VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A Biophilic Approach To Post-Secondary Learning Strategies: Facilitating Learning Through Intentional Time In Nature

Many post-secondary students report increasing difficulties with concentration, persistence, stress and anxiety. Focused listening in lectures, effective collaboration, efficient studying, and thoughtful time management contribute to post-secondary achievement, as do self-efficacy, tenacity, resilience, and perseverance. Together, these foundational skills and abilities, which undergird all academic disciplines, assist students in accomplishing expected tasks, facing challenges, and recovering from setbacks. Learning strategists work with students to bolster academic skills and abilities, typically through paper- or web-based techniques. Learning strategies are frequently taught and engaged with indoors; inside labs and studios, in front of computers and projectors, and practiced at home or at library desks. This narrative inquiry investigates how learning strategists may facilitate biophilic experiences to improve student achievement. Findings of this study indicate that Ryerson University's Portage program, offered to students with learning exceptionalities, may help to foster the very skills learning strategists seek to scaffold and support. Additionally, the findings from this study may be of benefit to the general student population.

Keywords: Biophilia
Learning Disabilities
Learning Strategies
Nature
Outdoor Education
Post-secondary
Advisor: Cooper, Karyn
Analysis of Thunderstorm Trends in Southern Ontario, Canada: Past and Future

Despite the potential hazards associated with thunderstorms, they have been underrepresented in climatology studies. Southern Ontario is Canadaâ s most active thunderstorm region, and the countryâ s most populous and industrialized region. To date there has been no analysis of past trends of thunderstorms in Southern Ontario, or any analysis of how thunderstorm frequency might change over the current century. This thesis consists of three research chapters flanked by an introduction (Chapter 1) and discussion (Chapter 5). In Chapter 2 manual thunderstorm observations from eight Environment Canada weather stations are evaluated for accuracy by comparing them to data from the Canadian Lightning Detection Network. The results indicate the manual observations are reliable for small distances around each weather station, as is expected given the normally localized nature of thunderstorms. In Chapter 3 the historical manual hourly thunderstorm observations are evaluated for trends over the past several decades. Daily precipitation and wind gust data are used as proxies to determine if there have been changes in thunderstorm intensity, and yearly thunderstorm occurrence is compared to the larger scale phenomena ENSO and NAO. No consistent significant trends were observed over this period in either thunderstorm occurrence or intensity and a correlation between thunderstorm frequency and ENSO and NAO was also not detected. In Chapter 4 thunderstorm occurrence was successfully related to convective available potential energy (CAPE), with the probability of observing a thunderstorm on a given day at each of the weather stations increasing with daily maximum CAPE. While there were no consistent significant trends in CAPE observed over the reference period, by statistically downscaling three general circulation models it was found that large and robust increases in CAPE are expected over the coming decades across all weather stations, which consequently will have the potential to result in an increase in thunderstorm frequency.

Keywords: climate change
lightning
severe weather
thunderstorms
Advisor: Gough, William A
Incentives in Supply Chain Management

My dissertation focuses on strategic issues in supply chain management. It consists of three studies. In the first chapter, I investigate the incentive issues in supply chain information sharing. Specifically, I provide an explanation for a long-standing question in supply chain management: why do supply chain firms often use simple contracts when our models typically show that more complex forms are needed to coordinate the supply chain? Using a stylized supply chain model consisting of a retailer who solicits forecast information from a manufacturer, I show that if there is sufficient operational flexibility in the supply chain, credible information sharing is indeed possible in a simple contracting environment. The second chapter focuses on the structure of supply chains in a competitive environment. It is motivated by Ford's support of the government bailout of its competitors General Motors and Chrysler. This is in sharp contrast with the general presumption that firms prefer fewer to more competitors. Using a stylized supply chain structure, I sort out conditions where firms have self-interest in promoting the sustainability of their competitors. To get some sense of whether the model can be a credible explanation for Ford's support of the bailout, I calibrate it to pre- and post-recession data. The calibrated model suggests that the bailout of GM and Chrysler actually benefitted Ford. In the third chapter, I present the Almost Robust Optimization model that is a simple and tractable methodology for incorporating data uncertainty into supply chain models. The model trades off the objective function value with robustness and finds optimal solutions that are almost robust. To efficiently solve the model, a novel decomposition approach is proposed that decomposes the model into a deterministic master problem and a subproblem which checks the master problem solution under different realizations. Finally, to demonstrate the efficiency of the methodology, I apply it to two important logistics problems.

Advisor: Berman, Oded
Krass, Dmitry
Fabrics and Semi-volatile Organic Compounds: Towards Understanding Accumulation and Release

The main goal of this thesis was to improve understanding of the role of clothing in human and environmental exposure to semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) by characterizing their accumulation and uptake kinetics to fabrics followed by release in laundry water. Cotton, rayon and polyester were used as test fabrics and halogenated and organophosphate flame retardants (HFRs and OPEs, respectively) and phthalates were test chemicals. Analytical and measurement methods were first developed for quantifying the uptake of SVOCs from indoor air to two passive air samplers. Distribution coefficients and uptake kinetics of HFRs and phthalates for cotton, rayon and polyester under ambient indoor and controlled conditions showed gas- and particle-phase accumulation. Uptake appeared to be air-side controlled when normalized to planar surface area, with uptake rates of SVOCs of 0.4â 0.9 m3 air equivalent/day.dm2 fabric. These rates imply that 2 m2 of typical clothing worn by a person would sequester chemical in 100 m3 of equivalent air per day due to the large capacity of fabrics to accumulate SVOCs, with times to reach equilibrium of >10 years for HFRs. An inverse relationship was found between accumulation by cotton versus polyester and KOW when OPEs, HFRs and phthalates were considered, indicating the need to consider physical-chemical properties of polar and non-polar chemicals and fabrics. Chemical release during laundering was a function (sigmoidal) of KOW with >80% and

Keywords: Chemical Partitioning
Fabrics
Indoor air
Laundry
SVOCs
Advisor: Diamond, Miriam Leah
Ordering Flexibility, Delay Information Heterogeneity, and Time-of-Service Preferences in Operations Management

This thesis studies three problems in operations management related to the reorder flexibility in supply chain management and operation strategies in service industry. In Chapter 2, I investigate the value of reorder flexibility under price competition. Although the supply chain literature shows that reorder flexibility increases profits even under quality competition, I show that price competition, arguably a more appropriate price formation model in the presence of reorder flexibility, may yield opposite results: (i) Reorder flexibility may increase competing firms' initial orders. (ii) Reorder flexibility hurts profits except if it reduces initial orders and in addition, demand variability is moderate, reordering is sufficiently inexpensive, and products are sufficiently differentiated. (iii) Firms can avoid the downside of reorder flexibility only in some cases where it hurts profits. In others, firms are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma, whereby reorder flexibility is the dominant strategy even though it hurts their profits. In Chapter 3, I study how the growing prevalence of real-time delay information affects service system performances, i.e., throughput and social welfare. I consider an M/M/1 system with two streams of customers, one informed about real-time delay and one uninformed. I show that the impacts of growing information prevalence on system performance measures are determined by the equilibrium joining behavior of uninformed customers. Moreover, throughput and social welfare can be unimodal in the fraction of informed customers. In other words, some amount of information heterogeneity in the population can lead to strictly more efficient outcomes than information homogeneity, under which the queue length is either visible or invisible to all customers. In the last chapter, I consider the capacity allocation problem when customer arrivals are endogenously determined by system intertemporal delays. I show that the socially optimal solution is in general not aligned with customer self-interested incentives, since customers do not take into account the provider's capacity cost when choosing their time-of-service (TOS). Therefore, in order to retain the incentive compatibility of the socially optimal solution, the provider has to charge for TOS such that price differences across time periods equal the corresponding capacity cost differences.

Advisor: Afeche, Philipp
Hu, Ming
Augmenting Animality: Neuromarketing as a Pedagogy of Communicative Surveillance

This research project considers ethical questions around neuromarketing and its implications for human freedom: How is neuromarketing shaping our subjectivities? How is neuromarketing disrupting our processes of meaning-making? If neuromarketing is scrambling our thinking, can we be free at all? The findings of this inquiry reveal that the practices inherent in the operations of neuromarketing as a form of communicative surveillance instrumentalize the consumer as a means to advertising ends. Neuromarketing discourse constructs and interprets consumers as brain images and particular brain types, reduced further to kinds of instinctive/affective reflex triggers to external advertising stimuli. The key difference between traditional forms of marketing and neuromarketing lies in what the technological apparatus can do to manipulate the consumer brain, that is, bypass the consumer's capacity for critical reflection, reducing the consumer to the metaphor of mind as animality via the animalization of thinking, as this dissertation seeks to argue. My research seeks to further understandings of the relations between neuromarketing and constructions of consumer subjectivities. I present a critical hermeneutics of neuromarketing discourse through an examination of narrative devices embedded in multimodal textual artifacts, looking to reveal recurrent themes, metaphors, explicit and implicit assumptions, beliefs, and values. I draw on a hybrid analytic that merges thematic textual analysis and philosophy, using Heidegger's tripartite thesis that the stone is worldless, animal is poor in world (animality), and man [sic] is world-forming, as a conceptual frame for showing how the discursive structures of neuromarketing work to animalize consumer thinking as a brain to study, disinhibit, and manipulate for instrumental ends. The tripartite division is useful heuristically as a method for revealing the crudeness of certain dimensions of the neuromarketing program inasmuch as they assume the consumer is situated in an understandable world, without explicating the process of understanding and/or the concept of "world" when meaning-making. I contend that neuromarketing aims to disrupt and override the thinking processes of consumers. By disrupting thinking, neuromarketing works in opposition to freedom of intelligence as foundational to a democratic way of life. Neuromarketing technique violates our freedom to choose.

Keywords: Education
Media and Communication
Neuromarketing
Philosophy
Surveillance Studies
Technology
Advisor: Boler, Megan
Agenda Setting in Global Policy Development: The Case of the International Labour Organization Decent Work Agenda

Structural inequality, employment insecurity, and unhealthy working conditions continue to rise. Confronted by these challenges, global institutions such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) are providing policy advice to protect and promote the health and well-being of workers. This dissertation focuses on agenda setting - how health and social problems get and stay on policy agendas and how agendas are set and produced through the political interactions of social actors -to better understand why global progress in improving poor working conditions through policy may be stalled. I conducted a qualitative study using data from interviews and publicly accessible archival policy texts about the Decent Work Agenda (DWA) and related texts. Interviews with 16 participants from the ILO, World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank (WB) helped to further understand what role the DWA has played in setting these institutions' work policy agendas. A critical discourse analysis of 10 policy texts surfaced different health, economic, and social conceptualizations of `decent work' in the work policy agendas of these institutions. My findings indicate that the DWA has not been fully embraced by the WHO and WB, although there is evidence of policy coherence within the UN multi-lateral system. I found evidence of resistance to "ILO language" by the WB and shift in ILO language from decent work to job over time (1999-2012). I observed a drift towards privileging macro-economic measures to foster job creation particularly in WB texts but also evidence of strategic appeals to economic interests in WHO texts. Deeply-held beliefs of neoliberalism that are embedded in global policy enabled pro-market and pro-economic discourses in the case of all three institutions I found that catalytic events such as the 2008-09 economic crisis and policy precedents contributed positively to attention to and use of the Decent Work Agenda as a policy instrument. I also found differences in the implicit and explicit use of terms such as decent work, health, health equity and economics within and across policy texts. How these concepts come to be interpreted differently in policy texts and contested globally in the face of vested institutional interests partially explains why efforts to improve global working conditions have been stalled.

Keywords: decent work
discourse
global governance
health equity
policy
Advisor: Cohen, Joanna E.
Infrared Emission Measurements of Radiation and Trace Gas Variability in the High Arctic

The objective of this Ph.D. is to investigate the atmospheric radiative budget and composition in the high Arctic using a new (prototype) interferometer. The Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change has equipped the Polar Atmospheric Environment Research Laboratory (PEARL) at Eureka, Nunavut (80ยบN, 86ยบW) with an Extended-range Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (E-AERI), which was installed in October 2008 at the PEARL Ridge Lab (610 m a.s.l.). The E-AERI measures the infrared (IR) thermal emission of the atmosphere in the 400-3000 cm-1 (3.3-25 μm) spectral region. An older AERI, the Polar AERI (P-AERI), was stationed in Eureka from 2006-2009 and was located at sea level. The impact of clouds and ice crystals on the radiative budget were investigated from two altitudes using these two AERIs. The increased radiance due to the presence of clouds was found to be larger at Eureka than at the Southern Great Plains (SGP), indicating that cloud cover plays an important role in the Arctic's radiative budget. This thesis presents the first measurements of the two surface cooling-to-space windows (at 10 and 20 μm) in the high (> 75o N) Arctic. Distributions of brightness temperatures were filtered based on cloud cover and do not vary in the summer, indicating that the 20 μm window is closed when water vapour is a maximum. Trends in downwelling radiance were found in several spectral microregions corresponding to these cooling-to-space windows and meteorological conditions (temperature, water vapour, cloud cover). Trends at 10 μm during the winter were positive, in the opposite direction, and significantly larger (factor > 3) than any of the seasonal trends detected at the SGP, indicating that changes in the downwelling radiance are accelerated in the high Arctic compared to lower latitudes. Spectra recorded by the E-AERI were also used to retrieve total column concentrations of O3, CO, CH4, and N2O year-round to fill a gap in the PEARL data series, providing the first continuous ground-based trace gas measurements throughout polar night at Eureka. This work involved the implementation of the SFIT2 retrieval algorithm modified for emission spectra. E-AERI trace gas retrievals were characterized and comparisons to other spectrometers at Eureka are within uncertainties (1-9% differences). An investigation of the diurnal and seasonal cycle of CO was performed to highlight the usefulness of continuous, year-round measurements at Eureka.

Keywords: Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer
Cloud Radiative Forcing
Emission Spectroscopy
Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy
Total Column Trace Gas Measurements
Trace Gas Retrieval Theory
Advisor: Strong, Kimberly
Pound Seizure: Legislation and Policy Debate in American Newspapers 1994 - 2005

Using content-analysis methodology, this study looks at the practice of pound seizure, a little-known phenomenon whereby community animal pounds and shelters sell lost, stolen, and no-longer-wanted companion animals to research facilities, where they are then used in scientific experiments. Specifically, it analyzes one-hundred United States-based newspapers from 1994 to 2005 with a view to determining whether a relationship exists between the extent and type of coverage about pound seizure, on the one hand, and the presence of "moral shock," on the other hand. Moral shock is a term coined by James M. Jasper, who defines it as "a visceral, bodily feeling, on a par with vertigo or nausea" that results from "an unexpected event or piece of information [that] raises such a sense of outrage in a person that she becomes inclined toward political action." After identifying instances of moral shock within the examined newspapers, the study traces possible connections between them and policy and legislative changes relating to pound seizure in the United States.

Keywords: Content Analysis
Pound Seizure
Advisor: Dilevko, Juris B
Embodiment and Subjectivity -- The Origins of Bodily Self-awareness

What is the role of the body in our conscious mental life? How does the body shape our sense of self? In what follows, I explore how our sense of self involves a sense of bodily self. I explore how we are aware of our bodies in our everyday being in the world, and I frame my approach using a phenomenological distinction between the body as subject and the body as object. I consider the sensory modalities by which we are aware of our body as the subject of experience - proprioception (the sensory modality responsible for providing information about body posture, limb location, and movement) and interoception (the sensory modality responsible for providing afferent information about visceral organs, bodily temperature, pain, body chemistry, etc.) - and I develop a model of how to understand these senses in relation to our typical bodily self-awareness. In doing so, I argue for the need to enrich our account of perception to include a particular form of bodily perception - bodily-self perception. I close by looking at the consequences of my view for understanding a specific, and much studied form of bodily experience: the sense of body-ownership. I argue that our current interpretations of cases such as the rubber hand illusion and virtual whole body illusions fail to take into account the distinction between our awareness of the body as subject and our awareness of the body as object. As a result of this failure, these illusions have been taken to show that our sense of self as bodily might not be entirely reliant on our own body. I show how this interpretation is false, and why a consideration of our interoceptive awareness of the body as subject is crucial for properly understanding just what these cases really show in regards to our sense of self as bodily.

Keywords: Bodily Awareness
Consciousness
Interoception
Phenomenology
Proprioception
Advisor: Thompson, Evan
Mechanisms by which Nicotine Enhances Pavlovian Approach Behavior and Responding for a Conditioned Reinforcer

Tobacco dependence is among the leading causes of preventable deaths in North America. The main psychoactive ingredient contributing to the addictive properties of tobacco is nicotine. Nicotine use may be reinforced, in part, by an effect of nicotine to enhance the motivating properties of reward-associated stimuli. This effect can be measured in animals by first pairing a discrete stimulus with primary reinforcement in a Pavlovian conditioning procedure, making the cue a conditioned stimulus (CS). To assess the motivating properties of that CS, a second step is employed to assess the ability of the CS to serve as a conditioned reinforcer and support a novel, operant response. The number of responses performed for presentations of the CS as a conditioned reinforcer is enhanced by psychostimulant drugs, such as nicotine. In this thesis, I found that the administration of nicotine during Pavlovian conditioning enhances approach behavior towards the reward delivery receptacle when the CS indicates reward availability. This phenomenon occurred in two different Pavlovian conditioning procedures. In the second step, those animals that received nicotine injections during the Pavlovian conditioning phase displayed enhanced responding for the Pavlovian CS as a conditioned reinforcer under the influence of an acute nicotine injection. To further characterize this effect of nicotine on the reinforcing properties of CSs, I identified the specific nicotinic receptor subtypes involved in this effect, examined the longevity of responding for conditioned reinforcement, and assessed the ability of nicotine and the cues to reinvigorate this operant response after extinguishing such behavior. Furthermore, I found that drugs that act on dopamine (DA) or serotonin (5-HT) receptors modify the effect of nicotine to enhance motivated responding for conditioned reinforcement. Finally, I assessed the impact of administering varenicline, bupropion, lorcaserin, and naltrexone on nicotine-enhanced responding for a conditioned reinforcer. Together, these data substantiate a role for nicotine in enhancing the motivating properties of CSs, and identify several pharmacological targets that influence this property of nicotine reinforcement.

Keywords: Conditioned Reinforcement
Nicotine
Nucleus Accumbens
Pavlovian Conditioning
Advisor: Fletcher, Paul J