VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Cultural Diversity and the Treatment of Trauma
Keywords: cultural competence
culture
diversity
therapy
trauma

The current study sought to address a concerning treatment disparity within the psychological profession. While cultural minority groups are more likely to experience trauma and psychological distress, they are less likely to access and benefit from mental health services. Furthermore, it is clear that cultural meanings and practices shape how trauma is experienced and understood. There remains critical need for culturally competent trauma services in Canada. The current study sought to address this need by exploring the broad research question: how do therapists take into account cultural diversity in their treatment of trauma? The aim of this study was to understand how trauma therapists working with culturally diverse clients conceive of trauma and culture, and how they employ interventions in order to deliver culturally sensitive and effective trauma therapy. The participants were comprised of ten registered psychologists who identified as working with culturally diverse trauma clients for at least one year and who agreed to partake in an in-depth interview about their clinical practice. Qualitative methods were used to develop a rich understanding of the process of delivering culturally sensitive trauma therapy. The data was analyzed thematically using grounded theory methodology and an integrative model of culturally competent trauma therapy was proposed. The study findings revealed three key ideas: developing self-awareness, contextualizing trauma and outside the therapy room. These themes suggest that therapists begin with themselves: they develop self-awareness about how their personal history and social position informs their perspectives, biases and therapeutic approach. They also conceive of trauma and trauma responses as shaped by sociocultural context. Despite therapists’ attempts at providing culturally sensitive care, external structural barriers often prevent culturally diverse trauma clients from the receiving the mental health services they need. This study suggests that truly providing culturally sensitive trauma therapy requires structural changes within the field of psychology and society. To that end, therapists working at the intersections of trauma and diversity are broadening the scope of their practice to include advocacy and activist efforts. The broad implications of these findings for research, education and clinical practice are addressed.
The Progenitors and Light Curves of Core-collapse Supernovae
Keywords: Hydrodynamics
Simulations
Supernova

Core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) theories have been long developed to link the observed SNe to their physical properties. Despite past endeavors, CCSN research is still an active field owing to data coming from wide-field surveys and advancements in the computational power that have made multi-dimensional simulations feasible. There remain outstanding questions regarding the progenitor systems of spectroscopic classes, the details of explosion mechanism, mass-loss history during the pre-SN phase of massive stars, etc. In this thesis, we present a series of theoretical, observational, and statistical studies to model physical properties of CCSNe primarily based on their optical light curves. First, we investigate the impact of asphericity at the time of shock breakout on the early light curves of CCSNe, focusing on the possibility of nonradial flows that typically develop in sufficiently nonspherical explosions. We construct adiabatic axisymmetric FLASH hydrodynamic simulations of these explosions and model the early light curves. Second, we present the spectroscopy and photometry of a H-rich Type II SN, KSP-SN-2016kf that was discovered by KMTNet Supernova Program within a day from the explosion. Our radiation-transfer hydrodynamical modeling of the light curves show that this SN could originate from a zeroage main sequence (ZAMS) star more massive that the ZAMS mass the cut-off limit for the mass of observed red supergiants (RSGs) in pre-SN images, dubbed as the “RSG problem”. Finally, we provide a systematic study of 56Ni mass (MNi) distribution of stripped-envelope SNe (SESNe) obtained from three different methods: 1) the radioactive modeling of light curve tails, 2) Arnett’s model, and 3) an analytical model of Khatami & Kasen (2019). The first method gives more accurate MNi estimates but relies on often-unavailable photometric information over the light curve tail, whereas the other two techniques require the peak luminosity and rise time of the light curve. The last technique also depends on the choice of a dimensionless parameter β that has yet to be observationally calibrated. Our MNi results show that Arnett’s model overestimates the tail values by a factor ∼2. We calibrate β using our tail MNi measurements for our SESN sample and discuss the implications of the obtained β values.
Heinrich Heine and the German Middle Ages
Keywords: German Studies
Germanistik
Heinrich Heine
Middle Ages
Mittelalter

Heinrich Heine famously identified German Romantic authors with the “resuscitation of the Middle Ages”. This identification has long been read as foundational to Heine’s critique of German Romanticism and what he saw as its political and cultural failings. It has long been assumed that Heine, whose own early poetry was heavily inspired by late Romantic authors such as Ludwig Uhland, rejected the German Middle Ages alongside his rejection of German Romanticism. Through an examination of Heine’s work, from his earliest poetry up to and including his long mock-epic poems Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen and Atta Troll, I argue that Heine’s fascination and interest in the German Middle Ages is enduring and deeply important to his literary project. I argue that, far from rejecting the Middle Ages, Heine attempts to recast the German Middle Ages in such a way that preserves it as a vital source of poetic inspiration. In addition, Heine’s re-evaluation of the German Middle Ages serves a foundational role in his attempts, primarily in De L’Allemagne (his overview of German culture, religion and philosophy), to develop a counter-narrative of the German Middle Ages that exposes pantheism as the core faith of the German peoples, as well as charts a path towards a politically progressive and emancipated Germany.
Robotic Cell Manipulation for Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI)
Keywords: Automation
In Vitro Fertilization
Robotics
Sperm

Infertility is a global health issue and affects millions of people. ICSI is the most commonly used technique for infertility treatment, and it achieved higher live birth rate than artificial insemination. ICSI involves the injection of a single sperm into an oocyte with a sharp glass micropipette. However, manual operation of ICSI suffers from inconsistency and potential damage to the cells. This research has addressed these two limitations by developing techniques of automation and less invasiveness for ICSI. Automated system was developed for measuring both motility and morphology of individual live sperm, to provide quantitative data for embryologists to select a single sperm for ICSI. The system has been validated to be highly reproducible and reliable. With customized design to add rotational degree of freedom, robotic micropipette alignment was developed based on kinematics modeling and controller design. The accurate alignment helped increase the success rate of sperm immobilization. Automated sperm aspiration was also proposed by establishing a nonlinear dynamics model and an adaptive controller to achieve high positioning accuracy within micropipette. To reduce cell damage during ICSI operation, robotic orientation control of deformable cells was developed. Polar body needs to be rotated towards 12 o'clock orientation before injection to prevent damaging the spindle. Deep neural networks were trained for robust detection of polar bodies to provide visual feedback. By force modeling and optimal control, an oocyte can be effectively rotated while consistently maintaining minimal cell deformation to avoid cell damage. Oocytes also suffer large deformation during injection, and cytoplasm needs to be aspirated into the micropipette to break oolemma. A new piezo drill was designed to penetrate the oocyte with less deformation and without cytoplasm aspiration. Robotic techniques were also developed to minimize the disturbance of piezo drill to cytoplasm. These techniques of robotic cell manipulation for clinical ICSI can achieve consistent outcomes independent of operator training and experience, increase operation safety by removal of human errors, and improve outcomes by reducing cell damage.
Gendering Asceticism in Medieval Sufism
Keywords: Asceticism
Gender analysis
Nishapur
Qushayri
Sufism
Sulami

Medieval Sufis reoriented the practice of Islamic mysticism away from asceticism and towards a structured program of inner cultivation under the guidance of elite male teachers. This dissertation argues that this inward turn represents a key historical moment in which Sufi identity was deliberately constructed upon idealized elite masculinity to combat rival groups in fifth/eleventh-century Nishapur. While previous scholars suggest medieval Sufism arose out of the Baghdadi context, an examination of the writings of two influential Nishapuri authors, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) and Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1074) reveals sociopolitical conflicts unique to Nishapur that provoked the formation of an urban institutionalized Sufism that excluded all but the male elite. The gendered consequences of this institutionalization is explored through the legacy of al-Sulamī and al-Qushayrī and the reproduction of their gendered discourse in the writings of Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) and Abū al-Faraj b. al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200). Through a gender-sensitive critical re-reading of asceticism in historicizations of medieval Nishapur, I demonstrate the role of opposition to rival ascetic groups in the institutionalization and perpetuation of elite androcentric Sufism. This study investigates shifting gendered discourses in representations of four early ascetic practices: bodily mortification (zuhd), wandering without provision (siyāḥa), sexual abstinence (ʿuzla, ʿafāf), and excessive voluntary fasting (jūʿ, ṣawm). The decline in popularity of these exercises came with increasingly more obvious language of gender differentiation in the writings of Sufi authors. Through an intersectional gender analysis that compares elite male depictions of women to those of youths, the enslaved, and racialized individuals, I problematize modern scholarship on Sufism and Islam that employs gender binaries without considering other social markers of difference in Islamicate literatures. I conclude that authors of medieval Sufism reinvented asceticism to oppose those they deemed deviant to their own hegemonic masculinity. Understanding that elite social actors negotiate orthodoxy and regulate practice through the language of gender demonstrates the usefulness of gender analysis as a method of exposing discourses of power in the formation of religious identity.
Transcolonial Politics of Poverty: Educating the Civil Society and Creating Neoliberal Citizenship in the Periphery
Keywords: Civil society education
Microfinance education
Ontological politics
Poverty
Sri Lanka
Transcolonialism

Transcolonial Politics of Poverty: Educating the Civil Society and Creating Neoliberal Citizenship in the periphery Ph.D. -Social Justice Education, 2020 Udeani Prasanga Alawattage Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) University of Toronto Abstract Microfinance has been one of the most extensive social engineering programs in less developed countries (LDCs). It entails a “credit plus” approach of neoliberal development constituting a massive civil society education program that links the grassroots poor with the neoliberal development doctrines and ideologies through a well sophisticated institutional infrastructure of development education. In this institutional setting, microfinance education is projected to the grassroots poor as an emancipatory form of education, especially capable of liberating the poor women. The existing research on microfinance has often been functionalist and managerial which lopsidedly concentrated mainly on the assessment of the efficacy of microfinance with very little attention on the ‘neoliberal politics’ of microfinance’s educational and discursive elements. There has been no substantive ethnographic study that attempts to offer a critical theorization of the ways in which microfinance subjugates the lives of the peripheral poor. As such, this study offers a critical theorization of the ‘neoliberal politics’ embedded in microfinance education. It reveals the ways in which microfinance creates a new form of neoliberal citizenship through the discourses of financial inclusion, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship and how it connects the grassroots poor with the intensification and acceleration of the circuit of the global financial capital. Methodologically this thesis draws on an ‘extended case study’ of Sri Lankan microfinance industry covering nine villages in six districts. It extends its micro ethnographic data to its macro-political, historical, and institutional contexts to explain the transcolonial political character of microfinance pedagogy. Theoretically, it draws eclectically on several Foucauldian, postcolonial/anticolonial frameworks to relate such ethnographic data to underlying structural and discursive apparatuses of global neoliberalism. In this manner, the thesis provides a theoretically informed rich empirical narrative of how the microfinance subjugates and objectifies the grassroots poor through its pedagogy of financial literacy, financial inclusion, and entrepreneurship in order to place them within the circuit of global capital. It reveals not only the transcolonial nature of microfinance discourses but also the ways in which the poor accommodate and resist such discourses. Keywords: Microfinance education; Sri Lanka; transcolonialism; civil society education; neoliberalism; ontological politics and poverty
The Temporal Structure of Neural Processes Underlying Human Precision Grasp Computations
Keywords: Decoding
EEG
Grasping
Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA)
Sensorimotor Control
Visuomotor

Object grasping is fundamental to our interaction with the environment. To plan a grasp, the brain relies on lateral and medial pathways within a parieto-frontal network that convert grasp-relevant object features into motor plans to guide hand movements. While much is known about their cortical loci, little is known about when representations of visual and visuomotor features emerge and how they unfold over time. Characterizing the temporal dynamics of these representations is crucial in order to provide a complete functional description of the grasp network and to elucidate the computational steps during grasp planning. The objective of this dissertation was to examine the temporal structure of neural processes underlying grasp planning and execution. To this end three studies were conducted in which electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded while participants planned and executed precision grasps upon viewing 3D objects. Time-resolved multivariate pattern analyses were employed to infer visual and visuomotor representations from the data. I demonstrate that grasp-relevant visual and visuomotor computations follow similar time courses but display different properties and dynamics. Further, grasp planning follows a monotonic progression from visual to motor representations but a partially non-monotonic progression from higher to lower level processes. Finally, visuomotor representations of grip size (implied by object size) and orientation progress differently over time but are similarly integrated into the grasp program. The latter is driven by overlapping neural processes that control left-handed and bimanual grasps and occur at an intermediate level of grasp control (i.e., upstream from the control of effectors but downstream from effector-independent goal representations). These results provide novel insights into the visual-to-motor transformations and hierarchical structure underlying the control of human precision grasps. Further, they highlight the need for temporally highly resolved methods like EEG or MEG to attain a comprehensive understanding of human grasp control.
Intergroup Contact Theory in a Nutshell: A Meta-meta- analytic Examination of Intergroup Contact Theory and the Contact Space
Keywords: contact space
direct contact
indirect contact
intergroup contact
meta-analysis

Over 65 years of research on intergroup contact theory has supported its claim that contact with people from different groups is a powerful method of improving attitudes towards these groups. This contact can take on five forms, which are direct contact, direct friendship, extended contact, imagined contact, and media contact. With research on intergroup contact having culminated on a meta-analysis on each of these forms, this project summarizes these meta-analyses into a narrative and statistical review to answer questions about intergroup contact that crosses its five forms. Major findings from both these reviews indicate that direct friendship and extended contact are empirically alike and different from these other forms of intergroup contact. This statistical review also found that closer cross-group relationships and more self-involvement in intergroup contact potentiate its effects on intergroup attitudes, whereas richness of intergroup contact does not do so. These results have important implications for intergroup contact theory, which includes determining where in the contact space intergroup contact is more or less effective and identifying direct friendship and extended contact versus direct contact, imagined contact, and media contact as a new and empirically valid system for classifying forms of intergroup contact. Including most of the existing research on every form of intergroup contact, this summary answers large-scale questions about intergroup contact that crosses its five forms while providing a comprehensive overview of this massive literature.
Ecology, Ontogeny, and Taxonomy of the Diverse Early Permian Dissorophoid Assemblage from Richards Spur, Oklahoma
Keywords: Dissorophoidea
paleontology
Permian
Temnospondyli
Tetrapoda

Dissorophoids are a diverse clade of temnospondyl amphibians that have long been of interest for their hypothesized relationship to modern lissamphibians and for their exceptional diversity in Permo-Carboniferous paleoenvironments of North America and western Europe. Beyond representing the earliest stages of lissamphibian evolution, dissorophoids represent arguably the most successful radiation of temnospondyls into terrestrial environments, in which they are both ubiquitous and remarkably diverse. The Richards Spur locality in Oklahoma, USA preserves the richest assemblage of terrestrial dissorophoids, positioning it as an excellent case study for furthering our understanding of dissorophoid evolution. To date most dissorophoid studies have been confined to the classic paleontological description of external anatomy. Using neutron computed tomography and paleohistology to augment the traditional descriptive approach, I provide greatly enhanced characterizations of morphology, ontogenetic trends, and phylogenetic patterns across the three terrestrial groups. For amphibamiforms, I produce the largest skeletochronological study of any Paleozoic tetrapod using femora of the stem lissamphibian Doleserpeton annectens, which identifies marked intraspecific variation and biannual responses to climatic harshness. For dissorophids, I produce the most detailed cranial ontogeny of any dissorophid to date for the eucacopine Cacops morrisi and provide the first records of three additional dissorophid taxa. High-resolution CT data reveals new complexities on osteoderm morphology that question traditional interpretations of osteoderm evolution in dissorophids. For trematopids, I describe a markedly immature specimen that highlights the challenges of gaps in the ontogenetic record, which are then tested in a phylogenetic context that reveals widespread confounding of inference by ontogenetic disparity for trematopids. Lastly, I produce tomographic comparisons of dissorophid and trematopid neurocrania and identify a conserved ontogenetic trajectory, a cryptic synotic tectum ossification of questionable homology to the amniote supraoccipital, and a surprising gap in the record of truly “adult” individuals of Cacops in the fossil record. Collectively, these studies greatly expand our understanding of the paleobiology of terrestrial dissorophoids through improved constraints of ontogenetic transformations and patterns of evolution across different regions of the skeleton. In turn, this work provides a more robust ontogenetic and phylogenetic framework through which to address broad questions of temnospondyl and lissamphibian evolution.
Rights to Confidential Information at Private Law
Keywords: Confidential Information
Jurisprudence
Ownership
Property Theory
Proprietary Rights
Trade Secrets

This thesis explores what it means to control, own, or have a proprietary interest in information. The Anglo-American civil litigation system rejects property as an actionable basis to assert rights over secret or confidential information. Simultaneously, other components of our legal system allow private actors to treat confidential information as intangible property, at least in the sense of constituting a controllable asset. We explore the melange of legal doctrinal developments that have allowed firms to commodify information, including trade secrecy law, the breach of confidence action, intellectual property law, and certain contractual mechanisms. Within legal theory this question is wound up in the information-property debate and the Legal Realist bundle of rights depiction of property. We use a Hohfeldian-Honoré analytical lens to untangle this perspective, and to articulate the contours of the zone of control that information rights holders wield over informational assets.
The Clinical and Economic Burden of Infections in Hospitalized Solid Organ Transplant Recipients in Canada
Keywords: costs
health outcomes
infection
mortality
pharmacoeconomics
transplant

To date, there has been limited literature describing the epidemiology, healthcare resource utilization, and economic burden of infections in hospitalized solid-organ transplant (SOT) recipients. The first study reports on the rate and timing of these syndromes and describes the associated microbiological epidemiology in a single-centre cohort. Infections were the most common (43%) complication among the 603 hospitalizations at a rate of 0.43 episodes per 1000 transplant-days, with 85% occurring greater than 6 months post-transplantation. The most frequent infection involved the respiratory tract (27%), with 53% of patients presenting without fever, 45% having no pathogen isolated, and multi-drug resistant organisms being isolated in 27% of cases. The second study reported on measures of clinical and economic burden, along with the impact of infectious disease specialist consultation. After propensity score matching, infectious disease consultation resulted in greater 28-day survival estimates (Hazards ratio (HR) =0.33, log-rank P=0.026), and reduced 30-day rehospitalization rates (16.9% vs. 23.9%, P=0.036). The median length-of-stay and hospitalization costs were increased for patients receiving an infectious disease consultation (7.0 vs. 5.0 days, P=0.002, and $9652 vs. $6192, P=0.003). However, the median length-of-stay (5.5 vs. 5.1 days, P=0.31) and hospitalization costs ($8106 vs. $6912, P=0.63) did not differ significantly among those receiving an early (