VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Inducible Rescue of N-methyl-d-Aspartate Receptor Deficiency to Study Brain Plasticity
Keywords: Behaviour
Inducible Rescue
NMDA receptor
Schizophrenia

Although brain plasticity is thought to be highest in the developing brain, evidence has shown that the adult brain is capable of a number of mechanisms that underlie developmental plasticity. This is important for the treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders, where insults occur during plastic and vulnerable developmental windows, ultimately leading to symptoms that continue into adulthood. We investigated the plasticity of the brain by disrupting the glutamate system, and determined whether intervention during adulthood could ameliorate neurodevelopmental symptoms. We asked whether the adult brain is sufficiently plastic to allow for rewiring and amelioration of behavioural abnormalities. To address this, a mouse model was generated. The GluN1-inducible rescue (GluN1-IR) mouse model develops in a state of global N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor hypofunction that can then be â rescuedâ , with NMDA receptor levels being genetically restored. The levels of rescue were quantitatively measured via behavioural, biochemical and molecular means. By restoring NMDA receptor function at two key developmental time points, adolescence and adulthood, we were afforded insight into when the brain may be more plastic and amenable to adaptive changes, potentially identifying key treatment windows for symptoms that arise in a number of neurodevelopmental disorders. However, independent of intervention time or length of recovery, plasticity remained constant. Even more interestingly, we identified that the degree of plasticity varied depending on brain regions. Cortically-mediated behaviours showed high levels of plasticity, while subcortical behaviours remained resistant to change. This was corroborated with biochemical and molecular outputs. This study suggests that, converse to what was classically believed, plasticity does extend well into adulthood. Limitations in plasticity may not be mediated by developmental age, but may be inherently programmed based on specific circuits for behaviours.
The Friendships of Adolescents with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Keywords: ADHD
Adolescents
Friendships
Mixed methods
Peer relations

The goal of this dissertation was to examine the friendships of adolescents with ADHD. In Study 1, I utilized quantitative methods to compare adolescents with and without ADHD with regard to friendship patterns at the level of markers (i.e., the presence of friendships, friendship quantity and stability, and characteristics of friends). In Study 2, I use a qualitative approach to investigate the meanings (i.e., subjective experience of friendship) and mechanisms (i.e., processes involved in forming and maintaining friendships) that may enhance or impair friendships of adolescents with ADHD. Moderators such as age and gender were considered in both studies. The sample for Study 1 comprised 107 adolescents, 13 to 18 years, 59 with ADHD (38 male, 21 female) and 48 comparison adolescents (22 male, 26 female). A subset of nine adolescents with ADHD, 16 to 18 years, participated in Study 2. The Adolescent Friendship Questionnaire (AFQ), Parent Friendship Questionnaire (PFQ), and a semi-structured interview were used. Results indicate that youth with ADHD typically develop at least one close friendship with same-age peers in adolescence. Adolescents with and without ADHD did not differ in the number of friends, the duration of close friendships, or the frequency of contact they have with their close friends. Adolescent girls with ADHD have fewer parent corroborated friendships than male adolescents with ADHD and teenagers without ADHD. According to parent report, adolescents with ADHD were more likely to have close friends with behaviour problems. When discussing their friendships, adolescents with ADHD described common experiences of social rejection, isolation, and victimization by peers, as well as problems establishing and maintaining friendships in childhood and early adolescence. They also recalled feeling embarrassed and emotionally distressed, and they perceived their unique challenges as uncontrollable, pervasive, and stigmatizing. Several adolescents with ADHD described becoming resigned to being friendless in adolescence. The transition to secondary school, however, seemed to facilitate friendship development with like-minded peers for adolescents with ADHD in this study. Findings are discussed within the context of the existing literature on the peer relationships of adolescents with ADHD. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed.
Fundamentals and application of the collapse transition of poly(acrylic acid) for synthesis of various polymer-templated nanoparticles
Keywords: lanthanides
nanoparticles
photocatalysis
poly(acrylic acid)
polymer collapse
UV crosslinking

The collapse of a long chain polymer from extended to globular conformation can be the basis for a synthesis of nanoparticles. For example, a negatively charged polyelectrolyte can be collapsed by positively charged counterions, forming a nano-sized polymer-counterion particle. Upon stabilization of the nanoparticle via UV crosslinking, further chemical reaction of the counterions can be performed. In principle, the method can be carried out with different polyelectrolyte-counterions pair, and hence has enormous potential for generating different kinds of nanoparticles. For each combination, a study of various parameters affecting the collapse process is required. Parameters including the valence state of counterions, counterion concentration, pH, polymer molecular weight, polymer concentration, and UV dose were found to affect the process. The vast parameter space governing the collapse of poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) by various ions and identified optimal synthesis condition for the polymer-counterion nanoparticles was investigated. First, a counterion concentration range at which PAA was collapsed yet have not formed aggregates was determined via viscosity and turbidity measurements. Second, optimization of the UV dose was explored for crosslinking of the nanoparticles while minimizing UV-induced chain scission. The optimization method was applied to the synthesis of various nanoparticles. Lanthanide oxide nanoparticles in similar chemical environments were synthesized, and their optical and magnetic properties were studied and compared to bulk materials. While their magnetic properties were similar to those of lanthanide ions, there was a notable enhancement of the UV absorption of CexOy-PAA and the luminescence properties of TbxOy-PAA and EuxOy-PAA. TixOy-PAA and BixWyOz-PAA were also synthesized and their photocatalytic properties were demonstrated using an organic dye model system. Lastly, photocatalytic properties of a hydrothermally-synthesized WO3 system were evaluated and Pt deposition on the WO3 system improved amaranth decolourization efficiency. The versatility of the approach in creating a wide range of nanoparticles was demonstrated and a universal method for creating various polymer-counterion nanoparticles was outlined.
Gene regulatory control of immune cell specification and differentiation in the sea urchin embryo and larva
Keywords: E-proteins
Evolution
GATA factors
Gene regulatory networks
MACPF
Sea urchin

Hematopoietic systems in mammals have been the focus of intense study. However, complications such as paralog compensation among transcription factor genes in complex vertebrate models can make it difficult to characterize gene regulatory networks (GRNs) for immune cell differentiation in detail, especially in vivo. Simple invertebrates can provide systems-level models to explore GRN function as it directs development in the intact organism. The sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) is an emerging model for such studies. Larval immunocytes are patterned in the mesoderm at the blastula stage. Immunocyte precursors express single gene orthologs of vertebrate hematopoietic factors, including GATA-1,-2, 3 factors, Scl/Tal2/Lyl1, and the E-proteins (E2A/HEB/E2-2). Genome analyses also reveal a complex system of immune receptors and effectors. In my thesis I sought to 1) characterize immune cell terminal differentiation genes in more detail, 2) characterize the role of E-protein transcription factor splice variants driving the emergence of distinct mesodermal cell types, and 3) characterize the later expression of key transcription factors in maintaining larval immunocyte populations. I identified two markers: a thioester Îą-macroglobulin like protein, Tecp2, and MacpfA2. MacpfA2 is part of a multi-gene family of 22 perforin-related effectors. Phylogenetic and expression analyses of the Macpf family identified eight sub-families that exhibit differential expression domains and transcriptional responses to infection across embryonic and adult tissues and cells. Two isoforms of SpE-protein were identified in immunocyte precursors: a longer canonical (Can) form and a truncated alternative (Alt) form that initiates from a unique first exon. SpE-Alt shares genomic organization and sequence conservation with the HEB and E2-2 vertebrate paralogs. SpE-Alt is required for immunocyte development and functions in a novel cis-regulatory mechanism between the two isoforms. A second isoform of SpGATA123 was also identified. A short isoform is predominant in immunocyte precursors and adult coelomocytes, whereas a longer form is expressed in larval endoderm. SpGATA123-S perturbation affects immunoctye migration and the expression of MacpfA2. SpGATA123-S and other early regulators of immunocyte specification re-emerge in the coelomic pouches of the feeding larva. These studies in the sea urchin have reinforced the hypothesis that although cell morphology and terminal effectors diversify rapidly among different animals, deep homology exists at the level of primitive hemocyte development across deuterostomes. Aspects of these systems are re-deployed in definitive stages of hematopoiesis. In sum, simple animal models offer tractable systems for studying the regulatory machinery governing immune cell emergence in vivo. This provides a foundation for comparative GRN investigations that will improve our understanding of the evolution of immune systems across phyla.
Unimagined Communities: Post-Apartheid Nation-Building, Memory and Institutional Change in South Africa (1990-2010)
Keywords: Commemoration
Institutionalism
Nationalism
post-colonialism

Studies of nationalism insist that the construction of usable pasts is central to the creation of national solidarities and the identity of a nation. However, this scholarship is limited by the scant attention that is paid to how those pasts are constructed, and the mechanisms through which decision-making occurs. The results of this neglect are often abstracted assumptions asserting a voluntarism and coherence that most often do not exist. Repeatedly, studies focus on the products of memorialization which imposes consistency and statist intentionality, after the fact, on what is a contingent, messy and complicated process. In addition, studies often assume a singularity of power, located in an unfragmented state, with authoritarian capacity to produce meaning. This dissertation remedies these flaws by paying attention to the processes and procedures through which national memorialization unfolds. It focuses specifically on the partial critical juncture that enabled South Africaâ s transition, which has produced multiple continuities with and changes from Apartheid institutions. Imagining the memory-nation here is thus theorized as both path-dependent and contingent. There are numerous factors at play in understanding memory-making including the character of transition, fractions within the governing party, frictions in the state, and the relationship between national, international and local contexts. In tracing the processes of memory-making as they are attached to nation-building, this dissertation pays careful attention to processual analysis that rejects the reification of â the nationâ and its memory. It argues that on-going dynamics of power in bureaucratic states tend to lend formal benefit to the already empowered with the so-called previously disadvantaged reliant on more informal mechanisms of asserting voice; in other words, in the context of the post-Apartheid dispensation, democratization and decolonization are not necessarily simultaneous processes. The dissertation does not present a puzzle for resolution, but instead suggests a method of reading the construction of the memory-nation. This method takes context and contingency not as variables in theory, but as theory itself. Thus, the unexceptional exceptionalism that is the nation-state in this global conjuncture can be analyzed and understood.
The Future of Mandatory Reporting Laws: Developing a Legal and Policy Framework for Determining What Reporting Obligations to Impose on Professionals
Keywords: autonomy
confidentiality
deterrence
law
mandatory reporting
privacy

Individuals within a professional-client relationship reveal a range of sensitive information that they might otherwise be reluctant to share with others. Mandatory reporting laws â laws that require professionals to report client information to the state â allow governments to extract this information in order to use it for social goals. These laws are widely used yet poorly understood. There is no apparent rationale for what is reportable and what is not. The existing legal literature largely ignores the interactions of these laws with the common law and other statutes, and particularly their compliance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The literature also considers individual mandatory reporting laws in isolation. This thesis provides a legal and policy analysis of mandatory reporting laws as a family of related laws in the Canadian context. The legal analysis considers the impact of these laws on the clientâ s interests in autonomy, privacy, and access to services, and on religious and conscience interests of the professional. It concludes that existing mandatory reporting laws infringe Charter rights in several ways. Some of these infringements will be justifiable under section 1 of the Charter as reasonable limitations in a free and democratic society. Others likely require legislative amendments. Overall, however, Charter compliance is not a significant restraint on lawmaking in this area, leaving legislators and policymakers vast possibilities to navigate. The policy analysis complements the legal analysis by setting out a four-component framework for evaluating existing laws and new proposals. The first component focuses on the purpose of the law; the second, on the special ability or opportunity of the professional to detect the reportable occurrence; the third, on the connection between the purpose of the law and the purpose of the profession; and the fourth, on the long-term impacts on the client-professional relationship. Together, the legal and policy analysis should enable legislators and policymakers to improve the coherence and consistency of lawmaking in this area. This thesis demonstrates that mandatory reporting laws are a powerful legal tool, but one that should be employed sparingly and carefully because it comes with real though often intangible harms.
A Biophilic Approach To Post-Secondary Learning Strategies: Facilitating Learning Through Intentional Time In Nature
Keywords: Biophilia
Learning Disabilities
Learning Strategies
Nature
Outdoor Education
Post-secondary

Many post-secondary students report increasing difficulties with concentration, persistence, stress and anxiety. Focused listening in lectures, effective collaboration, efficient studying, and thoughtful time management contribute to post-secondary achievement, as do self-efficacy, tenacity, resilience, and perseverance. Together, these foundational skills and abilities, which undergird all academic disciplines, assist students in accomplishing expected tasks, facing challenges, and recovering from setbacks. Learning strategists work with students to bolster academic skills and abilities, typically through paper- or web-based techniques. Learning strategies are frequently taught and engaged with indoors; inside labs and studios, in front of computers and projectors, and practiced at home or at library desks. This narrative inquiry investigates how learning strategists may facilitate biophilic experiences to improve student achievement. Findings of this study indicate that Ryerson University's Portage program, offered to students with learning exceptionalities, may help to foster the very skills learning strategists seek to scaffold and support. Additionally, the findings from this study may be of benefit to the general student population.
Analysis of Thunderstorm Trends in Southern Ontario, Canada: Past and Future
Keywords: climate change
lightning
severe weather
thunderstorms

Despite the potential hazards associated with thunderstorms, they have been underrepresented in climatology studies. Southern Ontario is Canadaâ s most active thunderstorm region, and the countryâ s most populous and industrialized region. To date there has been no analysis of past trends of thunderstorms in Southern Ontario, or any analysis of how thunderstorm frequency might change over the current century. This thesis consists of three research chapters flanked by an introduction (Chapter 1) and discussion (Chapter 5). In Chapter 2 manual thunderstorm observations from eight Environment Canada weather stations are evaluated for accuracy by comparing them to data from the Canadian Lightning Detection Network. The results indicate the manual observations are reliable for small distances around each weather station, as is expected given the normally localized nature of thunderstorms. In Chapter 3 the historical manual hourly thunderstorm observations are evaluated for trends over the past several decades. Daily precipitation and wind gust data are used as proxies to determine if there have been changes in thunderstorm intensity, and yearly thunderstorm occurrence is compared to the larger scale phenomena ENSO and NAO. No consistent significant trends were observed over this period in either thunderstorm occurrence or intensity and a correlation between thunderstorm frequency and ENSO and NAO was also not detected. In Chapter 4 thunderstorm occurrence was successfully related to convective available potential energy (CAPE), with the probability of observing a thunderstorm on a given day at each of the weather stations increasing with daily maximum CAPE. While there were no consistent significant trends in CAPE observed over the reference period, by statistically downscaling three general circulation models it was found that large and robust increases in CAPE are expected over the coming decades across all weather stations, which consequently will have the potential to result in an increase in thunderstorm frequency.
Fabrics and Semi-volatile Organic Compounds: Towards Understanding Accumulation and Release
Keywords: Chemical Partitioning
Fabrics
Indoor air
Laundry
SVOCs

The main goal of this thesis was to improve understanding of the role of clothing in human and environmental exposure to semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) by characterizing their accumulation and uptake kinetics to fabrics followed by release in laundry water. Cotton, rayon and polyester were used as test fabrics and halogenated and organophosphate flame retardants (HFRs and OPEs, respectively) and phthalates were test chemicals. Analytical and measurement methods were first developed for quantifying the uptake of SVOCs from indoor air to two passive air samplers. Distribution coefficients and uptake kinetics of HFRs and phthalates for cotton, rayon and polyester under ambient indoor and controlled conditions showed gas- and particle-phase accumulation. Uptake appeared to be air-side controlled when normalized to planar surface area, with uptake rates of SVOCs of 0.4â 0.9 m3 air equivalent/day.dm2 fabric. These rates imply that 2 m2 of typical clothing worn by a person would sequester chemical in 100 m3 of equivalent air per day due to the large capacity of fabrics to accumulate SVOCs, with times to reach equilibrium of >10 years for HFRs. An inverse relationship was found between accumulation by cotton versus polyester and KOW when OPEs, HFRs and phthalates were considered, indicating the need to consider physical-chemical properties of polar and non-polar chemicals and fabrics. Chemical release during laundering was a function (sigmoidal) of KOW with >80% and
Augmenting Animality: Neuromarketing as a Pedagogy of Communicative Surveillance
Keywords: Education
Media and Communication
Neuromarketing
Philosophy
Surveillance Studies
Technology

This research project considers ethical questions around neuromarketing and its implications for human freedom: How is neuromarketing shaping our subjectivities? How is neuromarketing disrupting our processes of meaning-making? If neuromarketing is scrambling our thinking, can we be free at all? The findings of this inquiry reveal that the practices inherent in the operations of neuromarketing as a form of communicative surveillance instrumentalize the consumer as a means to advertising ends. Neuromarketing discourse constructs and interprets consumers as brain images and particular brain types, reduced further to kinds of instinctive/affective reflex triggers to external advertising stimuli. The key difference between traditional forms of marketing and neuromarketing lies in what the technological apparatus can do to manipulate the consumer brain, that is, bypass the consumer's capacity for critical reflection, reducing the consumer to the metaphor of mind as animality via the animalization of thinking, as this dissertation seeks to argue. My research seeks to further understandings of the relations between neuromarketing and constructions of consumer subjectivities. I present a critical hermeneutics of neuromarketing discourse through an examination of narrative devices embedded in multimodal textual artifacts, looking to reveal recurrent themes, metaphors, explicit and implicit assumptions, beliefs, and values. I draw on a hybrid analytic that merges thematic textual analysis and philosophy, using Heidegger's tripartite thesis that the stone is worldless, animal is poor in world (animality), and man [sic] is world-forming, as a conceptual frame for showing how the discursive structures of neuromarketing work to animalize consumer thinking as a brain to study, disinhibit, and manipulate for instrumental ends. The tripartite division is useful heuristically as a method for revealing the crudeness of certain dimensions of the neuromarketing program inasmuch as they assume the consumer is situated in an understandable world, without explicating the process of understanding and/or the concept of "world" when meaning-making. I contend that neuromarketing aims to disrupt and override the thinking processes of consumers. By disrupting thinking, neuromarketing works in opposition to freedom of intelligence as foundational to a democratic way of life. Neuromarketing technique violates our freedom to choose.