VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Structural and Functional Correlates of Hand Recovery Following Childhood Stroke
Keywords: Functional Imaging
Medical Imaging
Motor Recovery
Pediatrics
Plasticity
Stroke

Following stroke in children, there is a wide range of motor recovery. This study examined the role of the corticospinal tract (CST) and its association with motor outcome of the hand in children following arterial ischemic stroke (AIS). The corticospinal tract was assessed several ways, using the appropriate imaging modalities.The primary hypothesis was that the extent of motor recovery in the stroke affected hand would be associated with two factors: 1) the extent of anatomical damage to the stroke affected corticospinal tract, and, 2) the extent and pattern of functional reorganization within the motor system. Children with AIS in the middle cerebral artery territory, occurring after the age of 2, were assessed for motor function with the validated Pediatric Stroke Outcome Measure. The presence of corticospinal tract damage was determined using conventional MRI to assess Wallerian degeneration, and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to quantify damage at the microstructural level. These measures were done in chronic phase following stroke. In the acute phase, (1 - 10 days post stroke), the presence of diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) signal abnormalities in the corticospinal tract were determined. Finally, neural activation patterns were evaluated using functional MRI to assess the location and extent of functional reorganization of the hand following stroke. These activation patterns were also assessed to determine the association with corticospinal tract integrity, and motor outcome. We found the integrity of the CST shows an association with motor outcome of the hand in pediatric stroke patients. Greater damage to the CST was associated with a greater motor deficit, suggesting that the level of motor skill recovery achieved in pediatric stroke patients relates to the gross morphological, and microstructural status of the CST. Integrity of the fibers in the CST also showed an association with the brain activation patterns. Greater damage to the CST was associated with a larger volume of activations during stroke affected hand use in the stroke affected hemisphere, and more severe outcome. The current study suggests that a structural and functional relationship exists in children with variable recovery of hand function following stroke. The use of complementary imaging techniques was effective in evaluating this relationship.
Injection-molded Thermoplastic Foams for Sound Insulation
Keywords: Injection Molding
Insulation
Polymer
Sound

Open-cell foam materials have many applications such as sound and thermal insulators, filter and separation membranes, scaffolds, battery electrode supports, and printing heads. Commercial open-cell polymeric foams have been almost exclusively manufactured with polyurethane thermoset materials. While the production of thermoplastic open-cell foam has been studied in batch foaming and extrusion systems, open-cell foaming with the injection molding process has not received enough attention due to its inherent challenge to produce an open-cell structure. However, despite that challenge, injection molding is one of the most cost-effective and widely used polymer processing technologies. Thermoplastic polymeric open-cell foams that are environmentally friendly and recyclable were developed for different applications including sound insulation using the injection molding machine process. This thesis work combines the conventional foam injection-molding process with mold opening and gas counter pressure techniques to achieve highly-expanded open-cell foam structures with/without an air-gap for sound insulation. Environmentally friendly and recyclable foams produced in this study showed promising results for sound insulation and sound absorption.
Diversity is (not) good enough: Unsettling White Settler Colonialism within Toronto's Queer Service Sector
Keywords: Qualitative
Queer
Settler Colonialism
Social Services
Toronto
White Racism

This dissertation explores the ways in which queer service provision and non-Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and trans (LGBTQ)-identified service providers in downtown Toronto can contribute to and become complicit in white settler colonial projects. During this study based on in-depth interviews, forty-three research participants were asked about their experiences working within their respective queer service organizations, and, more specifically, about their understandings of how diversity, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism are practiced. Findings highlight how queer service provision, particularly its perpetual crisis and capacity to care for queerness, can obscure the ways the organizations themselves contribute to the naturalization of a hierarchy of oppression that centralizes the needs of white queers. Additionally, I consider the narratives of white service providers' goodness as easily relocating Indigenous peoples as "problems" and "pathology" who then become unworthy of care. Moreover, this inquiry theorizes how the narratives offered by white service providers fit Indigenous peoples and people of colour into stories of Canadian multiculturalism. I show how non-Indigenous queer and trans service providers' evocations of diversity and inclusion easily deflect their implicatedness in white settler colonialism. Although queer service provision is a rich site of queer politics, it continues to be a site that is tied to state-sanctioned funding regimes and neoliberal models of care used to naturalize Indigenous peoples' elimination, erasure, and assimilation. Thus, this research contends that queer communities in downtown Toronto operate to sustain white supremacy and settler colonialism. I conclude with a set of questions that asks non-Indigenous service providers to engage with how they participate (often unknowingly) in white settler colonial projects, and move beyond queer service provision as a site of emancipation in order to meaningfully support Indigenous resurgence and decolonization.
Effects of Error Generation on Episodic Memory among Healthy Younger and Older Adults
Keywords: Aging
Cognition
Memory

Making mistakes during everyday learning is the norm rather than the exception, but its consequences for episodic memory are still unclear. A pedagogically motivated literature among younger adults shows that generating errors at study leads to improvements in memory for correct information (i.e. the error generation effect). By contrast, a clinically motivated literature among older adults suggests that error generation hinders episodic memory and should be avoided. The goal of this dissertation is to bridge these two literatures and uncover the conditions under which errors help or harm memory among healthy younger and older adults. Study 1 showed that relative to avoiding errors, generating errors at study led to increases in target memory when learning from conceptual cues, but decreases in target memory when learning from nonconceptual lexical cues. Moreover, this dissociation was found among both younger and older adults. Study 2 replicated this conceptual error generation benefit and showed that it was not modulated by cue constraint in both age groups (Study 2A), but that it was enhanced among younger adults when errors and targets were strongly relative to weakly related (Study 2B). Finally, Study 3 found that for both age groups, general knowledge errors were more likely to be corrected when they were produced with high relative to low confidence: This `hypercorrection effect' was stronger in younger than older adults when a free recall learning paradigm was used (Study 3A), but this age difference was eliminated when a multiple-choice paradigm was employed (Study 3B). Overall, these results suggest that the conditions yielding positive or negative effects of error generation on episodic memory are similar among younger and older adults: Lexical (i.e., nonconceptual) errors hinder memory, but conceptual errors enhance memory as a function of the amount of semantic processing they afford. These findings are interpreted within a framework of error processing, which posits the role of cognitive control in reducing error interference and enhancing activation of target information.
Engineering Tissue Patterning: Rules Governing Gene Expression Patterning and Compartment Boundary Formation in vitro
Keywords: compartment boundary
tissue engineering
Tissue patterning

Engineered bioartificial tissues represent one possible solution for overcoming the devastating shortage of organs and tissues, which causes hundreds of Canadian deaths every year. Despite considerable efforts however, the promise of bioengineering complex solid organs, such as liver and kidney, remains unfulfilled partly due to the challenges of organizing multiple cell components comprising such tissues ex vivo. One promising avenue of designing biomimetic tissues with improved organization is recapitulating certain aspects of developmental biology. In an embryo, cells within a developing tissue are commonly organized in a process of tissue patterning. During tissue patterning, expression of certain key genes is spatially patterned in initially naïve cells, leading to the formation of distinct phenotypic cell domains. Following this patterning process, separation of cells from distinct phenotypic domains is commonly ensured by implementation of compartment boundaries. To successfully recapitulate tissue patterning ex vivo therefore, it is important to study the rules governing gene expression patterning and boundary formation in vitro. In this work the question of how tissue pattering can be engineered in vitro is explored. This thesis describes methodology for patterning gene expression in vitro, outlines design principles governing generation of gene expression patterns with sharp interfaces, and explores the rules governing compartment boundary formation in vitro. The work presented here suggests that simply spatially controlling cell organization at the stage of developing an engineered tissue is not sufficient. Instead, to obtain multicomponent tissues with organizational stability it is necessary to incorporate long-term instructive cues into the design of bioartificial tissues.
Polymer-ionic liquid Electrolytes for Electrochemical Capacitors
Keywords: Electrochemical capacitors
Ionic liquid
Nanofiller
Polymer electrolyte

Polymer electrolyte, comprised of ionic conductors, polymer matrix, and additives, is one of the key components that control the performance of solid flexible electrochemical capacitors (ECs). Ionic liquids (ILs) are highly promising ionic conductors for next generation polymer electrolytes due to their excellent electrochemical and thermal stability. Fluorinated ILs are the most commonly applied in polymer-IL electrolytes. Although possessing high conductivity, these ILs have low environmental favorability. The aim of this work was to develop environmentally benign polymer-ILs for both electrochemical double layer capacitors (EDLCs) and pseudocapacitors, and to provide insights into the influence of constituent materials on the ion conduction mechanism and the structural stability of the polymer-IL electrolytes. Solid polymer electrolytes composed of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium hydrogen sulfate (EMIHSO
Intimate Encounters and the Politics of German Occupation in Belgium, 1940-44/45
Keywords: Europe
Gender
Intimacy
Occupation
Sexuality
World War II

Throughout the German military occupation of Belgium in the Second World War, German troops and Belgian civilians lived alongside one another and interacted in everyday life, in spite of repeated efforts of the German High Command and Nazi party to incite German men in uniform to avoid contact with locals, and particularly women. Using a wide array of sources from archives in Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain and the United States, including government and military documents, police reports, court records, draft laws and legislation and official correspondence, this dissertation explores one facet of the German-Belgian encounter between 1940 and 1944: the intimate.Domains of intimacy - including sexual violence, sex work, marriage and reproduction - were crucial in the shaping and management of German rule in occupied Belgium. The German and Nazi leadership sought to instrumentalize everyday contact and relationships between their soldiers and Belgian women as a means to secure military victory and construct the foundations for a racially based empire in Europe, the New Order. Belgian women's intimate labour offered a route to secure the morale of German soldiers through the promise of sexual reward; further, women's emotional, domestic and care labour as wives and mothers could maintain the stability of the occupation by binding Belgians to the occupation and the envisioned Greater Germanic Empire through the deep and lasting ties of the family. Yet even as the German authorities sought to use intimacy to cement occupation policy, they worried about its potentially destabilizing effects and the unwieldy nature of human contact; in particular, recalling the legacy of World War I and the first German invasion and occupation of Belgium, the German occupiers after 1940 worried about the threat posed by "dangerous women," such as the erotic female spy, the prostitute, the untrustworthy nurse and others. This study of intimacy in occupied Belgium - one of the "small countries" in Europe - demonstrates the multiple and uneven ways in which gender, sex, politics and race were entangled in official occupation policy.
Trends in the Evolution and Ecology of Functional Morphology in Neotropical Cichlids
Keywords: Adaptative Radiation
Biomechanics
Comparative Phylogenetics
Disparity
Fish
Multivariate Statistics

The uneven distribution of biological diversity has been a subject of great interest in the study of evolutionary biology. Advances in molecular phylogenetics and comparative methods have facilitated an increasing number of studies relating to the impacts of neutral and adaptive processes on morphological diversity, especially those relating to the predictions of adaptive radiation. While such studies have largely focused on restricted, island radiations, such as African Rift Lake cichlids and Caribbean anoles, recent years have seen an expansion of the analysis of morphological evolution within more broadly-distributed clades. Due to their species-richness, ecological/morphological diversity and age, the continentally-distributed freshwater fish Cichlinae (Neotropical cichlids) represent an ideal system for the study of morphological evolution and its relationship to ecological diversity. Combining data from biomechanics, morphometrics, modern and fossil specimens, and dietary analyses with a comprehensive molecular phylogeny and modern phylogenetic comparative methods I examined functional morphological evolution in Neotropical cichlids and the impact of factors such as selection, adaptation, extinction and ecological opportunity on diversification. Analysis of the functional morphospace of Neotropical cichlids revealed complex selective regimes that have contributed to their modern functional diversity. Rates of functional evolution varied with ecological opportunity in Neotropical cichlids, declining in South American through time and increasing upon the colonization of new habitats in Central America. Extinct, fossil cichlid species demonstrate the stability of selective processes on ecomorphological evolution over tens of millions of years. Functional morphology was also significantly correlated with dietary composition. While feeding roles constrained trait evolution along particular morphological axes, dietary specialization increased evolutionary rates, facilitating the evolution of more extreme morphologies. Neotropical cichlid morphological diversity has been influenced by selection and adaptive diversification especially in relation to trade-offs in bentho-pelagic foraging, and patterns of evolution in South America are consistent with a continental adaptive radiation.
High-density Power Management Architecture for Portable Applications
Keywords: digital controller
high-frequency
low-power dc-dc converters
low-volume
power management IC
switched-capacitor

This thesis introduces a power management architecture (PMA) and its on-chip implementation, designed for battery-powered portable applications. Compared to conventional two-stage PMA architectures, consisting of a front-end inductive converter followed by a set of point-of-load (PoL) buck converters, the presented PMA has improved power density. The new architecture, named MSC-DB, is based on a hybrid converter topology that combines a fixed ratio multi-output switched capacitor converter (MSC) and a set of differential-input buck (DB) converters, to achieve low volume and high power processing efficiency. The front-end switched capacitor stage has a higher power density than the conventionally used inductive converters. The downstream differential-input buck converters enable tight output voltage regulation, and allow for a drastic reduction of output filter inductors without the need for increasing switching frequency, hence limiting switching losses and improving the efficiency of the system. Furthermore, the new PMA provides battery cells balancing feature, not existing in conventional systems. The PMA architecture is implemented both as a discrete prototype and as an application-specific integrated circuit (IC) module. The on-chip implemented architecture is fabricated in a standard 0.13µm CMOS process and operates at 9.3 MHz switching frequency. Experimental comparisons with a conventional two-cell battery input architecture, providing 15 W of total power in three different voltage outputs, demonstrate up to a 50% reduction in the inductances of the downstream converter stages and up to a 53% reduction in losses, equivalent to the improvement of the power processing efficiency of a 12%. Moreover, the fabricated IC module is co-packaged with low-profile thin-film inductors, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced architecture in reducing the volume of PMAs for portable applications and possibly providing complete on-chip implementation of PMAs in near future.
Uncovering Roots of Diversity Conceptions in Teacher Candidates in a Concurrent Teacher Education Program: A Case Study of Teaching and Learning about Diversity
Keywords: Canada
Conceptual Change
Concurrent Teacher Education
Diversity
Equity
Social Justice
Education
Teacher Education

With the increasing diversity of students in Canadian schools (Egbo, 2011; Gérin-Lajoie, 2008; Solomon, Portelli, Daniel Campbell, 2005), teachers are expected to have an understanding, knowledge and skills related to diversity to be effective teachers of students with often multiple and intersecting diversities. Teacher education is ever more concerned with developing programs where future teachers can develop critical understandings and knowledge of the nature of diversity and the ability to readjust and respond to the diversity dynamics in schools (Childs, Broad, Gallagher-MacKay, Sher, Escayg McGrath, 2010; Gambhir, Broad, Evans Gaskell, 2008; Gagné, 2009). This case study investigated aspects of teaching and learning about diversity in a concurrent teacher education program with a focus on the sources and influences on diversity conceptions of teacher candidates. Findings revealed multiple tensions within the teacher education program, as well as within and among teacher candidates as they learned about diversity. At the programmatic level, there was tension caused by the differences in the way the teacher education curriculum was planned, delivered and experienced. At the level of the learner, individual characteristics appeared to influence developing conceptions of diversity to the point where these overshadowed the careful design features intended to support the development of socially just and inclusive educators. Two main lenses were used to analyse findings and highlight these tensions: the conceptual change lens (Posner et al., 1982; Hewson Lemberger, 2000; Larkin, 2010, 2012) and the liberal theory (Moosa-Mitha, 2005; McLaren, 1995; Fleras, 2002). The findings suggest that in addition to the model of teacher knowledge (Shulman, 1987) and conceptual change approach (Posner et al., 1982; Larkin 2010), other concepts and theories are important to understand teacher candidates' evolving conceptions of diversity as members of a society where liberal multicultural notions of diversity are promoted through public discourses and policies. These include what Fuller (1969) calls the stages of concerns of beginning teachers; King and Kitchener's (2004) reflective judgment model of development of epistemic assumptions in early adulthood or what Dewey (1904) calls "mental movement" of a student.
Challenging Workplace Bullying: The Shaping of Organizational Practices Toward Systemic Change
Keywords: critical and feminist research
organizational ethnography
power and social inequities
prevention and intervention practices
relationality
workplace bullying and violence

In the last two decades, much effort has been invested in empirical research to understand workplace bullying. However, the identification, development and use of practices to counter it remain one of the largest research gaps in the field. This study centres on how the current conceptualization of bullying places an exclusive focus on individual actors and acts which directly shapes prevention and intervention organizational practices limiting the potential for long-term, systemic change. I sought out an organization that is attempting to take up the concept of bullying differently and trace how this conceptualization shapes their practices. As a critical organizational ethnography, guided by institutional ethnography and practice-based studies, this study includes fieldwork within a major healthcare organization. I examine practices in depth, in particular policies and education and training programs, using participant conversations and textual analysis. I examine links between how the concept of workplace bullying is constructed on an everyday basis by organizational members and internal organizational practices. Bullying in this organization is conceptualized as an interpersonal issue, as well as an organizational and societal issue and as interrelated with other forms of violence. Changes in interpersonal relations of their members, as well as systemic and organizational changes, are central goals.It is important for anti-violence (including bullying) practices to not focus on individual acts and behaviours alone. Workplace bullying is best recognized and dealt with also as an organizational issue. If the organization's role remains hidden, its systems and practices interrelated with violence will continue unaltered. In particular, organizations need to view anti-violence practices as interrelated to those countering inequities in the workplace. Effective anti-violence practices do not stop with implementation. They are ongoing, collaborative processes of development, evaluation, learning, communication and unwavering commitment. Practice do not stand alone, but are related to, support and shape one another.