VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Culture and Private School Choice
Keywords: Cultural transmission
Culture
Inequality
Private school
School choice

In sociology, the role of education in cultural reproduction and, by extension, in the reproduction of class-based inequalities has been widely examined. School choice scholars have drawn on work exploring differences in cultural resources (e.g., capital) and comportments (e.g., habitus, concerted cultivation) to highlight the role of school choice in cultural reproduction. However, focus has generally been on differences between choosers and non-choosers, and on the choice between public school and other schooling options. As such, little is known regarding how, once they have decided to engage in private school choice, parents go about selecting specific schools. Moreover, while much attention has been given to practical and academic considerations in shaping parents’ school preferences, the role of cultural factors remains underexamined. When culture is considered, it is generally to examine class-based differences in resources and dispositions between choosers and non-choosers, neglecting potential differences among those engaging in choice. Finally, although parents engaging in school choice ultimately choose among schools to which their children are granted admission, little is known regarding schools’ selection of students/families and if cultural processes linked to homophily and cultural matching identified in other domains factor into these choices. This dissertation seeks to fill these gaps while arguing for a greater attention to the role of culture in furthering our understanding of all dimensions of private school choice. It does so – through distinct papers drawing on three sources of original data (interviews and a survey with parents engaging in school choice and interviews with private school administrators) – in three complementary ways: (1) by highlighting the centrality of culture and values in shaping parents’ preferences for and selection of private schools, (2) by showing how differences in access to field-specific cultural and social resources influence parents’ ability to fulfill their school choice wants and, by extension, to transmit advantages to their children, and (3) by drawing attention not only to the role of cultural matching in schools’ selection of students, but also to how these selection processes vary across schools with differing levels of selectivity and how parents’ cultural resources and dispositions interface with the interactive matching process.
Abandoning the Path of Least Resistance: Struggle in Health Professions Education
Keywords: adaptive expertise
desirable difficulties
health professions education
instructional design
preparation for future learning
productive failure

A significant challenge when assessing health-professions trainees is that our assessment methods tend to be retrospective. As such, we are missing the ability to assess how adaptive our students will be when they begin practising in the healthcare system. To address these gaps and to advance the science of health professions education, this dissertation draws on theories from psychology and the learning sciences to explore systems of instruction and assessment that develop adaptive expertise and the ability to continue learning in the future. In this dissertation, I investigate the relationship between productive failure and active generation, the flexibility of learning through struggle, and the role of conceptual knowledge formation when designing instruction that prepares students to learn in the future. I designed the studies in this dissertation to achieve the following research aims: 1) to characterize the relationship between productive failure and active generation, 2) to study whether the manipulation of pretesting questions by difficulty can support performance on future learning assessments, 3) to examine the role of prior knowledge when learning through struggle, and 4), to examine the role of conceptual knowledge as a cognitive mechanism when learning through failure. The results from my first study emphasize the crucial role of generation in learning. The results of my second study demonstrate that we can leverage testing using theories of productive failure to support the development of expertise and that the quality of the struggle experienced by the learner depends on the learner's prior knowledge. The results from my third study establish that productive failure allows students to develop conceptual knowledge that facilitates transfer. Collectively, the manuscripts presented here show how learning through struggle relates to conceptual knowledge development and preparation for future learning. These instructional design strategies have the value of accentuating the difference between performance and learning and ensuring that measures of learning are central to assessing learner’s success. Practically, the research lays the groundwork for designing educational interventions and curricula to develop pharmacist trainees who can be adaptive and flexible with their knowledge to solve future, unforeseen problems that will inevitably arise in their practice.
Non-parametric Identification and Estimation of Demand and Preferences using Scanner Data
Keywords: Demand
Non-Parametric
Preferences
Scanner Data

This thesis presents three essays on the partial non-parametric identification and estimation of demand and preferences using scanner data. In the first essay, I consider a critical real-world problem: the formal identification and estimation of food stamp fraud in the United States. It is shown that consumption choices can be used to bound fraud. The estimation procedure in this essay uses a standard assumption. In particular, it assumes that there exists a conditional quantile of consumption that coincides with an individual demand function. This assumption is strong, but useful for the structural estimation problem at hand. In the second and third essays, I propose flexible methods for estimating demand and preferences using scanner data that do not require this strong assumption. In the first proposed method, heterogeneity across consumers is introduced by assuming that the marginal rate of substitution is a random field. In such an environment, the theory of generalized functions can be used to test the integrability of expected demand at a parametric rate. If variation in preferences is small, then preferences can be recovered by approximating the relationship between preferences and demand with a first-order expansion and applying an analogue of the delta-method. In the second proposed method, individual-level heterogeneity is characterized by a distribution, and the heterogeneity across consumers is characterized by a Dirichlet process F over such distributions. Two frameworks for estimation are considered: a Bayesian framework in which F is known, and a hyperparametric (or empirical Bayesian) framework in which F is a member of a parametric family. Both methods are illustrated by applications to alcohol consumption.
Organizational Responses to COVID-19 in Canadian Symphony Orchestras - Six Case Studies
Keywords: Canadian music
case studies
organizational studies
symphony orchestras

This study is a collection of six case studies of Canadian orchestras which examines the differences in organizational responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Case studies method is utilized to explore the connection between the various facets of the external environment and the orchestras. The research question “How do Canadian symphony orchestras monitor and respond to their organizational environment in relation to COVID-19?” frames the focus of the study to understand how various environmental and organizational contingencies affect the organizational actions in response to the crisis caused by the pandemic. Each case study is composed of a research report with a comprehensive description of the orchestra and its environment, a discussion of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a detailed account of how each orchestra has responded to the pandemic crisis. Five hypotheses are analyzed and discussed using a theoretical framework. The framework merges the basic concepts of resource dependency theory and population ecology theory and incorporates four different units of analysis. The results of the research revealed each case orchestra had unique traits, contingencies and the external environment that influenced the organizational actions they took to mediate the impact of the pandemic. In general, the large and more professional orchestras with more than 10 million dollars in annual revenue, focused on keeping their musicians working, maintaining their organizational presence in the community and increasing legitimacy through various partnerships. Medium sized orchestras with annual revenue between 1 to 10 million dollars, have focused on keeping their concerts and the existing audience base. Small and/or community-based orchestras with under a million in their annual revenue focused on keeping the organizational structure and reaching out to their existing donor/audience base. The pandemic has forced all six case orchestras to act fast and move most of their organizational functions online and make the online presence more permanent.
Investigation of the TERT promoter DNA methylation status in human cancer
Keywords: Cancer
DNA methylation
Epigenetics
Telomere
TERT
THOR

Telomere maintenance is a hallmark of human cancer. In the majority of human cancer, telomere maintenance is achieved by reactivation of telomerase. TERT – a reverse transcriptase component of telomerase – is a proto-oncogene that governs the telomerase activity and is transcriptionally dysregulated in cancer. While genetic alterations including mutations affecting the TERT promoter has been described, the exact mechanism of TERT reactivation in human cancer cells remains poorly understood. The focus of this Ph.D. thesis is to investigate biological and clinical implications of aberrant DNA hypermethylation within the TERT promoter observed uniquely in human cancer. I initially uncovered a cancer-specific DNA hypermethylated region within the TERT promoter – which I defined as the TERT Hypermethylated Oncological Region (THOR) – and show high prevalence of this epigenetic alteration in the context of human cancer. I then determine the biological and clinical implications of THOR hypermethylation, leading to its potency as a therapeutic target and a diagnostic biomarker. Lastly, I elucidate a new model of differential allelic THOR hypermethylation in human cancer and how it can explain differential allelic expression of TERT. Together, these studies provide an insight into the DNA methylation landscape of the TERT promoter, introduce a THOR-dependent TERT upregulatory mechanism, and propose therapeutic and diagnostic potential of THOR hypermethylation signature.
What Causes Health? Revisiting the Social Determinants of Health (SDH) Through a Salutogenic Lens and Self-reported Health (SRH) as the Main Outcome: A Realist Evaluation
Keywords: Critical Realism
Network Analysis
Salutogenesis
Self-Reported Health
Sense of Coherence
Social Determinants of Health

For centuries healthcare has been driven by a disease-oriented mindset. Built on the Enlightenment philosophers’ thoughts and insights, this mindset has separated self from body, defined health as the absence of physiological disorders, and reduced healthcare to a disease elimination campaign. Even the social determinants of health (SDH) models have been designed to reduce the prevalence of the disease and to detect and correct pathogenic mechanisms of “social production of disease.” However, studies show that people with chronic or terminal conditions identify themselves as healthy. In the late 1970s and in his theory of Salutogenesis, Antonovsky hypothesized that people with a strong sense of coherence (SOC) manage to maintain their health, facing stressors created by life challenges. Informed by the realist evaluation methodology, this study explores how a Salutogenic SDH model operates if the duality of self and body is challenged by replacing medicine-diagnosed disease with self-reported health (SRH) as the outcome of the SDH models. In the first chapter, I argued that approaching health from a pathogenic perspective is misleading and has created many unintentional harms like the medicalization of life. From synthesizing seventy-one reviews (Chapter Two), I found that SRH can replace medicine-diagnosed diseases in SDH models. The systematic review (Chapter Three) showed that SOC has a robust and positive impact on the SRH of individuals, and its impact on the relationship between SDH and SRH is similar to that between SDH and disease. However, based on the findings from two review papers, I argued that to develop a true salutogenic SDH model, merely changing the outcome and even adding SOC as another determinant to the list of SDH is not enough. In a salutogenic model, a salutogenic outcome should be supported by a salutogenic mechanism. Using a network approach to data analysis in chapter four, I created an interface between the National Population Health Survey dataset and the realist evaluation methodology. I showed how strong SOC improves the general resilience of a person’s network of determinants and protects her health when a life challenge turns a determinant in the network turns from a resource into a deficit.
Topology and Magnetism in Quantum Materials
Keywords: anomalous Hall effect
chiral spin liquid
Kerr effect
optical Hall effect
skyrmion
Weyl semimetal

In this thesis, we study various electron systems with nontrivial topological characters emerging in real space, in reciprocal space, or driven by electron-electron interactions, from which a variety of extraordinary properties in thermodynamics, transport, and optics are uncovered. We begin with systems hosting real-space skyrmion spin texture known to induce an emergent magnetic field for conduction electrons in metallic magnets, resulting in observable anomalies in transport phenomena such as Hall effect and Nernst effect. We examine how the topological charge density of skyrmions can be tuned by the Zeeman field coupled to the spin texture, which in turn tunes the emergent magnetic field. Conduction electrons sensing such a tuneable emergent magnetic field are shown to exhibit anomalous quantum oscillations in physical quantities in addition to the conventional quantum oscillations from Landau quantization due to an orbital magnetic field. We then turn to study the impact of skyrmions on the optical Hall conductivity of the conduction electrons, from which a high-frequency resonant feature is found. A sum rule is discovered, which relates properties of the Hall resonance to the density of skyrmions in the system. The second part of the thesis is inspired by a remarkable oxide ferromagnet SrRuO3 where both momentum-space and real-space topology have been reported. Earlier works suggested the presence of topological Weyl nodes in the band structure, while Hall-effect experiments on its thin films detected anomalies reminiscent of the Hall-effect signature of skyrmions. In fact, there is a debate on the skyrmion origin versus the momentum space Berry curvature origin of these anomalies. Intriguingly, similar anomalies are observed in magneto-optical Kerr effect in thin films. We provide theoretical evidence suggesting a common origin from magnetic domains for the observed anomalies: (1) Kerr anomalies arise from magnetic domains and an unusual non-monotonic relation between Kerr angle and magnetization, whereas (2) Hall anomalies may be linked to highly skew domain-wall scatterings, occurring when there are Weyl nodes near the Fermi level. Finally, we study a bilayer Haldane model where Hubbard interactions can drive a topologically trivial band insulator into a strongly correlated topological phase. A slave-rotor mean-field approach is used to study its phase diagram and its properties, including its edge electron spectral function.
Substance Use Recovery and Stigma in Rural Contexts
Keywords: critical discourse analysis
identity
recovery
rural
stigma
substance use

BackgroundThe concept of recovery holds international legitimacy as a client-centered, strengths-based approach to mental health and substance use. How dominant recovery discourses shape the identities and affect the lives of people with substance use issues in rural areas have received little attention. The purpose of this three-paper dissertation is to better understand power operating within recovery discourses and trace the sociocultural processes by which stigmatized identities are constructed and resisted. Foucauldian and intersectionality theories are used to address the questions: 1) How do recovery discourses shape the identities of people with substance use issues in rural Ontario? 2) How do recovery discourses affect the daily lives of people with substance use issues in rural Ontario? 3) What strategies for resistance are employed to challenge substance use stigma? Methods Paper 1 presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two federal documents to examine how recovery is understood in Canada. Paper 2 applies a CDA to 40 semi-structured interviews with people with substance use issues in two rural communities to explore how they adopt and contest recovery discourses. Paper 3 presents a thematic analysis of the same 40 interviews to consider how people with substance use issues experience recovery, stigma, and resistance. Findings Findings from Paper 1 illustrate that dominant recovery discourses are enmeshed in complex networks of neoliberal, biomedical, legal, and moral discourses that (re)produce stigmatized identities at macro and micro levels, complicating the recovery literature and challenging normative assumptions related to substance use. Papers 2 and 3 present the voices of people with substance use issues in rural areas. Their experiences and perspectives align with and contest dominant recovery discourses and provide numerous strategies of resistance to counter substance use stigma. Conclusion This thesis complicates the growing body of substance use recovery literature in rural communities. The analyses of federal documents and personal narratives not only expose underlying power relations and ideological values that construct a reductionist model of recovery and perpetuate stigmatized identities, but encourage researchers, educators, policymakers, practitioners, and marginalized groups to advocate for more equitable approaches to recovery that eradicate stigma related to rural substance use.
Smart Thermostat Use in Multi-unit Residential Buildings: Impacts on Occupant Behaviour, Thermal Comfort, and Energy Performance
Keywords: energy management
HVAC
multi-unit residential buildings
occupant comfort
residential buildings
smart thermostats

As the proportion of the population who resides in urban centers grows, the number of dwellings in high-rise residential buildings is also increasing. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) typically accounts for over half of all energy use in this building type and, as such, consideration of these loads is key to effective energy demand-side management. Connected, smart thermostats provide new opportunities for energy management in high-rise residential buildings by facilitating access to suite-level data for building operators and researchers, improving occupant interfaces, and enabling the implementation of new in-suite HVAC control strategies (e.g., occupancy-based and load shifting control, as explored here). In this thesis, the impacts of smart thermostat use on occupant behaviour, thermal comfort, and energy performance were investigated through a field study in two contemporary high-rise residential buildings in Toronto, Canada. The key findings for each of these areas are summarized below.1. Occupant Thermal Comfort and Behaviours: Over-conditioning of suites occurred frequently in both buildings, despite the presence of in-suite temperature controls, resulting in thermal discomfort for occupants. As compared to conventional, programmable thermostats, higher schedule programming rates were observed amongst the study population, who has smart thermostats installed in their suites. 2. Thermostat Control Strategies:Occupancy-based thermostat control was estimated to reduce suite-level HVAC use by 5.9% ± 46% on average in the studied suites, however the energy impacts were limited by pre-existing short terminal HVAC unit runtimes (average runtime of 5 minutes/hour in the heating season and 12 minutes/hour in the cooling season). Overall, the load shifting strategy was ineffective, however, substantial shifting of suite HVAC load from on-peak to off-peak periods was observed in a subset of suites. 3. Chiller Plant Operation and Performance: Based on chiller plant operation data, modelling showed that reductions in building space cooling demand had diminishing returns in terms of reducing electricity use –the first 10% to 20% of space cooling demand reductions had the most impact on chiller plant electricity use. Further, using weather-based regression models and typical meteorological year forecasts for the 2040s, space cooling electricity use was forecasted to increase by 21% over 2020 levels.
Additive Material and Device Engineering for Stable Perovskite Solar Cells
Keywords: additive
perovskite
solar cell
stability

Metal-halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have risen rapidly in solar power conversion efficiency over the past decade. However, practical impact for PSCs will require stable materials and device architectures. The thesis focuses on strategies to improve the stability of PSCs and to realize devices that achieve high efficiency combined with good stability. In particular, the use of chemical additives – those that transform 3D lattices into quantum wells, additives that stabilize desired 3D crystal structures, and dopants that help shape the electric field profile in devices – adds a degree of freedom that I exploit in perovskite engineering with the goal of uniting performance and stability.I begin by analyzing ion-migration-induced degradation in PSCs operating at maximum power point (MPP). I find that using quasi-2D perovskites suppresses this undesired ion migration process. Compared to 3D devices that operate reliably for less than 10 hours, optimized quasi-2D perovskites show negligible performance degradation over 80 hours of operation while providing efficiency comparable to that of 3D perovskite devices. Next, I investigate the structural stability of CsPbI3 perovskite. I propose a method to create stable tetragonal Cs-based perovskites with a bandgap near 1.7 eV by adding small amounts of large A-site cations into the crystal lattice. Using mixed Cs and large organic cations, I stabilized Cs-based perovskites and achieve a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 15.2% and MPP stability of 230 hours. Finally, I investigate the stability and efficiency of devices that exploit perovskites with a p-i-n structure that is thermally stable at 85°C. CsFA perovskite is known to be thermally stable but has previously yielded low performance due to a low charge carrier diffusion length. I propose a band-engineering method to enhance the extraction of photocharges. Compared to the original p-i-n CsFA solar cells with a PCE of 18%, band-engineered solar cells achieved 20.3% stabilized power output and survive an 85°C heating test. This work presents a suite of strategies to improve the stability of PSCs, an important step toward economic and environmental impact. The understanding of PSC degradation and the countermeasures provided in this work contribute to further development of perovskite-based devices.