VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A New Approach to Guiding Non-Guitarist Composers Utilizing Computerized Calculations and Smart Devices
Keywords: Chordable
Guitar
Non-guitarist Composer
Playability
Playability Algorithm

Composing for the classical guitar presents unique challenges for non-guitarist composers, stemming from the instrument’s idiosyncrasies, technical limitations, and the physical constraints of the player’s hand. As a result, non-guitarists’ works often include impractical elements such as unplayable chords, or fingerings that exceed the hand’s limitations. To address these challenges, this research explores innovative solutions by applying computerized calculations to provide guidance for non-guitarist composers in creating playable combinations.Existing resources such as guidebooks and orchestration treatises often fall short in addressing the issues of playability, thereby hindering the creative process of composition. To identify the specific challenges, an analysis of selected works written by non-guitarists was conducted, and relevant literature on performer-composer collaboration and the impact of guitarists’ editorial suggestions on original compositions was reviewed. These studies suggest that while collaboration with guitarists has shown promise as a solution, the intricate nature of the guitar can impede effective collaboration, leading to edits that compromise the original creative intent. To tackle these issues, this research focuses on the development of an algorithm using computerized calculations. The algorithm primarily assesses the playability of chords and selected textures. Utilizing this algorithm, an application was developed to streamline the composition process by efficiently evaluating the playability of different combinations, visualizing the notes on a virtual fretboard and providing details on alternative fingerings. This tool will also enhance the collaboration process by saving time and facilitating effective communication between composers and performers. It is essential to acknowledge the scope and limitations of the algorithm and application, which may require further refinement and validation through collaboration with professional guitarists and composers with various compositional styles. Overall, by bridging the gap between compositional ideas and technical feasibility, this approach could lead to a new direction for guiding non-guitarist composers in creating more playable music and discovering new sonorities that enrich the classical guitar repertoire.
Creative Placemaking: Engaging Plurilingual Children in Creating Linguistically Equitable and Inclusive School
Keywords: children as co-researchers
creative methodologies
language awareness
linguistic landscape
placemaking
plurilingualism

Drawing from collaborative inquiry and multimodal qualitative study methods, this study engages plurilingual children as social actors, creators, and co-researchers of the linguistic landscape. This multidisciplinary study merges the fields of environmental design, sociolinguistics, and plurilingualism to explore children’s understanding of place, their perception of diversity and inclusivity, and to understand their meaning making behind their design imaginings to expose the linguistic diversity of their school’s community. Social semiotic theory is used as a framework to ground my inquiries, as it aims to understand how children’s design imaginings are produced in symbiosis with their cultural and social surroundings. Situated in the practice of creative placemaking, this study is rooted in civic engagement activities to foster “aesthetic of belonging through place-based arts initiatives” (Webb, 2013). Adopting Clark’s (2005) qualitative methodological ‘pieces’ of the Mosaic approach as a way of “listening and consulting with children” (p. 13), the data consists of children’s drawings of multilingual placemaking design, children’s reflexive writings, and on-going research conversations as children explore the perceptions of language diversity and inclusivity. Overall, this study advances our understanding of how children can exercise agency and participate in placemaking processes. This study has also contributed to the understanding of how children's placemaking design imaginings are produced and influenced by their cultural and social surroundings. Additionally, this study provides valuable insights into the types and requirements of placemaking design and engagement that are meaningful to plurilingual children to maximize their language awareness and sense of belonging.
Three Essays on Barriers and Limiting Beliefs At the Intersections of Family, Education, and Labor Economics
Keywords: behavioral economics
economics of education
family economics
impostor syndrome
labor economics
leftover women

Individuals may face various external and/or self-imposed barriers constraining them from their life's pursuits. This dissertation examines three such cases. Chapter 1 provides the first causal evidence that improvements in male economic status increase marriage rates. To obtain permanent income shocks for men, I examine a natural experiment surrounding the NBA’s annual player drafts. I show that players’ draft rankings deviate randomly from expert predictions and that these “draft shocks”---given well-defined NBA salaries for each draft rank---generate exogenous variation in players’ salaries. By constructing a new dataset tracking players’ major family decisions, I find that men are indeed more likely to marry when their earnings increase. Excluding superstar draft picks yields larger and more significant results, suggesting that lower income men are more responsive to income shocks. Chapter 2 presents joint work with Loren Brandt, Hongbin Li, and Laura Turner, looking at China's “leftover women,” a top policy concern, given Korea and Japan’s recent trend of college-graduate women marrying later and at lower rates than less-educated women. We find, however, that China's higher-educated urban women attain marital outcomes similar to those in the US rather than Asian Tiger countries: marrying later, but ultimately no less than the less-educated women. We quantify marriage quality using the Choo(2015) estimator and find similar marriage gains between high-educated and lower-educated peers, largely from increased assortative matching. We also project future completed marriage rates to remain stable for high-educated Chinese women, with continued rise in the prevalence of older brides from delayed marriage and remarriage. Chapter 3 asks whether feeling undeserving of or, conversely, overlooked for recognition at work affects performance. I examine the causal link in a high-achieving environment, by employing a natural experiment surrounding NBA drafts. With players randomly placing above or below their expert-endorsed ‘value,’ I show using rich NBA performance data that these “draft shocks” distort player productivity: Players significantly scale back on low-risk low-reward shots, ultimately scoring fewer individual points, and contribute more to teamwork instead. Their total productive output (and career longevity) remain unchanged, but depressed individual achievement persists for over 80% of the average player's career.
Inquiry and its Norms
Keywords: Curiosity
Epistemic norms
Inquiry
Zetetic norms

This dissertation explores the nature and norms of inquiry. In Chapter 1, I argue that curiosity is an intrinsic desire to know. My argument centers around ascriptions of the form ‘curious to φ’, used to attribute curiosity to see, to hear, to try,to meet, and so on. I argue that this form of curiosity should be understood as a desire to φ where the goal of φ-ing is to acquire knowledge. In Chapter 2, I develop an account of the norms of asking questions. The literature on the norms of asking has focused on speaker-centered norms. For instance, inquirers should not ask questions to which they already know the answer. I offer a range of linguistic data to show that there are addressee-centered norms as well: inquirers should not ask addressees who fall short of a certain epistemic status. That epistemic status, I argue, is knowledge. In Chapter 3, I address a puzzle about a tension between the norms of inquiry and the norms of belief. I propose two resolutions of the puzzle that have important consequences for understanding epistemic normativity. The first is thatepistemic norms are conditional on forming a doxastic attitude to a proposition, but have no say on whether to form a doxastic attitude at all. The second is that both positive and negative epistemic obligations, if they exist at all, are not satisfiable. In Chapter 4, I consider whether there are epistemic, rather than just practical, reasons to inquire. Evidentialists have argued that the answer is no, since there are only epistemic reasons for belief, while others have held that the answer isyes, because inquiry has an epistemic aim. In this chapter, I offer a different view: epistemic reasons are primarily for belief, but they also entail epistemic reasons to inquire when inquiring is needed for believing as we should.
Zoroastrian Philosophy in the Islamic World
Keywords: Dēnkard
global philosophy
Islam
Late Anitquity
Zoroastrianism

This dissertation describes a school of Zoroastrian philosophy that flourished in the 8th to 10th centuries of the Common Era. It is the first analysis of the school in terms of its own definitions, distinctions, and argument patterns. The school is named the Dēnkard School after the central extant text: the Dēnkard. The proponents of the Dēnkard School drew from Greek, Indian, and contemporary Islamic thought in order to articulate and advance a worldview rooted in the ancient Avestan literature of the Zoroastrians. They wrote in Middle Persian, and this makes them the earliest extant robust system of philosophy preserved in the Persian language. The dissertation discusses them both historical and philosophically. The historical origins of the school are obscure, but the fully articulated system dates to the early ʿAbbāsid period (8th – 10th CE). It is possible to outline six generations of the school, though only the thought of three of them stand out clearly. The earliest figure is The earliest representative is Adurfarrōbay (late 8th – early 9th), who is credited with revitalizing the Dēnkard as well as defending the religion in public. The second figure is Mardānfarrox (mid-9th), who was likely a younger contemporary of the philosopher al-Kindī (c. 800 – 873) and who wrote the most sophisticated public presentation of Dēnkard School philosophy. The third figure is Ādurbād (late 9th – early 10th), who finalized the Dēnkard as we have it today. The school mysteriously vanished in the century following Ādurbād, and the reasons for this disappearance are unclear. The philosophy of the Dēnkard School is articulated in two types of text: technical and public. The technical texts are terse and presume fluency in the system and so were likely only for internal scholastic use, while the public texts are clear and accessible and so show the school interacting with contemporary thinkers. Both types show familiarity with Greek, Indian, and contemporary Islamic thought, and both use this variety of sources to defend the metaphysical thesis of bifoundationalism. It’s the claim that all reality arises out of two independent and irreconcilable sources. Mardānfarrox develops this position through a polemic against the atheists, in which he argues for the existence of both a creator god as well as a contrary opposed to god. The Dēnkard develops it in a variety of ways, such as by arguing against absences or ontological negatives as well as by arguing that it’s directly available to the mind by being the absolute presumptions of thought.
Quantifying the impacts of resolution-dependent model errors on tropospheric ozone simulation
Keywords: Air quality
Convection
Ozone simulation
Resolution-dependent model errors
Stratosphere-troposphere-exchange

Ozone (O3) is an important trace gas in the troposphere, since it is a significant oxidant, greenhouse gas and pollutant. It is important to understand the processes controlling its distribution and variability. Although current Chemical Transport Models (CTMs) are capable of capturing the general characteristics of ozone, there are still biases in the models. One factor that contributes to the biases is the model resolution. This thesis quantifies the impacts of resolution- dependent model transport errors on modelled ozone, and discusses the main biases induced by coarse resolution.The GEOS-Chem model is run at the horizontal resolution of 2° x 2.5° and 4° x 5° at two different modes, with detailed and linearized chemistry, to isolate the dynamic and chemical impacts of coarse resolution. It is found that increased model resolution leads to a reduction in total stratosphere-troposphere-exchange (STE), which is compensated by an increase in net tropospheric chemical production. The ozone differences in the subtropical and extratropical upper troposphere are primarily attributed to the changes in STE. Meanwhile, convection is stronger in the higher resolution model, resulting in more ozone in the lower troposphere and less in the upper troposphere in the tropics at 2° x 2.5°. Evaluation with ozonesonde data confirms that the ozone simulation is improved in the higher resolution model. A second component of this thesis is an investigation of the impacts of re-computing convection online, which is one possible solution to restoring the weakened vertical transport in the tropics in the lower resolution model. Analyses show that re-computing the convection online at 4° x 5° would reduce the bias in ozone in the tropics, similar to the correction obtained in the higher resolution runs. A third component of this work is an evaluation of the modelled depths of the extratropical mixing region in the 2° x 2.5° model. The results indicate that the modelled mixing depth is comparable to that derived from observations, with a bias of about 1 km. It was also found that the model was capable of capturing the absence of a trend in the mixing region, suggesting that the 2° x 2.5° model could be suitable for ozone studies.
Closing the Gaps in Pediatric and Maternal Reference Standards for Biomarkers of Health and Disease
Keywords: clinical chemistry
pediatrics
pregnancy
reference intervals

Clinical biomarker assessment is integral to the diagnosis, prognostication, and monitoring of health and disease in pediatrics and during pregnancy. An understanding of the impact of dynamic physiological and metabolic adaptations throughout child growth and development as well as pregnancy on the circulating biochemistry is urgently needed to support evidence-based diagnostics. Inappropriate biomarker interpretation due to lack of high quality evidence significantly increases risk of misinformed clinical decision-making, with serious implications for mother and child. I postulate that pediatric and maternal reference values for the majority of routine and emerging clinical biomarkers change significantly during these periods, necessitating establishment of evidence-based reference intervals in these specific populations. Profiling of 78 biochemical and immunochemical parameters as well as 62 hematological parameters in healthy children and adolescents (birth to <19 years) was completed, resulting in a robust reference database of age- and sex-stratified pediatric reference intervals for clinical biomarkers of health and disease. Data mining techniques were also applied to interrogate a retrospective cohort of 120,000 healthy Canadian pregnant women and evaluate the influence of gestational age on 29 clinical biomarkers in uncomplicated pregnancy. A trimester-specific reference database for biochemical and hematological parameters was established and findings were validated in a newly derived prospective cohort of 104 healthy pregnant women. Findings revealed dynamic reference value patterns across the pediatric and gestational periods for biomarkers of renal, hepatic, thyroid, cardiac, inflammatory, and hematological function, supporting the urgent need for evidence-based reference intervals to improve laboratory assessment and clinical decision making in pediatric and maternal healthcare.
Machine Learning At-Home Physiotherapy Adherence
Keywords: Activity Recognition
Adherence
Inertial Sensors
Machine Learning
Physical Therapy
Physiotherapy

Adherence to prescribed physiotherapy is essential for successful treatment of rotator cuff pathology. Patients are typically responsible for performing the majority of physiotherapy independently at home, but methods for measuring adherence to home physiotherapy such as patient self-reporting lack objectivity and are prone to biases. Using state-of-the art machine learning (ML) techniques, our team has developed a Smart Physiotherapy Activity Recognition System (SPARS) for monitoring home shoulder physiotherapy adherence with inertial sensors in a commercial smart watch. The objectives of this thesis research are to advance ML research in physiotherapy adherence monitoring using smart watch inertial data, validate SPARS and its algorithms with clinical patient data, and to develop and deploy an ethically-guided SPARS-powered rehabilitation program. The newly developed SPARS technology was tested with a cohort of healthy volunteers, which allowed for the refinement of the technology prior to clinical use. An out-of-distribution (OOD) ML analysis was performed with the data collected, which advanced understanding of the use of ML algorithms for detecting activities of interest with human activity recognition (HAR) inertial data. A non-interventional validation study was performed with rotator cuff pathology patients, wherein smart watch inertial sensor data was collected using the SPARS system during supervised physiotherapy and independent home exercise sessions. An ML analysis of data collected by patients in the home setting was performed, yielding insights into ML physiotherapy exercise detection as well as home exercise performance. An analysis is presented comparing objective SPARS-generated measures of at-home physiotherapy participation and adherence with clinical outcomes and patient factors. Policy and ethics research guided the development of a SPARS-powered rehabilitation pilot program and SPARS-powered mobile apps providing real-time feedback on adherence, progress, and technique to both patients and treating physiotherapists. Output from this research and development work is presented, as well an analysis of data collected from a small patient cohort from this ongoing study. This research has advanced the field of ML HAR with inertial data, generated clinical and policy insights, and yielded an objective tool for monitoring and feedback of home shoulder physiotherapy adherence to inform individualized patient care.
The Unwired, the Ghost and the Automata: Utopian Reconfigurations of Collectives in Japanese Popular Culture
Keywords: Anime and manga studies
Critical theory
Japanese history
Japanese popular culture
Media studies
Videogame studies

This dissertation argues that utopian configurations of collectives emerge from popular culture, radically challenging dominant structures of power and conventional conceptualization of collective formation. The underlying argument posits that social change is necessary in the face of the devastating inequalities and discrimination, as well as the crippling exploitation of people and nature rooted in capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and colonialism which reinforce and sustain systemic violence. It also suggests that utopia is a key conceptual tool for conceptualizing approaches to social change and that popular culture is a rich terrain for experimentations in such change. Ultimately, it propounds that a reconfiguration of collectives is a fundamental component enabling social change. I thus navigate the three intertwined problems of utopia, popular culture, and collectives, for they are not only interconnected in their conceptual influences and histories, but also in the possibilities they hold. At bottom, my intervention is informed by a utopian framework of social change, engages in an exploration into the depths of popular culture as a productive playground for such change, and advances speculations on new ways of being together. In this dissertation, I develop three interrelated and cumulative configurations of collectives through the analysis of three media and popular culture works of fiction. I begin by considering the triple negation of mediation, the state and ultimately the interface in the anime series Serial Experiments Lain (1998), giving rise to the utopian imagining of alternative collectives I refer to as the Unwired Collectives. I then turn my attention to multimedia franchise Ghost in the Shell and propose the configuration of Ghost Collectives built on two pillars: the Stand Alone Complex which emerges from the transmedial cyborgian structure of the franchise, and the Reciprocity of the Ghost which defines the operative logic of transformative reciprocal exchange at the core of this new configuration. Finally, I re-functionalize these core concepts in the cumulative notion of Automata Collectives developed from the radical negation of endings in the videogame Nier: Automata (2017) and leading to a reconfiguration of the temporality of active participation that allows collectives to persist beyond their own ending.
The Role of the School Leader in Indigenous Education in Publicly Funded Ontario Schools
Keywords: curriculum
education
Indigenous
leadership
Ontario
schools

This study examined the ways in which school leaders are engaging in the work of Indigenous education within publicly funded schools in the province of Ontario. Interviews with ten school leaders were conducted to determine the skills, knowledge, strategies and perspectives they brought to their work and the openings and barriers they encountered at various levels of the system, in their attempts to move forward. A literature review provided an understanding of the existing research conducted in Ontario related to student and staff knowledge, curriculum and policy, and transformational leadership, as well as bringing Indigenous voice to the forefront in terms of the scope that Indigenous education and pedagogy can include. Critical race theory offered a theoretical lens through which to interpret the data, as this theory purports that colonization has resulted in vast inequities and the perpetuation of oppressive structures that benefit White supremist systems at the expense of Indigenous peoples, and peoples of Colour more generally. Operating within that system, the research highlighted the ways in which principals and vice principals work within their direct sphere of influence (the school) to support the learning of staff and students related to Indigenous education. A nested conceptual framework provided clarity to examine the impacts and influences of the various levels (society, Ministry of Education, School Board, community, Indigenous community, and school) impacting the work of school leaders. The findings also demonstrated systemic gaps and areas of need for further attention and funding. While pockets of in-depth work and professional development in Indigenous education were evident, foundational gaps in student and staff knowledge were also noted, along with questions about cultural appropriation and resistance to change. School leaders pointed out the importance of ongoing Indigenous partnerships within schools, and the need for further funding and structures to support such relationships. To address existing gaps, recommendations included curriculum overhaul through authentic partnerships with Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, Indigenous educators, and government funding to make such change a reality.