VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Air Quality, Externalities, and Decentralized Environmental Regulation
Keywords: Environmental Regulation
Air Quality

This dissertation investigates the causes and effects of the decentralization of environmental regulation. In Chapter 1, I provide an historical overview of air pollution regulation in the U.S., which serves as the context for this dissertation. Chapter 2 develops a model of interjurisdictional environmental regulation where economic and pollution spillovers may arise. I show that these spillovers may cause local jurisdictions to seek decentralized regulatory control, which in turn generates inefficient outcomes. Chapter 3 investigates empirically whether the decentralization of air pollution regulation in the U.S. during 1971-1990 caused an increase in transboundary air pollution. I find that the transfer of regulatory authority from the federal government to an individual state generated a significant increase in air pollution observed at monitors in downwind states. These findings vary with distance to those states creating transboundary spillovers and across pollutants with different atmospheric lifetimes. This is consistent with the notion that local governments do not account for externalities that their policies generate. The final chapter estimates a model of interjurisdictional environmental regulation that allows for transboundary pollution and competition for firms. The interdependence in jurisdictions’ regulatory choices from the spillovers creates a challenging identification problem, which I address using exclusion restrictions derived from the atmospheric physics of pollution propagation. For total suspended particulates, transboundary pollution will typically occur only between contiguous neighbours in the direction of the wind. This implies that exogenous factors affecting pollution dispersion (such as wind velocity) in distant jurisdictions can serve as instruments for neighbours' endogenous policy choices: they do not affect a given jurisdiction's regulatory choice directly, but directly affect the choices of that jurisdiction's neighbours. I find that a shift from centralized to state regulatory control causes significant increases in the number of polluting firms that locate in that state and decreases elsewhere; the same shift increases ambient air pollution at home and in other states. I also find that state regulatory choices respond much more to changes in the number of firms than to pollution. Further, I show that the degree of decentralization and the observed pollution outcomes are far from the counterfactual efficient levels.
Molecular Characterization of Endophytic Fungal Colonizers of Plant Roots: A Comparison between the Aggressive Invasives Vincetoxicum rossicum, Alliaria petiolata, and Local Native Plant Species
Keywords: invasive plant species
plant-fungal interactions
Vincetoxicum rossicum
T-RFLP

Soil fungi play an important role in regulating plant communities as well as above and below ground ecosystem-level processes; conversely, plant communities may also affect the structure and functionality of these root-associating fungi. Alteration of these fungal communities due to non-native plant invasion has the potential to disrupt biogeochemical cycling, soil structure, and plant growth. Both beneficial symbionts such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) as well as the total fungal community are potentially altered by aggressive invasive plant species in such a way as to disrupt existing native endophytic fungal communities in the soil post invasion. This disruption could provide a pathway for invasion and suggests the importance of investigating plant-fungal associations in invaded ranges. I used molecular techniques to characterize the fungal communities colonizing Vincetoxicum rossicum or Dog-strangling vine (DSV) and Alliaria petiolata or garlic mustard, both European natives that are currently well established in Eastern North America, as well as native plants that are commonly found persisting in the presence of dense colonies of DSV, as well as those same natives growing separately from DSV. Fungi colonizing different plant groups were analyzed using primers that target the internal transcribed spacer region of the ribosomal operon in order to amplify total fungal species (TF), as well as primers designed to exclusively amplify AMF using small subunit rRNA sequences. Significant differences were observed in the diversity of both the TF and the AMF communities colonizing native plants in the invaded sites relative to the uninvaded sites. Sequencing work indicated that DSV forms associations with a broad array of fungal partners relative to proximal native plants, suggesting the likelihood of it being a fungal generalist. As well, DSV was found to associate with described opportunistic AMF such as Glomus intraradices, G. caledonium, G. fasciculatum and G. mosseae, while natives growing within DSV patches were not. Finally, garlic mustard was found to have the dominant effect where DSV and garlic mustard were co-occurring. These findings support the ongoing investigations into plant invasion processes, and therefore contribute to the development of effective strategies for invasive species management as well as site restoration techniques.
Energy-oriented Partial Desktop Virtual Machine Migration
Keywords: Desktop Virtualization
Energy Conservation
Cloud Computing
Operating Systems

Modern offices are crowded with personal computers. While studies have shown these to be idle most of the time, they remain powered, consuming up to 60% of their peak power. Hardware based solutions engendered by PC vendors (e.g., low power states, Wake-on-LAN) have proven unsuccessful because, in spite of user inactivity, these machines often need to remain network active in support of background applications that maintain network presence. Recent solutions have been proposed that perform consolidation of idle desktop virtual machines. However, desktop VMs are often large requiring gigabytes of memory. Consolidating such VMs, creates large network transfers lasting in the order of minutes, and utilizes server memory inefficiently. When multiple VMs migrate simultaneously, each VM’s experienced migration latency grows, and this limits the use of VM consolidation to environments in which only a few daily migrations are expected per VM. This thesis introduces partial VM migration, an approach that transparently migrates only the working set of an idle VM, by migrating memory pages on-demand. It creates a partial replica of the desktop VM on the consolidation server by copying only VM metadata, and transferring pages to the server, as the VM accesses them. This approach places desktop PCs in low power state when inactive and resumes them to running state when pages are needed by the VM running on the consolidation server. Jettison, our software prototype of partial VM migration for off-the-shelf PCs, can deliver 78% to 91% energy savings during idle periods lasting more than an hour, while providing low migration latencies of about 4 seconds, and migrating minimal state that is under an order of magnitude of the VM’s memory footprint. In shorter idle periods of up to thirty minutes, Jettison delivers savings of 7% to 31%. We present two approaches that increase energy savings attained with partial VM migration, especially in short idle periods. The first, Context-Aware Selective Resume, expedites PC resume and suspend cycle times by supplying a context identifier at desktop resume, and initializing only devices and code that are relevant to the context. CAESAR, the Context-Aware Selective Resume framework, enables applications to register context vectors that are invoked when the desktop is resumed with matching context. CAESAR increases energy savings in short periods of five minutes to an hour by up to 66%. The second approach, the low power page cache, embeds network accessible low power hardware in the PC, to enable serving of pages to the consolidation server, while the PC is in low power state. We show that Oasis, our prototype page cache, addresses the shortcomings of energy-oriented on-demand page migration by increasing energy savings, especially during short idle periods. In periods of up to an hour, Oasis increases savings by up to twenty times.
Reconsidering Rawls: The Rousseauian and Hegelian Heritage of Justice as Fairness
Keywords: Rawls
Rousseau
Hegel
Kant

This dissertation is an attempt to better understand the moral and political thought of John Rawls. I begin by calling into question the conventional, though misleading, image of Rawls as a thoroughgoing Kantian. While the influence of Kant upon Rawls is undeniable and therefore well documented, there are important theoretical differences between them, and these differences open up the necessary interpretive space for the under-appreciated influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and G.W.F. Hegel. That neither Rousseau &ndash; a theorist of recognition &ndash; nor Hegel &ndash; a theorist of reconciliation &ndash; is regarded as an important influence on Rawls is a major oversight in the history of political thought &ndash; an oversight that my dissertation hopes to amend. But there is more at stake here than the addition of a new chapter in the history of political philosophy: when we expose the full extent of the Rousseauian and Hegelian heritage of justice as fairness (and later, political liberalism), we get a more complete, nuanced &ndash; and, in my view, a more attractive &ndash; image of the moral and political philosophy of Rawls. This new, richer image of Rawls&rsquo;s political philosophy is captured by what I call &ldquo;robust reasonableness&rdquo;: what Rawls offers, in the end, is a more conspicuously demanding account of the reasonable &ndash; of our obligations towards our fellow participants in social cooperation. Justice as fairness is thus anchored by a morality of engaged and committed citizenship. This is precisely what Rawls sees as missing from Kant&rsquo;s ethical philosophy. In response, he turns to Rousseau and to Hegel, both of whom provide, at least on Rawls&rsquo;s view, persuasive solutions to the pathologies of social and political life. Rawls incorporates many of these solutions into the normative and practical landscape of his own philosophical doctrine, and this compels us to reconsider that doctrine in the light of these unrecognized influences.
Legal Positivism and the Rule of Law: The Hartian Response to Fuller's Challenge
Keywords: legal philosophy
jurisprudence
rule of law
Hart
Raz
Fuller

This study analyses the way that legal positivists from HLA Hart onwards have responded to Lon L Fuller&rsquo;s challenge to positivism from the idea of the rule of law. The main thesis is that Hart and contemporary legal positivists working in the Hartian tradition have yet to adequately respond to Fuller&rsquo;s Challenge. I argue that the reason for this is the approach they take to dealing with Fuller&rsquo;s principles of the rule of law, which either (i) proceeds on the basis of the positivist perspective without engaging with Fuller&rsquo;s wider anti-positivist arguments, or else (ii) accepts Fuller&rsquo;s claim that the rule of law is part of our concept of law but does not acknowledge any effect of this on what determines legal validity (the content of legal norms). In both cases, I argue that tensions and problems result from a lack of engagement with Fuller&rsquo;s anti-positivism. On the one hand, positivists have failed to show why their account of the nature of law better reflects our understanding of law than Fuller&rsquo;s. On the other, the concessions that positivists have made to Fuller&rsquo;s arguments are often detached from other elements in their theories, raising the question of whether the positivist response to Fuller is coherent. In addition, by closely analysing the major positivist accounts of the rule of law, this study challenges a number of orthodox interpretations that confuse our understanding of the positivist response to Fuller. I show that most positivists accept that there is something morally valuable about a legal system&rsquo;s conformity to the principles of the rule of law, and that there is always some kind of at least minimal conformity to those principles in any legal system. By noticing what concessions positivists have made to Fuller&rsquo;s understanding of the rule of law, I aim to both (i) shift the debate to the remaining disputes with the Hartian positivists, particularly on issues such as the &lsquo;derivative approach&rsquo; and the &lsquo;validity Social thesis&rsquo;, and (ii) identify areas of fruitful engagement with Fuller, such as the question of judges&rsquo; moral obligations to law.
Negotiating Musical Style in Panama: Nationalism, Professionalism and the Invention of Música Típica Popular
Keywords: music
ethnomusicology
Panama
nationalism
musical nationalism
musica tipica popular
pindin
composition
territory
isthmus of Panama
isthmian studies
folk music
folklore
musica folklorica
musica tipica
Latin America
dance
music genre
music style
music economy
popular music studies

This dissertation provides both an historical outline and contemporary ethnographic account of the Panamanian musical practice called “música típica popular,” which is commonly understood in Panama to denote a specific kind of vernacular music that is widely embraced. By examining the social-historical processes, events and discourses that have contributed to the genre’s development, this study seeks to develop greater understanding of what I argue is this music’s particular and pronouncedly ambiguous relationship to prominent themes of Panamanian cultural nationalism. Specifically, I endeavour to show that early on in its history música típica popular epitomized Panama’s (liberalist-identified) national ethos of progressive modernity and cultural cosmopolitanism while at the same time maintaining alignments to specific territories and musical practices significant to Panamanian vernacular imaginaries. The historical outline covers música típica popular’s development beginning from the late nineteenth century to the present. Its focus is on the genre’s tandem commercialisation and massification, performance and production technologies and associated performance modalities, shared musical/sonic traits, repertoire and approaches to innovation through musical mixing or fusión (fusion). One of the central goals here is to trace and examine points of alignment between música típica popular and dominant paradigms governing isthmian geo-cultural self-identification—particularly the interplay between a rural-identified “vernacular” culture and the perceived urban cosmopolitanism of Panamanian metropolites. Through ethnographic research this study also aims to examine the various sonic, social and economic factors that contribute to notions of música típica popular as a particular socio-musical collectivity actively in dialogue with discourses of Panamanian national and cultural identity. To this end, notions of “genre” and “style” provide an analytical framework particularly for coming to terms with the interplay between sensibilities of convention and common practice, and a need for meaningful differentiation among practitioners. It is my contention that while música típica popular practitioners actively cultivate links both to themes of Panamanian music-cultural vernacularism and cosmopolitanism, on the whole the relationship of the genre to nationalist discourse should be more properly understood as one of sustained ambiguity: not wholly aligned to one theme or the other, and in fact doggedly and often productively resistant to such binary categorizations.
The Impact of Chromosomal Aberrations on the Regulation of Kallikrein 6 Expression in Serous Ovarian Carcinoma
Keywords: Molecular Cytogenetics
Chromosomal instability
Fluorescence in situ Hybridization
Spectral Karyotyping
Comparative Genomic Hybridization
Cancer

Ovarian cancer (OCa) remains the leading cause of death due to a gynecologic malignancy in North American women, and the pathogenesis of this disease is a consequence of the interplay between DNA, RNA and proteins. The genomes of these cancers are characterized by numerical and structural aberrations, resulting in copy number changes of the affected regions. The serine protease, Kallikrein 6 (KLK6), is a promising biomarker and is over-expressed in OCa. However, the mechanisms leading to the observed KLK6 overexpression are poorly understood; and to date, no study examining the chromosomal contributions to the overexpression have been conducted. Utilization of multi-colour Fluorescence in situ Hybridization (FISH)-based technologies to untreated primary serous OCa samples and cancer cell lines, showed that the KLK locus, on 19q13.3/4, is involved in both numerical and structural aberrations; was subject to high-level copy-number heterogeneity (p<0.001); and structural rearrangements of 19q were significantly co-related to grade (p<0.001). Patients with a loss of the KLK locus, or no structural rearrangement on 19q, experienced a trend towards longer disease free survival (DFS and better overall survival (OS), over those with a gain or amplification, or with breakage events on 19q. KLK6-specific immunohistochemistry (IHC) showed weak correlation with KLK6 copy-number, suggesting other mechanisms together with copy-number, drives its over-expression. Among these mechanisms are microRNA (miRNAs), also shown to be affected by the copynumber changes in OCas. Therefore, we investigated the role of miRNAs in OCa and their role in KLK6 regulation. Specifically, we examined the copy-number status and miRNA expression in a representative OCa cell line, OVCAR-3. miRNA expression profiling of OCa cell lines and primary tumours showed their differential expression, including the decrease in expression of the let-7 family members, which are predicted to target KLK6. Indeed, when hsa-let-7a was transiently transfected into OVCAR-3, a reduction of secreted KLK6 protein was detected. Thus, the contribution of numerical and structural aberrations of the OCa genome can directly affect the expression KLK6 through copy-number, but is also aided post-transcriptionally by miRNAs.
New Approaches to the Transplantation of Stem Cells and their Progeny for the Treatment of Retinal Degeneration
Keywords: retina
stem cells
biomaterials
photoreceptors
cell therapy
neuroscience

Cellular transplantation for photoreceptor replacement in retinal disease is limited by poor distribution, survival and integration of cells in vivo after standard delivery in saline vehicle. We were interested in addressing each of these barriers in order to improve transplant efficacy. To this end, we designed the first injectable biomaterial-based cell delivery vehicle to transplant adult stem cell progeny into the subretinal space of adult retina. A minimally-invasive and bio-resorbable blend of hyaluronan and methylcellulose (HAMC) was found to overcome cellular aggregation and non-contiguous distribution. The ability to direct stem cell differentiation toward a particular retinal lineage is another challenge facing clinical application. We showed that prospectively and clonally isolated multipotent mouse and human retinal stem cells (RSCs) could be directed toward a mature rod photoreceptor fate with the highest efficiency reported to date (&gt;90%). Combinations of taurine and retinoic acid directed rod differentiation similar to rod development in vivo. RSC-derived rods exhibited morphology, protein and gene expression consistent with primary cultures of rods in vitro. When combined with the HAMC delivery vehicle, greater cell survival and improved integration of post-mitotic RSC-derived rods was observed in vivo compared to saline delivery. Improved donor rod survival was ascribed to the CD44 receptor &ndash; HAMC interaction in vitro and in vivo. Combined with HAMC delivery, disruption of the glial limiting membrane improved cell integration and resulted in the highest levels of integration of adult stem cell-derived rod photoreceptors relative to previous reports in the literature. Mature rod-lineage committed cells demonstrated higher integration potential compared to immature rods in this context. The integrated cells expressed Rhodopsin and elaborated outer segments. In the absence of the glial limiting membrane, rod integration depended on pro-survival signals from the environment. This work demonstrates that adult RSCs show promise for regenerative medicine strategies in the adult retina.
An Automated Microsurgery System for Embryo Biopsy
Keywords: Autofocusing
PGD
Vision
Hysteresis
needle
embryo

Embryonic biopsy routinely involves the removal of one or two blastomeres in the preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) procedure to determine the presence of a specific disease. The rapid development of the PGD technique and stem cell research has led to great demand for highly automated high precision equipment for cellular component micro-extraction. This thesis presents the development of an automated microsurgery system for embryo biopsy. While the ultimate objective of this research is to improve the so called “take-home-baby rate”, the primary focus of this research, however, is devoted to demonstrate the automation of the first two steps in the embryo biopsy procedure: embryo immobilization and embryo perforation with a piezoelectric actuated micro-cutter mounted on a five DOF micromanipulator. A biological embryo holding device incorporating a unique configuration of fluidic channels is designed to increase embryo mobility in order to overcome friction force while maintaining a low suction flow rate and pressure. The validity of this design is demonstrated by good qualitative agreement between the experimental and simulation results. 3D nonlinear equations of motion of a micro-needle driven longitudinally by a piezoelectric actuator are developed based on Kane’s method . The longitudinal vibration of a micro-needle results in excitation of its out-of-plane, lateral eigenmodes at low damping coefficients. The dynamic model is in good agreement with experimental observations. This model is exploited further to describe the response of an immersed glass micropipette with imbedded mercury in piezo-assisted intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Furthermore, piezoelectric actuator dynamic nonlinearity introduced by hysteresis is addressed in this research. A new model is proposed to characterize the rate-dependent hysteresis based on Duffing's equation. A nonlinear capacitor element is incorporated into a linear second-order system to predict the relationship between an input state and a hysteretic output. The proposed hysteresis model is verified experimentally. Based on this approach, a new electromechanical piezoelectric actuator model is proposed. A vision-assisted controller for embryo perforation is proposed by implementing a vision tracking and robust autofocusing algorithm using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method. The performance of the proposed visual-based controller demonstrated experimentally to be effective in providing accurate embryo and micro-needle 3D positioning. Finally, an automated embryo perforation with the proposed mechanical approach was conducted successfully.