VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Knockabout and Slapstick: Violence and Laughter in Nineteenth-century Popular Theatre and Early Film
Keywords: Ideational Mimetics
Innervation
Knockabout
Laughter theory
Rough-House
Slapstick

This thesis examines laughter that attends violent physical comedy: the knockabout acts of the nineteenth-century variety theatres, and their putative descendants, the slapstick films of the early twentieth-century cinema. It attempts a comparative functional analysis of knockabout acts and their counterparts in slapstick film. In Chapter 1 of this thesis I outline the obstacles to this inquiry and the means I took to overcome them; in Chapter 2, I distinguish the periods when knockabout and slapstick each formed the dominant paradigm for physical comedy, and give an overview of the critical changes in the social context that separate them. In Chapter 3, I trace the gradual development of comedy films throughout the early cinema period, from the “comics” of 1900 to 1907, through the “rough house” films of the transitional era, to the emergence of the new genre in 1911-1914. Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 present my comparative analyses of the workings of four representative “tropes,” ubiquitous in various forms of knockabout performance and in various representative slapstick films: i) The burlesque prize fight (in variety theatre, in the Ethiopian sketches of blackface minstrelsy and in Keystone’s “The Knockout”); ii) the Pete Jenkins act (in nineteenth-century circus) and the “Wild Ride” (a sub-subgenre of chase film); iii) the “One-Two-Three-Switch motif” in knockabout song and dance and in the slapstick pie fight; and iv) The “White Night” of the Ethiopian sketches and the “Inn Where No Man Rests” of early film. Chapters 8 and 9 present my attempt to synthesize my findings and come to a conclusion by concretely theorizing what this comparison teaches us about knockabout and slapstick performance. Slapstick has a twofold nature: as a performance style, it is a quasi-verisimilar acting “anti-technique,” incorporating acrobatic elements. As a film genre, slapstick represents an intervention in the superfluous violence of everyday life: it functions to recuperate the spectator’s sense of his/her own potential freedom from complicity in social violence; and to make reconciliation with others possible. Nevertheless, the spectator may well reject these functions and use the slapstick film as a pleasurable outlet for his/her own sadistic energies.
From the Inside Out, from the Outside In: Devising in Canadian Puppet Theatre
Keywords: devising
dramaturgy
Puppetmongers
puppetry
semiotics
theatre

The ultimate goal of my dissertation is to address one deceptively simple question: Does the focus on the object in puppet theatre restrict the spontaneity and physical freedom that are so central to theatrical devising? Toronto-based Puppetmongers Theatre is my primary case study. Before I can begin to answer this question, I must chart a course through the history, practice, and theory behind each of the two axes of this study. These threads begin to come together as I identify a style of puppetry that is particularly compatible with devising: tandem puppetry. Practitioners of this style telescope the distance (semiotic and physical) between puppets and themselves and foreground their role as actors in their own right. They are therefore literally in an ideal position to act on any spontaneous creative impulses that they might experience. A devising performer is trained to respond to such impulses and to suggestions from others, but there is always a border between two principal spaces: that which is located within the body and that which is located without. This results in a kind of bondage, one from which the puppet theatre artist is freed. The puppet always exists outside of the live body or bodies onstage, even if only conceptually, such as when a performer “puppetizes” part of her body and presents it as a separate character. Manipulators therefore have, in one sense, considerably more control over wholly inorganic puppets than devising performers have over their own bodies, as they both see and control them from the outside. This power of control has its limitations, however, as while the body of the devising performer can react almost instantly to any impulse, the manipulator has an additional step to complete, as her reaction must be channelled through the puppet. In the end, a spirit of (ultimately serious) play is necessary if one wishes to take full advantage of the “flexibilities” offered by devising: collaborative, narrative, design, movement, and space flexibilities. All of these are transformed once they pass through the object-centred prism of puppetry, and yet all still obtain in the world of devised puppet theatre.
The Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo (1261-1517): History and Tradition in the Mamluk Court
Keywords: Abbasids
Cairo
Caliphate
Legitimacy
Mamluks
Medieval Egypt

This dissertation investigates the two-and-a-half century evolution of Islam’s most prominent leadership institution, the Abbasid caliphate, after its restoration in Cairo following the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258. Kept under the supervision of the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria (1250-1517), modern scholars tend to conclude that this so-called Abbasid “shadow” caliphate merely legitimized Mamluk rulers and little else within their society. Despite having shed much of its original power by the Mamluk period, the Abbasid caliphate of Cairo retained a definite measure of religious authority and enjoyed the reverence of significant sectors of the Cairene population including religious scholars, chroniclers, chancery scribes, poets, travelers, and, it seems, enjoyed even wider resonance among the masses of the local Muslim citizenry. A dynastic study of the Cairo Abbasids combined with analysis of contemporary opinions of the caliphate and its Mamluk sponsors rendered from juristic writing, advice literature, historiography, bureaucratic literature, and administrative documents allows the present study to move toward a comprehensive delineation of the significance of the revived office to the society in which it functioned. Although the caliphs as individuals were largely disposable and powerless, the office they held retained importance throughout the Mamluk period and contributed to larger civilizational understandings of “Caliphate” that allowed the inclusion of the Mamluk regime and its various administrative subdivisions.
Theorizing Pathways to Resilience among LGBTQ Youth: A Grounded Theory Study
Keywords: Grounded Theory
LGBTQ
Resilience
Youth

This three-paper dissertation seeks to advance the conceptual understanding of resilience among lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) youth. Interviews with service-providers (n = 16) and LGBTQ youth (n = 19) were conducted and analyzed, using Grounded Theory (GT) methodologies. The first paper conceptualizes how participants understand the construct of resilience and the associated concepts (i.e., adversity, positive adaptation). Three relevant categories are reported: (1) facing adversities across contexts, (2) growing up in the age of marriage equality, and (3) “doing well” while still in pain. Provided extensive adversities LGBTQ youth experience, participants endorsed a context-dependent understanding of “doing well” (e.g., “battling through”) rather than using normative criteria of health and wellbeing (e.g., absence of psychopathologies, presence of socially desirable outcomes). The second paper reports a substantive theory of resilience emerged in the GT study. The core category, paving pathways through the pain, suggests that youth build on their experiences of marginalization and the concomitant emotional pain to carve out personalized pathways to resilience. All youth employed the following five processes: (1) navigating safety across contexts, (2) asserting personal agency, (3) seeking and cultivating meaningful relationships, (4) un-silencing social identities, and (5) engaging in collective healing and action. While the degree of which and the ways in which youth made use of these resilience processes varied, youth focused their attention to the areas of their individual life circumstances that inflicted emotional pain and engaged more deliberately in one or more of the resilience processes related to the origins of pain. In the third paper, results of the GT study, along with other relevant literature, inform the application of a social ecological framework of resilience in working with LGBTQ youth. This framework conceptualizes that the role of social workers is to promote not only the internal capacity of LGBTQ youth but also the capacity of their social ecologies to better support them. A youth case is discussed to inform interventions across the micro, mezzo, and macro levels of practice. Discussion sections for each paper and the dissertation conclusion summarize study results, limitations, and implications for social work and further research.
Phylogenetics and Dental Evolution in Sphenacodontidae (Synapsida)
Keywords: Dentition
Dimetrodon
Teeth
Therapsid

Paleozoic sphenacodontid synapsids are the oldest known fully terrestrial apex predators, distinguished by strong heterodonty, massive skulls, and well-developed labio-lingually compressed, recurved teeth with mesial and distal cutting edges (carinae). Dimetrodon is an Early Permian (295–272 Ma) sphenacodontid known from southern USA, Canada, and Germany. Dimetrodon is of exceptional importance as it is the most abundant and speciose sphenacodontid, providing valuable information on issues related to the origin of therapsids. Thirteen species of Dimetrodon are currently recognized from hundreds of specimens, but many of these taxa are primarily identified on the basis of size, stratigraphic, and geographic locations. Therefore, little is known about the relationships among species of Dimetrodon or the role they and other sphenacodontids played as apex predators in shaping Early Permian ecosystems. A robust, species-level phylogeny of sphenacodontids will allow for the examination of evolutionary patterns within the clade. The first in-depth description, including histological analyses of several species of Dimetrodon, reveals that the dentition is diverse and bears species-specific morphology. Tooth morphology includes simple carinae with smooth cutting edges and elaborate enamel features, including the first occurrence of cusps and true denticles (ziphodonty) in the fossil record, and the first description of plicidentine in synapsids. The first species-level time calibrated phylogenetic analysis for sphenacodontids, including the enigmatic Bathygnathus borealis, indicates that significant changes within the clade are related to the dental apparatus. This suggests that the morphological changes in sphenacodontids are associated with changes in feeding style and trophic interactions in these ecosystems. The results presented in this thesis are the first steps towards a more comprehensive understanding of evolutionary changes within sphenacodontids and highlights innovations in the group, including the first adaptations towards hypercarnivory.
Aristotle on Spontaneity
Keywords: Ancient
Chance
Generation
Luck
Nature
Teleology

Ordinary living beings, according to Aristotle, are generated by parents of the same kind. They are exemplary instances of substances, and their generation is a paradigmatic application of his theory of causality. Yet Aristotle believes that numerous organisms are not generated by parents of the same kind, but are spontaneously generated. Many commentators tend to dismiss these cases as phenomena that fall beyond what in nature occurs ‘always or for the most part’. I argue that this is incorrect: spontaneous generation is as regular, common, frequent, and predictable as the generation of living beings by parents of their own kind. Some authors have claimed that the regularity of spontaneous generation is such as to threaten Aristotle’s general theory of causality and the metaphysical principles on which it rests. I show the fallacies behind this position, and argue that Aristotle emphasizes the ontological peculiarity of spontaneously generated creatures and provides appropriate principles to justify their existence in the natural world. Other authors have argued that the account of spontaneity presented in Historia Animalium and De Generatione Animalium is inconsistent with the analysis of spontaneity offered in the Physics and the Metaphysics. I argue that this view rests on the mistaken assumption that the Physics and the Metaphysics present a univocal account of τὸ αὐτόματον. I then read Physics B 4-6 and Metaphysics Z 7-9 independently of one another, and show that τὸ αὐτόματον is, in Aristotelian terms, an equivocal phenomenon. I argue that while the Metaphysics offers an account of the spontaneous generation of individual organisms, which Aristotle endorses in his biological works, the Physics presents an account of the chance generation of entire species of organisms, which he rejects.
Murder, Myth, and Melodrama: The Theatrical Histories of Jack the Ripper
Keywords: cultural history
late-Victorian
London
melodrama
myth
visual culture

In 1888, several murders in the London boroughs of Whitechapel and Spitalfields became the first modern serial killings reported by mass-circulation daily media. These were identified with “Jack the Ripper,” a name that still resonates in popular culture and entertainment. This dissertation looks to the theatrical culture of London, arguing that theatre and drama provided models for the creation of this figure, which has the cultural status of a “myth” in the sense defined by Roland Barthes. Drawing on the vocabulary of Barthes and on Diana Taylor’s idea of the “scenario” as a unit of enacted narrative with mythic cultural force, four case studies from a variety of London stages trace how ideas and anxieties about urban modernity were taken from the stage and used by newspaper writers and the public to imagine the Ripper. The first looks at a production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that took place at the same time as the murders, showing how these modeled the killer for a middle-class audience. The second describes an illegal basement theatre in the East End that used representations of the murdered women as one of its variety of entertainments, arguing that these both resisted and confirmed definitions of the murders, the victims, and Whitechapel itself as “obscene.” A third case looks at London Day By Day, a successful 1889 melodrama, arguing that this was the first representation of the Ripper on a legitimate stage, albeit in a conflicted and partially-obscured way that nevertheless reveals how crucial melodrama and its iconography was to popular understandings of the murders in the first place. The final case study looks at The Lodger, a 1914 novel that was adapted to stage and screen, tracing how urban legends about a possible killer functioned to consolidate the image of the murders in the 20th century. In conclusion the contemporary practice of “Jack the Ripper Walking Tours” is briefly surveyed to argue that contests over visuality, poverty, obscenity, and urban space that had important currency in the late-Victorian theatre are an integral part of the Ripper myth and remain relevant to this day.
Radical Ornament: Its Effects and Affects Understood through the Materiality of Rocaille Ornament and Body-horror Films
Keywords: 18th-Century French Art
Body-Horror Films
David Cronenberg
Ornament
Rococo

This dissertation analyzes a type of ornamentation I describe as radical through an examination of its effects and affects, which are observed in the common formal and functional aspects of French rocaille ornaments and in the material details of contemporary body-horror films. Although these areas of study have obvious differences, by demonstrating what their materiality has in common I make innovative claims about the potential agential power of ornament. In Chapter One, the lack of analysis of rocaille forms is examined in the work of little-discussed rocaille artists. I explain that the framing systems formed by rocaille ornaments are open and that their effects are like Derrida’s parergonality. I also equate the actions of rocaille ornaments with the work of the informe. Chapter Two examines how the contemporary materiality, which I term heterogeneous organic detail (HOD), is physically comparable to that of rocaille ornaments, while its actions are explained as viral and prosthesis-like. Viral actions are described as those of breaking boundaries, communicating infection, and transforming infected subjects into symptomatic ones. Chapter Three demonstrates that rocaille ornaments and HODs have such powerful affect that they allow their viewing subjects to connect to imaginary space and become other via what is explained as prosthetic imaginary experiences. Due to this affective process, rocaille space is argued to be subjective because it is resolved in the viewer’s imagination. Another implication of radical ornament’s induced prosthetic experiences is that the infected subject’s personal identity may be transformed. Thus, the areas most affected by the work of radical ornament are the subject’s perception of space and the subject’s personal identity. The dissertation concludes that unlike other forms of ornamentation, radical ornaments destroy order and the centrality of subject matter by creating associations and connections between segregated sectors that allow for intersubjectivity. This disruption causes radical ornament’s subject to be re-embodied and the split between subject-object and mind-body to be effaced. By addressing the lack of material and theoretical examination of these two types of materiality, this dissertation contributes to a rethinking of the nature and agency of ornament.
Large-scale decomposition strategies for collaborative operating room planning and scheduling
Keywords: Branch-and-check
Collaborative operating room planning and scheduling
Flexibility
Game convexity and Shapley value
Logic-based Benders decomposition
Optimization

Operating rooms (ORs) play a substantial role in hospital profitability, and their optimal utilization is conducive to containing the cost of surgical service delivery, shortening surgical patient wait times, and increasing patient admissions. We extend traditional single-hospital operating room scheduling to a coalition of multiple collaborating hospitals in a strategic network. Using data from the University Health Network (UHN), in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, we propose new centralized approaches to elective and operating room scheduling when multiple collaborating hospitals are involved. We formulate the OR scheduling problem based on location-allocation problems in supply chain management. We ensure caseload balancing among collaborating hospitals in macro and micro levels. We additionally incorporate patient-to-surgeon allocation flexibilities, surgeon-to-hospital allocation flexibilities, and surgeon schedule tightness. Furthermore, we tackle single-hospital multiple specialty OR scheduling problems and single-hospital single-specialty multi-resource constrained OR scheduling problems. We develop novel logic-based Benders decomposition and branch-and-check techniques for these problems and we show that our approaches are up to two orders of magnitude faster than directly solving the mathematical models.
Neighbourhood Sanitation and Childrenâ s Diarrhea in Developing Countries
Keywords: Child health
Sanitation
Wastewater

Diarrhea is a leading cause of global child mortality. Sanitation has long been recognized as a key intervention against diarrhea, but it has been mostly evaluated as a household-level intervention for household-level health gain, without addressing its implications at neighbourhood-level. In this thesis, neighbourhood sanitation was defined as safe removal of excreta from the neighbourhood environment to prevent human contact. The effect and cost of neighbourhood sanitation intervention against childrenâ s diarrhea were evaluated. The distinct effects of neighbourhood sanitation conditions and household sanitation on diarrhea morbidity were distinguished and compared by a systematic literature review. The results suggested that sanitary neighbourhood conditions and household sanitation access are each associated with reduced diarrheal burden, at comparable magnitudes. The effect of neighbourhood sanitation was further investigated by an exposure-response analysis of neighbourhood-level coverage of sanitation facilities and under-five childrenâ s diarrheal illness. Health survey datasets from 29 developing countries were analysed using a multilevel regression model. The study found a non-linear exposure-response trend between neighbourhood sanitation coverage and diarrhea. A sanitation coverage threshold was identified, below which increase in sanitation coverage was associated with marginal reduction in diarrhea. The cost of neighbourhood sanitation delivered by centralized wastewater management (CWWM) and decentralized wastewater management (DWWM) strategies were compared in a case study site in India. As part of the analysis, the cost variability of DWWM was assessed for a broad range of system configurations. The study showed that NSan delivered by DWWM can be less costly than that by CWWM but with higher land requirement. The lower cost, together with the enhanced flexibility and resilience offered by DWWM, suggested that DWWM may be an adequate alternative to CWWM in rapidly developing regions. The findings of this thesis demonstrate that neighbourhood sanitation is an important and cost-effective intervention against childrenâ s diarrhea in developing countries.
Embodied Humanistic Intelligence: Design of Augmediated Reality Digital Eye Glass
Keywords: 3DHDR
Augmediated Reality
Gesture Recognition
High Dynamic Range
Humanistic Intelligence
Wearable Computing

In this thesis, I present a new generation of Augmediated Reality Digital Eye Glass (DEG) that embodies the principles of Humanistic Intelligence (HI). In particular, this thesis addresses the fundamental issues in the practical realization of the HI framework, most notably the dynamic range of sensors and the design of a natural human-computer interface based on three dimensional (3D) gestural input. First, to address the dynamic range limitation of color sensors, a practical implementation of high dynamic range (HDR) image composition and tone mapping algorithms were designed on both Field-programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to enable real-time processing of video streams. The algorithms are optimized for wearable applications and provide a constant runtime performance independent of the scene. To demonstrate the robustness of the algorithm, a specialized DEG helmet was designed to work under the most extreme lighting condition - tungsten inert gas welding. In addition, I discuss the development of a novel HDR technique for 3D depth sensing cameras called 3DHDR. Here, I present a method of creating 3D HDR depth maps using an array of 3D depth sensing cameras designed for wearable applications. The system provides a tonal and spatial range that significantly exceeds the capability of any individual depth sensor. Finally, I present an untethered wearable solution of DEG with 3D gestural input based on 3DHDR. The recognition system provides various mode of operations and allows users to integrate gesture-based input to control the Augmediated Reality DEG system. The final prototype has been translated to a development platform for use in future wearable computing research to further explore the HI framework.