VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Assessing Glycaemic Index Utility: From Bench to Bedside
Keywords: Diabetes Mellitus
Education
Glycaemic Index
Intervention
Knowledge Translation
Nutrition

Glycaemic index (GI) categorizes carbohydrate-containing food according to postprandial glycaemic effect. The Canadian Diabetes Association supports integration of GI-education into standard care for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Notwithstanding, most Canadian RDs identify as “non-users”; citing a need for studies examining GI-mechanism and GI-efficacy and a lack of reliable educational materials as barriers to GI-utility. These barriers highlight practice-based research opportunities spanning bench-to-bedside, such as: The examination of novel metabolic pathways and evaluation of low GI-education/ diet effectiveness using established markers of utility. The overall purpose of this dissertation was to address, experimentally, gaps in the literature, highlighted by educators as barriers to GI-utility. METHODS: Three studies were completed. Study one examined the effect of slowing carbohydrate absorption on postprandial oxidative stress (novel GI-mechanism) in overweight/obese participants (n=18). Study two involved the development and evaluation of a questionnaire designed to evaluate an evidence-based GI-education platform for DM (n = 29), using a one-armed pre/post-intervention pre-test design. Study three (RCT; n=99) was performed to evaluate the effect of the low GI-education platform on glycaemic control in women with GDM using the questionnaire pre-tested in study two. RESULTS: Sipping 75g dextrose solution slowly over 3.5h reduced postprandial oxidative stress compared to consuming it over 5min. Studies two and three showed that participants who received GI-education were satisfied with the education, showed a significant increase in GI-knowledge score (36%; p
Uncovering a Forgotten Italian Renaissance Comedy: A Commented Critical Edition of Francesco Antonio Rossi's Capriccio
Keywords: commented critical edition
European theatre
Italian comedy
literary criticism
philology
Renaissance

Comedy is an essential literary genre for any culture and any period. It provides both a representation and criticism of society, societal norms and societal institutions, and, as such, allows scholars to reconstruct societies and regain knowledge from centuries ago. As Riccardo Scrivano argues, “with the audacity of its fictions, its hypotheses, its capacity to cancel the usual modes of conduct, it reveals to us different ways of organizing knowledge, and thus different ways of knowing” (12). Each and every play and playwright add a new dimension of knowledge and a new means of knowing to our established repertoire of understanding. Consequently, every play, comedy in this instance, contributes to the process of understanding and influencing the society in which it is set, as well as those that follow it and those from which it borrowed. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead observes that “Italian playwrights turned to Roman antiquity to find a dramatic technique, but they combined literary traditions and the contemporary reality of their own country to create a comic theatre that helped determine the course of modern European drama” (Modern Comedy 243). Every play and playwright, including Francesco Antonio Rossi and his Capriccio, perform an important role in this process and should not be overlooked. The central objective of this dissertation is to produce a commented critical edition of Francesco Antonio Rossi’s Capriccio in accordance with the standard methods and practices laid down by modern scholarship in textual criticism. Until Rossi’s Capriccio is given new life in the form of a critical edition, academia’s comprehension of this author and his work will be incomplete, leaving Rossi’s comedy to sit on library shelves, never having had its significance realized.
Conjunctive Coding of Complex Object Features
Keywords: Experience
fMRI
Memory
Object perception
Perirhinal Cortex
Ventral Visual Stream

Critical to perceiving an object is the ability to bind its constituent features into a cohesive representation, yet the manner by which the visual system integrates object features to yield a unified percept remains unknown. Another important aspect of object perception is the ability to represent complex objects across different viewing angles, despite the drastic variability in appearance caused by shifting viewpoints. This dissertation describes a novel application of multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of neuroimaging data that allows a direct investigation of whether neural representations integrate object features into a whole that is different from the sum of its parts and whether these representations are view invariant. Results showed that patterns of activity throughout the ventral visual stream (VVS), extending anteriorly into the perirhinal cortex (PRC), discriminated between the same sets of features when combined into different objects. Despite this sensitivity to the unique conjunctions of features, this activity was invariant to the viewpoints from which the conjunctions were presented. These results suggest that the manner in which our visual system processes complex objects depends on the explicit coding of the feature conjunctions comprising them, and that these representations are invariant to large changes in visual appearance caused by shifting viewpoints. To test whether experience with the objects changed the pattern of conjunctive representations across the VVS, participants were scanned in a separate fMRI study following an extensive behavioural training period. Results showed that both view-dependent and view-invariant conjunctive representations shifted to more posterior regions of the VVS, suggesting that training affected how unique feature conjunctions are represented across the VVS. These results support the representational-hierarchical view of cortical organization and contribute to our understanding of object perception and memory.
'This Place Should (Not) Exist': An Ethnography of Shelter Workers and the In-Between
Keywords: christianity
ethnography
homelessness
liminality

This dissertation draws on twenty-one months of participant observation at The Salvation Army Gateway, a shelter for men in Toronto. It pays particular attention to the shelter’s thirty-two workers, to their efforts to be both “the best shelter in the city” and to “befriend the poor.” The story told here employs Victor and Edith Turner’s theory of liminality as both prompt and foil. The understanding of the liminal it employs and the rationale for deploying it in relation to the Gateway are the subject of Part I. Aspects of the liminal (in-between) stage/state have been paired with various aspects of shelter life – certain repertoires, objects, ideas. There are eighteen such pairings, each provoking a short, ethnographically driven chapter. The interplay between the shelter and the liminal is at times illuminating, ironic, even incomplete. The chapters are clustered according to four themes – also called the coefficients of life at the shelter: stuckedness, subjunctivity, immaturity, irony. These four are simultaneously plotted in such a way as to lead the reader deeper into Gateway life. Part II Stuckedness, discusses contexts that surround the Gateway and hold it in place. Part III Subjunctivity, enters the shelter by way of the workers’ own ideas, desires, and intentions for the way the Gateway operates, especially its friendliness. Part IV Immaturity, tells the story of any-given day at the Gateway in order to consider its ambient youthfulness, and the significance of such for the formation of alternative community there. Part V Irony, unpacks the irreconcilable ironies that the workers live with. Understanding the Gateway as liminal space offers opportunity to think about whether or not the shelter system ought to exist in a city like Toronto and how all of us are implicated in sustaining it. While this thesis tries to preserve some of the undecideability of such a question, it also seeks to complicate the notion that people ought always to leave shelters in favour of “housing” or having their “own home.” This dissertation ultimately offers “homefulness” as a better measure for what is and is not lacking among the so-called “homeless.”
Prior-knowledge Effects on Associative Memory Processing
Keywords: Associative memory
encoding
fMRI
memory
post-encoding brain activity
prior knowledge effects

Forming new associations is a fundamental process in building our knowledge system and creating episodic memories. How prior-knowledge influences acquisition of novel associations has not been thoroughly investigated. Based on recent cognitive neuroscience literature on multiple-component memory processing, I hypothesize that prior-knowledge can trigger additional evaluative, semantic, or episodic processes, supported by the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), anterior temporal pole regions (aTPL), and hippocampus (HPC), respectively, to facilitate new associative learning. To test this hypothesis, I first developed a face-house associative memory task in Experiment 1, in which famous faces were used to elicit multiple-component prior-knowledge, such as social emotional, semantic, and episodic memories. Using this task, I found that recollection-based, not familiarity-based, associative memory was indeed facilitated by this type of prior-knowledge. Then, I used this task in two fMRI studies to examine how prior-knowledge could affect brain activity during associative encoding (Experiment 2) and post-encoding rests (Experiment 3). Consistent with my hypotheses, in Experiment 2, I found that the vmPFC and HPC, as well as the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and fusiform face area (FFA), showed stronger activation when famous, compared to nonfamous, faces were involved. Importantly, the vmPFC, aTPL, and HPC also exhibited stronger activation when famous faces elicited stronger prior emotions and memories. Experiment 3 showed that HPC connectivity with FFA and vmPFC during rest was stronger following encoding of associations with famous than non-famous faces. Post-encoding connectivity between the HPC and FFA, and between the aTPL and PPA/FFA, also predicted later associative, but not item, memory, only in the famous condition. These results indicate that when prior-knowledge is involved, the HPC, vmPFC, and aTPL, which support prior episodic, social-evaluative, and semantic memories, respectively, continue to interact with each other and the posterior perceptual brain regions (e.g., the PPA and FFA) during the post-encoding rest to facilitate off-line processing of the newly formed memory and enhance it. Taken together, these findings support my hypotheses that prior-knowledge reconfigures memory processing among different brain systems, by triggering additional evaluative, semantic, or episodic processes, to facilitate new associative memory formation during both encoding phase and post-encoding rests.
The Large Maf Transcription Factor Traffic Jam Regulates Collective Cell Migration During Drosophila Oogenesis
Keywords: Border Cell Migration
Large Maf Transcription Factor
PKCdelta
Traffic Jam

Collective cell migration is a fundamental process throughout development. The migrating border cell cluster (BCC) in the Drosophila ovary is a good in-vivo model system to study this process. My work focuses on the function of the large Maf transcription factor, Traffic Jam (Tj), in regulating BCC migration. Tj has a dual function in both promoting and inhibiting BCC migration, as reduction or increase of tj expression leads to migration delays. I found a genetic interaction between Tj and three factors known to promote BCC migration: an inhibitor of the JAK/Stat pathway, Socs36E, the transcription factor Slow border cells (Slbo), and the adhesion molecule DEcadherin (DEcad). At high expression level, Tj enhances the expression of Socs36E, which subsequently inhibits JAK/Stat and causes reduction of Slbo. High Tj expression also inhibits DEcad upregulation in the BCC. Activation of Slbo, which is induced by JAK/Stat, leads to a natural downregulation of Tj. This low expression level of Tj maintains Slbo expression in the BCC, which allows for DEcad upregulation. My work has shown that Tj is an important component of this regulatory network, which allows for proper BCC migration. Analysis of BCC morphology reveals that Tj also functions in regulating the formation of actin-based cellular protrusions. These protrusions are normally extended by border cells and are necessary for its movement. Altering Tj expression leads to abnormal organization of the actin cytoskeleton and morphology of the protrusions. This effect does not appear to be mediated through Slbo or DEcad, which are known to regulate actin. A genome-wide microarray screen identified serine/threonine kinase Protein Kinase C δ (PKCδ) as a putative target of Tj. Changing PKCδ expression in the BCC also causes abnormal organization of actin filaments. Genetic interaction studies suggest that Tj regulates actin organization through upregulating PKCδ. Furthermore, altering Tj or PKCδ expression changes the distribution pattern of an actin filament elongation factor, Enabled, in the BCC. My results have identified Tj and its putative downstream effector, PKCδ, as crucial regulators of the actin cytoskeleton and cellular protrusions in the BCC.
Sowing the State: Nationalism, Sovereignty and Agrarian Politics in Venezuela
Keywords: Agrarian Reform
Development
Food Security
Nationalism
Sovereignty
Venezuela

Sowing the State is an ethnographic account of the remaking of the Venezuelan nation-state at the start of the twenty-first century which underscores the centrality of agriculture to the re-envisioning of sovereignty. The narrative explores the recent efforts of the Venezuelan government to transform the rural areas of the nation into a model of agriculture capable of feeding its mostly urban population as well as the logics and rationales for this particular reform project. The dissertation explores the subjects, livelihoods, and discourses conceived as the proper basis of sovereignty as well as the intersection of agrarian politics with statecraft. In a nation heavily dependent on the export of oil and the import of food, the politics of land and its various uses is central to governance and the rural is a contested field for a variety of social groups. Based on extended fieldwork in El Centro Técnico Productivo Socialista Florentino, a state owned enterprise in the western plains of Venezuela, the narrative analyses the challenges faced by would-be nation builders after decades of neoliberal policy designed to integrate the nation into the global market as well as the activities of the enterprise directed at transcending this legacy. Not merely a restoration of the status quo or reassertion of a prior independence, I argue the Venezuelan nation is being reinvented in this drive for sovereignty and the tensions between peasants, technical experts and workers in the Florentino enterprise reflect the cleavages of an emerging state form.
The Rhetoric of Sincerity in Early Modern Epistemology
Keywords: Bacon
Descartes
Epistemology
Milton
Rhetoric
Sincerity

What does it mean to be true to oneself? This dissertation historicizes the question by examining how the epistemological and literary works of Francis Bacon, John Milton, and René Descartes negotiate the relationship between truth and self through the novel concept of “sincerity.” The modern fascination with this ideal has its origins in the well-worn Shakespearean adage, “this above all: to thine own self be true,” but we often forget the original motivation to be sincere so that “thou canst not then be false to any man.” In contrast to the individualism of contemporary “authenticity” culture, in the early modern period being true to oneself was not yet a worthy end in its own right, but a means of being true to others. I examine how and why these authors’ public arguments for new scientific, political, and philosophical epistemologies are staged in a surprisingly subjective voice. I argue that in the process of developing new ways of knowing they deploy a rhetoric of sincerity that draws on their culture’s social understanding of identity, but that anticipates and makes possible the premises of modern authenticity. Following the Introduction’s discussion of the historical emergence of sincerity, Chapter One considers Bacon’s subjective presentation of his theories for an objective empiricism, and argues that he stages his own suffering as a form of identity for the new science. Chapter Two examines Milton’s revolutionary political prose, analyzing in particular his appeal to seventeenth-century discourses of zeal, and his presentation of his anger as a model of political enfranchisement. Chapter Three considers the Discourse on the Method as a paradoxically anonymous autobiography, and reveals how Descartes frankly presents his own story as a philosophical liberation that is freely available to his reader. In each case, the candour and conviction of the writer exemplifies, is perhaps even constitutive of, the method described. These authors’ arguments for epistemology appeal to a social rhetoric of sincerity, even as their theories lay the groundwork for the authenticity to come. They provide an important corrective to our understanding of early modern identity, and the origins of our own sense of self.
Shame on Who: Understanding the Effects of Shame Proneness, Emotion Dysregulation, Language Processing Capacity and Trauma on Batterer Intervention Program Attrition
Keywords: Batterer Intervention Program
Emotion Dysregulation
Intimate Partner Violence
PTSD
Shame
Treatment Attrition

Abstract Batterer Intervention Programs experience high rates of attrition. Previous studies have examined explanatory factors including socio-demographic factors, intrapersonal and interpersonal factors, and system factors. This study examines the bivariate and multivariate effects of trauma, trauma symptomatology, shame-proneness, emotion dysregulation, language processing capacity, and substance misuse as well as demographic and systemic factors on both post-intake program enrollment and post-group start enrollment for men mandated to attend a Partner Assault Response (PAR) Program in Ontario. A convenience sample of 147 participants volunteered to participate in this observational study; 26 participants withdrew from treatment, 12 did so prior to starting group. Kaplan-Meier testing revealed the independent effects of the explanatory variables, Age Group, PTSD Likelihood and Relationship Status were all associated with attrition. Older men were more likely to complete the PAR program than younger men, while single men and men with indications of PTSD were less likely to complete. The multivariate model fitted to predict PAR program attrition (attrition post-intake) included only one variable, Age Group; when other variables in the model were controlled, younger men had 3.8 times the hazard of leaving the PAR program prematurely than older men. The multivariate model fitted to predict group attrition (attrition post-group start) included two factors: (1) Age Group and (2) PTSD Likelihood. For participants who attended group, younger men had 6 times the hazard of leaving group early than older men, and men with a higher likelihood of having a PTSD diagnosis had 3.7 times the hazard of withdrawing prematurely from the PAR program than those with a lower likelihood of having a PTSD diagnosis. Study participants reported elevated levels of shame proneness and emotion dysregulation. The study findings suggest the need for trauma-informed assessment for Batterer Intervention Programs. Service implications are discussed related to the elevated levels of shame proneness and emotion dysregulation identified in the study.
Developmental Plasticity of Tonotopic Maps in Chinchilla Auditory Midbrain
Keywords: c-fos immunohistochemistry
enhanced acoustic environment
inferior colliculus
multi-unit electrophysiology
neuroplasticity
precocious animal model

Sensory areas of the brain have the remarkable ability to reorganize following changes in peripheral input, especially during early development. Cortex of altricious species (post-natal hearing onset) is often investigated. It remains unclear whether neural connections in auditory midbrain reorganize when precocious subjects (hearing onset in utero; e.g., chinchilla laniger) are reared in an enhanced acoustic environment. Neonatal chinchillas were chronically exposed to a moderately-intense (70 dB SPL) narrowband (2 ± 0.25 kHz) sound stimulus for 4 weeks. No difference in tone-specific auditory brainstem response thresholds, hair cell morphology, neural thresholds, and bandwidth 10 dB above threshold were observed around 2 kHz, suggesting the exposure stimulus was non-traumatic. Sound frequency maps in central nucleus of inferior colliculus (IC) were defined with microelectrode recordings. We observed a significant decrease in the proportion of neurons dedicated to octave bands centered at 2- and 8- kHz. Changes were not limited to sound-exposure frequencies: increases in low-frequency representation (below 1 kHz) were observed. We describe a c-fos immunolabelling protocol for chinchilla. Bands of neurons observed following 90-min, 6-kHz stimulation lay ventro-medial to those present following 90-min, 2-kHz stimulation, consistent with the known tonotopic organization of IC, and verified herein by electrophysiological recordings. Interestingly, we observed decreased labeling adjacent to these bands, which we suggest represent inhibitory regions. Following sound exposure, then 90-min, 2-kHz sound stimulation, the number of labeled cells both in the 2-kHz region and throughout IC was increased. Sound-exposed subjects who received no further sound stimulation had c-fos expression patterns similar to silence controls, suggesting sound-exposure does not alter basal levels of c-fos expression, but changes the way neurons respond to prolonged (90-min) tone stimulation. This study contributes to a growing body of literature that suggests that sound frequency representation in auditory midbrain is altered following passive peripheral input during development.
The Role of Smaug in Post-transcriptional Regulation
Keywords: Arrest/Bruno (Bru)
Germ plasm
Polysome gradient
Primordial germ cell
RIP-Chip
Smaug

Smaug is a sequence-specific RNA-binding protein (RBP) and a multifunctional post-transcriptional regulator. In this thesis, I have used genome level analysis to gain a panoramic view of regulation by Smaug during early Drosophila embryogenesis. I show that Smaug plays a direct and major role in the translation and stability of a large set of maternal mRNAs. Smaug’s target transcripts function in a diverse array of processes including metabolism, lipid droplet function, protein folding and protein stability, suggesting previously uncharacterized functions for Smaug. I also performed detailed analysis of Smaug’s regulation in the embryo’s germ plasm and found that Smaug sits at the top of a posttranscriptional regulatory cascade that controls primordial germ-cell number by attenuating synthesis of the embryonic germ plasm. In the germ plasm, Smaug binds to arrest mRNA to repress the translation of Bruno (BRU) protein. BRU potentiates the production of Oskar (OSK) protein and germ plasm, Thus, repression of Arrest/Bruno (Bru) by Smaug is required for the establishment of the correct number of germ cells during early embryogenesis.