VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Sexual Conflict and the Evolution of Reproductive Traits
Keywords: Genitalia
Guppies
Placentae
Poeciliopsis
Water striders

Sexual conflict occurs when the fitness interests of males and females differ. There is some support for inter- and intralocus sexual conflict, but we still lack a full understanding of the impact of these processes. In this thesis, I use several different approaches to study the role of interlocus sexual conflict on the evolution of reproductive traits. In three chapters, I examine variation in and evolutionary processes underlying the rapid, divergent evolution of genitalia. In Chapter 2, I explore interpopulation variation of genitalia in a water strider, Gerris incognitus. I found higher rates of evolution of genital than non-genital traits and greater complexity of intromittent than non-intromittent genital traits. However, I did not detect a signature of sexual selection on genital evolution. In Chapters 3 and 4, I examine two characteristics of genitalia in Trinidadian guppies, Poecilia reticulata. First, I test whether the genital claws function to transfer sperm to unreceptive females. I found that clawed males transferred up to threefold more sperm than declawed males to unreceptive females, but similar quantities to receptive females. Second, I test whether longer genitalia impede male reproductive behaviours at higher current flows. I did not detect a cost for genital elongation, but males did alter their mating strategies in response to current flow. Finally, I was interested in whether mating system can affect the level of parent-offspring conflict and, thus, placental evolution. In Chapter 5, as a first step, I examine natural variation in the morphology of the maternal follicle and embryonic pericardial sac in eight closely related species of Poeciliopsis that span the range in maternal nutrient provisioning during development. I found that species that provide substantial provisioning had (a) maternal follicles that were more hypertrophied and folded, and (b) embryonic pericardial sacs that were more extensively covered with epithelial microvilli and richly vascularized than species with no or moderate provisioning. Taken together, this thesis provides evidence that sexual conflict can play a role in the evolution of reproductive traits, but it is important to consider that role in the context of other evolutionary and ecological processes.
Regulation of neuronal Cl- homeostasis and GABAergic inhibition by components of excitatory neurotransmission
Keywords: Excitation-inhibition balance
Hyperexcitability
Epilepsy
Neuropathic pain
Neurodevelopmental disorders
GABA
Glutamate
Hippocampus
CNS
Glutamate receptors
Auxiliary subunits
iGluR
Kainate receptors
Multi-protein complex
Neuronal chloride homeostasis
Cation chloride cotransporters
SLC12A5
KCC2
Neto2
GluK2

KCC2 is the neuron-specific member of the K+-Cl- cotransporter family of proteins, which maintains a low intracellular Cl− essential for fast inhibitory synaptic transmission in the mature central nervous system (CNS). KCC2 is essential for survival, as KCC2 knock-out mice die at birth due to respiratory failure. Moreover several neurological disorders including neuropathic pain, epileptic seizures and autism spectrum disorders exhibit impaired synaptic inhibition due to decreased KCC2 expression and function. Despite the critical importance of this protein in maintaining fast synaptic inhibition, KCC2 was discovered to be abundantly expressed at the vicinity of excitatory synapses in 2001. Since this discovery, no study has systematically analyzed how components of synaptic excitation regulate KCC2 function and fast synaptic inhibition in the CNS The principal novel discoveries from my thesis research are: (i) native-KCC2 exists in a multiprotein complex with key members of excitatory synapse namely, the kainate-type ionotropic glutamate receptor (iGluR) subunit GluK2, and its auxiliary subunit Neto2; (ii) these components of excitatory synapse could serve as auxiliary subunits of KCC2 – a concept which was previously non-existent for transporters in general, and in particularly for KCC2; (iii) Neto2 and GluK2 regulates several aspects of KCC2 cellular regulation including total and surface abundance, oligomerization and transporter efficacy in vitro and in vivo; (iv) finally, loss of Neto2 or GluK2 result in impaired KCC2 transporter function in hippocampal neurons. Hence, my discovery represent a novel regulation of KCC2 function and fast synaptic inhibition by components of excitatory transmission, significantly advancing our growing understanding of the tight interplay between excitation and inhibition.
The Arf-GEF Steppke Controls Cell Division In the Early Drosophila Embryo
Keywords: Arf small G proteins
cell division
development
Drosophila
morphogenesis
Steppke

The early Drosophila embryo forms somatic and germ cells by cell division from a syncytium. This process requires dynamic plasma membrane remodelling shaped by a complex set of interconnected cytoskeletal and membrane trafficking events. To examine how the plasma membrane Arf G proteins contribute to this process, I investigated the role of the Drosophila cytohesin Arf-GEF Steppke, an activator of plasma membrane Arf G proteins, in the early embryo. My first aim was to characterize how Steppke influences cleavage furrow ingression during somatic cell formation. By analyzing steppke loss-of-function and gain-of-function embryos, I discovered that Steppke locally restrains the membrane cytoskeleton to prevent abnormal membrane growth at the base of furrows. Genetic interaction analyses showed that the Steppke/Arf pathway antagonizes Rho1-dependent actomyosin pathways, an antagonism that appears to be partially achieved by stimulating AP-2/clathrin-dependent endocytosis. In my second aim, I examined the role of the Steppke/Arf pathway on restricting primordial germ cell formation. I first showed that it prevents precocious formation of a group of somatic cells at the anterior pole of the embryo. I also examined its effect on primordial germ cell formation at the posterior of the embryo. A series of genetic interaction tests showed that Steppke normally antagonizes germ plasm-induced Rho1 activity, antagonizing the formation of primordial germ cells. Therefore, Steppke seems to set a global inhibitory threshold for cell division. Overall, I defined a critical role of the Steppke/Arf pathway in restraining the actin cytoskeleton during cell division.
L'impact du bilinguisme sur la compréhension conversationnelle des adolescents atteints des troubles du spectre autistique
Keywords: autism
bilingualism
second language acquisition

Dans la présente thèse, nous examinons la compréhension conversationnelle chez trois adolescents autistes monolingues anglophones et trois adolescents autistes bilingues anglais-français. D'une part, nous cherchons à savoir si les difficultés au niveau de la compréhension conversationnelle observées chez les individus autistes examinés dans les études antérieures se retrouvent chez nos participants. D'autre part, nous tentons de déterminer si le bilinguisme a un impact sur la compréhension conversationnelle de nos participants bilingues. Nous avons ainsi entrepris deux tâches pragmatiques qui examinent la capacité de nos participants de reconnaître les violations des maximes conversationnelles de Grice (Tâche Pragmatique I) et la capacité de ces derniers de choisir parmi plusieurs réactions sociales celle qui correspond le mieux à une déclaration sociale donnée (Tâche Pragmatique II). Nous avons également demandé à nos participants d'expliquer leurs réponses. Les résultats quantitatifs de notre étude montrent que les difficultés au niveau de la compréhension conversationnelle observées chez les individus autistes ne se retrouvent pas chez nos participants autistes. Nous attribuons la réussite de nos participants à plusieurs iii facteurs : l'ordre de présentation des violations conversationnelles dans la Tâche Pragmatique I, le niveau de socialisation et le niveau de scolarisation de ces derniers. En outre, nous avons trouvé que le bilinguisme n’a pas d’impact négatif et qu'il pourrait même avoir un impact positif sur la compréhension conversationnelle de nos adolescents bilingues. Nous expliquons la réussite de nos bilingues par l'environnement linguistique enrichi de ces derniers ainsi que par leurs compétences cognitives plus avancées. Enfin, au niveau qualitatif, d'après les évaluations fournies par les trois juges indépendants, nos adolescents autistes manifestent plus de difficultés à expliquer leur raisonnement qu'à identifier la bonne réponse. Nous proposons donc qu'afin de mieux discerner les difficultés pragmatiques chez les autistes, il serait plus révélateur d'administrer des tâches qui examineraient la capacité de ces derniers à exprimer leur raisonnement social.
Contextualizing Unconventional Beliefs And Ritual Activity: A Case Study Of Moderate Risk And Problem Slot Machine Gamblers
Keywords: cognitive dissonance
modern superstition
problem gambling
slot machine gambling
social and organizational processes
unconventional beliefs

This dissertation examines gambling associated beliefs. To this point, research on these beliefs is found in the field of psychology, but provides little contextual insight to the gambling scenario. The dissertation uses theoretical insights from the field of sociology, and specifically the sociology of beliefs as well as religious and social movements, to examine beliefs through a sociocultural lens. In a bid to gain contextual insight informed by subjective understanding, the research draws on in-depth interviews. In total 43 moderate-risk and problem slot machine gamblers were interviewed along with a comparison group of 10 non-problem gamblers all from Toronto, Ontario. Four key findings emerge from this research. 1) Beliefs about the ability to determine or procure an outcome might be more accurately described as modern superstitions; the comparison group of non-problem gamblers has similar beliefs, thus supporting this suggestion. 2) The casino frames the experience of these particular problem gamblers, providing them with structure, supporting their beliefs, and allowing them to experience and enact strongly held values. 3) Their belief in one day securing a substantial win appears largely indestructible as demonstrated by investigating its structure and validation logics or strategies. 4) Various dissonance management strategies are used to maintain this belief although the success of any one strategy depends on a host of social processes; similar strategies and processes are found among apocalyptic groups awaiting prophetic confirmation. In their entirety, these findings suggest that the beliefs of problem gamblers may not only be viewed as cognitive distortions. An alternative view is that they might also be understood as a problematic belief system that is as “normal” as any other belief system, only that these beliefs are non-rational instead of irrational and thereby resistant to disconfirmatory evidence.
CMOS Biosensor for Rapid Detection of Bacteria and Antibiotic Susceptibility
Keywords: Anatibiotic susceptibility
Bacteria detection
Biosensor
CMOS
ISFET

The development of a low-cost, specific and sensitive integrated system for the detection and identification of bacteria, that can provide results rapidly has been a major research challenge. This thesis introduces a systematic approach to the selection and design of appropriate biological components combined with a microelectronics system, that pro- vides rapid and highly specific detection results at a low sensor cost and using a small sample volume. The bacterial detection system achieves specific identification through the use of two types of biological recognition elements: bacteriophages and bacteriocins. Both systems utilize the rapid e✏ux of potassium ions to the sample as a result of the infection of the specific bacteria in the sample by the biological recognition elements. The potassium e✏ux is a transducing event detectable by a potassium selective field e↵ect transistor implemented in CMOS, providing conclusive results in less than 10 minutes. Di↵erent strains of Gram-negative E. coli were tested using bacteriophages, and both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacterial species were tested using bacteriocins. Mea- surement protocols and processing techniques are implemented to cancel the e↵ect of ion-selective system DC baseline variations and drift. The implemented sensors achieve the minimum detection limit of 3 ⇥ 107 cfu/ml at 10-minute detection time using the PVC-based potassium-sensitive membranes with the sensitivity of 10
"Doleful Records": Empire and Melancholy in Romantic India
Keywords: British Romanticism
Death
Empire
India
Melancholy
Women writers

This dissertation considers how the feelings unleashed by death – namely mourning and melancholy – were harnessed to understand, organize, and legitimate imperial power in India during the British Romantic period. The project examines the writing of women authors such as Mariana Starke, Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Sydney Owenson, and Emma Roberts alongside contemporary political debates to demonstrate how the affective strategies surrounding death were performing the labour of empire in the literary topography and psychogeography of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Faced with personal, political, and national losses on a grand scale, Britons had to reimagine grief as a force to be mobilized and deployed, rather than one acting upon them. The difficulty of dealing with death from the distance and difference of a foreign outpost, where the traditional networks of consolation could not be accessed, demanded new forms of sympathy, sociability, and a reconstitution of communal identity in response to losses that could not be confronted. While the bodies of the dead grounded the imperial project in India, the mobility of their printed afterlives reconnected them to a sympathetic national body at home. The first chapter of this dissertation demonstrates how Elizabeth Hamilton exploits melancholy as a rhetorical strategy that provides women with access to political discourse and posits mourning as an affective branch of the imperial project. Nineteenth-century writers converged around a controversial death ritual – sati, the Hindu practice of widow-burning – to organize the policies and feelings that constituted the British “civilizing mission” in India, and the second chapter examines how the writings of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, and Sydney Owenson engage with the figure of the dying and mourning “other” woman. The third chapter investigates the vision of Anglo-Indian community drawn in Emma Roberts’s travel writing to suggest that the morbid sociability she finds in India is, in fact, an ideological projection of Anglicist colonial administration. This dissertation provides new channels of inquiry into the transperipheral dynamics of imperialism from the 1780s to the 1830s, and demonstrates how the afterlife of British Romanticism continues to haunt our understanding of political subjectivity.
Capturing the Dead: Identification and Photography in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants
Keywords: Emigrants
Identification
Photography
Sebald

This dissertation examines the function of photographs in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. I argue that images in the book encourage the reader to identify with those depicted in them and simultaneously discourage this identification. Dissecting the mechanism and motivations of this inherent contradiction, an ethics of viewing and writing about the past emerges. Sebald engages the readers with these photographs, I argue, to champion a cautious and qualified identification. Sebald's interactions with the past are indicative of his historical background. Having missed the catastrophic events of the Second World War, he is motivated by a historical compunction to depict the past and a personal desire to be present in it. The photographs discussed in this dissertation both fulfill and frustrate this desire. They demonstrate how the momentous events can be transmitted to and worked through by Sebald's generation. For this reason, The Emigrants contributes vitally to the work of Vergangenheitsbewältigung; it attempts to grapple with and overcome the legacy of the Holocaust by encouraging a form of nuanced, and therefore ethical, identification. To explore Sebald's relationship with this legacy, I examine photographs that put the viewer in four different subject positions: family member, researcher, victim, and perpetrator. This diversity of perspectives constitutes precisely the "synoptic and artificial view" that Sebald advocates. Images of each subject position reveal different insights on how his generation views the past. Almost twenty-five years after the publication of The Emigrants, the book continues to be the topic of rigorous scholarly discussion, testifying to its relevance to present German society and beyond.
Fashionable Chemistry: The History of Printing Cotton in France in the Second Half of the Eighteenth and First Decades of the Nineteenth Century
Keywords: 18th century
printed textiles

In the seventeenth century, when brilliantly coloured Indian painted and printed cotton textiles reached Europe they became very popular. Due to the large volume of imported textiles, local wool and silk producers became concerned and they petitioned for strict regulations. In France, legislation was introduced that banned import and local production of printed cotton textiles from 1688 to 1759. This thesis looks at how the knowledge of printing cotton in the Indian manner reached Europe and how it was implemented by the French textile industry, especially at Jean-Michel Haussmann’s establishment in Logelbach outside Colmar in Alsace and Christophe-Philippe Oberkamf’s establishment in Jouy-en-Josas outside Versailles. In the eighteenth century France did not have a textile printers’ guild to restrain the introduction of the Indian method or stop the impact from contemporary scientists whose research was adapted and used to benefit the industry. I investigate the co-operation between craftsmen and scientists by studying published scientific papers and dye books that focused on new innovations and improvement aimed at benefitting this industry. To verify that the new methods and scientific ideas were really implemented it is important to look at the textiles themselves. Using examples from the Royal Ontario Museum’s Collection and comparing them to written information in Gottlieb Widmer’s manuscript and the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet’s dye books, we can evaluate the development of textile printing at Oberkamp’s establishment. The printed textile Les Travaux de la manufacture (The activities at the factory) which illustrates textile printing at Oberkampf’s factory in 1783-1784, can also increase our knowledge of the printing process. Printing textiles is really a form of applied chemistry and in the second half of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, French scientists and craftsmen co-operated and worked closely together to the benefit of this very lucrative industry.
Icons and Identity: A Study of Two Museums and the Battle to Define Toronto
Keywords: Community politics
Cultural sociology
Iconic architecture
Museums
Urban political-economy
Urban studies

Iconic architecture has become a popular “hard-branding” strategy among urban policymakers hoping to elevate the global status of their city and attract outside investment, tourists, and skilled migrants. However, iconic architecture is more than just an economic tool; it is an attempt to create a symbolic representation of place which, in the process, physically reshapes the urban landscape itself. As such, iconic architecture offers an important opportunity to study the relationship between abstract notions of place and concrete urban development practices. Focusing on this relationship, this dissertation investigates two museum expansion projects in Toronto: the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Both museums hired internationally-renowned architects to design striking, iconic facades and both projects became mired in political controversy that pitted the museums against members of the surrounding community. Focusing specifically on the role of culture and meaning, the dissertation offers three main findings. First, it reveals that public cultural institutions (the primary clients of iconic architecture) use this development strategy to generate political legitimacy and, by extension, attract outside financial support. By asserting themselves physically within the cityscape, they similarly attempt secure a central place within local public life. Second, the dissertation demonstrates how competing notions of place can emerge between different groups of urban inhabitants and subsequently become the basis for urban political struggle. Employing cognitive mapping analysis, the dissertation demonstrates how the museums’ cosmopolitan vision for Toronto contradicted more locally-focused notions of place held within the community. Finally, in examining how this political conflict played out during development, the dissertation reveals the importance of “performative power” in forging community consensus and overcoming initial differences. More specifically, the success of the projects depended on how well the museum leadership conformed to existing cultural expectations held within the community. These findings, taken as a whole, provide important empirical and theoretical insights into how urban inhabitants understand place, and how these understandings inform their actions within the context of major urban development projects.
The First Oxford Sentences Commentary on the Last Things: An Edition and Study of Richard Fishacre's In quartum Sententiarum, Distinctions 43-50
Keywords: Medieval Theology
Richard Fishacre
Scholasticism
Sentences Commentary
University of Oxford

Abstract The First Oxford Sentences Commentary on the Last Things: An Edition and Study of Richard Fishacre’s In quartum Sententiarum, Distinctions 43-50 Louis Shwartz Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto 2015 Richard Fishacre (d. 1248), one of the first Dominican masters to teach at the nascent University of Oxford, composed his lengthy commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences during the final decade of his life. The closing eight distinctions of Fishacre’s commentary study the Last Things and comprise a diverse array of loosely related topics: the general resurrection, the final judgment, the fiery reforging of the world, purgatory, indulgences, heaven, and hell. Drawing on all surviving manuscript witnesses, I have edited this section of Fishacre’s work. Additionally, in two case studies dealing with indulgences and glorified bodies, I show how Fishacre, by invoking law and natural science, proposes new ways of revisiting standard theological questions, influences the eschatological teachings of his successors, and promotes a remarkably interdisciplinary approach to pedagogy. Thus beyond providing modern scholars with a critical edition of Fishacre’s teachings concerning the Last Things, my work also sharpens our knowledge of Fishacre’s academic career, examines his unique teaching methods, compares the intellectual traditions developing at Oxford to those being fostered at Paris, and develops new frameworks of historical inquiry which can be applied to other portions of Fishacre’s massive Commentary.