VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Fluorotelomer-Based Acrylate Polymers as an Indirect Source of Perfluoroalkyl Carboxylates

Fluorotelomer-based acrylate polymers (FTACPs) are a class of side-chain fluorinated polymers that have been widely used as surface protectants in textile, upholstery and paper industries. Despite FTACPs constituting the largest fraction of commercial fluorotelomer products, little is known about their environmental fate. This dissertation investigates the development and application of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry to directly analyze the environmental fate of model FTACPs, which was hypothesized to be a significant indirect source of perfluoroalkyl carboxylates (PFCAs). MALDI-TOF methods were developed using a homologous series of FTACPs with fluorotelomer and hydrocarbon acrylates. The relative degree of FTACPs fluorination was demonstrated to influence the sample preparation protocol for MALDI-TOF analysis. Application of the MALDI-TOF method was used to directly determine the biodegradation of the model FTACP, poly(8:2 FTAC). Alterations to the characteristic repeat pattern of poly(8:2 FTAC) suggested biodegradation, which was consistent with the indirect analysis of PFCAs by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). The biodegradation half-life of poly(8:2 FTAC) ranged from 8 to 111 years. Further MALDI-TOF method development demonstrated that FTACPs could be directly quantified using the matrix signal as an internal standard. Direct MALDI-TOF quantification measured the model FTACP, poly(8:2 FTAC-co-HDA), to within 25% of the theoretical concentration in aqueous media. Off gassing of residual fluorotelomer alcohols (FTOHs), and as the first degradation product of FTACPs supports atmospheric long-range transport (LRT) of volatile precursors as a principal mode for the global distribution of PFCAs. A collection of surface soils obtained from areas with little human impact showed PFCAs, as well as perfluoroalkanesulfonates (PFSAs), were distributed consistent with the atmospheric oxidation of volatile precursors. The principle goal of this dissertation was to directly analyze FTACP degradation. The qualitative MALDI-TOF results strongly suggest that FTACPs will degrade under environmental conditions, and likely represent a significant indirect source of PFCAs.

Keywords: Environmental Fate
Fluorinated Polymers
MALDI-TOF
Method Development
Advisor: Mabury, Scott A
Deliberate Orientation and Transition Practices as Part of a Broader Student Success Strategy: A Comparative Study of Three Large Urban Ontario Colleges

DELIBERATE ORIENTATION AND TRANSITION PRACTICES AS PART OF A BROADER STUDENT SUCCESS STRATEGY: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY OF THREE LARGE URBAN ONTARIO COLLEGES Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Wayne Poirier Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is to examine institutional behaviour concerning orientation and transition efforts for first year college students. This case study examines three large urban colleges in Ontario focusing on the orientation and transition approach at each institution and studied the extent to which each is using known best practices in the field of orientation and transition in their effort to generate increased student success. Informed by the related literature with an emphasis on Canadian and Ontario specific content, the study examined findings in relation to the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) thematic framework and the implications and recommendations drawn from the Pan-Canadian Study of First Year College Students to uncover similarities and differences. The case study employed a document analysis and qualitative interview analysis to examine the extent to which orientation and transition efforts are part of college wide strategic planning and ingrained within the institutions. The information is cross referenced between the document analysis and participant interviews and comparisons are drawn from the key themes identified within the literature. The findings shed further light on the efficacy of the CCSSE survey instrument and its themes and identify areas for further study in the Ontario college context. The analysis conducted indicate that there is good model fit with the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) thematic framework of Educational Effective Practices in the three colleges that participated within this case study. While this study is not generalizable, the findings of this study adds further qualitative evidence that the CCSSE thematic framework is applicable to the three large urban Ontario colleges studied and, in combination with the 2010 Mandarino and Mattern HEQCO study, provides evidence that the CCSSE thematic framework is a reasonable tool to plan and assess orientation and transition practices as part of a broader student success strategy for colleges with similar characteristics. The efficacy of the CCSSE tool can be improved by supplementing it with a survey designed to account for the findings of the 2007 Pan Canadian Study of First Year College Students.

Keywords: CCSSE
Ontario colleges
Pan Canadian Study of First Year College Students
student development
student engagement
student success
Advisor: Dietsche, Peter
Bunkhouse Drama: An Examination of Control and Agency among Migrant Farm Workers in Ontario, Canada

This thesis examines workers' experiences of control and agency at the micro-political level of the dormitory/workplace in the context of Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). I ask: 1) How are individual migrant workers responding to workplace and (im)migration policies and practices that aim to produce a flexible and compliant workforce; and 2) what forms of creative research strategies are best suited to documenting and examining the private, largely hidden lives of migrant farm workers? The thesis sheds light on the daily forms of resilience, opposition and survival among an entrenched, yet largely hidden workforce on the margins of Canada's labour market. I conducted my fieldwork in the town of Leamington, Ontario, a well-established hub of Canada's greenhouse industry, and as such a significant terminus for SAWP workers. In order to fully engage workers in the research process, I incorporated a qualitative, embodied, active and participatory approach to research grounded in life history, personal narrative, and drama-based methods. Through my interactions with workers I explore in detail how colonial attitudes operate alongside Canada's official policy of multiculturalism in the context of migration and employment among `low-skilled' guest workers. Throughout the thesis I examine workers' stories through the conceptual lenses of worker agency, workplace relations and worker emancipation. My research reveals that in tightly controlled and surveilled workplace environments workers learn to be intensely competitive and to distrust each other as a means of survival, resulting in a deep sense of isolation among workers, thus stifling potential opportunities for building group solidarity. However, I found that workers' participation in non-work related activities during leisure hours produced small breaches in the accepted norms of control, offering potentially rich opportunities for critical reflection and dialogue. I argue that an analysis of complex and even contradictory worker subjectivities that are developed and performed in everyday life among Canada's SAWP workers offers a more nuanced understanding of worker solidarities, collective social movements and the potential for labour education at the margins of Canada's labour market.

Keywords: Migrant farm workers
Qualitative Research
Temporary Foreign Worker Program
Theatre of the Oppressed
Worker agency
Advisor: Burstow, Bonnie
Functional Polymer Foams from In-situ Fibrillated Polymer Blends

Polymer foams are utilized in a range of applications such as absorption, mechanical cushioning, thermal and sound insulation, and medical devices. In comparison with amorphous polymer foams, foams of semicrystalline polymers are desirable in applications that require higher service temperatures and chemical resistance, but preparing foams of semicrystalline polymers is challenging due to their weak melt strength near processing temperatures. Blending of immiscible polymers has emerged as a convenient route to tune the viscoelastic and crystallization properties of polymers. Here we show that the in-situ generation of a fibrillar morphology during physical blending of immiscible polymers can broaden the foam processing window of semicrystalline polymers. These results formed the basis for a W.O. Patent. We anticipate that these results will help in the development of alternative polymer formulations and optimization of existing ones for the large-scale manufacture of semicrystalline polymer foams with unique properties for advanced applications. For example, novel superhydrophobic and oleophilic open-cell foams were obtained from polypropylene (PP) containing polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) fibrillar dispersed phases in a fully scalable extrusion process. These open-cell foams are technologically promising for applications such as oil-spill cleanup, organic pollutant removal, and field water remediation.

Keywords: blends
extrusion
fiber
foam
open-cell
polymers
Advisor: Park, Chul B
How Socioeconomic Status Shapes Individuals' Experiences of the Work-family Interface in Canada

Work-family conflict and time pressure have emerged as potent and pervasive stressors in the daily lives of Canadian workers. Yet little is known about the socioeconomic distribution of these work-family outcomes, or the underlying mechanisms, because previous research has largely focused on homogeneous samples, typically consisting of well-educated managers and/or professionals. Drawing on the Stress Process Model as an overarching framework, and through statistical analyses of confidential data from Cycle 20 of the General Social Survey (2006), the dissertation at hand seeks to address this significant gap in knowledge by exploring how and why socioeconomic status (i.e., education or occupation) affects exposure to work-family conflict and time pressure. The findings of this dissertation are largely consistent with (limited) previous research, demonstrating that higher-status individuals in terms of education, occupation, or income are more exposed to work-family conflict and time pressure than their lower-status counterparts. Only in the case of work-to-family conflict do the findings diverge somewhat from this pattern, as individuals in both the highest and lowest occupational groups have the greatest and identical exposure to this work-family outcome. Further, the socioeconomic distribution of work-family conflict is invariant across gender and parental status. However, gender and parenthood jointly condition the occupational distribution of time pressure, such that mothers in managerial occupations have the greatest exposure. Job- and home-related demands and resources consistently affect work-family conflict and time pressure across socioeconomic groups. However, constellations of job- and home-related demands and resources tend to differ between socioeconomic groups, largely accounting for the observed socioeconomic distributions of work-family conflict and time pressure. This suggests that, in order to be effective, government and workplace policies and programs intended to ease earning- and caring-role combination must be designed with an understanding of the unique circumstances that give rise to work-family issues among higher- and lower-status individuals.

Keywords: class
socioeconomic status
time pressure
work-family conflict
work-family interface
Advisor: Schieman, Scott
"Most of them, they just want someone to under them:" Gender, Generation, and Personhood among the Xhosa

Drawing on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation focuses on gendered and generational conflicts about social reproduction in a rural Xhosa community in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. By exploring locally-contentious topics such as human rights, gender equality, love marriage, bridewealth, bride abduction, and the deployment of sexuality, I make several related arguments about personhood, the deployment of tradition, and the experience of modernity. The forms of personhood, tradition, and modernity that I discuss are all vernacular concepts, and are not overarching analytic tools. Firstly, I show that local people interpret these contests in generational, gendered, and also temporal terms, framing rural life and the will of elders as timeless tradition, in contrast with modern city life, and with the habits and aspirations of youth. The predilections of elders thus bear the moral authority of both imagined history, and ancestral will. Secondly, I show various ways in in which experiences of and aspirations about tradition and modernity are themselves deeply gendered, and that these divergent aspirations are sources of considerable interpersonal conflict. Thirdly, I demonstrate that inequality is intrinsic to the subject positions through which people understand their identity. Accordingly, idioms such as gender equality and (egalitarian) human rights render the meaning of these subject positions unclear. Accordingly, sociality between genders and generations is often characterized by antagonism and uncertainty. Finally, I identify a deep, ironic contradiction at the core of domestic life: worsening economic austerity means that people of all ages and genders are becoming more interdependent. However, this increasing interdependency, which has historically been central to local forms of personhood, is concurrent with the rising prominence of an ideological system which privileges autonomous, independent, choice-oriented forms of personhood as the cornerstone of a worthy self. Thus, South Africa's economic crisis is also a crisis of meaning about equality, gender, age, sexuality, and spirituality, played out through the messy intimacy of social reproduction and rural domestic life.

Keywords: Gender
Generation
Human Rights
Kinship
Personhood
Xhosa
Advisor: Boddy, Janice
Wardlow, Holly
Understanding the Encapsulins:Prediction and Characterization of Phage Capsid-like Nanocompartments in Prokaryotes

Encapsulins are a distinct family of prokaryotic compartments, comprised of an icosahedral shell encapsulating a variety of enzymes. The encapsulin shell protein is similar in sequence and structure to the capsid protein of dsDNA tailed bacteriophages. Although found across diverse phyla of Bacteria and Archaea, few encapsulins were previously characterized. My thesis work utilized a bioinformatic approach to identify and investigate the functions of all encapsulins found in bacteria and Archaea. I found 590 encapsulins showing definite sequence similarity to the previously described encapsulins, which I refer to as "classical encapsulins". I identified four new enzyme families strongly predicted to be classical encapsulin cargo enzymes: ferredoxins, rubrerythrin-like, Dps-bacterioferritin-like, and hemerythrin-like proteins. While most species encode encapsulin cargo proteins adjacent to the encapsulin gene, I discovered 113 species encoding cargo proteins in genomic regions far removed from the encapsulin gene. I also found 118 genomes encoding two or three different enzymes strongly predicted to be targeted to the same encapsulin. Genes encoding three protein families, radical SAM oxidoreductases, CutA1-like proteins and metalloproteases, are highly enriched near encapsulin genes, but without targeting motifs for direct encapsulation. In addition to classical encapsulins, I discovered 1060 novel putative encapsulins related to diverse families of phage capsids. The largest family of these novel encapsulins, with 986 proteins is larger than the classical encapsulin family, and conserves a sulphur metabolism operon encoding cysteine desulfurases, acetyltransferases, and rhodaneses. These activities are predicted to relieve sulphur restriction, and toxicity of cyanide and other oxidants. Overall, novel and classical encapsulins and their encapsulated enzymes are predicted to contribute to polyvalent cation dependent catalytic activities, and relieve heavy metal and cyanide toxicity. Phylogenies predicted capsids and encapsulins share intermingled ancestry. My work shows that encapsulins perform more diverse functions and are much more widely distributed than any other prokaryotic compartment.

Keywords: bacterial physiology
bacteriophage
compartmentalization
computational biology
encapsulin
Advisor: Davidson, Alan R
Parkinson, John
Artful Mediums: Women, Séance Photography, and Materialization Phenomena, 1880-1930

This dissertation examines the photographic documentation of the spiritualist movement that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an attempt to scrutinize and expose the claims of mediums, a number of leading scientists brought cameras into the séance in order to capture supernatural phenomena on film. The ensuing chapters explore the images that resulted from some of these experiments, with an emphasis on the documentation of several prominent female mediums, including Eva C., Eusapia Palladino, and Linda Gazzera. The investigations of Drs. Albert von Schrenck Notzing, Camille Flammarion, Gustave Geley, and Charles Richet inform the bulk of these pages. Scientific séance photography ultimately documented a wide range of "materialization phenomena" within the darkened conditions of the séance, consisting of ectoplasmic materials, ghostly faces, and spectral body parts, which appeared to emanate from the medium's body and then dissolve into nothingness. My project hinges on the premise that these mysterious apparitions were symbolic creations, much like artworks, which carried implicit cultural and aesthetic meaning. I have sought through the ensuing analysis to examine the frameworks of meaning that surrounded the art of the séance, and to situate the medium as an artist within her own right.

Keywords: mediums
photography
séances
spiritualism
women
Advisor: Kaplan, Louis
Syme, Alison
Anhedonia in Major Depressive Disorder: Exploration of a Predictive Clinical Phenotype

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a debilitating psychiatric illness that involves a complex interplay of neurobiological dysfunction. At present, the majority of MDD patients fail to remit with current antidepressants that target the serotonin and norepinephrine systems, resulting in a high prevalence of treatment resistant depression (TRD). In the last several years, emerging evidence has pointed to the role of anhedonia in predicting non-response to pharmacologic treatment. However, anhedonia scales, as measured in MDD, reflect consummatory pleasure, despite findings supporting a broader definition including interest, motivation and pleasure. Furthermore, the link between anhedonia and dopamine has not been clearly elucidated in a human MDD sample, nor has either been evaluated as a predictor of therapy in TRD. The goal of the present studies was to refine the measurement of anhedonia, explore its association with dopamine, and evaluate anhedonia and dopamine as potential biomarkers of response to Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), a neurosurgery for TRD with putative dopaminergic effects. From the present studies it has been shown that refinement in anhedonia measurement in the Dimensional Anhedonia Rating Scale (DARS) by including interest, motivation, effort and consummatory pleasure provides additional utility over the gold standard scale, and may be able to identify MDD subtypes (i.e. TRD). Furthermore, the first preliminary evidence was provided for a direct link between self-reported anhedonia in MDD and dopamine D2/D3 receptor binding in the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, two regions implicated in reward response and depression. Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that D2/D3 binding potential in the orbitofrontal cortex, additional prefrontal regions, insula and temporal cortex can predict outcome to antidepressant therapy with DBS, representing a potential biomarker of response.

Keywords: anhedonia
deep brain stimulation
dopamine
positron emission tomography
scale development
treatment resistant depression
Advisor: Sproule, Beth A
Kennedy, Sidney H
Mutation in VMAT2 Causing a Pediatric Neurotransmitter Disease

This thesis describes a new disease encompassing infantile-onset movement disorder (including severe parkinsonism and nonambulation), mood disturbance, autonomic instability, and developmental delay that was identified in eight cousins of a consanguineous Bedouin family in Saudi Arabia. The autosomal recessive disease was hypothesized to be a disorder of monoamine neurotransmission, and evidence supporting its causation by a mutation in SLC18A2 (which encodes the vesicular monoamine transporter 2 [VMAT2]) was acquired by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping, homozygosity analysis, and exome sequencing. VMAT2 translocates dopamine and serotonin into synaptic vesicles and is essential for motor control, stable mood, and autonomic function. The loss of VMAT2 function was further confirmed through biochemical assay of serotonin uptake. Consistent with a defect in vesicular monoamine transport, treatment of the patients with levodopa was associated with worsening, whereas treatment with direct dopamine agonists was followed by immediate ambulation, near-complete correction of the movement disorder, and resumption of development. Understanding the underlying mechanism of this disorder extends the spectrum of known pediatric neurotransmitter diseases, serves as the first demonstration of mutation in VMAT2 causing a human phenotype, and thereby provides new insight into the role of VMAT2 in monoamine homeostasis. This thesis additionally demonstrates the utility of implementing genomic diagnosis in the clinic, with respect to providing simple and effective treatments in a timely manner to improve outcomes for patients with rare inborn errors of metabolism.

Keywords: Pediatric Neurotransmitter Disease
VMAT2
Advisor: Minassian, Berge A