VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Towards Measuring Hydrophobic Hydration at Small and Large Scales
Keywords: AFM
Hydrophobic
Machine Learning
Multivariate Curve Resolution
Polymer Collapse
Surface Science

The hydrophobic effect is well-known, ubiquitous, and of critical importance to difficult problems such as protein folding and molecular self-assembly. The effect, as understood today, arises not from any direct force, but rather emerges from the statistics of many such forces acting on a variety of molecules. We have in our possession advanced theories aiming to predict the statistical outcomes of such systems without exhaustive sampling or extensive parameterization. However, certain key predictions of these theories lack validation, and their generalization to systems of nonideal hydrophobes or to mixed solutions remains an open question. This thesis aims to describe these theories, analyze their predictions in the context of available experimental evidence, and add to that evidence. To this end, traditional tools such as contact angle measurements and vibrational spectroscopy will be employed in conjunction with single polymer pulling experiments and modern statistical analysis techniques. Machine learning methods will be examined as an avenue for increasing single molecule force spectroscopy throughput, with the specific goal of trackingrare events which might contain a large amount of information. Sum frequency generation data will be examined alongside solute-correlated Raman and infrared spectra, specifically for the investigation of aromatic hydrocarbons in the presence of protein-folding agents.
The Role of NLPR3 Inflammasome in Response to Thermal Injury and Sepsis
Keywords: Burn
Inflammasome
Inflammation
Sepsis

Although the induction of acute-phase inflammation after burn injury is essential, if prolonged it can induce increased risk of infection and sepsis. The NLRP3 inflammasome has established itself as an integral mediator of the acute phase response, however there is a current lack of understanding how it is involved in the inflammatory response after burn injury. In this study we investigated the role of the NLRP3 inflammasome in burn and septic patients and further aimed to determine if its components can be used to predict sepsis. In Chapter 2 we established the hyperinflammatory response in adult burn and septic burn patients. We also showed that there is increased NLRP3 inflammasome activation and expression in white adipose tissue (WAT) of burn patients and that its pro-inflammatory by-products increase with increasing injury severity. In Chapter 3, we studied the effect that NLRP3 knockout would have on survival and the immune response in rodents. Interestingly, knocking out NLRP3 inflammasome resulted in increased bacterial clearance and survival in rodents. However, it also induced greater acute responsiveness at the site of injury and WAT characterized by greater macrophage and neutrophil infiltration, ER stress, apoptosis/pyroptosis, and increased systemic inflammation. Differential effects were found in other organs with an overall faster return to baseline in inflammatory mediators. In septic burn patients, we found peaks in WAT NLRP3 gene expression occurring later than non-septic’s. Extending these findings in Chapter 4, we used the major source of NLRP3 inflammasome (macrophages) and its by-product (IL-1β) to generate the Septic Predictor Index to identify burn patients susceptible to sepsis. Patients with Index ratios greater than 0.5 had reduced macrophages proportions in WAT that were producing excess amounts of pro-inflammatory IL- 1β, and subsequently developed sepsis. Collectively, these results suggest that the NLRP3 inflammasome is a critical acute-phase mediator in septic burn patients and despite its utility to identify patient susceptible to sepsis, its mechanism is complex yet protective of sepsis development.
The Construction of Teacher Candidates' Imaginaries and Identities in Canada, Colombia, and Chile: An International Comparative Multiple Narrative Case Study
Keywords: Canada
Chile
Colombia
imagination
language teacher education
language teacher identity

Preparing future language teachers to address the needs of diverse learners has made it imperative for teacher education programs to embed reflective components in their curricula. As part of these efforts, researchers and teacher educators have become more aware of the need to have future teachers examine their own teaching Selves (Kumaravadivelu, 2012) and their language teacher identities (LTIs) (Barkhuizen, 2016, 2017a; Morgan, 2004; Varghese, Morgan, Johnston Johnson, 2005). One of the notable advances in this burgeoning field is understanding that teachers’ identities can be viewed as the constant intersection between: teachers’ past Selves, their current Selves, and their ideal or imagined Selves (Kubanyiova, 2012). It is precisely within this area of understanding the role of future teachers’ imagination in language teacher education (LTE) and LTIs that this dissertation aims to contribute. The present study provides a detailed account of how future language teachers construct their imaginaries in three five-year teacher preparation programs, one in Ontario, Canada (preparing teachers of French as a second language); one in Chile (preparing teachers of English as a foreign language; and one in Colombia (preparing teachers of both English and French as foreign languages). iii This goal is achieved through an international, comparative, multiple, narrative case study. Data was collected through questionnaires, document collection, familiarization with the contexts, as well as innovative data collection tools like multimodal identity texts (Cummins Early, 2011; Valencia Herath, 2015), and online memes (Shifman, 2014). Findings show the presence of six recurring narratives in the accounts gathered from participants. These include: 1) globalization; 2) neoliberalism; 3) contemporary mediated globalized (mostly Eurocentric) culture; 4) a narrative of interconnectedness in a globalized world; 5) a predominantly Eurocentric understanding of LTE; and 6) images and stories of teachers and learners. This study highlights the influence of these six narratives in the construction of participants’ imaginaries, as well as their agency to transform such narratives to suit their needs and use them to negotiate their own professional identities. Implications for the further exploration of teacher candidates’ imaginaries in LTE programs, as well as future avenues for research are discussed.
Placing the Festival: A Case Study of the Toronto International Film Festival
Keywords: Audience Development
Consumer Influence
Cultural Industries
Economic Development
Film Festivals
Temporary Clusters

Economic geographers researching the film industry have focused on the dual spatial pattern of film work that has arisen since the sector restructured in the 1970s. The new geography of film has been characterized simultaneously by concentration (i.e. major clusters) and dispersal (i.e. â runawayâ production). During this time, film festivals have proliferated in cities across the globe, yet remain largely unexplored. This presents a need to better understand major film events as important, if temporary, nodes in the cultural production system. Adopting a festival-centric approach, this case study of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) yields particularly rich insights on the potential value festivals create for the film industry, festival participants, and the host region. In part, this is because TIFF is connected to a global festival circuit and is embedded in a city with established local film production. My research takes up the growing interest in events, extends conceptualizations of value-creation, and considers how TIFF brings together international actors from across the film value chain. The research foregrounds the role of an active audience in valorizing an experiential cultural product, and in building the reputation of local film. This research contributes three major findings. First, it finds that TIFF acts as a temporary cluster, which creates opportunities for networking, relationship-building, and industry learning. It is also an important site for selling and promoting work, and creating pipelines to access non-local knowledge, markets and resources. Second, this research explores the expanded role for consumer influence, and finds that audience engagement with films at TIFF creates an information-rich environment, which influences business decisions, professional development, and marketing activities. Third, this research finds that TIFF contributes to place-making and culture-led urban development. These findings have implications for policy, practice and research across industry, government and academic communities.
What is Missing? Jürgen Habermas's Turn to a 'Post-secular Society' and the Limits of Postmetaphysical Modernity
Keywords: Critical Theory
Political Theory
Postmetaphysical
Postsecular
Translation

This thesis examines Jürgen Habermas’s recent turn to a “post-secular society” and evaluates this move in light of the wider background of his philosophical and political thought. While taking stock of Habermas’s arguments that a postsecular turn in liberal politics is necessary in order to regenerate and thus strengthen and stabilize the normative content of the Enlightnement project, my analysis in this thesis shows that the concept of “post-secular society” raises significant nor-mative tensions for the “postmetaphysical” character of Habermas’s philosophical and theoretical thinking. In the first part of the thesis I examine Habermas’s re-construction of the normative project of modernity (as found in the works of Kant, Hegel and Marx) independent from the metaphysical premises of “the philosophy of the subject”. My discussion brings to the fore the central role played by the “dialectic of Enlightenment” in Habermas’s thought: modernity must generate normative substance out of its own resources and thus “communicative reason” continues the Enlightenment project of finding a rational replacement for metaphysics/religion. I also underscore the role played in this project by the thesis of the “linguistification of the sacred”. In the second part of the thesis I examine Habermas’s recent writings (post 9/11/2001) and the concept of a “post-secular society” introduced in them. Conceding that something is missing in the “postmetaphysical” view of modernity as previously articulated, Habermas turns to religion as an important source of normative and moral insight. A “post-secular society” relies on a project of translation: the cognitive (or truth-) content of religious traditions must be “salvaged” from the religious dogmatic shell that encapsulates them and transferred into the “universally accessible” language of reason. I examine this project and discuss some important normative tensions that it generates first, for the project of grounding modernity out of its own normative resources and, second, for the universal dimension of “communicative reason”. Finally I suggest some directions that could be explored in order to cash in on the aspirations animating Habermas’s project of “salvaging” translation and make this project more feasible and plausible.
Unsettled Settlers: Irish Catholics, Irish Catholicism, and British loyalty in Upper Canada, 1819-1840
Keywords: ethnic identity
Irish Catholicism
migration
politics
religion
Upper Canada

This dissertation examines the role of Roman Catholicism in the process by which Irish Catholics integrated into Upper Canadian society in the first half of the nineteenth-century. For Upper Canadian Irish Catholics, Roman Catholicism was a “settling” force. In addition to providing familiar spiritual succor to individual migrants, religion provided order, organization, and focus to individual settlement and was the point upon which community-building efforts were frequently centred. But the Roman Catholicism of the Irish in Upper Canada was also “unsettling.” It was perceived by the dominant Protestant society as a key element in the inappropriate cultural baggage with which Irish Catholic migrants travelled, it was a barrier to political power and social advancement, and was believed to be at the root of violence and anti-social behaviour attributed to the Irish in the period. Despite repeated demonstrations of loyalty and good intentions in perpetuating the British connection on the part of the province’s Irish Catholic population, persistent and preexisting prejudices about Ireland and the politics, motivations, and abilities of Roman Catholic Irish, meant that population persisted as an outlier in colonial society. The local orientation and scope of Roman Catholicism amongst Irish settlers in Upper Canada challenges the transnational emphasis in the current historiography of Irish Roman Catholicism and offers an offers an additional model to the process by which the Irish came to dominate the English-speaking Roman Catholic Church. In Upper Canada, the extra-institutional migration of clergy and lay people, and the community-oriented religious practice at the mission and parish level was vital to the progress of Catholicism in the colony. Consequently the diocese of Kingston and the Upper Canadian context demonstrate the extent to which the influence of the Irish on the progress of Catholicism in the English-speaking settler world must include the local as well as transnational contexts.
The Politics of Evidence-Informed Policymaking: a case study of the Ontario Poverty Reduction Strategy
Keywords: education policy
evidence-based policymaking
evidence-informed policymaking
knowledge mobilization
policy window

In the last several decades, increasing pressure to reduce child poverty through better public policies has resulted in the prioritization of “evidence-based” social policy reform agendas worldwide, as well as a proliferation of research on effective evidence-informed policymaking (EIPM). However, studies on evidence use in policymaking tend to focus on singular aspects of the policy process, using ambiguous definitions and concepts for EIPM. Through a case study on the Ontario Poverty Reduction Strategy (OPRS), this thesis contributes knowledge on the policy process, examining how policy actors understood and worked towards EIPM. Drawing from policy theory and EIPM literature, this qualitative study explores the research question: How was evidence used to inform the policymaking process for the OPRS? Along with three sub-questions that address distinct aspects of EIPM: 1) Who and what were the influential sources of evidence? 2) What were the enabling and constraining conditions for evidence use? 3) How did external policy advisors bring evidence to the policy table? Phase I addresses the first sub-question through a website scan of EIPM attributes and activities of poverty reduction organizations in Ontario (n=210) in comparison to the external advisors to the OPRS (n=54). Phase II addresses sub-questions 2 and 3 through interviews with elite policy advisors (n=19) serving in distinct stages of the policymaking process. Findings show that influential evidence producers were politically astute in utilizing evidence through framing and persuasion strategies, and invested in long-term alliances to leverage political opportunities. Results from the website scan show that OPRS advisors displayed higher levels of policy engagement work and activities (or, “push mechanisms”) than peripheral stakeholders. The interview data reveal that the EIPM opportunity for the OPRS was contingent upon a policy window that emerged out of the “perfect storm” of people, power, and political context. However, the role of evidence was pervasive in the critical and mutually influential interactions between structure and agency. Understanding the dynamic connections between these elements provides important insights for evidence producers and users alike in working towards effective evidence utilization for policymaking. Based on the findings, recommendations for policy engagement strategies are provided to research producers.
Pre-service Teachers, Feedback and French Proficiency Development: Running the Race or Crossing the Finish Line? To Win You Must Run...
Keywords: Dialogic Feedback
Feedback for Learning
French Proficiency
Future language teachers
Self-Regulated Learning
Willingness to Communicate

This qualitative, exploratory study examined the feedback experiences of ten undergraduate students who hope to teach (in) French and five FSL instructors in Higher Education (HE). Through a series of three interviews with each student, an online survey, an analysis of work samples and course documents, as well as single interviews with instructors, classroom observations and focus groups, this study investigated four areas of interest: the characteristics of instructor-led feedback activities provided to future teachers wanting to teach (in) French; the ways future FSL teachers use feedback; how feedback practices interact with individual context variables; and tasks that allow instructors to provide the best feedback. All participants were engaged with the topic of feedback. Students wanted to know how to improve, and demonstrated evidence that they thought about and acted on the feedback they were offered, even when the feedback was one-way (written), or minimally detailed. Some students were already preparing for a future in FSL teaching by the choices they made to use French, during and outside of coursework. However, the findings from this study corroborate the “feedback gap” found by Evans (2013), between the feedback students receive and their capacity to use feedback to improve their work. When there was interaction pertaining to the work students did, students were more able act on the feedback given by their instructors. Important implications for the theory and practice of forming FSL teachers follow from this. First, language teaching requires knowledge of language (language proficiency) (Andrews, 2003), thus, developing language proficiency for teaching, in HE, may be helpful. Second, to ensure that instructors’ investment of time in giving feedback is justified by its efficacy, students must both understand the feedback, and know what to do with it. To that end, employing dialogic feedback processes between instructors and their students may be productive for all (O’Donovan, Rust, Price, 2016).
Mind the (Knowledge-to-Action) Gap: Exploring Factors that Affect Physical Activity in Breast Cancer Survivors
Keywords: Knowledge translation
Physical activity

This program of research aimed to assess the predisposing, reinforcing and enabling factors that influence physical activity (PA) among women with breast cancer from individual, environmental and provider perspectives. Study 1 was a cross-sectional study involving an online questionnaire completed by breast cancer survivors (BCS; N=201). This study aimed to identify unmet needs and preferences for PA resources among BCS. Various forms of social support for PA were identified as salient unmet needs or preferences. Study 2 involved an environmental scan of regional cancer centres in Ontario (N=14) and textual analysis of free and available materials collected from the centres (N=58). The aim of this study was to evaluate cancer centers for PA information and infrastructure. The infrastructure of the cancer centres provided some opportunities for dissemination of PA information. Gathered textual materials were rated favourably, included consequences of physical inactivity, yet included only some behaviour change techniques (BCTs) that are critical for initiating or maintaining PA. Study 3 involved four focus groups with cancer care clinicians (N=27) from cancer centres in southern regions of Ontario. The aim of the focus groups was to examine factors affecting PA counselling between clinicians and BCS. Clinicians found that cancer center administration and clinic flow were barriers to PA counselling, perceived lack of available resources and time constraints. In order to facilitate PA counselling, clinicians wanted resources that were patient-focused and available on multiple platforms. Together, the studies identify key individual, environmental, and practitioner factors that need to be addressed through future research in order to develop appropriate resources to facilitate PA in BCS. Importantly, the predisposing factors include BCSâ age, time since treatment and PA level and cliniciansâ PA attitudes and skills; reinforcing factors included textual materials with few BCTs and social and environmental norms of cancer centres; enabling factors included materials and resources for BCS and clinicians.
Grammatical Variation and Change in Industrial Cape Breton
Keywords: Cape Breton Island
Dialectology
English Dialects
Language Variation and Change
Nova Scotia

The following dissertation explores four changes in progress in a large mixed corpus of speech from Cape Breton Island. Its goal is to establish evidence for a generational genetic relationship between Cape Breton English and Scottish/Irish English, if any. Findings indicate that Cape Breton English is instead more similar to Inland Canadian English with respect to both quantity and kind for these changes. This paper also explores the processes of transmission and diusion on Canadian English's eastern edge. It contributes to the growing body of literature on change in the English stative possessive, deontic modality, future temporal reference, and quotative systems.
Everyday Wonders and Enigmatic Structures: Riddles from Symphosius to Chaucer
Keywords: Chaucer
enigmatic structures
medieval literature
riddles
the everyday
wonder

As I am proposing it, the medieval everyday is “what we see” rather than “what we know”––it is made up of the sights, objects, and encounters of lived experience. This dissertation points to a way of thinking about the everyday that I trace from Latin and Old English riddles through to late medieval riddles and Chaucer’s dream vision poems. My approach is structured by two key claims. My first is that riddles seep into other literary genres through what I call ‘enigmatic structures’––passages of heightened uncertainty governed by riddling conventions. My second claim is that for my medieval authors and their readers, everyday wonders––wonders in lived experience––are often understood through enigmatic structures and vice versa. My chapters are about poets for whom the wondrous in the everyday was a shared concern as they debated the origins of wonder, teased out questions about their own poetics, and applied riddling techniques to philosophic and literary problems. Chapters 1 and 2 show how a particular affective mode of engaging with the everyday coalesces in Anglo-Saxon riddles and wisdom-texts, and acquires enigmatic structures and distinctive wonder-related vocabulary. Chapter 1 explores the origins of this trend in the Latin riddle collections of Symphosius, Aldhelm, and Alcuin. Chapter 2 examines how everyday wonders and enigmatic structures create a technology of wondering in the Old English Boethius, Solomon and Saturn II, and the Exeter Book Riddles. My final chapters argue that late medieval riddles inform Chaucer’s approach to everyday wonder. Chapter 3 surveys the landscape of late medieval riddling and examines Chaucer’s deployment of enigmatic structures and everyday wonders in The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls. Chapter 4 proposes a new intertext for Chaucer’s House of Rumour in the Secretum philosophorum, and offers a new reading of the “queynte hous” as a were––a pun that refers both to a fish weir, and to a condition of radical uncertainty. From the Anglo-Saxon period to the fourteenth century, riddles both inscribe and respond to wonder within the familiar world, charting a wise approach to the everyday’s deep mysteries.