VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Optimization of Lateral Ankle Sprain Management Practices Among Physiotherapists in the Canadian Armed Forces
Keywords: ankle
military
rehabilitation
sprain

Lateral ankle sprains (LAS) are the 3rd most common injury sustained by military members, affecting their physical readiness and thereby the operational readiness of the military. To limit the impact of LAS on the operational readiness of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), this thesis used three studies to investigate an approach to optimize the LAS management practices of CAF Physiotherapists. Firstly, a literature review determined the LAS management practices recommended by current best research evidence. Subsequently, 52 CAF Physiotherapists were surveyed to establish their LAS management practices. Comparing these sources revealed that over 84.6% of the respondents reported using evidence based practices across all stages of healing. However, respondents also reported a relative delay in prescribing balance strengthening exercises until the sub-acute stage of healing, and reported a limited use of balance functional performance measures across all stages of healing. A focus group of CAF Physiotherapists further explored their LAS management practices and investigated any factors affecting the implementation of a comprehensive rehabilitation program derived from current research evidence. Seven participants confirmed delaying their prescription of strengthening exercises and using a limited number of balance functional performance measures¸ but denied barriers to implementing the rehabilitation program in garrison or on deployment. A pilot study investigated the feasibility of conducting a randomized trial to determine the value of adding manual ankle mobilizations to the rehabilitation program to improve ankle dorsiflexion in 20 CAF members with LAS. It was concluded that the study design was feasible in a CAF setting, yet there were no statistically significant differences in ankle dorsiflexion between the mobilization (95.2±47.5mm) and sham groups (94.7±36.9mm) at 2 weeks (p=0.84). However, while clinically important changes in ankle dorsiflexion and self-reported function were reported by both groups, the magnitude of change was larger in the mobilization group. The recommendations of this thesis may be clinically applied by CAF Physiotherapists to optimize their LAS management practices and limit the impact of LAS on CAF operational readiness
Dynamics of Violence between Intimate Partners in the Narratives of Incarcerated Women in Canada: A Violent Events Perspective
Keywords: Canada
Female violence
Incident-based approach
Partner violence
Violent event
Violent interaction

While we have learnt much in the last forty years about the prevalence of and risk factors for violence perpetrated by individual men and women in their intimate relationships, little research has focused on the interaction between intimate partners within a violent situation. I argue that given the complex nature of intimate relationships and intertwining roles, behaviours, and emotions of both partners, examining the couple's interaction -- rather than the disconnected behaviours of individual men or women -- can provide a deeper understanding of and new insights into the process of violence between intimate partners. Using a sample of 295 violent incidents reported by 135 incarcerated women, I explore the interactional aspects of violence in the incidents from a violent events perspective. Identifying and drawing on different dimensions of violent dynamics, e.g., initiation of violence, reaction to initial violence, the use of violence in the entire incident, and injuries to partners, I used Latent Class Analysis to identify specific classes of violent incidents that represent more general patterns of violent dynamics. This incident-based analysis identified four distinct classes of violent incidents and characteristics associated with each of them at the individual, relationship and situational levels. My study finds evidence consistent with previously identified violent types and also detects a novel type of violent dynamics in the relationships of high-risk incarcerated women. Moreover, the context-based and interaction-based approach in my study reveals the heterogeneity of women's behaviour in a violent situation. These findings question a `one size fits all' approach to address such a complex and multidimensional phenomenon as intimate partner violence and suggest carefully tailored interventions for different violent types/incidents.
On the Development of a 2MHz Radial Imaging Ultrasound Array for Potential Use in Guiding Pedicle Screw Insertion
Keywords: Bone
Image guided surgery
Imaging Arrays
Spine Surgery
Transducers
Ultrasound

Spinal fusion surgeries often require the insertion of screw implants into the pedicle bone. Although the procedure is somewhat routine, there is an inherent error rate when surgeons employ manual feedback techniques in the operating room. An alternative image guidance technique to reduce the error rate is an ultrasound transducer, which could be incorporated with the surgical toolkit to image the pedicle bone from within. This allows for real-time, non-radiating visualization of the anatomy and bone boundaries relative to the tip of the toolkit. The primary objective of this thesis is to describe the design and fabrication of 2MHz ultrasound probes for pedicle screw guidance. Three single-element transducer designs (3.5mm diameter) are explored in order to arrive at an acoustic design (backing, active, matching layer) that enables intra-pedicular imaging. To eliminate the need for manual rotation of the transducer, we have successfully designed and fabricated a 2MHz radial array that consists of 32 elements (3.2mm outer diameter). Using a commercial platform, we have obtained radial images from successive groupings of four array elements, when the array was placed in various fluids. Although this work has not demonstrated intra-pedicular imaging, we believe that it represents an important step in this direction. A secondary objective of this work is to investigate the directionality distribution in the pedicle's trabecular bone. This stems from the need to better understand the manner in which it can affect ultrasound propagation. In this thesis, we have estimated the direction distribution of pedicle trabecular bone from micro-CT images using Gabor filters. The Gabor filter was tested for suitability in detecting trabecular structures first through simulated 2-D line tests then through 3-D bone models. When applied to micro-CT images of six human pedicle bones, the final results are an estimation of the main directions of trabecular structures in both the coronal and sagittal planes. However, since the pedicles tested were from just one cadaver, more general conclusions cannot be drawn concerning the directionality distribution. Nonetheless, a reliable quantitative method has been developed that should have considerable potential in a variety of applications.
Bellini: Optimizing Mobile Application Traffic Flows through the Cloud
Keywords: Application-layer routing
Cloud computing
Data transmission
Mobile computing
Multi-touch streaming
Optimization

With the proliferation of mobile devices with large multi-touch displays, millions of users are carrying mobile devices everyday and interacting with mobile applications using multi-touch gestures. Since a majority of mobile devices are connected to the Internet wirelessly, cloud computing platforms have been increasingly used to meet the demand from mobile applications. In the context of mobile cloud computing, this dissertation explores the possibilities of offering better performance to mobile applications with the help of the cloud infrastructure. After a careful examination of problems towards the integration of the cloud, it is discovered that mobile applications face significant challenges in reality. On one hand, mobile applications seek to properly route data flows via the cloud, to saturate flow throughput, shorten data latency, and reduce delay variance. On the other hand, applications wish to take advantage of the cloud to allow users to interact socially, and engage mobile users in a smooth and convenient interactive environment. In order to address these challenges, this dissertation proposes to design a unified solution to bridge mobile applications and the cloud with performance and user experience as top concerns. By studying a wide range of mobile applications with different needs, in terms of data exchange, interaction and socializing, we have designed and implemented a mobile-centric system framework, named Bellini, from scratch. First, the Bellini framework is able to improve the performance of applications by sending data through geo-distributed datacenters in the cloud. Second, it facilitates multi-touch interactions among mobile devices through the cloud infrastructure, by carefully packetizing, streaming, and replaying multi-touch gestures. Finally, it supports spontaneous social interaction between users in the same mobile application, be they in the same living room using local connections such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, or around the world over the cloud. In order to thoroughly evaluate the performance of the Bellini framework, we have conducted two case studies, including a mobile music composition application that supports online interactive editing, and a mobile video conferencing application, featuring high-throughput streaming.
The Role of Responsivity in Youth Rehabilitation: The Case of Mental Health
Keywords: justice-involved
mental health
offender
rehabilitation
responsivity
treatment planning

Mental health problems are a significant concern for justice-involved youth. Yet there is substantial variability in how mental health problems have been understood in terms of their role in offending and their significance to treatment planning and outcomes. Perspectives on mental health from a predominantly clinical literature differ from the conceptualization found in the rehabilitation-focused Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) literature. This dissertation consists of two papers addressing the role of mental health issues in justice system involvement, with a focus on youth. Paper 1 provides a conceptual analysis of the two literatures to elucidate points of contrast and potential for common ground. I argue that the two literatures differ in seven ways: major goals, definition of risk, predictors studied, outcomes of interest, timelines of interest, features- versus disorder- based approaches, and what is included in the category of mental health concerns. Using these identified differences as an interpretative framework, areas of concordance are then identified. Directions for research include the role of mental health in offending, especially for youth in a developmental context, and gender differences. Implications for policy and practice are reviewed. Paper 2 presents an empirical study that examined probation services and reoffending outcomes for 232 youth following comprehensive assessments of their mental health and criminogenic risk/needs. The role of mental health functioning was examined in the context of assessed and treated criminogenic needs. Youth with identified mental health needs were no more likely than youth without such needs to reoffend, regardless of whether those needs were treated. Youth who received mental health treatment were more likely than other youth to have their criminogenic needs treated, suggesting that mental health treatment was associated with intermediate treatment targets. However, criminogenic needs treatment reduced the risk of reoffending regardless of mental health; mental health treatment did not significantly moderate the effectiveness of criminogenic needs treatment. These findings are discussed in terms of possible interpretations of responsivity, reflecting either that treatment of mental health problems facilitated engagement in criminogenic needs treatment, or that youth received higher quality or more comprehensive services due to systems-level variables. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Multimission Fuel-burn Minimization in Aircraft Design: A Surrogate-modeling Approach
Keywords: Aircraft Design
Mission Analysis
Mixture of Experts
Multidisciplinary Optimization
Multipoint Optimization
Surrogate Model

Aerodynamic shape and aerostructural design optimizations that maximize the performance at a single flight condition result in designs with unacceptable off-design performance. While considering multiple flight conditions in the optimization improves the robustness of the designs, there is a need to develop a rational strategy for choosing the flight conditions and their relative emphases such that multipoint optimizations reflect the true objective function. In addition, there is a need to consider uncertain missions and flight conditions. In this thesis, the strategies to formulate the multipoint objective functions for aerodynamic shape and aerostructural optimization are presented. To determine the flight conditions and their corresponding weights, a novel surrogate-based mission analysis is developed to efficiently analyze hundreds of actual mission data to emulate their flight-condition distribution. Using accurate and reliable surrogate models to approximate the aerodynamic coefficients used in the analysis makes this procedure computationally tractable. A mixture of experts (ME) approach is developed to overcome the limitations of conventional surrogate models in modeling the complex transonic drag profile. The ME approach combines multiple surrogate models probabilistically based on the divide-and-conquer strategy. Using this model in the mission analysis significantly improves the range estimation accuracy, as compared to other conventional surrogate models. As expected, the multipoint aerodynamic shape and aerostructural optimizations demonstrate a consistent drag reduction, instead of the localized improvement by the single-point optimizations. The improved robustness in the multipoint optimized designs was also observed in terms of the improved range performance and more consistent fuel-burn reduction across the different missions. The results presented in this thesis show that the surrogate-model-assisted multipoint optimization produces a robust design that is optimized for a set of flight conditions matching real-world operations, which is ensured by the use of historical flight data.
A Teacher's Reflexive Story of Student Voice Pedagogies: An Autoethnography
Keywords: Autoethnography
Pedagogy
Poststructural Feminist Anti-Racism
Race and Marginalized Youth
Social Justice Education
Student Voice

This study is an autoethnography of my experiences with student voice reforms. Ultimately, I am concerned with better understanding the possibilities for student voice as a transformative teaching and learning practice within the context of neoliberal education. The discussion is anchored in two past student voice projects in which I was involved, one as a researcher and one as a facilitator. As method, I revisit these experiences through memory and various artifacts by way of field notes, personal journals, lesson plans, and email correspondences, to unpack embodied voices of difference that frame contemporary epistemological questions of how we come to know and understand our life worlds. More specifically, I am concerned with how teachers take up student voice in their pedagogies, how teachers come to understand themselves and their students in terms of student voice, and how social differences come to contour student voice pedagogies. I query: How do teachers understand student voice? What are the ways in which teachers experience student voice? How does the experience of student voice organize and inscribe teacher ←→ student relationships? And, how are student voice practices shaped, organized, and inscribed through social difference? Grounding this inquiry is poststructural feminist anti-racism as an interwoven discursive orientation and politics for troubling and transforming schooling and education. My analyses address how my presence as an individual and as a member of socio-historical groups in the student voice initiatives affected the projects' dynamics. My findings amplify the necessity of time and space for educators to critically reflect on their practices when implementing reforms, time and space that were provided by engaging autoethnography. The study contributes important strategic processes towards realizing the necessary goals of critical reflexive practices in teaching and learning, addressing the question of `how' to do critical reflection through autoethnography.
Meditation and Holistic Contemplative Pedagogy: An Exploration of the Relationship of Five Teachers' Meditation Practices to the Pedagogical Process
Keywords: meditation
phenomenology

This qualitative study examines how five teachers' meditation practices have an impact on their pedagogy. The teachers' spiritual practice of mindfulness meditation shapes their understanding of themselves and their students, generating a holistic contemplative pedagogy. While there has been a growing body of literature on meditation, contemplation and holistic education, this research brings these fields into a more in-depth, detailed conversation. Teachers gain knowledge from their lived experience in the profession, which works to benefit their mindfulness practice. The study reveals that the experiential practice of mindfulness meditation can help teachers access their thoughts and feelings better, and create a more benevolent engagement with students. Meditation helps the teachers transcend and recast negative emotions. Through mindfulness, they become more loving and respectful of both themselves and their students, all while providing them a safer space in which to thrive. The practice of meditation, then, mirrors the practice of teaching. Mindfulness meditation helps shape a holistic contemplative pedagogy, which enhances teachers' understandings of their profession and the lives of students in a contemporary moment of change. The dissertation, therefore, contributes to a wider field of inquiry into the benefits of mindfulness meditation, not only in education, but also in the human sciences more broadly.
Actions in the Eye
Keywords: action recognition
computer vision
consistency analysis
human eye movements
machine learning
saliency prediction

Systems based on bag-of-words models from image features collected at maxima of sparse interest point operators have been used successfully for both computer visual object and action recognition tasks. While the sparse, interest-point based approach to recognition is not inconsistent with visual processing in biological systems that operate in `saccade and fixate' regimes, the methodology and emphasis in the human and the computer vision communities remains sharply distinct. Here, we make three contributions aiming to bridge this gap. First, we complement three existing state-of-the art large scale static and dynamic computer vision annotated datasets (Hollywood-2, UCF Sports and Pascal VOC Actions) with human eye movements collected under the ecological constraints of visual action and scene context recognition tasks. To our knowledge these are the first large human eye tracking datasets to be collected and made publicly available for video and images, unique in terms of their (a) large scale and computer vision relevance (over 2 million fixations), (b) dynamic, video stimuli (Hollywood-2 and UCF Sports) and (c) task control, as well as free-viewing. Second, we perform quantitative analyses on the problems of inter-subject consistency and task influence on eye movements. To this end, we propose novel algorithms for the automatic discovery of areas of interest (AOI) and introduce several sequential consistency metrics. Our findings underline the stability of patterns of visual search among subjects in the experimental conditions we consider and show that task instructions can influence visual search patterns. Third, we leverage the significant amount of collected data in order to pursue studies and build automatic, end-to-end trainable computer vision systems based on human eye movements. Our studies not only shed light on the differences between computer vision spatiotemporal interest point image sampling strategies and human fixations, as well as their impact on visual recognition performance, but also demonstrate that human fixations can be accurately predicted, and when used in an end-to-end automatic system, leveraging some of the advanced computer vision practice, can lead to state of the art results.
The Representation of Masculinity in Crisis: An Interrogation of Its Roots and Reasons
Keywords: Critical Theory
Fin de Siecle
German Film
Germanic Literature
Masculinities
Weimar Republic

This dissertation develops out of the disturbing realization that masculinity is pervasively represented as `in crisis.' It argues that both `masculinity' and `crisis' are discursive constructs, which have been functioning in unison since the late nineteenth century to bolster male hegemony. My introductory chapter offers an explication of how discursive domination functions at the level of signification. It explains, and applies to numerous examples, the method of discourse analysis developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and also engages with Reinhardt Koselleck's critical history of the concept `crisis,' which has recently been further developed in the work of Janet Roitman. In chapter two I examine the roots of the `masculinity in crisis' discourse in the European fin de siècle. This search proceeds by way of readings of Rémy de Gourmont's La Dissociation des Idées, Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, and Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter. Chapter two also examines the crucial role that the representation of women played in defining masculinity as `in crisis' during the period. My third and fourth chapters offer in-depth readings of several literary and cinematic works, these showing that while `masculinity' being represented as `in crisis' is a constant, the forms and tropes employed in this representation vary over time and are geographically contingent. I focus in chapter three on Arthur Schnitzler's stories Leutnant Gustl and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief, prose works within which contemporaneous psychological, gender and class discourses converge in protagonists representative of bourgeois Austrian masculinity `in crisis.' Chapter four argues by way of analyses of the canonical Weimar era films Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari and Die Straße as well as Ernst Toller's Heimkehrer drama Hinkemann that the sudden postwar domination of the discursive field by visual forms of media - what Martin Jay calls `a scopic regime' - resulted in `masculinity in crisis' becoming increasingly spectral - taking on ghostly and/or monstrous forms - and spectacular, namely as an event staged for the voyeuristic gaze. In my conclusion I pursue answers to why `masculinity' has been for over a century, and more importantly continues to be, pervasively represented as `in crisis.'