VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
An Ethnography of Interprofessional Interactions in Discharge in a Canadian Acute Care Setting
Keywords: ethnography
general internal medicine
interprofessional care
patient discharge
social theory

Governments and hospital administrators are concerned with patient discharge from hospital, assessing efficiency and quality through length of stay, readmission rates, and discharge summaries. There is less attention being awarded to how health care workers practice and interact in relation to discharge within the context of professional roles, boundaries, and organizational structures. This thesis reports on an ethnographic study using theories of medical dominance and negotiated order to explore the nature of, and interplay between, meso-structural factors that shape interprofessional interactions in discharge in a general internal medicine unit and micro-level interprofessional interactions. Data collection, conducted from January 2012 to May 2013, involved observations, interviews, and documentary analysis. Approximately 65 hours of observations were undertaken, 23 semi-structured interviews were conducted with health care workers, and government and hospital discharge documents were collected. Data were analyzed using a directed content approach. The findings indicate that the division of healthcare labour and managerialism in the form of discharge policy are affecting health care workers' roles and opportunities for interprofessional interactions. While patterns of medical dominance exist, these occur amongst changing professional roles and interprofessional boundaries, due to the impact of managerialism on the range of healthcare workers. Consequently, there were varying opportunities for interprofessional negotiations to occur around discharge. The impact of meso-structural factors and the nature of interprofessional interactions were analyzed in relation to decision-making about patient readiness for discharge and preparation for discharge, and in the context of interprofessional rounds. A further factor affecting interprofessional interactions in relation to discharge examined in this study is the existence of a medical clinical teaching unit. An understanding of the impact of meso-structural factors on interprofessional interactions and the nature of the micro-level negotiations that occur is important for the development of interprofessional education and practice interventions.
Mapping Long-term Cortical Maturation of the Auditory System in Adolescents who are Deaf and have used a Unilateral Cochlear Implant to Hear
Keywords: Children / Adolescents
Cochlear Implant
Development
Hearing Loss / Deafness
NeuroImaging
Unilateral

In the present Thesis, we used novel imaging tools to study maturation of the auditory brain in adolescents who are deaf and have use a unilateral cochlear implant (CI) to hear for most of their lives. A CI is a surgically implanted auditory prosthesis that establishes hearing in children who are deaf. The aims of implantation are to halt any effects of deafness on the brain and promote normal auditory development. Unfortunately, CIs do not restore normal hearing as they provide only a crude representation of sounds and eliminate important cochlear processing. It has recently been shown that unilaterally stimulating the auditory system with a CI and leaving the opposite pathways deprived of input for longer than 1.5 years compromises bilateral auditory development. We are now exploring the cortical consequences of missing this sensitive period and driving maturation of the auditory cortex with unilateral implant stimulation. We measured electrically-evoked cortical responses in adolescents who had over a decade of unilateral CI experience before receiving a second implant in the opposite deprived ear. This provided an unparalleled opportunity to assess the effects of long-term unilateral stimulation/deprivation on the auditory pathways in the adolescent brain. We tracked the development of cortical responses with CI experience and localized underlying areas of cortical activity in the brain using our beamformer imaging methods. Neural synchrony of these responses was calculated to assess the co-ordination of activity across brain regions in response to sound. Our results indicate that long-term unilateral implant stimulation promotes normal-like maturation of the auditory cortex with good speech perception outcomes, providing a general impression that some degree of auditory development proceeds normally. However, abnormally strengthened activity from the hearing ear to the contralateral cortex and increased synchrony in networks known to be involved in cognitive processing suggests that cortical abnormalities persist into maturation. In the opposite deprived ear, cortical responses were atypical, had abnormally large dipoles and abnormal neural synchrony, perhaps reflecting cortical un-coupling/dis-connectivity in response to sound. We suggest that unilateral maturation of the auditory cortex drives lasting auditory asymmetries and leaves the deprived pathways unprotected from deafness-induced abnormalities.
Three Essays in Energy Economics and Industrial Organization, with Applications to Electricity and Distribution Networks
Keywords: Antitrust Issues and Policies
Distribution Networks
Electricity
Energy
Industrial Organization

Electricity industries are experiencing upward cost pressures in many parts of the world. Chapter 1 of this thesis studies the production technology of electricity distributors. Although production and cost functions are mathematical duals, practitioners typically estimate only one or the other. This chapter proposes an approach for joint estimation of production and costs. Combining such quantity and price data has the effect of adding statistical information without introducing additional parameters into the model. We define a GMM estimator that produces internally consistent parameter estimates for both the production function and the cost function. We consider a multi-output framework, and show how to account for the presence of certain types of simultaneity and measurement error. The methodology is applied to data on 73 Ontario distributors for the period 2002-2012. As expected, the joint model results in a substantial improvement in the precision of parameter estimates.Chapter 2 focuses on productivity trends in electricity distribution. We apply two methodologies for estimating productivity growth - an index based approach, and an econometric cost based approach - to our data on the 73 Ontario distributors for the period 2002 to 2012. The resulting productivity growth estimates are approximately ‐1% per year, suggesting a reversal of the positive estimates that have generally been reported in previous periods. We implement flexible semi-parametric variants to assess the robustness of these conclusions and discuss the use of such statistical analyses for calibrating productivity and relative efficiencies within a price-cap framework. In chapter 3, I turn to the historically important problem of vertical contractual relations. While the existing literature has established that resale price maintenance is sufficient to coordinate the distribution network of a manufacturer, this chapter asks whether such vertical restraints are necessary. Specifically, I study the vertical contracting problem between an upstream manufacturer and its downstream distributors in a setting where spot market contracts fail, but resale price maintenance cannot be appealed to due to legal prohibition. I show that a bonus scheme based on retail revenues is sufficient to provide incentives to decentralized retailers to elicit the correct levels of both price and service.
Investigation of Cyclic Deformation and Fatigue of Polycrystalline Cu under Pure Compression Cyclic Loading Conditions
Keywords: cyclic creep
cyclic deformation response
cyclic stress strain curve
fatigue
polycrystalline Cu
pure compression

It is commonly accepted that fatigue crack is initiated under tensile fatigue stresses. However, practical examples demonstrate that cracks may initiate under pure compressive fluctuating loads, e.g. the failures observed in aircraft landing gear frames. As the mechanism of such failures is rarely investigated, there is very limited or non-existent knowledge pool on cyclic deformation response under pure compressive fatigue condition. Our recent work verified that fatigue cracks may nucleate from stress concentration sites under pure compression fatigue, but whether or not a form of stress concentration is always needed to initiate a crack remains uncertain. In this study, compression fatigue tests under different peak stresses were carried out on smooth bars of fully annealed OFHC Copper. The purpose of these tests is to investigate not only the cyclic deformation response but also the possibility of crack nucleation without the stress concentrator. Results showed that overall the cyclic stress-strain response and microstructural evolution of OFHC Copper under pure compression fatigue exhibits rather dissimilar behaviour compared to those under symmetrical fatigue. The specimens hardened rapidly within 10 cycles under pure compression fatigue unlike the gradual cyclic hardening behaviour in symmetrical fatigue with the same peak stress amplitude. Compressive cyclic creep behaviour was also observed. Moreover, TEM observation showed that only moderate slip activity was detectable on the surface instead of typical PSB features. The surface observations revealed that surface slip bands did not increase in number nor height as cycling progressed. In addition, surface roughening by grain boundary extrusion was detected to become more severe with further cycling. Therefore, the plastic strain accommodated within the samples was not mainly related to dislocation activities. Instead, the mechanism of cyclic creep response for pure compression fatigue was correlated and caused primarily by grain boundary extrusions. Such phenomenon was found to eventually lead to crack nucleation. Furthermore, from symmetrical fatigue testing, it was noted that depending on the polarity of the loading spectrum in the first half cycle, i.e. compression or tension, regular or anti-Bauschinger effect was observed, respectively. Such observations further elucidate the role of compression loading spectrum versus tension loading in fatigue.
Measuring Slip Resistance of Winter Footwear
Keywords: Footwear
Friction
Gait
Slip Resistance
Slips and Falls

Slip and fall accidents represent an enormous burden in terms of human suffering and economic costs. In winter conditions, outdoor falls increase as cold temperatures and precipitation create hazardous conditions underfoot. An effective method of reducing falls is the use of slip resistant footwear. However, the optimization of this footwear is hindered by the fact that slip resistance is not easily measured and the validity of existing measurement devices is questionable. The series of four studies presented here show the progression of work utilizing human-centred approaches to evaluating the performance of winter footwear on real winter surfaces and have led to the development of a new test method. To start, traditional measures of slip severity were used to evaluate the effectiveness of winter boots and cleated footwear devices while subjects walked in common winter conditions. Walking trials on level and uneven icy surfaces showed that while cleated footwear did reduce slip frequency, they did not prevent dangerous slips from occurring. Further testing showed that the current standard test conditions and parameters used for determining footwear slip resistance do not adequately simulate gait in winter conditions. As a result, a new user-centred protocol was developed for testing footwear. Subjects were asked to stand and walk across a wet, icy surface that was tilted progressively until they could no longer maintain balance, thereby establishing the maximum achievable incline angle for a variety of styles of footwear. This method proved to be reliable on wet ice so a refined protocol was applied to a larger sample of footwear which was then tested on dry ice as well as snow conditions. The results showed the importance of testing winter footwear in snow conditions, which had not been done before. These studies demonstrate the viability of testing footwear without removing the critically important human component.
RST-style Discourse Parsing and Its Applications in Discourse Analysis
Keywords: Computational Linguistics
Discourse Analysis
Discourse Parsing

Discourse parsing is the task of identifying the relatedness and the particular discourse relations among various discourse units in a text. In particular, among various theoretical frameworks of discourse parsing, I am interested in Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). I hypothesize that, given its ultimate success, discourse parsing can provide a general solution for use in many downstream applications.This thesis is composed of two major parts. First, I overview my work on discourse segmentation and discourse tree-building, which are the two primary components of RST-style discourse parsing. Evaluated on the RST Discourse Treebank (RST-DT), both of my discourse segmenter and tree-builder achieve the state-of-the-art performance.Later, I discuss the application of discourse relations to some specific tasks in the analysis of discourse, including the evaluation of coherence, the identification of authorship, and the detection of deception. In particular, I propose to use a set of application-neutral features, which are derived from the discourse relations extracted by my discourse parser, and compare the performance of these application-neutral features against the classic application-specific approaches to each of these tasks. On the first two tasks, experimental results show that discourse relation features by themselves often perform as well as those classic application-specific features, and the combination of these two kinds of features usually yields further improvement. These results provide strong evidence for my hypothesis that discourse parsing is able to provide a general solution for the analysis of discourse. However, we failed to observe a similar effectiveness of discourse parsing on the third task, the detection of deception. I postulate that this might be due to several confounding factors of the task itself.
Declines and Regains in Income Status and Health Status Among Mid- and Later-life Canadians
Keywords: Canada
logistic regression analyses
mid- and later-life
National Population Health Survey
social causation
sociodemographic and health behaviour factors

As Canada's population ages, understanding the associated economic and social issues that may emerge becomes critical. This study's purpose was to investigate sociodemographic and health behaviour factors that influence income and/or health changes among Canadians in mid- and later-life. To examine these factors, logistic regression analyses were undertaken using a representative sample (n = 2,368) of Canadians, ages 40 to 59 from seven cycles (1994-1995 to 2006-2007) of longitudinal data from the National Population Health Survey. This study examined whether, for this age group, income decline was a stronger determinant of health decline (social causation) than vice versa (reverse causation). Of 382 respondents who experienced both an income and health decline, 230 experienced an income before a health decline. Several logistic regression findings supported social causation and only one supported reverse causation. Also explored by this study was the comparative influence of sociodemographic versus health behaviour factors on changes in income and health. Compared to sociodemographic factors, health behaviour factors had less influence on changes in income and health. The physical inactivity and obesity variables were infrequently statistically significant predictors of income and health changes. The drinking habits variable was frequently a statistically significant predictor of changes in income and health. A history of smoking was very frequently a statistically significant predictor--of health declines only, both income and health declines, and income declines before health declines.The factors associated with * two-fold declines (income and health) were higher income, good or very good (vs. excellent) health, being older, not having graduated from high school, and a history of smoking; * income regains were lower income, being male, younger, married, and a high school graduate; and * health regains were higher income, being neither a high school graduate nor an immigrant, never having smoked, and being a moderate or nondrinker. A better understanding of the patterns and predictors of income and health declines and regains among mid- and later-life Canadians may serve to identify opportunities to improve the future welfare of the elderly.
Flexible Dynamics and Attitude Control of a Square Solar Sail
Keywords: Attitude Control
Control Allocation
Finite Element Method
Flexible Dynamics
Solar Sail
Wrinkling

This thesis presents a comprehensive analysis of attitude and structural dynamics of a square solar sail. In particular, this research examines the use of corner-attached reflective vanes to control the attitude of the spacecraft. An introduction to known solar sail designs is given, then the mathematics involved in calculating solar radiation pressure forces are presented. A detailed derivation and implementation of the unconstrained nonlinear flexible structural dynamics with Finite Element Method (FEM) models are explored, with several sample simulations of published large deflection experiments used as verification measures. To simulate the inability of a thin membrane to resist compression, the sail membrane elements are augmented with a method that approximates the wrinkling and the slacking dynamics, which is followed by a simulation of another well-known experiment as a verification measure.Once the structural dynamics are established, the usage of the tip vanes is explored. Specifically, a control allocation problem formed by having two degrees of freedom for each tip vane is defined and an efficient solution to this problem is presented, allowing desired control torques to be converted to appropriate vane angles. A randomized testing mechanism is implemented to show the efficacy of this algorithm. The sail shadowing problem is explored as well, where a component of the spacecraft casts shadow upon the sail and prevents solar radiation pressure force from being produced. A method to calculate the region of shadow is presented, and two different shadowing examples are examined - due to the spacecraft bus, and due to the sail itself.Combining all of the above, an attitude control simulation of the sail model is presented. A simple PD controller combined with the control allocation scheme is used to provide the control torque for the sail, with which the spacecraft must orient towards a number of pre-specified attitude targets. Several attitude orientations are simulated, then a number of modifications to the control are explored. The controllability of the rigid and the elastic modes of the sail at different stable states is demonstrated as well, showing that the sail is controllable for all its modes in its stable state.
Study of the Regulation of the Expression of the Notch Ligand Delta-like 4 by Thymic Epithelial Cells
Keywords: Delta-like 4
Gene expression
mRNA regulation
Thymic epithelial cells
Thymus

The thymus is the inductive site for T-cell lymphopoiesis. Key to this function is the expression of the Notch ligand Delta-like 4 (Dll4) on the surface of thymic epithelial cells (TECs). Work by our laboratory and others have linked the control of Dll4 expression to the 3-dimensional (3D) reticular arrangement of TECs and implicated that the transcription factor FoxN1 as playing a role in the regulatory axis. However, a full understanding of Dll4 regulation remains elusive. In this thesis, evidence is put forth which supports the model in which Dll4 is regulated both at the transcriptional and post-transcriptional level. Transcriptionally, FoxN1 is a direct regulator of Dll4 transcriptional initiation, as there are functional FoxN1 consensus sequences in the the promoter region of Dll4. Furthermore, ectopic FoxN1 expression can increase levels of Dll4 messenger RNA (mRNA) in thymic stromal monolayer cell cultures. Post-transcriptionally, Dll4 mRNA contains destabilizing AU-rich elements in its 3' untranslated region. The 3D reticular arrangement of TECs contributes to stabilize Dll4 mRNA likely as a result of active p38 mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) signalling. Upon disruption of the 3D structure, p38 MAPK signalling is diminished, concomitant with a rapid decay of Dll4, while pharmacological activation of the p38 MAPK pathway blunts the loss of Dll4 expression in monolayer TEC cultures. Future studies will focus on identifying the physiologically relevant extracellular signalling cues that activate p38 MAPK in TECs, and describing the factors contributing to the decay and stability of Dll4 mRNA. By understanding Dll4 regulation, we will gain insight not only into the biology of the thymus, but how organ structure affects gene function at the molecular level.
How District System Leaders Support Principal Capacity Building in Ontario: A Study of the Leading Student Acheivement Initiative
Keywords: District Leaders
Leadership
Leading Student Achievement

This thesis examines how district leaders, specifically Leading Student Achievement (LSA) System Leaders, support principal capacity building in the Ontario Leading Student Achievement project. The LSA project uses the strategy of networked principal capacity building to support the interaction of principals within and across schools to build professional knowledge creation and sharing. The conceptual framework for this study is based on the research on district practices that influence improved student learning. This study identifies how LSA System Leaders support networked principal capacity building through an examination of Ministry of Education expectations for LSA System Leaders; board contextual factors that influence how LSA System Leaders support networked principal capacity building; LSA System Leader personal experiences; and the use of LSA online networked learning formats. Phone interviews of a sample of LSA System Leaders confirmed their use of Ontario Leadership Framework (OLF) practices in supporting networked principal capacity building. Respondents provided evidence of how they act as implementing agents, aligning the LSA initiative with other board and Ministry of Education initiatives. During 2012-2013, LSA System Leaders noted the impact of labour unrest on their ability to collect and utilize system student achievement data to focus networked principal capacity building. The study findings confirmed the presence of resolute leadership within the guiding coalition in board committees to improve student achievement, as well as in senior administration. The study findings also confirmed that district leaders' practices to support principal capacity building evolve, respond and adapt to board and school contextual factors, and evolving principal learning needs. District leaders facilitated access to online learning formats to maximize capacity building through pre and post-session learning activities. The study findings were situated within the broader literature review to address the role of districts in supporting professional learning; the nature of district practices which support professional learning; and implications for districts leading networked principal capacity building. A further synthesis of the study findings classified district leader practices to support principal capacity building as those of focusing and aligning; resourcing and incentivizing; and using personal leadership resources