VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Cultivating Bodies, Discipline and Pleasures: An Institutional Ethnography of a Sports School
Keywords: body
discipline
institutional ethnography
pleasure
sports school
student-athlete

Despite the proliferation of sports schools across Canada, very little attention has been paid to them within Canadian education systems. Starting from this premise, and given the relatively little academic attention directed toward understanding the sports school in sociological, educational and cultural terms, my dissertation set out to critically explore the historical development and social meaning of sport and recreation in a Canadian sports school. Engaging in a detailed institutional ethnography, I specifically examined how the space, everyday lives and experiences of student-athletes and staff in a sports school are an effect of a matrix of discourses—institutional discourses (e.g., Sport Canada policy statements, institutional documents) bodily discourses (e.g., management of the body through disciplinary technologies) as well as normalization of injury discourses (e.g., injury as a pain-reward complex), to name a few. I argue that the (re)production of disciplinary technologies, framed by discourses of excellence, enabled the manifestation of desire as a productive force. I demonstrate that while the culture of the sports school involves living within disciplinary apparatuses—apparatuses that may in fact limit the body’s potentiality—paradoxically, living within these disciplinary technologies and networks of pouvoir, can open youth up to the potential (puissance) for a range of embodied pleasures, even if this potential is quickly harnessed by the forces of pouvoir (Pronger, 2002). What my research illustrates is that living within such spaces of discipline and pleasure becomes a way of enacting discourse and practices that athletes (and adults) choose to apply to themselves and their daily lives. While desire and pleasure can be organized through adultist cultures of excellence and performance, what my findings make clear is that young people are legitimate participants in creating the cultures of their classrooms and sportscapes and can be agents in how they experience and embody desire and pleasures in their lives.
Predicting Advanced Endovascular Aneurysm Repair Complications Using 3D Analytical Tools
Keywords: abdominal aortic aneurysm
endovascular
EVAR
fenestrated
stent graft

Fenestrated and branched endovascular aneurysm repair [(F/B)EVAR] is a minimally-invasive method for the treatment of aortic aneurysms involving the visceral segment. These procedures involve the placement of a stent graft that incorporates fenestrations or branches with the goal of excluding the aneurysmal sac while preserving blood flow to the visceral arteries. These fenestrations or branches need to align precisely with the target arteries to maintain blood flow and prevent ischemia related adverse events. The objective of these studies is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of stent graft misalignment and to identify methods to predict and prevent stent graft misalignment with a long-term goal of making these procedures safer and more effective for patients. Stent graft misalignment is a multifactorial process that includes stent graft planning, intraoperative positioning, and stent graft rotation. Greater than 50% of patients undergoing (F/B)EVAR had at least one misaligned renal fenestration and misalignment was associated with higher rates of procedural target vessel complications and severe post-operative adverse events. Similarly, intraoperative stent graft rotation (occurring in 37% of fenestrated procedures) was also associated with a 36% absolute increase in post-operative adverse events. In a multivariate analysis, factors predictive of stent graft rotation included iliac artery torsion, iliac artery calcification, and device length. Insertion technique also plays an important role in the degree of stent graft rotation. In vivo correction for orientation which is commonly performed during the insertion of the device appears to increase the observed rotation and supports the concept of fully removing the device, adjusting the orientation, and subsequently reinserting. Finally, this thesis describes a finite element analysis-based method for predicting the final location of the delivery system and the resulting aortoiliac deformation.
Essays in Labour and Urban Economics
Keywords: Entrepreneurship
Human capital
Occupational choice
Unobserved heterogeneity

This thesis contains three essays that focus on topics in labour and urban economics. In Chapter 1, I use new administrative Canadian matched owner-employer-employee data to investigate the mechanisms that drive entry into entrepreneurial careers and entrepreneurial success among young individuals. I pay particular attention to the value of prior work experience in entrepreneurship. I use information on the career choices and earnings of individuals each year to structurally estimate a dynamic Roy model of career choice. I recover parameters governing: (a) the returns to various types of experience in the labour market and in entrepreneurship, (b) the non-pecuniary benefits associated with being a worker and an entrepreneur, and (c) career-specific entry costs. I use the estimated model to evaluate the impact of policies designed to promote successful entrepreneurship. Chapter 2 (joint with Leah Brooks and Gisela Rua) investigates how containerization impacts local economic activity. Containerization is premised on a simple insight: packaging goods for waterborne trade into a standardized container makes them dramatically cheaper to move. We use a novel cost-shifter instrument -- port depth pre-containerization -- to contend with the non-random adoption of containerization by ports. Container ships sit much deeper in the water than their predecessors, making initially deep ports cheaper to containerize. Consistent with New Economic Geography models, we find that cities near container ports grow an additional 70 percent from 1950 to 2010. Gains predominate in cities with initially low population density and manufacturing. Chapter 3 (joint with Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Stefano Polloni, and Matthew Turner) investigates the relationship between the opening of a city's subway network and its air quality. We find that particulate concentrations drop by 4% in a 10km radius disk surrounding a city center following a subway system opening. The effect is larger near the city center and persists over the longest time horizon that we can measure with our data, about eight years. We estimate that a new subway system provides an external mortality benefit of about $594m per year. Although available subway capital cost estimates are crude, the estimated external mortality effects represent a significant fraction of construction costs.
Optimizing Data Analytics Jobs with Fairness Constraints in Datacenter Networks
Keywords: big data analytics
coflow scheduling
datacenter networking
fairness
resource allocation

Thanks to the exponential growth of data that needs to be processed in cloud datacenters, data parallel frameworks, such as MapReduce and Spark, have emerged as foundations of cloud computing. It becomes increasingly significant to improve the performance of data analytics jobs running in a shared cluster. Towards this objective, we investigate important research problems in this dissertation as follows. Utility-Optimal Coflow Scheduling. A coflow represents a set of network flows in the communication stage of a data parallel job. The completion time of a job is determined by the collective behavior of a coflow and influenced by the amount of network bandwidth allocated to it. We focus on the design and implementation of a new utility optimal scheduler across competing coflows, to provide differential treatment to coflows with different degrees of sensitivity, yet still satisfying max-min fairness across these coflows. Job Scheduling across Datacenters. As large volumes of data are generated and stored across geographically distributed datacenters, recent research proposed to distribute the tasks of a data analytics job across datacenters, considering both data locality and network bandwidth. Yet, it remains an open problem in the more general case, where multiple jobs need to fairly share the resources at these datacenters. We study the assignment of tasks belonging to multiple jobs across datacenters, with the specific objective of achieving {\em max-min fairness} across jobs sharing these datacenters, in terms of their job completion times. Multi-Path Routing across Datacenters. To process geo-distributed data, optimizing the network transfer in communication stages also becomes increasingly crucial to application performance, as the inter-datacenter links have much lower bandwidth than intra-datacenter links. We focus on exploiting the flexibility of multi-path routing for inter-datacenter flows of data analytics jobs, with the hope of better utilizing inter-datacenter links and thus improve job performance. We formulate the scheduling problems as lexicographical optimization problems and address the challenges incurred by their multi-objective and discrete nature. We design and implement our solutions as real-world coflow scheduler based on the Varys open-source framework and fair scheduler based on Spark. We also design and implement an optimal multi-path routing and scheduling strategy.
The Development of Substrates and Inhibitors of the PNAG Biosynthetic Machinery
Keywords: Assay Development
Biofilms
Deacetylase
Drug Design
Enzymology
PNAG

Biofilms are surface-attached colonies of bacteria that are encapsulated in an extracellular matrix composed of a milieu of proteins, nucleic acids and polysaccharides. In a wide variety of clinically relevant bacteria including Staphylococcus epidermidis and Escherichia coli the composition of the biofilm matrix is dominated by a partially deacetylated polymer of β-(1,6)-linked N-acetylglucosamine (PNAG). The protein components that are responsible for the synthesis, modification and export of the PNAG polymer are encoded by the ica and pga operons in S. epidermidis and E. coli respectively. It has been shown that deletions of any of the gene products comprising the Pga or Ica biosynthetic machinery result in the absence of a biofilm-forming phenotype and severely attenuated virulence. This work explores new ways of understanding the activity of enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of the PNAG polysaccharide. An NMR-based assay was developed to more directly observe the rates of PNAG biosynthesis in vitro. Analogues of UDP-GlcNAc incorporating NMR-active nuclei were synthesized using a chemoenzymatic approach and validated with the processive glycosyltransferase PgaCD. Additionally, substrate-based inhibitors of the deacetylase enzymes PgaB and SpPgda were designed and synthesized. A 2-C gluco scaffold was accessed through glycosidation of a cylcopropyl donor and functionalized with either a methylphosphonate or sulfonamide moiety, meant to mimic the anionic tetrahedral deacetylase transition state. In a separate effort, using structure- and fragment-based inhibitor design strategies in combination with in silico docking, inhibitors of PgaB were developed and synthesized. Finally, new fluorogenic substrates of deacetylase enzymes were synthesized and tested against PgaB and IcaB. The most promising new substrate, AMMU, facilitated high throughput screening of IcaB using a library of over 130 000 compounds.
The benefit of game design for facilitating productive negativity in monotonic and non-monotonic learning scenarios in undergraduate medical and life sciences education
Keywords: conceptual change
game-based learning
game design
life sciences education
medical education
randomized controlled trials

Game-based learning (GBL) approaches in science and medicine have been shown to lead to greater cognitive outcomes than traditional methods of learning in many scenarios. However, there is little empirical evidence linking game design patterns or mechanics to learning outcomes, thereby limiting the practical implications of this research on instructional design. This dissertation postulates that a primary benefit of GBL is its ability to facilitate negative experiences that lead to learning. The concept was investigated in two exemplar learning scenarios with undergraduate students: (1) a case of monotonic learning (i.e. knowledge gain) with medical students studying human vascular anatomy, and (2) a case of non-monotonic learning (i.e. conceptual change) with biology students who hold misconceptions about the emergent nature of molecular environments. In both case studies, GBL interventions were compared to active control conditions with identical pedagogical content, core interaction mechanics, and visual aesthetics as the games—but which lacked gaming-specific elements—to determine the benefit of game design in facilitating productive negativity and its relationship with learning outcomes. It was found that, for both monotonic and non-monotonic learning scenarios, the increased probability of negativity created by the game significantly changed patterns of interactions: individuals exposed to the GBL interventions engaged in a strategic style of interaction, while those exposed to the control engaged in more exploratory/experimental interactions. Only in-app performance in the GBL groups were predictive of learning outcomes across all studies, suggesting a kind of learning guarantee in the presence of game design. Secondary findings regarding levels of motivation/engagement were inconclusive; those regarding the confounding effect of student attributes suggest that culture may play a role in the acceptability and efficacy of GBL approaches by undergraduate students, while previous gaming exposure, gender, and academic abilities do not. Future work should continue to investigate the possible link between culture, productive negativity, and GBL acceptability, and seek better ways of measuring negativity.
Fundraising in Ontario Colleges: An Emerging Profession?
Keywords: charity
funding
fundraising
philanthropy
profession
theory

Conceptualized because I found a paucity of standardized requirements for fundraising positions, this exploratory/descriptive research study explored whether fundraising is an emerging profession in the context of Ontario’s English language Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAAT). The study relied on both quantitative and qualitative data through a survey and interviews with five participant groups: college knowledge leaders, fundraisers and teachers in eight Ontario colleges, students enrolled in a full-time fundraising program, and donors who had contributed to an Ontario college within the previous five to 10 years. Focusing on fundraising post 1995, the study sought to explore the extent to which the five classical traits of professions identified in the literature, were evident in Ontario college fundraising activity, namely: autonomy, a formal course of study, a unique body of knowledge, professional associations with a formal code of ethics, and state regulations. The sample size was relatively small because of the focus of the research. Additionally, the findings of the study are not generalizable, as participants were not randomly selected from the population. However, as an exploratory/descriptive study and because of the paucity of scholarly data related to the specific research focus, the findings will add to an overall understanding of the topic. The literature review for the research revolved around the history of philanthropy in Canada as it relates to laws and taxes, origins of fundraising in Ontario colleges, and traits or characteristics that define a profession. The findings concluded that fundraising is not yet a profession, but it is in the process of evolving into one as some traits associated with a profession were visible in the data; other traits were at various stages of development. In fact, when fundraising in Ontario colleges was analyzed for the presence of trait criteria, I found that none of the requirements of the identified characteristics were fully met. The study concluded that there was room for more research in the area of fundraising as a profession in Ontario and there was a need for the development of Canada-specific fundraising policies as well as deeper inquiry into the professionalization of fundraisers.
Modulation of the Hippocampal Neurogenic Program by the Circadian Clock Machinery and the small GTPase, Rasd1/ Dexras1
Keywords: Cell cycle
Circadian Clock
Dexras1/ Rasd1
Neurogenesis
Stem Cell

The mammalian hippocampal subgranular zone (SGZ) is home to a limited pool of quiescent neural stem/ progenitor cells (QNPs). These cells respond to intrinsic and extrinsic physiological changes, embark on the neurogenesis program and give rise to glutamatergic granule neurons that populate the dentate gyrus (DG). In this thesis, I uncovered two mediators of the neurogenic program: the circadian clock and the small GTPase, Dexras1. The circadian clock machinery controls daily timings in cellular events via the transcription-translation feedback loop (TTFL), which includes Bmal1 and Period2. In this thesis, I demonstrate the presence of the molecular clock and of rhythmic cell proliferation in the SGZ. The absence of Period2 abolishes the gating of cell cycle entrance of QNPs, whereas the genetic ablation of Bmal1 results in constitutively high levels of neurogenesis and cognitive defects. Mathematical model simulations show that the circadian clock may be essential in mediating cell-cycle inhibitors that targets the cyclin D/Cdk4-6 complex, and in turn disruptions in this system result in the abolishment of gating mechanisms. This study uncovers the interrelationship between the cell cycle and the circadian clock and emphasizes the importance of proper rhythmicity for hippocampal function. The most potent enhancer of hippocampal neurogenesis is physical exercise. The mechanism by which physical exercise promotes the rapid expansion of the proliferative pool remains elusive. Here, I demonstrate that exercise induces the cell cycle entrance of QNPs, a mechanism that is dependent on the presence of Dexras1. The loss of Dexras1 alters the survival of mitotic and post-mitotic cell survival in a stage-specific manner. At the molecular level, the absence of Dexras1 abolishes exercise-dependent activation of pro-mitogenic signaling cascades and inhibits the transcriptional up-regulation of neurotrophic factors. This study reveals Dexras1 as an important stage-specific regulator of exercise-induced neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus by enhancing pro-mitogenic signaling to neural progenitor cells and modulating cell survival. Altogether, this thesis demonstrates the high responsiveness of QNPs to extracellular signals. Within each chapter, I challenge current beliefs in the fields of circadian rhythms, cell signaling and neurogenesis, and develop new perspectives on adult stem cell regulation.
The role of the teneurin C-terminal associated peptide (TCAP) family in energy metabolism and skeletal muscle physiology in protochordates and chordates
Keywords: Glucose
Metabolism
Skeletal Muscle
Stress
TCAP-1

Stress can be defined as any event that threatens homeostasis. Organisms have a finite source of energy to allocate towards stress-coping mechanisms, while maintaining enough energy for other key life aspects such as growth and reproduction. Thus, when stress demands a higher portion of the energy budget to overcome the stressor, it impacts the overall fitness of the organism. As stress and energy are intrinsically linked, mechanisms of enhancing energy production would provide the organism with a better capacity to deal with stress. Recently, a highly conserved stress-modulating peptide, teneurin C-terminal associated peptide (TCAP), has been described. As TCAP has roles in stress regulation, it led to question if the TCAP family could have roles in energy metabolism. Therefore, the primary objective of this work was to determine if the TCAP family plays a role in skeletal muscle metabolism and stress, in relation to muscle function, as skeletal muscle is a key metabolic regulator and is involved in the organismal stress response. Due to its early evolutionary history, three model organisms were chosen across evolution to study TCAP actions. Using the protochordate, Ciona intestinalis, the cyprinid, Danio rerio, and the rodent, Rattus norvegicus, this research established that the TCAP peptides enhanced contractile function in skeletal muscle via increased metabolic activity, and that these effects are highly conserved. Importantly, the resulting enhanced ATP production provides an increased threshold for stress, as demonstrated by a decrease in stress-related responses with TCAP treatment under stressful conditions. In addition, this work is the first to demonstrate the expression and function of the teneurin/TCAP-ADGRL system in the skeletal muscle of all three organisms, revealing a novel mechanism of action for the TCAP family. Thus, this research provides critical insight into the dynamic regulation of skeletal muscle function and metabolism by the TCAP family.
From simulations to signals: Analyzing gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences
Keywords: black hole
compact binary
data analysis
gravitational waves
LIGO
neutron star

Detecting gravitational waves is just the start of the story; to understand their nature and the systems that emitted them, we develop methods to correctly recover signals and characterize their source properties. This thesis describes three topics in Advanced LIGO gravitational-wave data analysis, each addressing technical challenges in order to improve the detection and measurement of gravitational-wave signals from compact binary coalescences. In the first project, I present a set of numerical relativity simulations that track the coalescences of binary black holes. I describe the methods by which the simulations were performed, as well as the techniques used to evaluate their gravitational waveforms. A comprehensive error analysis concludes that the minimum overlap of numerical relativity waveforms is 99.97%. My second project improves one of Advanced LIGO's detection pipelines by deriving a source-dependent likelihood-ratio ranking statistic to rank incoming compact binary coalescence signals. Results show that using a source-dependent ranking statistic improves the pipeline's sensitive volume-time -- and therefore, its sensitivity -- for binary neutron stars detections by 6-16%. In my final project, I determine the detectability of precessing compact binaries, deriving an analytic model and then estimating quantitatively the fraction of detected events where precession is measurable by gravitational-wave detectors. My model is consistent with the lack of detectable precession from currently observed signals and indicates, in particular, that GW170817 was not emitted by a strongly precessing system.