VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Neural Basis of Working Memory: Using Probabilistic Tractography to Examine White Matter Integrity and its Association to Working Memory in Paediatric Brain Tumor Patients
Keywords: posterior fossa tumors
DTI tractography
working memory
craniospinal radiation therapy

Paediatric posterior fossa tumors are often effectively controlled with a combination of radiation, chemotherapy and surgery. However, therapeutic craniospinal radiation has been associated with widespread cognitive late effects. Working memory is one such cognitive ability that has yet to be fully examined in this clinical population. Bilateral tracts connecting the cerebellum with the DLPFC were delineated using DTI tractography in all participants, replicating the cerebrocerebellar pathway outlined in an animal model. There were observable differences in white matter integrity (quantified by DTI measures of anisotropy, and mean, axial, and radial diffusivity) of the cerebellum-DLPFC pathway in patients versus controls. Additionally, working memory deficits that were found in patients were correlated with DTI indices pertaining to the cerebellum-DLPFC pathway. Therefore, this thesis is the first to explore the possible relations between white matter integrity of this pathway following treatment for paediatric posterior fossa tumors and working memory function.
Being Manly Men: Conveying Masculinity Through Eating Behaviour
Keywords: Masculinity
Eating Behaviour

Males were given false feedback that they scored low, high, or no feedback (control group) on masculinity and given a “masculine” food (meat pizza), a “feminine” food (vegetarian pizza), or the choice between the two to eat. An interaction between masculinity condition and food condition was found when the “feminine” food condition and the Control group were removed, such that low-masculine participants given meat pizza ate a small amount, as did high-masculine participants given a choice. High-masculine participants given meat pizza ate a large amount of food as did low-masculine participants given a choice. In certain situations males want to appear masculine and therefore eat a larger amount of food, or want to appear attractive on other dimensions and therefore eat a smaller amount of food.
The Genetic and Behavioral Analysis of Insulin Signaling in Caenorhabditis Elegans Learning and Memory
Keywords: Learning
Memory
C. elegans
insulin signaling

Insulin signaling plays a prominent role in regulation of dauer formation and longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans. Here, I show that insulin signaling also is required in benzaldehyde-starvation associative plasticity, where worms pre-exposed to the odor attractant benzaldehyde in the absence of food subsequently demonstrate a conditioned aversion response towards the odorant. Animals with mutations in ins-1, daf-2, and age-1 which encode the homolog of human insulin, insulin/IGF-1 receptor, and PI-3 kinase, respectively, have significant deficits in benzaldehyde-starvation associative plasticity. Using a conditional allele I show that the behavioral roles of DAF-2 signaling in associative plasticity can be dissociated, with DAF-2 signaling playing a more significant role in the memory retrieval than in memory acquisition. I propose DAF-2 signaling acts as a learning specific starvation signal in the memory acquisition phase of benzaldehyde-starvation associative plasticity but functions to switch benzaldehyde-sensing AWC neurons into an avoidance signaling mode during memory retrieval.
Consultation or Consent? Indigenous People's Participatory Rights with regard to the Exploration of Natural Resources According to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Keywords: Indigenous Peoples
Natural Resources

This thesis examines the development of the right of indigenous peoples to natural resources on their lands and territories in international law. It examines international treaties, the jurisprudence of international courts and other international bodies, as well as the practice of international actors. A special focus is on the UN General Assembly Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The thesis describes the drafting process and the discussions that took place around the issue of land rights and natural resources, and uses this to draw conclusions on the development of a new international customary law of an indigenous right to free, prior and informed consent with regard to natural resources.
The Common Law Right to Privacy
Keywords: Common Law
Privacy

This paper justifies and delineates a common law right to privacy. The first part of the paper reviews the current state of the law of privacy. The second part defines privacy by distinguishing privacy rights from those otherwise protected by the common law. The paper argues that the appropriate organizing principle behind the legal concept of privacy is the idea of control over one’s interactions with others. The third part argues that protection of privacy at common law is justified both pursuant to the demands of the Charter and with a theoretical understanding of private law based on a Kantian notion of Right. The final part argues that such an analysis determines the substantive nature of the protection that should be afforded at common law, namely that privacy should be protected from both intentional and negligent interference.
The Effect of Real-time Feedback on Users Ability to Improve Consistency of NIRS Detectable Signals
Keywords: near-infrared spectroscopy
brain computer interface
feedback
rehabilitation engineering

Individuals with limited motor control are often unable to interact with their environment. Recently, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) systems have been investigated as potential brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Previous studies examined data offline, preventing users from understanding how their thoughts triggered the NIRS system. This thesis focused on understanding the short-term effects of feedback on user’s ability to learn how to control BCIs. Data were collected from control and experimental groups over seven sessions, as they performed fast singing imagery or mental arithmetic. Significant differences were observed between the control group’s results in non-feedback sessions and the experimental group’s results in feedback sessions. Qualitative results from 3 of the 10 participants suggested they had control of the feedback system. They performed the task with online accuracies of 61% - 88% in the final 2 sessions with feedback. These results suggest that continued investigation of NIRS feedback systems is warranted.
Effects of Coating Formulations on Thermal Properties of Coating Layers
Keywords: coating layer
coating formulation
thermal conductivity
thermal property
xerography
electrophotography
digital printing
coated paper
paper physics
GCC
kaolin

The effects of coating formulation on thermal characteristics of coating layers were systematically studied for xerographic toner fusion on coated papers. Model coatings were formulated using three types of ground calcium carbonate and one kaolin pigments, each mixed with 6, 10, 18, and 25 pph of styrene butadiene latex binder. Porosity was found to be a key parameter for coating thermal conductivity adjustment, and was determined by the latex concentration. The particle size distribution and morphology of pigments also affect the overall thermal characteristics of coating layers. Print qualities on model coated papers were evaluated by print gloss measurement, toner adhesion test, and pair-wise visual ranking, and it was proved that print gloss is reduced with increasing bulk thermal conductivity of coating layers. The coating layer consisted of Covercarb HP pigment and 10 pph of latex was found to have the best performance in the three print quality evaluation tests.
Production Structure, Input Substitution, and Total Factor Productivity Growth in the Softwood Lumber Industries in U.S. and Canadian Regions
Keywords: softwood lumber
productivity
production structure

This study uses a translog cost function to specify the production structures of the softwood lumber industry in three U.S. regions (the West Coast, the Inland, and the South), and four Canadian regions (Ontario, the British Columbia Coast, the British Columbia Interior and Quebec), from 1988 to 2005. First, two separate production models are specified and analyzed, one is a “U.S. model” for the U.S. regions, and the other is a “Canada model” for the Canadian regions. Second, all seven regions are included in one production model, a “U.S.-Canada model”. In the U.S.-Canada model, purchasing power parity over the Gross Domestic Product is used to convert cost and price data of Canada from Canadian into U.S. dollars. The Allen and Morishima elasticities of substitution, price elasticiteis of demand, rate of technical change, and total factor productivity growth are estimated in each model, and the results are presented and compared.
Injury and Neighborhood Marginalization: Does it Matter Where You Live?
Keywords: Injury
Injuries
Neighborhood
Neighbourhood
Neighborhood marginalization
Neighbourhood marginalization
Marginalization
urban
Ontario
Unintentional injuries
Intentional injuries
Assaults
Self-inflicted injuries
Residential instability
Material deprivation
Ethnic diversity
Dependency

Background: Injury is an enormous public health problem in Canada. Recent studies have suggested that characteristics of the residential environment, particularly neighborhood marginalization, may be important in determining injury risk. Objective: To determine whether there is an association between neighborhood marginalization and injury in the largest urban cities of Ontario. Methods: A retrospective, cross-sectional, ecological study was conducted to evaluate the relationship between neighborhood marginalization and injury in 0-64 year olds who resided in the ten largest cities of Ontario between 2003-2005. Results: Neighborhoods with high levels of ethnic diversity had significantly lower rates of unintentional injuries, neighborhoods with high levels of material deprivation had significantly higher rates of assaults, and neighborhoods with high levels of residential instability and material deprivation had significantly higher rates of self-inflicted injuries in adults. Conclusions: The association between neighborhood marginalization and injury differs depending on the type of injury examined.
The Specificity and Neural Basis of Impaired Inhibitory Control
Keywords: inhibitory control
ADHD
brain injury
impulsivity

Impaired inhibition is a deficit of several psychopathological disorders, particularly attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In the first study, a meta-analysis was conducted to determine whether impaired inhibition as measured by the Stop Signal Task is specific to ADHD, or whether it could be found in other psychopathological disorders. The meta-analysis found an inhibitory deficit in ADHD, but also in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia (SCZ), suggesting that deficient inhibition is not specific to ADHD. A common neural mechanism may underlie deficient inhibition in ADHD, OCD, and SCZ. Study 2 aimed to determine the neural basis of inhibition using a lesion-deficit approach in children with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Only TBI children with white matter lesions in the superior frontal gyrus (SFG) region showed impaired inhibition compared with orthopedic injury controls. This suggests that deficient inhibition may stem from frontal lobe white matter damage, particularly in the SFG.
Reducing Complexity of Liver Cancer Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy
Keywords: Liver Cancer
Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy

Intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) can potentially increase the dose delivered to liver tumours while sparing normal tissues from dose. More complex IMRT, with more modulation of the radiation beam is more susceptible to geometric and dosimetric uncertainties than simpler radiotherapy plans. Simple breath-hold liver IMRT using few radiation beam segments (<30) was investigated in 27 patients to determine the quality of treatment in terms of tumour dose coverage and normal tissue sparing as compared to index IMRT using >30 segments. In all 27 plans number of segments was reduced to <30 without compromising tumour coverage or normal tissue dose constraints, at the expense of dose conformity. Delivered tumour and normal tissue dose did not differ statistically between IMRT plans when accounting for treatment residual geometric error. This research supports considering the use of simple IMRT for treatment of liver cancer, except when loss of dose conformation is undesirable (i.e. very high doses).
Poor Glycemic Control Predicts Increased Neuro-retinal Dysfunction in Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes
Keywords: diabetes
diabetic retinopathy
electrophysiology
electroretinogram
multifocal electroretinogram
slow flash multifocal electroretinogram
multifocal oscillatory potentials
type 1 diabetes
adolescents
hemoglobin A1c
retina
glycemic control

Studies demonstrate localized neuro-retinal dysfunction in patients with diabetes and no visible diabetic retinopathy (DR). Poor glycemic control is a strong risk factor for DR. We hypothesized that poor glycemic control predicts increased areas of localized neuro-retinal dysfunction in patients with diabetes. Forty-eight adolescents with diabetes and 45 controls were tested using the standard (103 hexagons) multifocal electroretinogram (mfERG). Negative binomial regression analysis was conducted with number of abnormal hexagons (delayed responses) as the dependent variable and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), disease duration, age and sex as covariates. Results indicate that a one-unit increase in HbA1c predicts an 80% (p = 0.002) increase in the number of abnormal hexagons when controlling for age. Increased areas of neuro-retinal dysfunction are predicted by worsening glycemic control in patients with no visible DR. Standard mfERG may be useful in monitoring patients with diabetes and identifying those who may be at risk of developing DR.
Implementation of a Spatially-resolved Explicit Photodynamic Therapy Dosimetry System Utilizing Multi-sensor Fiber Optic Probes
Keywords: Photodynamic Therapy
Spectroscopy
Dosimetry
Cancer

Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) has proven to be a minimally invasive alternative treatment option for various conditions including cancer. The treatment efficacy of deep-seated tumours with PDT is variable, compared to the treatment of tissue surfaces such as the skin and esophagus. This is partly due to inadequate monitoring of the three interrelated treatment parameters: treatment light, photosensitizer and tissue oxygenation. This thesis presents the development of a system for explicit dosimetry of PDT treatment light and tissue oxygenation using multi-sensor fiber optic probes for spatially resolved parameter measurements. The system uses embedded fluorescent sensors for treatment light quantification. Tissue oxygenation measurement is accomplished using frequency domain techniques with embedded phosphorescent metalloporphyrin compounds as sensors.
Two-dimensional Barcodes for Mobile Phones
Keywords: communication
phone
barcode
wireless
camera
channel model

There are several potential applications for a high data density barcode that can be easily photographed and decoded by mobile phones, but no such symbology currently exists. As a result, a new barcode was designed to exploit the low-pass characteristic of a camera phone channel and is presented as a means of facilitating wireless optical communication with mobile phones. A channel model was established and subsequent simulation results led to the design of a colour barcode with encoding done in the Discrete Cosine Transform domain. A waterfilling process and a noise-shaping algorithm enhance performance, while a new fast acquisition method allows for rotational and size invariance. An outer Accumulate-Repeat-Accumulate code is employed, followed by an inner Reed Muller code with a rate varying according to spatial frequency. The final barcode data-density is 3.5 times greater than the leading symbology and has proven robust to various impediments imposed by camera phones.
A High-performance, Reconfigurable Architecture for Restricted Boltzmann Machines
Keywords: Reconfigurable Architecture
Neural Networks
FPGAs
High Performance Computing

Despite the popularity and success of neural networks in research, the number of resulting commercial or industrial applications have been limited. A primary cause of this lack of adoption is due to the fact that neural networks are usually implemented as software running on general-purpose processors. Hence, a hardware implementation that can take advantage of the inherent parallelism in neural networks is desired. This thesis investigates how the Restricted Boltzmann machine, a popular type of neural network, can be effectively mapped to a high-performance hardware architecture on FPGA platforms. The proposed, modular framework is designed to reduce the time complexity of the computations through heavily customized hardware engines. The framework is tested on a platform of four Xilinx Virtex II-Pro XC2VP70 FPGAs running at 100MHz through a variety of different configurations. The maximum performance was obtained by instantiating a Restricted Boltzmann Machine of 256x256 nodes distributed across four FPGAs, which results in a computational speed of 3.13 billion connection-updates-per-second and a speed-up of 145-fold over an optimized C program running on a 2.8GHz Intel processor.
A Study of Conflict Detection in Software Transactional Memory
Keywords: software transactional memory
concurrency control

Transactional Memory (TM) has been proposed as a simpler parallel programming model compared to the traditional locking model. However, uptake from the programming community has been slow, primarily because performance issues of software-based TM strategies are not well understood. In this thesis we conduct a systematic analysis of conflict scenarios that may emerge when enforcing correctness between conflicting transactions. We find that some combinations of conflict detection and resolution strategies perform better than others depending on the conflict patterns in the application. We validate our findings by implementing several concurrency control strategies, and by measuring their relative performance. Based on these observations, we introduce partial rollbacks as a mechanism for effectively compensating the variability in the TM algorithm performance. We show that using this mechanism we can obtain close to the overall best performance for a range of conflict patterns in a synthetically generated workload and a realistic game application.
Improved Coding Techniques for MPPM-like Systems
Keywords: Coding Theory
Free Space Optical Communication
Multi-pulse pulse position modulation

Multipulse pulse position modulation (MPPM) has been widely proposed to improve data rate over the traditional pulse position modulation (PPM) in free-space optical communication systems. However, there is no known efficient method of encoding MPPM codewords. Furthermore, MPPM is not the optimal coding scheme (in terms of data rate) given the two main constraints of optical systems (duty cycle and zero runlength). In this work, an improved encoding technique for MPPM is provided as well as an analysis of regions where significant rate gain over MPPM is achievable. A new coding technique based on constrained coding is introduced that allows construction of codes which achieves considerable rate gain over comparable MPPM systems. In addition, our new codes allow for convenient concatenation with an outer-code and are suitable for iterative decoding. Simulation results show that these codes can achieve a 6 dB coding gain over comparable MPPM systems.
A Frequency-scalable 14-bit ADC for Low Power Sensor Applications
Keywords: ADC
scalable
delta-sigma
incremental converter

In this thesis, a 14-bit low-power Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) is designed for sensor applications. Following on previous work, the ADC is designed to be frequency scalable by 1000 times from 1.67S/s to 1.67kS/s. To reduce power, class AB opamps are used. The design was fabricated in 0.18um CMOS and occupies an area of 0.35mm2. Operating at full-rate as a Delta-Sigma modulator, the ADC achieves 91.8dB peak SNDR while consuming 83uW. In incremental mode, the ADC powers off periodically to achieve frequency scalability, maintaining 84.7dB to 89dB peak SNDR while operating from 1.67S/s to 1.67kS/s.
Efficient Multi-ported Memories for FPGAs
Keywords: FPGA
computer architecture
multi-ported memory
multipumping
soft processor
parallelism
FIFO
buffers

Multi-ported memories are challenging to implement on FPGAs since the provided block RAMs typically have only two ports. In this dissertation we present a thorough exploration of the design space of FPGA multi-ported memories by evaluating conventional solutions to this problem, and introduce a new design that efficiently combines block RAMs into multi-ported memories with arbitrary numbers of read and write ports and true random access to any memory location, while achieving significantly higher operating frequencies than conventional approaches. For example we build a 256-location, 32-bit, 12-ported (4-write, 8-read) memory that operates at 281 MHz on Altera Stratix III FPGAs while consuming an area equivalent to 3679 ALMs: a 43% speed improvement and 84% area reduction over a pure ALM implemen- tation, and a 61% speed improvement over a pure "multipumped" implementation, although the pure multipumped implementation is 7.2-fold smaller.
Ectopic Notch1 Activation Alters Mammary Cell Fate During Puberty and Promotes the Development of Lactating Adenomas during Pregnancy
Keywords: Notch
Mammary Gland
Lactating Adenoma
ELF5+/ER- Cell Fate

The role that each of the Notch receptors play in controlling alveolar development and cell fate determination in the mouse mammary gland has remained unclear. By utilizing a cre-conditional constitutively active intracellular Notch1 knock-in I define, in vivo, that ectopic Notch1 activation is sufficient to inhibit ductal outgrowth, cause the formation of alveolar-like cell accumulations, and promote Elf5+/ER- cell fate, at the expense of ER+ cell fate, in the mammary gland of pubescent mice. Furthermore, ectopic Notch1 in the pregnant mammary gland is sufficient to promote the formation of pregnancy/lactation-dependent lactating adenomas. These lactating adenomas consist of differentiated secretory cells and normally regress during involution but progress into non-regressing tumours after multiple pregnancies. These lactating adenomas exhibit decapitation secretions characteristic of apocrine differentiation. Together these results suggest that Notch1 may function to promote Elf5+/ER- cell fate and may be misregulated in pregnancy-associated masses and apocrine-carcinoma of the breast in humans.
Frequency and Clinical Importance of Pathological Discordance in Lymphoma
Keywords: Lymphoma
Pathological Discordance
Clinical Impact

We conducted a retrospective review of discordant pathology for lymphoma patients treated at the Princess Margaret Hospital between 2000 and 2003. We identified 2818 lymphoma patients of which 1567 (38%) met inclusion criteria with 167 discordant cases (discordance rate 15.7%). Six reviewers blinded to clinical management rated potential for harm on a minimal to severe scoring. The majority (67.6%) received a rating of moderate to severe. Review of actual clinical management revealed unnecessary surgical procedures, incorrect chemotherapy and under or over treatment of patients. For discordant cases, 8.4% were identified as having severe actual harm. This means that 1/6 patients diagnosed with lymphoma may have a change in diagnosis after pathologic review, 1/9 will have discordance with the potential to cause moderate to severe consequences, and 1/75 will experience significant clinical harm. We conclude that pathologic discordance in lymphoma is common and can lead to patient harm.