VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Influence of Sulfide Stress Conditions on the 34S-isotope Enrichment in Sulfate During Dissimilatory Sulfate Reduction
Keywords: Stable Isotope
sulfur isotope
sulfate reduction
isotope fractionation
fractionation
non-Rayleigh
sulfate reduction and fractionation model
Desulfobacter latus
S-isotope
sulfate

The purpose of this thesis was to experimentally investigate the influence of increasing sulfide concentrations on the 34S isotope enrichment in sulfate during dissimilatory sulfate reduction (DSR). Two independent batch culture experiments with different maximum sulfide concentrations of up to 20 mM in the first and up to 40 mM in the second experiment were conducted using the marine sulfate reducer Desulfobacter latus. A comparison of the results from both experiments revealed a distinct offset towards more positive δ34S(SO42-) values in the 'high-sulfide' experiment, compared to the 'low-sulfide' experiment. While a Rayleigh type fractionation model was able to match the slopes - i.e., enrichment factors - of both experiments, it failed to reproduce the proper y-axis intercept in the 'high-sulfide' experiment. I therefore propose a new fractionation model that allows for a backward flow of ambient H2S into the bacterial cell and a subsequent enzymatically mediated oxidation of H2S to sulfate. The new backward flow increases with elevated H2S concentrations and is described as a first order rate constant. Unlike a Rayleigh type fractionation model, my model explains the slope and y-intercept of both experiments with a single parameter set. The new model with H2S-reflux further suggests that it can be used to determine growth kinetic parameters like the half-saturation constant through δ34S measurements. These findings support the hypothesis of microbially mediated, bi-directional S-fluxes between oxidized and reduced sulfur species. Because the S-transport during DSR appears to be bi-directional, great care must be taken when evaluating culture experiments with a Rayleigh type fractionation model, owing to the fact that an evident S-backward flow violates the prerequisites for applying the Rayleigh model. A variable S-backward flow results in variable enrichment factors which increased from -11 (no H2S) to ≈-17 ‰ (40 mM of H2S) in my experiments. I show for the first time the significance of a bi-directional H2S transport across the cell membrane during DSR and its consequences for the 34S-isotope fractionation in sulfate.
The Role of BERP in Mammalian Systems
Keywords: genetics
mouse model
gene regulation

p53 functions as an important tumour suppressor through its ability to regulate a number of important cellular processes such as cell cycle arrest, apoptosis, DNA repair, senescence, and angiogenesis. An in vivo genetic modifier screen performed using Drosophila melanogaster resulted in the identification of D. melanogaster brain tumour (brat) as a putative modifier of of the p53 small eye phenotype. Mammalian homologs of brat are members of the tripartite motif family that contain a c-terminal NHL domain. We focus on elucidating the in vivo role of one such homolog, BERP, through the generation and characterization of a classical gene-deletion mouse mutant. We report that BERP-deficient mice exhibit enhanced learning/memory, increased fear, impaired motor coordination, and increased resistance to PTZ -induced seizures. Electrophysiological and biochemical studies show a decrease in mIPSC amplitude along with a decrease in cell surface expression of gamma2 subunit-containing GABA A receptors in the brains of BERP-deficient mice. In addition, no effect of genotype is apparent when examining BERP mRNA levels in the brain. This suggests that the decreased cell surface expression of gamma2 subunit-containing GABA A receptors is likely a posttranscriptional phenomenon and supports the possibility that BERP may be involved in the intracellular trafficking of GABA A receptors. In investigating the possible relationship between BERP and p53, we identify the presence of a transcriptionally competent p53 response element within the first intron of the human BERP genomic locus and demonstrate that the BERP expression is up regulated in a p53-dependent manner both in vitro and in vivo. These results support the interpretation that BERP is a novel p53-regulated gene and suggest a new role for p53 in the regulation of GABA A receptor trafficking and epileptogenesis.
Quand l'Autre prend la parole. La représentation de trois formes d'altérité dans le roman contemporain.
Keywords: alterity
foreigner
insanity
poverty
first-person narratives
Francophone literature
French literature
Québec literature
otherness

La notion d’altérité circule avec insistance dans la conscience collective contemporaine, mais, à ma connaissance, il n’y a pas d’ouvrage critique qui aborde simultanément la spécificité de différentes sortes d’altérité dans la fiction pour en saisir les formes, la signification et les enjeux, surtout à partir de la perspective de l’Autre. Ce travail organise l’étude de la représentation de trois formes d’altérité dans six romans contemporains français, québécois et francophones dans lesquels l’Autre est le sujet du discours : 1. L’étranger : La dot de Sara (Agnant, 1995) et Un aller simple (van Cauwelaert, 1994) ; 2. La folie : Moha le fou Moha le sage (Ben Jelloun, 1978) et La chaise au fond de l’œil (Aude, [1979] 1997) ; 3. La pauvreté : L’exil aux portes du paradis (Dahan, 1993) et Conte d’asphalte (Calife, 2007). Mon objectif principal est de cerner la représentation textuelle de ces formes d’altérité ainsi que leur rôle et leur signification quand la diégèse adopte la perspective d’un personnage qui exprime lui-même sa dissemblance et son aliénation potentielle. Quand l’Autre prend la parole, son statut est entièrement bouleversé, car il ne s’agit plus d’une représentation « traduite » de son expérience ou d’une appréhension de ce personnage par un tiers. Mon travail révèle selon la perspective du marginalisé soit une transformation dans la signification de l’altérité soit un brouillage des frontières entre la marge et le centre qui remet en question, dans certains cas, l’existence même de l’altérité. Cette étude dégage également les caractéristiques discursives communes et distinctives des formes de l’altérité. En outre, elle met en lumière l’instabilité du statut Autre dans le texte romanesque : ce statut peut évoluer, se transformer et parfois même disparaître alors que, dans d’autres circonstances, il peut être un facteur identitaire incontournable et immuable. La multiplicité de ces variations illustre la complexité de chaque manifestation d’altérité et la flexibilité de la notion que le roman d’expression française utilise de façon centrale et critique. Cette thèse contribue ainsi à l’enrichissement de notre compréhension de l’exploitation littéraire des formes de l’altérité, phénomène qui marque de manière importante la littérature contemporaine.
Donne and the Sidereus Nuncius: Astronomy, Method and Metaphor in 1611
Keywords: Poetics
Astronomy
Early Modern
Metaphor

John Donne’s poetry has long been famous for its metaphysical conceits, which powerfully register the impact of the “New Philosophy,” yet the question of how his work is implicated in the new forms of knowledge-making that exploded in the early seventeenth century has remained unanswered. “Donne and the Sidereus nuncius” examines the relation between method and metaphor on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution by reading the poetry and prose of Donne in the context of developments in early modern astronomy, anatomy and natural philosophy. I focus primarily on two texts, Ignatius, his Conclave (1610) and the Anniversaries (1611-2), which are linked not only by chronology, but also by their mutual concern with the effects of distorted perception on the process of understanding the universe. Written directly after the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (1610), these works offer a historicized perspective on Donne’s changing use of scientific metaphor in relation to the transformative crux of the discovery of the telescope, which provided a startling new optical metaphor for the process of knowing. In this context, “Donne and the Sidereus nuncius” considers the conceptual work performed by scientific metaphor as part of an ongoing transformation from emblematic to analogic figuration. Donne’s search for material that is, in his phrase, “appliable” to other subjects, depends on an analogic conception of metaphor, a comparison that enables new thinking by identifying underlying commonalities between disparate objects. Building on this understanding of metaphor as comparative, I examine Donne’s self-conscious use of metaphors of methodical knowledge making—invention, innovation, anatomy and progress—in the context of instrumental metaphors, such as the telescope, spectacles, perspective, and travel narratives. In doing so, I suggest that Donne’s metaphorical conceits explore the conflict between scientific attempts to discern order in nature and the distorting effects of methodological frameworks imposed on the object of analysis.
An FPGA-based Real-time Simulator for the Analysis of Electromagnetic Transients in Electrical Power Systems
Keywords: Real-time Simulation
Power systems
FPGA

A physical control/protection platform needs to be tested and its functionality verified prior to installation and commissioning. Closed-loop testing of a physical control/protection platform, in a real-time simulator environment is practically the only option to safely and thoroughly verify the design integrity and evaluate its functionality and performance. Moreover, a real-time simulator is also required to conduct statistical switching studies, as it substantially reduces the total run time of the study. This thesis proposes and develops a generalized methodology for implementation of the power system equations in the FPGA environment. The developed methodology enables real-time operation, for closed-loop testing of physical control/protection platforms in hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) configuration, and even faster-than-real-time operation, for statistical switching studies. Based on the developed methodology, an FPGA-based simulator is developed and tested. The salient features of the proposed implementation are: ² It enables the use of a nanosecond range simulation time-step to simulate large systems in real-time, in contrast to the us range time-steps used in the existing simulators. Thus it is also able to provide a wide frequency bandwidth for the simulation results. ² It retains the calculation time, within each simulation time-step, nearly fixed irrespective of the size of the system. ² It eliminates the need for the corrective measures, adopted in the existing real-time simulators, to reduce error due to the lack of synchronization between the simulation time-grid and the output signals of the control/protection platform under test. As an integral part of this work, this thesis proposes and develops the modified two-layer network equivalent (M-TLNE). The salient feature of the M-TLNE is its computational efficiency, as compared to the existing network equivalents, which makes it a prime choice for statistical switching studies and real-time simulation of electromagnetic transients. This thesis also proposes a generalized methodology, applicable to both single and multi-port network equivalents for both single- and multi-phase systems, for developing the proposed M-TLNE. The developed methodology ensures the stability and passivity of the M-TLNE.
The Effect of Lifelong Musicianship on Age-related Changes in Auditory Processing
Keywords: aging
auditory processing
music
hearing
EEG
age-related hearing loss

Age-related declines in hearing abilities are common and can be attributed to changes in the peripheral and central levels of the auditory system. Although central auditory processing is enhanced in younger musicians, the influence of lifelong musicianship on age-related decline in central auditory processing has not yet been investigated. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation was to investigate whether lifelong musicianship can mitigate age-related decline in central auditory processing. In the first experiment, age-related declines on four hearing assessments were compared between musicians and non-musicians. Speech-in-noise and gap-detection thresholds were found to decline at a slower rate in musicians, providing an increasing advantage with age. Furthermore, musicians had a lifelong advantage in detecting a mistuned harmonic, although the rate of age-related decline was similar for both musicians and non-musicians. Importantly, there was no significant effect of musicianship on pure-tone thresholds, suggesting that lifelong musicianship can mitigate age-related decline in central but not peripheral auditory processing. To test this hypothesis, a second experiment compared auditory evoked responses (AERs) between groups of older and younger musicians and non-musicians. Results indicated that exogenous neural activity was enhanced in musicians, but that age-related changes were similar between musicians and nonmusicians. Furthermore, endogenous, attention-dependent neural activity was enhanced in older adults, suggesting a compensatory cognitive strategy. Importantly, endogenous activity was preferentially enhanced in older musicians, suggesting that lifelong musicianship enhanced cognitive processes related to auditory perception. In the final experiment, the ability to segregate simultaneous sounds was tested in older and younger musicians and non-musicians by using a mistuned harmonic paradigm, where AERs to harmonic complexes were compared to AERs when one of the harmonics was mistuned. Results indicated that musical training in older adults has little effect on early automatic registration of the mistuned harmonic. In contrast, late attention-dependent activity, associated with the perception of the mistuned harmonic as a separate sound, was influenced by musical training in older adults, suggesting that lifelong musicianship preserves or enhances cognitive components of concurrent sound segregation. In summary, musical training was found to reduce age-related decline in hearing abilities due to enhanced central processing of auditory information.
Early Outgrowth Cells As A Novel Therapy for Chronic Kidney Disease
Keywords: chronic kidney disease
heart failure
fibrosis
diabetes
oxidative stress
cell therapy

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) and its cardiac complications represent a large and growing problem in Canada. The progression of CKD is driven by the activation of several final common pathways of injury, including fibrosis and oxidative stress. If left unchecked, these inter-connected processes lead to progressive damage and subsequent organ dysfunction. Current clinical therapies, consisting of aggressive blood pressure control and blockade of the renin-angiotensin system, fail to arrest this progressive injury in a significant number of patients. Early outgrowth cells (EOCs) represent a novel bone marrow-derived cell population that have been recently described to have tissue protective activity. In this work, we examined the effects of intravascular EOC infusion in two independent models of CKD, demonstrating potent anti-fibrotic renoprotective effects in the subtotally nephrectomized (SNX) rat, a well-established model of non-diabetic progressive CKD, and anti-fibrotic and anti-oxidant effects in the db/db mouse, a commonly used model of type 2 diabetic nephropathy. In the SNX rat, which is characterized by impaired cardiac relaxation reminiscent of a common and high risk clinical CKD phenotype, EOC infusion was also associated with improved cardiac structure and function. In both cases, infused EOCs were not retained in significant numbers within the diseased kidney or heart, but rather localized to distant organs such as the liver, spleen, and bone marrow. We further demonstrated that EOCs release soluble factors with anti-oxidant and anti-fibrotic activity in vitro, and that a cell-free preparation of EOC-derived factors can mimic the reno- and cardiac protective effects of the cells themselves when infused into the SNX rat. Taken together, our results demonstrate the therapeutic potential of an EOC-based strategy for the treatment of CKD and its cardiac complications, and provide the preclinical rationale for the design of clinical trials of EOC-based therapies for this devastating disease.
Aspects of Linguistic Integration of Recent Immigrants to Canada: Determinants of English Language Proficiency, Role of English in Labour-market Integration Outcomes and Skills Utilization
Keywords: Immigration
Integration

The thesis explores the determinants of English proficiency as well as its role in labour-market integration outcomes and skills utilization. The Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada provides the data for the empirical analysis. The introductory chapter offers insight into the recent changes to the Canadian immigration policy as well as immigration trends. This chapter also outlines chapters Two through Six and establishes the conceptual framework that unifies them. Chapter Two introduces two theoretical approaches, human capital theory and macro-level factors of the source and destination countries’ framework. It presents a review of the literature and introduces a theoretical model of linguistic integration that is subsequently tested in Chapters Three and Four. Chapters Three and Four focus on the application of human capital theory and macro-level factors of the source and destination countries’ framework. Chapter Three explores the factors that contribute to the immigrant’s English proficiency upon arrival. Chapter Four investigates the role of human capital and destination country’s macro-level factors in English proficiency four years after migration. The principal empirical results indicate that macro-level factors of the source country are significantly related to the English proficiency at arrival, while macro-level factors of the destination country are significantly related to English proficiency four years after migration. The results also corroborate findings described in the human capital literature aiding comprehension of the relationship between human capital endowments and English proficiency. Chapter Five investigates the role of English proficiency in such labour-market integration outcomes as employment seeking, incidence of employment, and employment within ethnic enclaves. The study finds that English proficiency is associated with higher odds of employment seeking and employment in Canada. It also significantly increases the likelihood of being employed outside ethnic enclaves. Chapter Six integrates human capital theory and language as a dimension of ethnicity framework. The analysis concentrates on the role of English in immigrants’ skills utilization. The principal results add to human capital theory, indicating that English proficiency significantly increases the odds of skills utilization. The findings also reveal that immigrants who speak standard English are more likely to utilize their skills than non-standard English speakers.
Early Fault Detection for Gear Shaft and Planetary Gear Based on Wavelet and Hidden Markov Modeling
Keywords: Early Fault Detection
Hidden Markov Modeling

Fault detection and diagnosis of gear transmission systems have attracted considerable attention in recent years, due to the need to decrease the downtime on production machinery and to reduce the extent of the secondary damage caused by failures. However, little research has been done to develop gear shaft and planetary gear crack detection methods based on vibration signal analysis. In this thesis, an approach to gear shaft and planetary gear fault detection based on the application of the wavelet transform to both the time synchronously averaged (TSA) signal and residual signal is presented. Wavelet approaches themselves are sometimes inefficient for picking up the fault signal characteristic under the presence of strong noise. In this thesis, the autocovariance of maximal energy wavelet coefficients is first proposed to evaluate the gear shaft and planetary gear fault advancement quantitatively. For a comparison, the advantages and disadvantages of some approaches such as using variance, kurtosis, the application of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S test), root mean square (RMS) , and crest factor as fault indicators with continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for residual signal, are discussed. It is demonstrated using real vibration data that the early faults in gear shafts and planetary gear can be detected and identified successfully using wavelet transforms combined with the approaches mentioned above. In the second part of the thesis, the planetary gear deterioration process from the new condition to failure is modeled as a continuous time homogeneous Markov process with three states: good, warning, and breakdown. The observation process is represented by two characteristics: variance and RMS based on the analysis of autocovariance of DWT applied to the TSA signal obtained from planetary gear vibration data. The hidden Markov model parameters are estimated by maximizing the pseudo likelihood function using the EM iterative algorithm. Then, a multivariate Bayesian control chart is applied for fault detection. It can be seen from the numerical results that the Bayesian chart performs better than the traditional Chi-square chart.
Stances on the Land: Political Perspectives on Land Use Governance in Vermont
Keywords: Land Use
Vermont
Politics
Social divisions

Vermont, like many rural places in the developed world, has been the destination of many urban migrants seeking lifestyle amenities unavailable in the city. This migration has been blamed for intractable conflicts over land use governance, with newcomers pitted against long-time residents on such issues as wilderness designation, agricultural impacts and motorized recreation. How accurate, though, are these representations of political visions polarized along lines of residential status? This dissertation maps out the complexity of popular outlooks on land use governance in Vermont using a Q-method survey and semi-structured interviews. Analysis of the survey found evidence for two distinct perspectives on land use governance, which were termed Green Governance and Government Scepticism. While distinct, these perspectives were not diametrically opposed; on many issues of concern to one group the other group was neutral. These groups did not map directly onto residential status; in particular, long-time residents were clearly evident in both groups. Looking deeper into the stances on land use, tensions between stances are evident at both the level of the group and the individual. The dissertation traces these tensions and considers their implications for how individuals are enrolled in larger political projects such as neoliberalism. In many cases, uncertain enrolment suggests places where groups could productively engage each other and develop less antagonistic relationships. The dissertation fits the political orientations it examines into a broader cultural reading of social divisions that goes beyond residential status. It posits the existence of cultural complexes with an array of components contributing to social identity. These components – which include residential status and political orientation – influence each other without being determining. Compared with more established moral economy frameworks, this model seeks to provide a more flexible theorization of the relationship between social identity and political outlook.