are needed in order to develop targeted interventions which will facilitate BR access for all BC patients.
Evaluating the Clinical Impact of Timing of Aneurysmal Treatment following Subarachnoid Hemorrhage
Keywords: Administrative health data
Endovascular aneurysm repair
Meta-analysis
Subarachnoid hemorrhage
Surgical aneurysm repair
Treatment timing

The projects in this thesis addressed the knowledge gap regarding optimal timing of aneurysm treatment following subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) by evaluating whether earlier aneurysm treatment improves clinical outcomes. This was first examined in a meta-analysis synthesizing evidence from observational studies on timing of endovascular coiling of ruptured aneurysms. The results informed a cohort study using Ontario registry and administrative data evaluating timing of surgical or endovascular aneurysm treatment in SAH, where early treatment within one calendar date of SAH was compared to later treatment. The use of administrative data for evaluation of outcomes in SAH was bolstered by external validation of the Nationwide Inpatient Sample Subarachnoid Hemorrhage Severity Score (NIS-SSS), as well as a modified version of the NIS-SSS (m-NIS-SSS). The meta-analysis of observational studies demonstrated a possible but inconsistent benefit of treatment within 1 day of SAH. Treatment