VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Path Dependence, Abnormal Times Missed Opportunities: Exploring factors that facilitate or constrain implementation of institutional reforms post catastrophic natural disasters
Keywords: Abnormal Times
Incremental reforms
Institutional change
Natural Disaster
Negative feedback
Path Dependence

Path dependence literature largely accepts that large-scale disasters trigger abnormal times that weaken path dependence and create windows of opportunity to bring about institutional reforms. Yet experience suggests that institutional reforms are rarely implemented post catastrophic disasters. This thesis examines factors that might explain why the windows of opportunity triggered by disasters are missed in some cases, while seized in others. This question is explored by juxtaposing two case studies: the Gorkha 2015 earthquakes (Nepal) and the Uttarakhand 2013 flood (India). My analysis reveals the critical role of (a) gradual reforms taken during normal times and its influence on actions taken during abnormal times, (b) negative feedback by external and internal actors, and (c) denial or acknowledgement of negative feedback by internal actors. Based on the findings, I elaborate policy suggestions that may aid in mitigating the possibility of abnormal times repeatedly becoming missed opportunities.
Socratic Method and Moral Motivation
Keywords: Conversion
Eros
Exhortation
Plato
Refutation
Socrates

I argue for a new account of the role of philosophical argument in changing a person’s core values. As philosophers, we tend to think it is possible to cause someone to change his values by directing some piece of reasoning at him. But that is often naïve, as can be seen by the trajectory of many political disputes: one side takes an argument to be persuasive, and the other refuses to accept it. As it happens, this is the exact progression of many Platonic dialogues. Socrates argues that his interlocutor’s core values are mistaken, and his interlocutor, despite being unable to identify where, if anywhere, the argument goes astray, rejects its conclusion. Is, then, argument out of work when it comes to changing a person’s core values? Many scholars, including Martha Nussbaum, Gregory Vlastos, and Alexander Nehamas, hold that Plato believes as much. On the standard view, Plato thinks that philosophical argument is an ineffective way of reforming a person’s life, and he rejects Socrates’ project, as outlined in the Apology, of using philosophical argument to persuade his interlocutors to value wisdom more than money, honor, and everything else. Against this standard view, I argue that Plato offers a compelling account of how philosophical argument can be effective at transforming a person’s values. As has not been appreciated by other scholars, Socrates uses his methods of refutation and exhortation in most cases not to advocate wisdom’s overriding importance, but rather to motivate pursuing wisdom merely for its instrumental value, and this because it is the instrumental pursuit of wisdom that is meant to be transformative. Socrates’ overall strategy, then, is not unlike that of the professor who recruits a student to philosophy with the promise that it will improve her LSAT scores, all the while anticipating that, once the student experiences the thrill of abstract, intellectual inquiry, she will lose her legal ambitions and devote herself to philosophical studies. What justifies this strategy, in our eyes and Plato’s, is that, in some important contexts, including the choice of a way of life, the right reasons can come into view only after taking up some practice, and so the practice cannot be motivated by the right reasons until it is taken up on some other basis.
Entanglements: Volkswagen de MĂŠxico and Global Capitalism
Keywords: Capitalism
Car Production
Cars
Mexico
NAFTA
Transnational Corporation

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of global capitalism. It examines the multilayered presence of Volkswagen de México to grapple with the double-edged sword of transnational economic dependencies. Car manufacturing in Mexico has created jobs for a number of college graduates, middle class status, modes of relationality and care, and even the possibility to migrate to Germany. At the same time global car production relies on a large number of low-wage and uncertain jobs, on mechanisms that make labor cheap and discipline the labor force, as well as on land and water dispossession. While Volkswagen de México is a medium of inclusivity into 21st century global capitalism, it has also created contentious relations on the ground: among those who celebrate the presence of the factory, those who oppose it, those who have been violently excluded, and among unionized and non-unionized workers. To elucidate this complex and convoluted landscape of social relations, this study examines how transnational car production intersects with processes of nation-state formation, local ideas about status, and personal aspirations, as well as the conjunctures between global transformations, manufacturing, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. This dissertation shows how Volkswagen’s car economy has endured through forms of domination, subjugation and accommodation, and traces its not-always-predictable effects on the ground. Thereby it offers a nuanced and textured account of how global capitalism is constituted trans-locally.
Ivan Goes Abroad: The Red Army in the Balkans and Central Europe, 1944-1945
Keywords: Red Army
Sexual violence
World War II

Ivan Goes Abroad: The Red Army in the Balkans and Central Europe, 1944-1945 explores the Red Army’s occupation of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria in World War II, focusing on the issue of sexual violence against women. In order to explain the Soviet troops’ behavior, Ivan Goes Abroad examines the Kremlin’s policies in each country that they occupied, the Red Army’s propaganda line, the leadership’s disciplinary policies toward criminals in the ranks, and the frontline soldiers’ and officers’ attitudes to the local population. A potent mix of factors from above and below resulted in mass rapes. Many Soviet male troops viewed women primarily as sex objects, believing that their membership in a victorious Red Army entitled them to women’s bodies, even by force. Furthermore, as the Red Army’s soldiers and officers moved across the Balkans and Central Europe, they developed a series of stereotypes about countries that they encountered. These views were mostly independent of the official line, although they were extremely common among the rank and file and higher ranking officers. When soldiers attributed to a nation positive characteristics, as was the case in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, they behaved with relative restraint. In contrast, when they assigned negative characteristics to a nation, as was the case in Romania, Hungary, and Austria, they wreaked havoc against the civilians. The high command sent mixed signals to the rank and file about the acceptability of violence against civilians. Although robberies, rapes, and murders of civilians were always illegal in the Red Army, the commanding officers’ permissive attitude towards the violence, the dehumanizing hate propaganda against Romanians, Hungarians, and Austrians, as well as the inability of the high command to impose discipline on the frontline troops, signalled to the rank and file that their crimes would go largely unpunished.
â In the Language of the Patriarchâ : Patriarch Tikhon, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Soviet State (1865-1925)
Keywords: canon law
Orthodox Church
Russian Revolution
Tikhon

In 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church became independent from the state for the first time in two centuries. The first All-Russian Church Council voted to restore the institution of the patriarchate, and in the midst of the Bolshevik Revolution, Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) was chosen to become the Patriarch of Moscow and All-Rus. Tikhon’s eight-year tenure as patriarch spanned the crucial period during which two powerful currents—long-awaited ecclesiastical reform and unexpected political upheaval—converged and clashed. This dissertation reconstructs the language and worldview of Patriarch Tikhon, tracing the historical roots of the ideas and beliefs he espoused. The patriarch’s mode of speaking about Russia, the human person, and the meaning of life and history represented an alternative to Bolshevik definitions of those same terms. Patriarch Tikhon has been largely ignored by Western scholars of Russia. In recent years, historians of Soviet Russia have argued that we ought to take more seriously the discourse of Bolshevik actors and consider that Bolshevik language revealed a great deal about the worldview and practices of the Bolsheviks themselves. This dissertation proceeds on the assumption that the same can be said of the patriarch’s language. It analyzes how this language developed in the pre-revolutionary period, how it fit within larger trends in Orthodox thought and practice, and what it meant for Tikhon, his contemporaries, and the Bolsheviks. This centerpiece of this study is the published version of the sledstvennoe delo or “investigatory file” of Patriarch Tikhon. The file contains information gathered by the secret police about the patriarch from 1918 to 1925. Each chapter relies on different types of sources in order to parse the language of the investigatory file. These include archival documents from the Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), and the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), and from the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Published sources include records of correspondence between Tikhon and government representatives, friends, and other clergymen; theological journals from the nineteenth century; diocesan newspapers from all of the dioceses in which Tikhon served; post-revolutionary Russian newspapers; foreign newspapers; and memoirs.
Arterial and Venous Identity during Angiogenesis in Health and Diabetes
Keywords: Arterial and venous identity
Diabetes
ECs/PVCs
HGF
notch signaling
PDGF

Background: Vascular complications of diabetes are due in part to impaired angiogenesis. The extent to which these problems are due to disturbed identification of newly formed endothelial cells (EC) as ‘arterial’ or ‘venous’ (i.e. AV specification), recruitment of perivascular cells (PVC), or perturbed growth factor expression, had not been addressed. Methods Results: Using microvascular preparations from type-I diabetes (T1D) and non-diabetic animals transplanted into T1D and non-diabetic hosts, we show that mice T1D have impaired vessel AV specification, displaying ubiquitous expression of arterial marker ephrin-B2, loss of hierarchical organization, and reduced PVC coverage. Blockage of PVC recruitment in normoglycemic mice did not affect blood flow, but recapitulated the vascular immaturity of T1D, implicating PVCs in AV-specification. The latter occurred with downregulated Jagged1 and Notch3, key modulators of EC-PVC interactions. Co-cultures showed that PVCs induce arterial identity by increasing ephrin-B2, while decreasing venous marker eph-B4. This was antagonized by hyperglycemia or by inhibiting Jagged1 in EC. Vessel sprouting and consequent loss of AV identity was also dependent on hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) secreted from PVCs, with HGF levels decreased in T1D. Vessel anastomosis and implant perfusion was delayed in T1D,suggesting a role for HGF in inosculation. Finally, EC exposed to pulsatile stretch (mimicking pulsatile flow) upregulated platelet-derived growth factor-b (PDGFb), which was blunted by hyperglycemia. Importantly, microvessels from mice with T1D displayed normal PVC coverage, hierarchical organization and Jagged1/Notch3 expression after implantation into non-diabetic hosts, indicating no ‘metabolic memory’. Conclusion: We show that AV identity is impaired in T1D, due to abnormal PVC recruitment, dysregulated expression of HGF (by PVC) and PDGFb (by EC). These findings are associated with disordered Jagged1-Notch3 signaling, and lead to ineffective vascular connections with the host, which can be normalized in non-diabetic hosts.
Burlesque Natural Philosophers: Eighteenth-Century Satires of Science and Social Innovation
Keywords: British
Eighteenth Century
Restoration
Satire
Science

Abstract This dissertation examines the socio-political underpinnings of the satires about science that proliferated in British literature from 1660 to 1800. Most scholarship on the topic assumes that frequent literary assaults reflected a prevailing scepticism about science, and this assumption continues to prejudice analyses of satires like The Virtuoso (1676), Blazing World (1668), and the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (pub.1741). However, science was widely embraced as a reliable mode of investigation, and people were generally enthusiastic about it. Why then are there so many farcical natural philosophers in eighteenth century literature and so few respectable ones? I argue that the satirical virtuoso served as a focal point for new forms of social conflict. His zeal for scientific innovation registered broader, often unacknowledged, anxieties about Englandâ s emerging cultural of innovation. Thus, burlesque natural philosophers, who strive to topple traditional hierarchies of knowledge, serve as proxies for the dynamic middle orders, who were seen to threaten traditional social hierarchies. The dissertation is composed of five case studies focusing on different moments of intersection between science and social hierarchies. The first study is of Margaret Cavendish, whose fantastical travelogue Blazing World and its companion treatise on Experimental Natural Philosophy (1668) articulate the perceived link between epistemic and political revolution in a manner that most eighteenth-century satires merely imply. Next I examine Dr. John Woodward, perpetual butt of the Scriblerian group, whose satires fashioned him as an embodiment of social ambition and cultural degeneration. I then discuss three scientific parodies by Henry Fielding and how they reflected the growing presence of science in popular culture. The fourth chapter is on the surprising prevalence of science in oriental tales, and how stories like Rasselas (1759) and Vathek (1786) used the imaginative east to reflect on prospective technological advances like manned flight and large-scale engineering projects. The final chapter, on Elizabeth Hamiltonâ s anti-Jacobin novel Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), explores the paradox of late-century conservatives who embraced scientific and economic progress, but who continued to regard such progress as threatening traditional social structures.
On the Effectiveness and Challenges of Electrosynthesis Strategies in Escherichia coli
Keywords: Escherichia coli
ethylene glycol
glycolic acid
metabolic engineering
orthogonality

Conventional bioprocesses that aim to convert CO2 to fuels and chemicals do so through a supply chain that begins with agricultural products such as corn, intermediaries like dextrose, and eventually produce chemicals by fermentation. However, it has long been desired that bioprocesses be established to convert CO2 point source emissions to chemicals. Fundamentally, this is a thermodynamics problem since the use of CO2 as a feedstock requires an efficient mechanism to deliver energy to produce chemicals. The focus of this work is to examine several strategies for microbial electrosynthesis, the delivery of electrical energy to microbial cell factories, for producing chemicals. The study encompasses four areas type of microbial electrosynthesis and the results are summarized here: 1) Experimental work was performed to evaluate the affect of neutral red mediated charge transfer in mutant strains of Escherichia coli for the purpose of producing succinic acid. The results of this task showed wild-type cells exhibited the greatest molar increase in succinate yield with an 89% increase while an ldhA deficient strain showed 40% increase. The lack of direct charge transfer was implicated as the cause since an electron balance was not able to account for an increase in succinate. 2) We explored the use of mediators such has formate that can be generated from carbon dioxide and renewable electricity as a carbon source for cell growth and chemical production. An auxotrophic strategy was employed to engineer formate assimilation, and growth rate on formate as a C1 donor for folate was determined to be 0.33 h-1. This was 78% of the wild-type strain. 3) We developed a framework for analyzing how metabolic pathways can be efficiently engineered into microbes to produce chemicals. This orthogonality framework showed ethylene glycol to be a highly promising substrate for electrosynthesis applications. 4) Finally, a bioprocess for the conversion of ethylene glycol to glycolic acid was characterized and its suitability to replace glucose as a feedstock was examined. The maximum glycolate titres for the best performing conditions reached 10.6 g/L. The highest substrate uptake rate for ethylene glycol was determined to be ca. 5 mmol/gDW-h.
Dinosaur Palaeoecology in the Late Cretaceous of Alberta: Quantitative Assessments Using Vertebrate Microfossil Bonebeds and Stable Isotope Analyses
Keywords: Community Ecology
Cretaceous
Dinosaur
Palaeoecology
Paleontology
Stable Isotope

The Belly River Group (BRG) of Alberta is one of the best-sampled Late Cretaceous terrestrial faunal assemblages in the world, providing a high-resolution biostratigraphic record of terrestrial vertebrate diversity, and has potential to be a model system for testing hypotheses of dinosaur palaeoecological dynamics. Vertebrate microfossil bonebeds (VMBs; assemblages of small bones and teeth concentrated together over a relatively short time and representative of community composition) offer an unparalleled dataset to better test these hypotheses by ameliorating problems of sample size, geography, and chronostratigraphic control that hamper many palaeoecological analyses. The first half of this thesis uses the largest VMB dataset yet assembled to test if trends in vertebrate diversity and community structure in the BRG are best explained as a response to environmental and sea-level change, and finds that while the vertebrate community as a whole was sensitive to these changes, the dinosaurs were not. This provides evidence against the long-held idea that dinosaur communities were sensitive to small-scale environmental gradients within a single depositional basin. The second half of this thesis tests hypotheses of dinosaur diet and niche partitioning using stable carbon and oxygen isotope analyses of species and guilds in a VMB assemblage. Results of these analyses refute the hypothesis that large diet-tissue fractionations explain enriched stable carbon values previously found in dinosaurs, as similarly enriched values are found in multiple sampled vertebrate groups, suggesting instead that they are related to changes in local isotopic baseline. These isotope data were then compared with a similar analytical sample from a modern analogue vertebrate community collected from Louisiana. Broad overlap exists in many of the species and guild distributions in both the extant and fossil systems, suggesting a lack of community-level saturation in resource use, less exclusionary control on niche occupation, and stronger selection for generalists rather than specialists. Overall, the results of this thesis suggest that greater care should be taken when making inferences into dinosaur community dynamics in the absence of thorough quantitative assessments and extant analogue data.
Cultural Constructions of Trauma and the Therapeutic Interventions of Caribbean Healing Traditions
Keywords: Caribbean healing traditions
Counselling and psychotherapy
Cultural competence
Historical trauma
PTSD
Spirit possession

The psychological literature indicates that integrating traditional healing practices into counselling and psychotherapy with Caribbean clients may address some of the mental health concerns of this population and the underutilization of mental health services. Traditional healing is often used in lieu of mental health services; however, the lack of knowledge of the precise therapeutic interventions and mechanisms of change that are key components to such integration limit its clinical utility. To address this gap in the literature, this study explored the specific ways in which Caribbean individuals conceptualize trauma and the therapeutic interventions of Caribbean healing traditions as a treatment modality. A constructivist grounded theory approach was implemented in the data collection and analysis. Ten adults of Caribbean heritage living in Toronto, who used the therapeutic interventions of Caribbean healing traditions, each participated in one semi-structured interview. Three overarching themes emerged from the data: experiencing trauma and suffering, explanations and meaning of trauma and suffering, and healing interventions. The study highlights the role of history and culture in shaping idioms of trauma, distress and healing, and contributes to both research and practice by offering a substantive framework for assessing, diagnosing and treating Caribbean clients, which may address the many challenges to mental health care for this population.
Accelerating Secure Computations Under Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Keywords: Cybersecurity
FHE
Fully Homomorphic Encryption
GPU Acceleration
Secure Search

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) systems enable computations on encrypted data without decrypting and without knowledge of the secret key. In this thesis, we describe an optimized RLWE-based and NTRU-based variants of the FHE system recently proposed by Gentry, Sahai and Waters (GSW). Although the GSW system was widely believed to be less efficient than its contemporaries due to the dimensionality of its ciphertext, we demonstrate quite the opposite behavior. We first highlight and carefully exploit the algebraic features of the system to achieve significant speedup over the state-of-the-art FHE implementations, namely the IBM homomorphic encryption library (HElib) and DARPA's SIPHER implementation. We introduce several optimizations on top of our HE implementation, and use the resulting scheme to construct numerous secure applications. We introduce the first high performance Homomorphic Processing Unit (HPU) hardware accelerator. A carefully crafted parallel GPU implementation of our RLWE scheme running on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX980 achieved a speedup factor of 89,700x compared to DARPA's SIPHER v01 baseline implementation. Our single-staged homomorphic processing unit (HPU) hardware accelerator achieved a speedup factor of 57x compared to our GPU implementation. Our NTRU scheme is mathematically 4x more efficient than our RLWE scheme. In total, our NTRU scheme running on one single-staged HPU unit managed to achieve a combined speedup factor of 2x10^7 compared to DARPA's SIPHER v01 baseline implementation, which is twice the performance target originally set by DARPA's PROCEED program to accelerate fully homomorphic encryption. An additional 4.47x speedup can be achieved by implementing a log(n)-staged HPU unit at the cost of 3x the die area. Finally, by exploiting the computational independence in our FHE schemes and applications, a speedup factor of 10^9 can be achieved by distributing independent computations on 50 single-staged HPU units.