VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Role of the Carotenoid Lycopene as an Antioxidant to Decrease Osteoporosis Risk in Women: Clinical and in vitro Studies
Keywords: lycopene
antioxidant
osteoporosis
bone turnover markers
oxidative stress
paraoxonase
bone
reactive oxygen species

Lycopene is a potent carotenoid antioxidant shown to decrease the risk of chronic diseases associated with oxidative stress and has recently begun to be studied in relation to osteoporosis. However, studies specifically associating intervention with lycopene and a decreased risk for osteoporosis have not yet been conducted, and the mechanisms by which lycopene affects bone have yet to be elucidated. The purpose of this thesis was to explore the hypotheses that supplementation with lycopene would increase antioxidant capacity while decreasing oxidative stress parameters; subsequently decreasing bone turnover markers, and thus the risk of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women. Specifically, experiments were designed to determine whether lycopene acts in its antioxidant capacity to improve bone health, and to delineate the mechanisms of these effects. These hypotheses were investigated through a cross-sectional study, a randomized controlled clinical study, and in vitro studies on human osteoblast cells. The results presented in this thesis demonstrate that intervention with the potent antioxidant lycopene significantly increased concentrations of the 5-cis isomer and resulted in significantly decreased oxidative stress parameters in postmenopausal women. This decrease in oxidative stress parameters resulted in significantly decreased concentrations of the bone resorption marker crosslinked N-telopeptides of type I collagen (NTx). The typical diet of participants included a relatively low intake of lycopene, and the corresponding serum lycopene concentrations were not as effective in decreasing biomarkers of oxidative stress and bone resorption as those obtained from supplementation with lycopene to increase 5-cis serum lycopene. Studies on the paraoxonase enzyme suggest that lycopene is most effective in quenching oxidative stress to decrease bone turnover markers when the internal antioxidant defenses are insufficient or decremented. Mechanisms demonstrated by the in vitro findings suggest that cis lycopene is capable of both preventing and repairing the damaging effects of oxidative stress in osteoblasts. Overall, this thesis provides evidence that lycopene acts through its antioxidant capacity to decrease oxidative stress parameters and bone turnover markers, and may, therefore, reduce the risk for osteoporosis. Based on these findings, the consumption of lycopene by women to improve overall bone health should be considered.
“On the Pawprints of Terror": The Human Rights Regime and the Production of Truth and Subjectivity in Post-authoritarian Chile
Keywords: Human rights
Chile
Latin America
Governmentality
Biopolitics
Foucault
Torture
Truth commissions
Athoritarianism
National reconciliation
Agamben

In 1990, Chile made a successful transition from the authoritarian dictatorship that had ruled the country since 1973 to a democratically elected government. The authoritarian regime was characterized by massive and systemic practices of human rights abuses, and it left an official toll of 5,000 deaths, about 2000 of which constitute “detained and disappeared people”, and an additional 27,000 people who have been officially recognized as victims of torture. These figures do not take into account the unknown numbers of Chilean exiles, or those who were internally displaced or who lost their jobs due to their suspected political affiliations. The human cost of the military regime has continued to be one of the most enduring issues confronting the post-authoritarian Chilean nation. This thesis builds on the work of critical researchers who locate the Chilean authoritarian regime in the transnational politics of the Cold War and their effect in implementing neo-liberalism in Chile. This literature demonstrates that terror was a constitutive, rather than an incidental, element of neo-liberal governmentality: governmentality that inscribed itself on Chilean bodies through terror practices and that remains unscathed through the transition to democracy. With that premise in mind I explore, through a historical analysis of major conjunctures in the history of human rights debates in Chile, how the post-authoritarian nation accounts for the human rights legacies of authoritarianism while obscuring the continuity of authoritarian governmentality. I propose that human rights constitute a biopolitical governmental regime that in a manner comparable to the authoritarian terror captures human life within the realm of state power. As a regime, human rights submit experiences of terror to specific power-knowledge technologies that render terror intelligible, manageable and governable. Rather than promoting essential values of truth and justice, the human rights regime produces specific discourses of truth and justice as well as specific discourses of subjectivity and nation. In concrete terms, this thesis explores how the post-authoritarian nation and it subjects use the human rights regime to discursively construct a national truth in order to promote and protect specific governmental arrangements.
The Molecular Characterization of Head and Neck Cancer in Young Patients
Keywords: Head and Neck Cancer
Young Patients
Oral Cancer
Human Papillomavirus
SNP Array
Mismatch Repair

Head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCCs) most commonly develop in older patients (≥60 years of age) with a history of tobacco and alcohol use. However, young individuals (≤45 years of age) can also develop HNSCC, often without common risk factors. Increasing evidence shows that Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infection is associated with particular HNSCC sites (e.g. oropharynx). We assessed the Roche Linear Array HPV Genotyping Test in several lesions and then examined the prevalence of HPV in HNSCCs from young and older patients. HPV infection was most prevalent in oropharyngeal cancers (16/22, 73%), rarely found in oral cavity cancers (2/53, 4%), and other head and neck sites (1/17, 6%). HPV positive tumors were associated with patients that were >40 and <60 years old (p=0.02). The absence or shortened time of carcinogen exposure from common risk factors and the development of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) at an early age suggest aberrant genetic events that are different than those in OSSCs from older patients. We used Affymetrix SNP 6.0 arrays to genomically profile oral tumors from young and older patients. Tumors from young patients showed different regions/genes of copy number alterations than those from older patient tumors. An increase of regions of loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in tumors from older patients was observed, and there was a high prevalence of copy number neutral LOH on chromosome 9 in tumors from young and older patients. These data suggest different genetic mechanisms in these patient groups. We have previously shown that HNSCCs from younger patients exhibited a high incidence of microsatellite instability (MSI), a marker of defective mismatch repair (MMR). Deregulated mRNA levels of hPMS1, hPMS2 and hMLH1 were observed and absent/low expression of hPMS1, hPMS2 and hMLH1 protein levels were observed in >50% of OSCCs. No mutations were observed in hPMS1 and hPMS2 and no significant differences of MSI or LOH were observed across genomic loci between tumors of young and older patients. The role of these genetic mechanisms in oral cancer appears complex; studies such as ours should further improve our knowledge of the molecular mechanisms leading to early-onset oral carcinomas.
Architectural Introspection and Applications
Keywords: Computer Science
Computer Engineering
Security
Computer Security
Virtualization
Virtual Machine
Hypervisor
Introspection
Attestation
Semantic Gap
Rootkit
Patch Management

Widespread adoption of virtualization has resulted in an increased interest in Virtual Machine (VM) introspection. To perform useful analysis of the introspected VMs, hypervisors must deal with the semantic gap between the low-level information available to them and the high-level OS abstractions they need. To bridge this gap, systems have proposed making assumptions derived from the operating system source code or symbol information. As a consequence, the resulting systems create a tight coupling between the hypervisor and the operating systems run by the introspected VMs. This coupling is undesirable because any change to the internals of the operating system can render the output of the introspection system meaningless. In particular, malicious software can evade detection by making modifications to the introspected OS that break these assumptions. Instead, in this thesis, we introduce Architectural Introspection, a new introspection approach that does not require information about the internals of the introspected VMs. Our approach restricts itself to leveraging constraints placed on the VM by the hardware and the external environment. To interact with both of these, the VM must use externally specified interfaces that are both stable and not linked with a specific version of an operating system. Therefore, systems that rely on architectural introspection are more versatile and more robust than previous approaches to VM introspection. To illustrate the increased versatility and robustness of architectural introspection, we describe two systems, Patagonix and P2, that can be used to detect rootkits and unpatched software, respectively. We also detail Attestation Contracts, a new approach to attestation that relies on architectural introspection to improve on existing attestation approaches. We show that because these systems do not make assumptions about the operating systems used by the introspected VMs, they can be used to monitor both Windows and Linux based VMs. We emphasize that this ability to decouple the hypervisor from the introspected VMs is particularly useful in the emerging cloud computing paradigm, where the virtualization infrastructure and the VMs are managed by different entities. Finally, we show that these approaches can be implemented with low overhead, making them practical for real world deployment.
Decentralized Coding in Unreliable Communication Networks
Keywords: error-correcting codes
wireless networking

Many modern communication networks suffer significantly from the unreliable characteristic of their nodes and links. To deal with failures, traditionally, centralized erasure codes have been extensively used to improve reliability by introducing data redundancy. In this thesis, we address several issues in implementing erasure codes in a decentralized way such that coding operations are spread to multiple nodes. Our solutions are based on fountain codes and randomized network coding, because of their capability of being amenable to decentralized implementation originated from their simplicity and randomization properties. Our contributions consist of four parts. First, we propose a novel decentralized implementation of fountain codes utilizing random walks. Our solution does not require node location information and enjoys a small local routing table with a size in proportion to the number of neighbors. Second, we introduce priority random linear codes to achieve partial data recovery by partition and encoding data into non-overlapping or overlapping subsets. Third, we present geometric random linear codes to decrease communication costs in decoding significantly, by introducing modest data redundancy in a hierarchical fashion. Finally, we study the application of network coding in disruption tolerant networks. We show that network coding achieves shorter data transmission time than replication, especially when data buffers are limited. We also propose an efficient variant of network coding based protocol, which attains similar transmission delay, but with much lower transmission costs, as compared to a protocol based on epidemic routing.
Cognitive Interference Management in 4G Autonomous Femtocells
Keywords: Wireless Communication
Interference Management
4th Generation
Autonomous Cellular Network

We present a vision for 4G cellular networks based on the concept of autonomous infrastructure deployment. Cellular base stations, or femtocell access points, are deployed by network users without being constrained by the conventional cell planning process from the network operator. Autonomous deployment allows the network to grow in an organic manner which requires new methods for spectrum management. We study a framework for autonomous network optimization based on the method of cognitive interference management. In our model, a number of femtocells are co-channel deployed in an underlay macrocellular network. Instead of fully reusing 100% of the macrocellular resource, partial reuse is cognitively determined in femtocells based on their individual network environment. According to an interference signature perceived from the environment, a femtocell autonomously determines the appropriate channel allocation and minimizes the network interference. Upon the cognitive acquisition of the random infrastructure topology, base station pilot power is autonomously configured in order to maximize the cellular coverage. A series of network self-configuration procedures are discussed for automatic cell size adaptation and resource management. Our results show that the new approaches based on cognitive radio configuration facilitate the network optimization in terms of interference management, mobile handoff, pilot power control and network resource allocation. The proposed framework offers a 4G vision for spectrum management in an autonomous self-managed cellular architecture.
Integrated Droplet-based Microfluidics for Chemical Reactions and Processes
Keywords: microfluidics
microreactor

This thesis describes a study of various aspects of chemical reactions conducted in microfluidic reactors. (i) In the first project, we proposed the application of the 'internal trigger' approach to multi-step microfluidic polymerization reactions conducted in droplets, namely, polyaddition and polycondensation. We hypothesized and experimentally established that heat generated in the exothermic free radical polymerization of an acrylate monomer triggers the polycondensation of the urethane oligomer. As a result, we synthesized monodispersed poly(acrylate/urethane) microparticles with an interpenetrating polymer network structure. (ii) In the second project, we developed a multiple modular microfluidic reactor with the purpose of increasing productivity in microfluidic synthesis. Compared to the productivity of the single microfluidic reactor < 1g/hr, we synthesized poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) particles at a productivity of approximately 50g/hr with a CV < 5%. We analyzed and addressed several challenges of this process, such as the fidelity in the fabrication of microfluidic reactors, crosstalk between individual reactors sharing a common liquid supply, and coalescence of droplets. (iii) We developed an integrated microfluidic reactor comprising four parallel individual reactors to study the effect of geometry and surface energy of the microchannels on the emulsification process. We spontaneously generated droplets with different volumes by integrating individual droplet generators in parallel with varying geometry. This approach is important in studies of the effect of droplet surface and volume on chemical reactions, and in the studies of diffusion-controlled processes. (iv) We conducted a microfluidic study of the reversible binding of CO2 to secondary amines in the process that mediates solvent polarity switch. We studied reaction rates and CO2 uptake by generating plugs of gaseous a CO2 and monitoring the change in their dimensions. We also demonstrated fast screening of reaction conditions, as well as the ability to reverse the reaction in situ.
Administrative Law and Curial Deference
Keywords: administrative law
judicial review

This thesis examines three interrelated issues. The first concerns a question about the status of administrative law, namely whether administrative officials have authority to determine what the law requires under a democratic constitution. Historically, this question has not been adequately addressed in public law scholarship because neither Diceyan constitutional theory nor common law doctrine has been traditionally receptive to administrative law. In this thesis, I argue that there are good reasons for people to respect the legal authority of administrative officials and their decisions. Those reasons are rooted in respect for the democratic process by which administrative officials are empowered, and respect for the various forms of expertise that administrative officials possess. The second issue concerns the doctrinal aspect of administrative law. If there are good reasons for believing that administrative officials have legitimate legal authority, then those same reasons suggest that judges should respect administrative legal decisions. In order to better understand how the relevant reasons for respecting administrative decisions alter the practice of judicial review, I compare and contrast the traditional doctrine of jurisdictional review with the doctrine of curial deference. This comparison shows that the doctrine of curial deference provides a superior account of the legitimate legal authority of administrative officials, and that this account makes a practical difference for the practice of judicial review. The third issue concerns whether the doctrine of curial deference can be reconciled with the rule of law. Assuming that there are good reasons for respecting administrative decisions, how can judges both respect an administrative decision while ensuring that it is consistent with the rule of law? I argue that judges can both respect administrative decisions and maintain the rule of law by requiring administrative officials to justify their decisions adequately in light of public reasons which are both patent and latent in existing legal materials.
The Effects of a Teacher-child Play Intervention on Classroom Compliance in Young Children in Child Care Settings
Keywords: compliance
child care
pre-school
play
children

The current study evaluated the effect of a teacher conducted play intervention on pre-school aged children’s compliance in child care settings. Study participants included 11 children ranging in age from 2 to 5 years old and seven early childhood education teachers within seven classrooms across five child care centres. Teachers were trained to conduct daily 5 minute play sessions consisting of contingent praise, mirroring, and warm responsiveness. A combination ABAB and multiple baseline design was used to demonstrate the effect of the play intervention. Pre-treatment observations revealed varying degrees of recurring child compliance difficulties. The play intervention was associated with improved rates of compliance for each participant child regardless of differences in age, gender, and level of compliance difficulties. The intervention is discussed with regard to its potential as a pro-active, non-intrusive strategy for improving young children’s classroom compliance.
A Newton-Krylov Approach to Aerodynamic Shape Optimization in Three Dimensions
Keywords: Aerodynamic
Shape
Optimization
Newton-Krylov

A Newton-Krylov algorithm is presented for aerodynamic shape optimization in three dimensions using the Euler equations. An inexact-Newton method is used in the flow solver, a discrete-adjoint method to compute the gradient, and the quasi-Newton optimizer to find the optimum. A Krylov subspace method with approximate-Schur preconditioning is used to solve both the flow equation and the adjoint equation. Basis spline surfaces are used to parameterize the geometry, and a fast algebraic algorithm is used for grid movement. Accurate discrete-adjoint gradients can be obtained in approximately one-fourth the time required for a converged flow solution. Single- and multi-point lift-constrained drag minimization optimization cases are presented for wing design at transonic speeds. In all cases, the optimizer is able to efficiently decrease the objective function and gradient for problems with hundreds of design variables.
Symphonic Engagement: A Case Study of Extra-curricular Engagement in String Orchestras
Keywords: Music
Education
String Education
Engagement

Symphonic Engagement is a longitudinal study spanning six years, investigating the reasons and benefits for, and the impact on twelve urban public school students who decided to use their free time to participate and be engaged in extra-curricular activities in string orchestras. Literature and research inform us that the arts can play a significant role in the curriculum, inside and outside school, and this study discusses: the connection of the music curriculum to students’ future lives after secondary school graduation; the place of music education in the curriculum; music in our society; music and the brain; the effect of after-school programs on student engagement; and the pedagogy of arts education. Case study is the qualitative methodology used in this research. Data comes from interviews, field notes, and questionnaires that explore and interrogate the issues surrounding music education. Twelve young participants, from different gender, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds, were interviewed about their lived experiences and involvement with string orchestras, and on the ways in which these experiences have affected them as students and as members of society. The analysis of the data reveals connections between the author’s arts experiences in the public school system, and those of the twelve students interviewed. The teacher-student relationship, equity, family influence, and technology are discussed as factors that can strengthen programs for youth, by deepening engagement in school experiences. This study explores why some teachers and students choose to participate or become engaged in extra-curricular activities and examines the impact on educational communities, on the future direction of string education, and on the relationship of the teaching/learning experience.