VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Persuasion Strategies: Canadian Campus Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns and the Development of Activists, 2012–20

Starting in July 2012, the climate change non-governmental organization 350.org proliferated the idea of fossil fuel divestment campaigns at universities. They provided a “campaign in a box” with a common demand for divestment from the 200 corporations with the largest fossil fuel reserves over ﬁve years and a standard set of tactics, then supported individual campaigns largely by shaping the overall media narrative. Campaigns were launched across Canada with the strategic objectives of persuading universities to divest, delegitimizing the fossil fuel industry in the eyes of the public and decision makers, and recruiting and developing a new cadre of climate change activists. Using the contentious politics theoretical framework, this dissertation provides an anatomy of the campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) movement, including the political opportunity structure in which it arose, the mobilizing structures campaigns used to organize labour and make decisions, and the activist repertoires they employed. My chief research question is how involvement in the CFFD movement influenced the political beliefs and behaviours of activists. Based on my interviews with organizers in Canadian campaigns, a review of the journalistic media and published scholarship on divestment, and social media monitoring of campaigns, I conclude that the main eﬀect of the CFFD movement on activist beliefs was to diﬀerentially socialize them into climate justice (CJ) and CO2 -energy (CO2-e) worldviews. These diﬀer in their account of the root causes of climate change, and most notably in the political project which they call for in response. For CJ advocates, climate change is one manifestation of profound global injustices including colonialism and racism. Eliminating the problem of climate change thus requires eliminating those causes, and thus a radical global programme of political and economic reform. CO2 -e advocates question whether the issue linkages at the heart of the CJ strategy are analytically convincing and, more importantly, part of a sound strategy for avoiding the worst projected eﬀects of unconstrained climate change. While the CJ worldview has helped overcome some of the emotional and motivational problems that block eﬀective climate action, it only speaks to a limited subset of the population that embraces the progressive assumptions behind it. Producing a sufficient coalition to enact eﬀective climate change policies and keep them in place requires support from non-progressive flanking coalitions who share an interest in climatic stability but do not embrace the rest of the CJ agenda.

Keywords: divest
divestment
fossil fuels
Advisor: Vipond, Robert
Evaluating the Feasibility of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation as an Adjunct to Physiotherapy in Children and Youth wth Acquired Brain Injury

Background: Children and youth with subacute moderate to severe acquired brain injury (ABI) experience plateaus in gross motor recovery toward the end of inpatient rehabilitation. Thus, novel treatment adjuncts may be used to enhance recovery. The primary objective of this dissertation was to evaluate the feasibility of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as an adjunct to inpatient physiotherapy in school-aged children and youth with ABI. Methods: A chart review was conducted to establish the gross motor change associated with inpatient ABI. A systematic review was undertaken to determine if motor evoked potentials (MEP) are an appropriate neural outcome for tDCS protocols involving motor intervention in healthy individuals. A tDCS feasibility trial was conducted at the author’s pediatric rehabilitation centre where participants were randomized to receive either 20 minutes of sham or active anodal tDCS immediately prior to their existing inpatient physiotherapy sessions for up to 16 sessions. Results: The chart review provided an estimate of gross motor change for inpatient ABI rehabilitation with two of the outcome measures implemented in the feasibility study. The systematic review revealed that MEP outcomes varied considerably across tDCS studies and were therefore not measured in the feasibility study. Feasibility study eligibility and retention were lower than the a priori targets. Over 21 months, six children were eligible for the study, four enrolled in the study, three commenced the study protocol, and one completed all study sessions. Symptom ratings before and after each tDCS session suggest that the participants tolerated tDCS. Physiotherapy session documentation and analysis detailed the motor learning strategies content of the physiotherapy sessions accompanying tDCS. Conclusions: This dissertation established gross motor outcomes associated with inpatient pediatric ABI rehabilitation and identified the limitations of MEPs as a neural outcome. While eligibility and retention were barriers to tDCS study feasibility, our study processes (including differentiating between ABI symptoms and tDCS side effects, analyzing the physiotherapy session content paired with the tDCS, and evaluating gross motor outcomes with a complementary set of outcome measures) were feasible and can be applied in future tDCS research in pediatric ABI.

Keywords: Acquired Brain Injury
Inpatient Rehabilitation
Pediatric
Physiotherapy
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation
Advisor: Wright, F Virginia
Beal, Deryk S
Essays in Industrial Organization and Housing

This thesis contains three chapters exploring topics related to industrial organization and housing. The first chapter studies demand estimation of products with unobservable and varying availability. I show that unobservable product availabilities are recoverable from firms' profit maximization conditions. Searching for optimal assortment can be very time-consuming, because the total number of assortments increases exponentially with the number of products. I show firms only need to choose from a foldable menu, wherein the number of assortments equals the number of products. I provide an empirical application of the foldable menu model in China's tobacco industry. My results show that ignoring varying product availabilities leads to underestimated price elasticity (0.38 vs. 1.2) and thus false tax policy implications. Making all cigarettes available positively affects consumer welfare (+6.75%) and cigarette sales (+12.11%) but negatively affects wholesale profits (-5.95%).The second chapter proposes a penalized estimator for random coefficients demand models and tests its performance. Berry et al. (1995) proposed the widely used estimator for random coefficients demand models, the BLP estimator, which requires the inversion of model-predicted market shares using contraction mapping to obtain mean utilities and then uses the generalized method of moments (GMM) for estimation. The inversion step requires many iterations and thus is computationally costly. We propose a penalized estimator for random coefficients demand models, where the inversion step is unnecessary. We augment the GMM objective function with a penalty for the distance between observed market shares and predicted ones. Monte Carlo experiment results show that when using an appropriate starting point of search, the performance of our estimator is comparable with that of the BLP estimator. The third chapter empirically tests the effects of the Ontario Non-Resident Speculation Tax on the Greater Toronto Area's housing markets. Using house transaction data and the hedonic model, I find that the housing markets of areas preferred by domestic Chinese residents were more adversely affected by the Non-Resident Speculation Tax than those of the rest Greater Toronto Area.

Advisor: Luo, Yao
Solubility of Sodium Salts in Kraft Black Liquor and the Impact on Evaporator Fouling

The evaporation of black liquor is a key step in the chemical recovery cycle of kraft pulp mills. Black liquor is concentrated stepwise by evaporating water in multiple effects evaporators (MEE). The majority of the scaling and fouling instances during black liquor evaporation are attributed to sodium salts. The focus of this thesis is to obtain the necessary solubility data for sodium oxalate and sodium carbonate-sodium sulfate salts and thus generate empirical models for sodium salt solubility that can be applied in mills to help reduce evaporator scaling. Sodium oxalate solubility was studied in the temperature range of 50 °C to 140 °C and a dry solids range of 14% to 70% dry solids. Four mill liquors were studied for the work done below 100 °C, and sodium oxalate solubility was not found to be liquor-dependent but rather depended only on the concentration of sodium, concentration of oxalate, and temperature. Two different empirical formulas were developed for solubility below 100 °C and solubility above 100 °C. These formulas were applied by a mill with sodium oxalate scaling in several of their evaporator effects. Double salts of sodium carbonate and sodium sulfate precipitate in the evaporation sets of all kraft pulp mills. Most of the solubility work focused on the transitions between the different salt species and the solubility of the carbonate-rich salts, about which there is relatively little data in the present literature. Empirical formulas were developed for use by mills and were utilized in the following studies with electrostatic precipitator (ESP) ash. Electrostatic precipitator (ESP) ash is used by the pulp and paper industry in two different ways to try and reduce sodium salt scaling. The first is to dissolve it in black liquor so that a sulfate-rich double salt precipitates first rather than carbonate-rich salts, which causes more severe scaling. The second approach is to add the ash above the solubility limit to increase the crystal surface area for precipitating salts to precipitate onto. The experiments showed that ash added below the solubility limit dissolves quickly, reaching saturation as fast as 10 min. It also found that ash, when added to carbonate-rich black liquor above the solubility limit, remains as burkeite and sodium sulfate and, within 24 h, does not undergo dissolution and re-precipitation to a carbonate-rich salt. This may help explain the varied success of using precipitator ash to reduce sodium salt scaling in kraft black liquor evaporators.

Advisor: DeMartini, Nikolai
Promoting Higher Education Institutes: Issues and Practices

The purpose of this research is to examine how universities promote themselves. In particular, it explores why these institutions engage in promotional activities, the promotional strategies they adopt, the challenges they face in promoting themselves, as well as the outcome of the promotional activities. The literature review examined each of the elements of promotion mix (advertising, direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, digital marketing/social media and public relations) in the context of universities. Most of the studies conducted earlier were theoretical in nature. This study enriches the existing literature by empirically examining all of the elements of promotion mix together in the context of universities. The methodology used was qualitative. Data was collected by interviewing eight departmental staff members who are directly involved in the promotional activities of their respective departments within a university. The findings suggest that the universities engage in promotion activities to promote their ranking as well as to establish their positioning as a reputable brand which helps to increase student enrollment and revenue either in the form of more tuition or in the form of non-governmental funding. Implications for practice are discussed, highlighting the advantages as well as the challenges practitioners may face while executing a promotion mix strategy. For example, research highlights the advantages of TV advertising in reaching a wide range of audiences, yet it also tells the practitioner to be careful of the high cost of TV advertising which may not be suitable for one’s budget. Similarly, while social media marketing is very effective in reaching a wide audience, marketers need to be careful of the user generated content which may or may not be suitable for an organization’s promotional efforts. Lastly, directions for future research are also discussed guiding the readers on how to further enhance research on this topic by either conducting a quantitative study and/or developing an international study to enhance generalizability of this research.

Keywords: Education Marketing
Higher Education Marketing
Higher Education Promotion
Marketing Higher Education
Promoting Higher Education
Promoting University
Advisor: Ryan, James
Who Should I Trust? Uncertainty and Risk for Knowledge Transfer from Multiple Sources in Reinforcement Learning Domains

Despite the recent success of reinforcement learning (RL) in simulated domains and industrial applications, sample-efficiency remains a fundamental limitation of many model-free algorithms. Transfer learning mitigates this problem by using prior knowledge obtained by solving one set of tasks in order to accelerate the convergence on future tasks. However, while many frameworks have been proposed to successfully transfer different kinds of knowledge representations between tasks, existing transfer learning approaches remain largely incognizant to risk and uncertainty during transfer. In this thesis, we identify two sources of risk that must be addressed in order to make transfer learning from multiple knowledge sources more reliable and autonomous: epistemic uncertainty arises due to a lack of uncertainty about the model predictions, while aleatory uncertainty arises due to the stochastic nature of the environment. We address epistemic uncertainty by leveraging Bayesian model combination (BMC) to quantify and utilize uncertainty over the selection of knowledge sources for transfer, and we develop novel analytical techniques to efficiently tackle approximate Bayesian inference to train such models. We demonstrate the success of the proposed framework by transferring value functions, policies, and raw demonstrations between tasks. Next, we begin our treatment of aleatory uncertainty by highlighting some of the challenges in accounting for such risks during transfer, namely the lack of computationally tractable solutions that also provide theoretical assurances on the quality of transfer and control of risk. To mitigate this problem, we begin with two transfer learning approaches that have been highly successful in risk-neutral transfer -- namely potential-based reward shaping and successor features -- and extend them to the risk-sensitive setting. We empirically validate all our contributions on standard RL benchmarks, where they are shown to outperform other state-of-the-art transfer learning approaches in terms of robustness to noise and covariance shift in the training data, risk-sensitivity, and ease of interpretation.

Keywords: Bayesian Inference
Deep Learning
Ensemble
Reinforcement Learning
Risk
Transfer Learning
Advisor: Sanner, Scott
Lee, Chi-Guhn
Misconduct Mismanagement: Independent Oversight, Accountability, and the Rule of Law

Over the last few decades, there has been increasing interest in research and theory on police oversight. Likewise, different types and layers of oversight mechanisms have been introduced to advance the democratic policing ideal. Unfortunately, the endless cases of police wrongdoing, oversight decisions that are almost always stacked against members of the public, and a series of civil protests across the Western world against police brutality and abuse of power suggest that the added layers of external oversight have yet to deliver the promised outcome. Some elements of democratic policing—such as the use of minimal coercion, respect for human rights, justice, equality, and responsive policing—explicitly relate to how policing services are delivered through the behaviours and decisions of individual police officers. Others—such as independent oversight, accountability, and the rule of law—are directly relevant to the control mechanisms that moderate their discretionary authority. Most existing studies on police oversight, such as those focused on social psychological theory of procedural justice, lack conceptual clarity on these elements. The majority of studies on this topic overlooks the role of institutional design and dynamics in relation to the overarching aim of democratic policing as they primarily focus on individual-level subjective evaluations and the willingness to obey. My dissertation conducts a case study of Ontario, Canada. It takes a qualitative approach using primarily case law, governmental reports, and semi-structured interviews with the oversight officials and other key stakeholders as data sources. I analyze the practices and implications of having heterogeneous external oversight mechanisms within the same regulatory space for democratic policing. I outline several inconsistencies within the democratic policing framework and shortcomings of the police oversight system that relies on a heterogeneous network of arm’s length authorities. I find that both the rules and values enshrined in the oversight system—however all-encompassing and -promising they may sound—permit considerable room for interpretation; and the same logic and formula that failed the previous oversight regime continue to paralyze the new oversight arrangements.

Keywords: Accountability
Case Study
Independent Oversight
Police Misconduct
Regulation and Governance
Rule of Law
Advisor: Macklin, Audrey
Hannah-Moffat, Kelly
Irreversible Fluxes in Double-diffusive Systems and the Origin of Thermohaline Staircases

Thermohaline staircases are structures in the ocean characterized by well-mixed layers of uniform temperature and salinity separated by sharp interfaces. Based on the background stratifications in which these structures are embedded, observed staircases can be categorized into salt-fingering and diffusive-convection staircases. Although it is generally believed that the formation of these staircase structures is related to double-diffusive processes, a detailed formation mechanism is still under debate, especially for those found in the Arctic Ocean. In this thesis, I have systematically investigated the formation of both types of staircases, those found in the low-latitude oceans and those found in the polar oceans. This investigation is pursued by studying the flux laws that govern the turbulent environment in each of these regimes. Specifically, I first developed a theoretical framework that can be used to separate the irreversible component of turbulent mixing from the reversible stirring component in a double-diffusive system. Direct numerical simulations were then performed in both the salt-fingering system and the shear-driven diffusive-convection system in order to infer accurate parameterization schemes that best capture these systems’ irreversible fluxes. These flux parameterizations were further analyzed theoretically to understand the mechanism for the development of the staircase structures. For the salt-fingering system, I studied the evolution of salt-fingering staircases in a vertically inhomogeneous environment and addressed the observational trend that the characteristic step size in a salt-fingering staircase is larger in regions characterized by weaker gradients. For the diffusive-convection system, I systematically investigated an original mechanism that appears to be responsible for the formation of thermohaline staircase structures that broadly exist in the Arctic Ocean, which has puzzled researchers for five decades. This work shows that a stratified-turbulence-based layering mechanism could be responsible for the layer formation process in the Arctic pycnocline. Contrary to conventional wisdom, double diffusion based upon the different molecular diffusivities of heat and salt plays no significant role in staircase formation in the diffusive-convection regime. Rather, in this regime, the control on layer formation is provided by the turbulent diffusivities of heat and salt.

Advisor: Peltier, William W.R.P.
Insight into the Neurophysiology of Major Depressive Disorder in Youth and its Treatment Via Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Approximately 30 – 50% of youth with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) do not respond to conventional treatments. Accordingly, novel treatments are needed for this population. A greater understanding of the pathophysiology of youth MDD may help guide the development of such treatments. In adults with MDD, theta burst stimulation (TBS) applied to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been found to be clinically effective. However, the clinical and neurophysiological effects of TBS for youth MDD have not been investigated. It was hypothesized that youth with MDD would exhibit excessive DLPFC cortical reactivity, as probed by combined transcranial magnetic stimulation-electroencephalography (TMS-EEG), relative to healthy youth. It was also predicted that for treatment of youth MDD, bilateral DLPFC TBS would be clinically effective, and would reduce DLPFC cortical reactivity. Finally, it was hypothesized that baseline cortical inhibition of the DLPFC would predict treatment response to TBS. In study one, cortical reactivity of six cortical sites (bilateral DLPFC, motor cortex, and inferior parietal lobules (IPL)) was assayed in healthy youth and youth with MDD. In accordance with our hypothesis, youth with MDD exhibited significantly greater cortical reactivity in the bilateral DLPFC relative to healthy youth; no differences were found in the motor cortices or IPLs. In study two, youth with MDD underwent ten sessions of bilateral DLPFC TBS. This treatment was found to be safe, feasible, and effective in significantly reducing depressive symptoms. In study three, the neurophysiological effects of bilateral DLPFC TBS were assessed in youth with MDD. DLPFC cortical reactivity was not modulated by TBS treatment. However, cortical reactivity of the right IPL was significantly reduced. In study four, the association between baseline cortical reactivity and treatment response to bilateral DLPFC TBS treatment were assessed. Only cortical reactivity measures related to cortical inhibition and excitation at the left DLPFC were found to be predictive of treatment response. Excessive cortical reactivity of the DLPFC, as probed through TMS-EEG, may be critical in the pathophysiology of MDD in youth. Furthermore, TBS applied to the DLPFC may be a promising novel treatment for youth MDD.

Keywords: Adolescence
Depression
Electroencephalography
Major Depressive Disorder
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Youth
Advisor: Blumberger, Daniel M