VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Thinking Through Dilemmas
Keywords: Careers
Cognition
Death and Dying
Dilemmas
Dual Process Models
Pedophilia

According to the sociological dual process model (SDPM), all thoughts occur either automatically and unconsciously or deliberately and consciously. However, by analyzing three empirical cases where individuals often engage in great amounts of deliberation – death and dying, pedophilia, and career decision-making – I find that individuals engage in what I term automatic deliberation: a mode of thinking which is both habitual and effortful. Given the high levels of emotional resonance of these topics for many individuals, schemas and frames for thinking about and through these topics are frequently alternated between in ways which demonstrate a blend of habituated understandings and conscious deliberation. Recent innovations in dual process theorizing are utilized to help support my argument. Specifically, the hybrid and parallel dual process models – two models which assume strong interconnections between automatic or Type 1 and deliberate or Type 2 processes. The data analyzed in this dissertation support this blended view of cognition by demonstrating how individuals think through complex topics in patterned yet personalized ways as they draw on schemas and frames to arrive at their final conclusions. Individuals’ thought processes are mapped out using the concept of cognitive paths: the routes that individuals tend to take when reasoning through particular topics which can fruitfully be unpacked in terms of which ideas are called upon, how they are used, and how they take shape throughout an individual’s overall response trajectory. The patterned yet personalized nature of thought as made evident through the analysis of automatic deliberation and cognitive paths implies that, rather than being purely Type 1 or Type 2 in any given instance, cognition has both automatic and deliberate dimensions to it. By framing cognition in such a manner and mapping it out using cognitive paths, sociologists can more accurately gauge the extent to which culture shapes cognition in any given empirical domain.
Epigenetic Basis for Heterogeneity in Vascular Cell Adhesion Molecule 1 Gene Expression in the Cytokine Activated Vascular Endothelium
Keywords: DNA methylation
Epigenetics
Gene regulation
Heterogeneity
Vascular biology
VCAM1

Homogeneous populations of mature differentiated primary cell types can display variable responsiveness to extracellular stimuli, though little is known about the underlying mechanisms that govern such heterogeneity at the level of gene expression. Here we show that morphologically homogenous human endothelial cells exhibit heterogeneous expression of VCAM1 after TNFα stimulation. Variability in VCAM1 expression was not due to heterogeneity of intracellular signal transduction, but rather to preexisting established heterogeneous states of promoter DNA methylation that were generationally conserved through mitosis. Variability in DNA methylation of the VCAM1 promoter resulted in graded RelA and RNA polymerase II binding that gave rise to a distribution of VCAM1 transcription in the population after TNFα stimulation. Microarray analysis and single cell RNA sequencing revealed that a number of cytokine-inducible genes shared this heterogeneous response pattern. These results show that heritable epigenetic heterogeneity is fundamental in inflammatory signalling and highlight VCAM1 as a metastable epiallele.
Incorporating Youth into the Political Arena: Elite Structures, Elite-youth Linkages, and Youth (De-) mobilization in post-1960 Turkey (1960-2016)
Keywords: elite studies
state-society relations
Turkish Politics
Youth politics

This dissertation investigates why the Turkish state encountered sustained youth contention and failed to contain it in the 1960s and the 1970s, while it proved more capable in preventing the emergence/escalation of youth dissent in the post-1980 period. Studies on social movements have not treated youth as a central category (Bayat 2010) and have under-theorized the processes of youth mobilization and demobilization. Besides, scholars of state-society relations in the Global South have paid scant attention to the political role of youth and elite attempts at incorporating young people into the political and economic structures. This study undertakes a comparative-historical analysis of political elite-youth linkages to explain the trajectory of youth political participation in post-1960 Turkey. By elite-youth linkages, I refer to the attempts of the power-holder elites at regulating youth political participation in accordance with their particular interests and to the ways young people benefit from, negotiate, or at times challenge elite claims to exert control over youth political agency. This study contends that the more fragmented the Turkish elites in the period from 1960 to 1980, the more they turned to participate themselves in youth mobilization via the process of partisan incorporation. Elite fragmentation in part facilitated militant youth behavior, left the Turkish state vulnerable to youth contention, and created youth mobilization that was sustained over a long period. The more cohesive the Turkish elites in the post-1980 coup period, the more they turned away from establishing partisan linkages with youth and the more they subscribed to incorporation as moderation and control. Elite cohesion curbed the mobilizational capacity of youth and ultimately triggered youth political disengagement. Finally, the more the ruling party elites perceived threats to emerging elite hegemony in the post-2010 period, the more they adopted hybrid incorporation to secure incumbency and sustain political hegemony. Elite hegemony weakened oppositional youth politics and politically empowered pro-government youth.
The Key of Ordering: Reading Musical Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Keywords: Guillaume de Machaut
History of the Book
Medieval manuscripts
Reading practices
Roman de Fauvel
Roman de la Poire

This is a study of a complex attitude toward manuscript production and an associated reading practice in musical manuscripts from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France. The practice is based on the idea that music was not only defined as a sonic phenomenon received through hearing but it could also be received through the intellectual perception of the order of things. Some manuscripts were designed based on the idea of musica mundana, or the harmony of the spheres, and reading such books was seen as a way to exercise this type of hearing, which enacted the mystical ascent of the reader to beatific vision. The three manuscripts examined exhibit this practice in their ordering and content: Roman de la Poire (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2186), Roman de Fauvel (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 146), and Guillaume de Machaut’s MS A (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1584). After a methodological introduction, chapter two defines the manuscript production and reading practice using medieval metaphysics and a novel understanding of the medieval definition of musica as a basis. The three manuscripts’ diverse contents of poetry, music, and art were composed and ordered based on precise mathematical proportions and these proportions highlight content throughout the manuscripts. Chapter three examines the ordering scheme of the Roman de la Poire manuscript. It is designed based on an elaborate ordering scheme that is meant to lead the reader to understand the transcendent order of Love. Chapters four and five examine the ordering scheme of the Roman de Fauvel manuscript. The Complainte d’amor at the beginning of the manuscript contains a hidden map that reveals the ordering scheme of the whole manuscript. Chapters six and seven examine the ordering scheme of Guillaume de Machaut’s MS A. The Prologue is a cryptic puzzle that reveals a task for the reader to undertake and a map for him or her to navigate through the ordering of the manuscript. The conclusion suggests that this manuscript production and related reading practice is based on the idea of hylomorphism—that the form (ordering) and the matter (content) must be considered as one substance.
Mechanisms of Centriole Duplication and Spindle Assembly in Human Cells
Keywords: Centriole duplication
Spindle assembly
TRIM36

The centrosome is the major microtubule-organizing center in animal cells. Centrosomes duplicate once and only once per cell cycle thereby ensuring that two centrosomes are present in mitosis, each of them organizing one of the two spindle poles. Numerical and structural centrosomal abnormities lead to a number of devastating human diseases, including ciliopathies, microcephaly and cancer. Despite extensive effort at elucidating the molecular mechanisms underpinning centriole assembly, our understanding of this process remains incomplete and many novel factors remain to be identified. Here, using a high-throughput, semi-automated centriole duplication screen, I identified TRIM36 as a novel regulator of centriole duplication and mitotic spindle assembly. TRIM36 is a microtubule-binding RING-type E3 ligase. In centriole duplication, TRIM36 regulates daughter centriole assembly in a manner that is dependent on the RING domain. Using super-resolution microscopy, I discovered that TRIM36 plays a role in the early steps of centriole formation, where it mediates the recruitment of SAS6. TRIM36 depletion also caused severe defects in mitotic spindle assembly and chromosome congression. My results indicated that the dual role of TRIM36 in centriole duplication and spindle formation involves, at least in part, the recruitment of γ-tubulin to centrosomes. Co-depletion of RBM14, a negative regulator of centriole duplication, compensated for the loss of γ-tubulin recruitment and rescued both the centriole duplication and spindle assembly defects. These results provide insights into the critical role of the E3 ligase TRIM36 in centriole duplication, mitotic spindle assembly and cell cycle progression.
Kampoeng Cyber: Community-based Internet Development in Post-Suharto Indonesia
Keywords: Branding
Development
Governmentality
ICT4D
Internet
Kampung

This dissertation based primarily on ethnographic data obtained from research conducted in Yogyagarta, Indonesia between 2012 and 2014, explores the community development practices of a low-income Javanese neighborhood (or kampung). This neighborhood, known locally as “Kampoeng Cyber,” initiated a grassroots internet-access project in 2008 to provide low-cost high-speed internet to most of its 150 or so residents. Through practices of narrative performance, informal branding, and online identity construction, the residents of Kampoeng Cyber have attracted local, national, and international attention (and modest sponsorship from various donors) for their community-based development efforts to improve neighborhood internet connectivity and literacy. The thesis argues that despite Kampoeng Cyber’s seemingly novel and unique approach to self-initiated development, the community’s practices represent both continuity with past Javanese practices of cultural expression, and an evolving shift in Indonesian development discourse and orientation over recent decades. This transition involved a broad (though incomplete) reorientation from top-down state-controlled programs that dominated during the New Order period under President Suharto (1966-1998), toward a model of community-empowerment and grassroots development. In the gap left behind by large-scale programs that have failed to connect most of Indonesia’s population to the internet, some communities have begun to find their own solutions to the digital divide—solutions which find close parallels with international development rhetoric centered on community access to information and communications technology. Overall, the dissertation traces the practices that result in alignments between small-scale community and international development discourse.
Caregiver Support Policies in Ontario: Analyzing the Pace and Direction of Policy Change
Keywords: Canada
Caregivers
Dementia
Health Policy
International

Population aging and concomitant growth in the number of older Canadians experiencing multiple chronic health and social needs has sparked inquiry respecting the support of informal caregivers—the family, friends and neighbours who provide the bulk of the everyday personal, instrumental and emotional help required by persons with chronic needs to maintain well-being and independence. The central argument proposed in this thesis is that, although there have been advances in caregiver support policies in Ontario, for the most part, progress in this area has been uneven, halting, and at the policy margins. Chapter 2 (Study 1) identifies policy instrument use, programmatic interventions, and the comprehensiveness of supports targeting caregivers among five OECD Member States: Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Policies for informal caregivers of seniors in Ontario are also examined from 1981 to 2016. Results demonstrated despite a similar policy context, heterogeneity exists among interventions and policy instruments across the OECD. Additionally, as early as the mid-1980s a large and growing body of evidence documented the difficulties of Ontario’s caregivers, and yet, their situation remains only minimally addressed by policymakers. Chapter 3 (Study 2), examines the Caregiver Framework for Seniors Project (CFSP) using quantitative analysis. Results demonstrated that the mix, cost, and volume of supports selected in care plans signaled that program resources were deployed to cross-subsidize and offset rising care burden amidst constricted home and community care budgets. Chapter 4 (Study 3), examines the dynamics of policy change and/or stasis in Ontario. As neo-institutional theory would predict, change is heavily influenced by political and historical factors, including: (1) powerful interests and the structure of health system design on resource allocation, (2) economic and demand side factors, and (3) institutional factors that limit scale and spread. Chapter 5 reviews key findings, strengths and limitations. Recommendations for future research are also presented in this concluding chapter. The findings of this thesis confirm that progress across Canada has been halting. With few exceptions, including the Ontario case, even promising initiatives such as the CFSP have not scaled or spread.
Accessibility Beyond the Schedule
Keywords: accessibility
GTFS
public transport
Toronto Transit Commission
transit
transport

The study of accessibility - the ease of reaching destinations - by public transport has made huge advances thanks to the availability of standardized, routable transit schedule data. The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) has provided researchers with a vast trove of machine-readable data allowing for highly detailed spatio-temporal modelling of scheduled transit operations. Yet it is well established that in the real-world schedules are imperfect - vehicles often run late, get bunched, miss transfers, arrive too full for anyone to board, and otherwise behave in predictably unpredictable ways. Schedule data alone cannot possibly account for this distinctly stochastic component of much transit service, which to date has been considered separate from accessibility analysis under the umbrella of "reliability''. This dissertation takes the perspective that transit service is reliably unreliable and will continue to be so until humans are taken out of the equation. Detailed observations of actual service can be used to construct more realistic models for estimating travel times and thus accessibility via transit. Chapter 2 introduces a novel method of converting a detailed GPS record of transit fleet locations into a retrospective GTFS package. This backward-looking "schedule'' format allows the same tools developed for schedule-based GTFS analysis to be applied in Chapter 3 to a more accurate depiction of actual transit accessibility. The findings indicate that models of transit accessibility based on schedule data alone tend to produce substantial overestimates of accessibility and systematic spatial errors by failing to account for normal irregularities in service provision. Chapter 4 points toward a way of better suiting available GTFS analysis tools to actual transit service by addressing the problem of imperfect information in modelled route choice. The travel time implications for a large minority of trips are shown to be substantial. Transit accessibility research has come a long way in the last decade and has a long way yet to go. Models based on schedule data alone should give way in many cases to models based on service as actually provided, acknowledging that schedules may guide but rarely constrain the transit services that passengers actually use every day.
Binary Neutron Star Simulations: New Tools and Insights
Keywords: binary neutron star
discontinuous Galerkin
neutrino
numerical relativity

On September 14th, 2015 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves from a merging binary black hole. Just under two years later, LIGO joined by Virgo, detected gravitational waves from merging neutron stars in coincidence with detections of a gamma ray burst and kilonova. Many more detections of this kind are expected in the future. There are several problems that are facing the numerical relativity community now that binary neutron stars (BNS) have been detected by LIGO and this thesis will tackle two of them. We first present a new numerical scheme that aims to lay the groundwork for more realistic BNS simulations in the future. This code uses discontinuous Galerkin numerical methods to solve elliptic problems on curvilinear and non-conforming meshes in parallel on large supercomputers. We test this code on several problems in numerical relativity, including one that mimicks the discontinuities in the phase transitions of a Neutron star, as well as the two and three black-hole initial gravitational data problem. This code will be used in the future to obtain highly accurate initial gravitational data for BNS simulations. Following this, we present a set of twelve new BNS simulations using a current state-of-the-art numerical relativity code. We study the neutrino and matter emission from this set of twelve simulations to establish trends between the source parameters and the emission from the binary. Large sets of BNS merger simulations will be crucial for the upcoming LIGO observation runs to maximize the extractions of astrophysical information from the instrument data. Finally we conclude the thesis by overviewing upcoming work involving our new code and simulations. This includes porting our discontinuous Galerkin code to the new task-based parallel framework SpECTRE and importing our BNS simulation data into long-term disk evolution codes and nuclear reaction networks to compute kilonova light curves.
Unemployment, Unemployment Protection, and Health in the Era of Neoliberal Welfare State Retrenchment
Keywords: austerity
health inequalities
neoliberalism
unemployment
welfare reform
welfare state

Research in the field of public health has generated a broad consensus that the organization of the welfare state has a major influence on the distribution of health within and across populations. By and large, extant contributions to this body of scholarship have adopted a relatively static view of the welfare state. Yet, due to the rise of neoliberalism and its attendant political consequences, contemporary welfare state arrangements differ in important respects from the prevailing regimes of the past. In fact, over the last several decades, governments in a vast majority of advanced capitalist countries have undertaken substantial efforts to reduce the scope and generosity of their social protection systems. From a public health standpoint, these developments raise important questions concerning the extent to which neoliberal-era welfare state policies remain effective levers with which to protect population health and promote health equity. In the present dissertation, I pursue this line of inquiry with specific reference to the neoliberal-era connections between unemployment, unemployment protection, and health in two retrenched welfare states: Canada and Germany. Through a series of empirical studies, I show that: (i) health inequalities between employed and unemployed workers are widening over time; (ii) unemployment benefits play an important role in protecting workers against the adverse health consequences of unemployment; and (iii) the neoliberal retrenchment of unemployment benefits has negatively impacted the health of unemployed workers. Taken together, my findings implicate the neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state as a significant factor contributing to adverse trends in the health of the unemployed and, by extension, as a driving force behind widening unemployment-related health inequalities. These insights, in turn, add empirical weight to growing political demands for the expansion of the welfare state. Beyond illustrating the value and importance of adopting a dynamic view of the welfare state determinants of health, this dissertation makes a contribution to outstanding efforts on the part of public health researchers and practitioners to tackle the problem of persistent health inequalities in our neoliberal times.
A Modular and Hierarchical Framework for Motion Planning with Feedback-based Motion Primitives
Keywords: Control theory
Motion planning
Optimal control
Quadrotors

As robots become more integrated into everyday society, an increasing emphasis is being placed on their ability to execute complex tasks while maintaining safety. One of the most fundamental tasks in motion planning and control is the coordination of multiple robots to safely and efficiently reach target destinations. In recent years, a hybrid systems approach, that which combines both continuous and discrete system descriptions, has proven to be an attractive methodology for control with complex specifications. Although there is extensive literature on both the design of continuous time feedback controllers and discrete motion planning algorithms, relatively few works address the rigorous integration of these two components, especially in the context of multi-vehicle coordination. In this dissertation, we leverage the hybrid systems paradigm to formulate a novel framework for motion planning and control of multi-vehicle systems that is modular, robust, and provably safe. This dissertation contains three distinct contributions. The first contribution considers the synthesis of low level continuous time feedback controllers for guiding system trajectories along a desired direction; to this end, an open problem in classical linear quadratic control was solved. The second contribution broadens the scope to develop a modular motion planning framework that combines low level feedback-based motion primitives with high level planning algorithms. Finally, the third contribution extends this modular framework towards a multi-hierarchy of motion primitives in order to improve scalability with respect to the number of vehicles. Both the second and third contributions include experimental validation on a collection of quadrocopters.