VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Identifying the optimal treatment among common non-surgical neck pain treatments

Background. In Canada and the United States, the most commonly prescribed neck pain treatments are standard nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (sNSAIDs), Cox-2 NSAIDs, exercise, mobilization, and manipulation. Deciding which treatment is best is difficult because of the trade-offs between beneficial and harmful effects, and because of the uncertainty of these effects. Objective. Our objective was to identify the optimal treatment for non-specific neck pain using decision analysis. Methods. (Quality-adjusted) life expectancy associated with standard NSAIDs, Cox-2 NSAIDs, exercise, mobilization, and manipulation were compared in a decision-analytic model. Estimates of the course of neck pain, background risk of adverse events in the general population, treatment effectiveness and risk, and patient-preferences were inputted into the model. Assuming equal effectiveness, we conducted a baseline analysis using risk of harm only. We assessed the stability of the baseline results by conducting a second analysis that incorporated effectiveness data from a high-quality randomized trial. Results. There were no important differences across treatments. The difference between the highest and lowest-ranked treatments predicted by the baseline model was 4.5 days of life expectancy and 3.4 quality-adjusted life-days. The difference between the highest and lowest-ranked treatments predicted by the second model was 7.3 quality-adjusted life-days. Conclusion. When the objective is to maximize life expectancy and quality-adjusted life expectancy, none of the treatments in our analysis were clearly superior.
The effects of examinee motivation on multiple-choice item calibration and test construction

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a false assumption regarding the motivation of examinees on multiple-choice item calibration and test construction. A simulation study was conducted using data generated based on two models of item responses (the 3-parameter logistic item response model alone, and in combination with Wise's Examinee Persistence model (1996a)). Items were calibrated using a Bayesian method. For the conditions studied, the item parameter estimates based on responses from poorly motivated examinees were biased and more variable than estimates based on responses from a "normal" group of examinees. Bias in item parameter estimates resulted in bias in item information estimates and test information estimates for optimally constructed tests. The implications of the results for test development companies, examinees and users of test results are discussed.

Keywords: Educational tests and measurements, Design and construction
Item response theory
Psychological tests, Design and construction
Motivation (Psychology)
Implicit religious bias and the intergroup attributions

The Ultimate Attribution Error (UAE; Pettigrew, 1979) is the tendency for prejudiced individuals to attribute an outgroup member's negative behaviour to dispositional factors, but discount an outgroup member's positive, counter-stereotypic behaviour by attributing it to external factors, such as luck, special advantage, situation, an exceptional case, or extra effort. We conducted one of the first formal tests of the UAE, using the Implicit Association Test and Social Dominance Orientation as measure of intergroup attitudes. We found that individuals with strong implicit pro-Christian or pro-Jewish biases were less likely than individuals with moderate implicit biases to make discounting attributions of a Jewish actor who donated to a charity. When a Jewish actor did not donate to a charity, individuals with strong implicit pro-Christian or pro-Jewish biased were more likely than individuals with moderate implicit biases to make discounting attributions. Attributions for Christian and control actors were not moderated by intergroup attitudes.
Black teacher, white spaces: negotiating identity across the classroom

This paper examines the lived experiences of six Black anti-racist educators as they engage in dialogues on race in classrooms within a public school district where the students and teachers are predominately white. The Black teacher is often in the position of being an anti-racist text simply by their bodily presence within the school. Their existence in the space of whiteness at once extends the definition of 'teacher' to include Black bodies, while it opens possibilities of who can have knowledge, and who can have authority. Using an anti-colonial lens and drawing on principles of Black feminist epistemology, this project aims to let the lived experience of Black educators serve as the source of knowledge. It examines some of the challenges and supports which Black educators encounter in their practice of anti-racist pedagogy, and concludes by offering suggestions for Black educators, school districts and teacher education programs.

Keywords: Teachers, Black, Ontario
Racism, Ontario
Discrimination in education, Ontario
Phylogenetic systematics and speciation in highland deer mice of the peromyscus mexicanus species group

The hypothesis that highland Central American deer mice in the Peromyscus mexicanus species group (P. grandis, P. guatemalensis , and P. zarhynchus) may be late-Pleistocene vicars of a widely distributed common ancestor is evaluated. An alternative model of local parapatric divergence along elevational clines from nearby lower elevation P. mexicanus group species was also examined. Analysis of mitochondrial restriction fragment sites failed to support the monophyly of the highland taxa, and a simple model of derivation from a common mesic ancestor is rejected. Local parapatric divergence of the highland taxa also is not supported and most cases of sympatry between highland taxa and P. mexicanus or P. gymnotis are examples of secondary contact. The major divisions observed among members of the P. mexicanus species group are not reflected in the current systematic arrangement of the included taxa and the group is in need of systematic revision.
Development of animal models and characterization of molecular mechanisms in muscle and neuropathic pain

Mechanisms that maintain pathological pain associated with deep tissue and peripheral nerve injuries are largely unknown. In the present study, mouse models of these chronic pain conditions were developed. Chronic muscle pain mouse model was raised by injecting carrageenan, a known inflammatory agent, into the gastrocnemius muscle on days 1 and 5. A neuropathic pain model with least muscle injury and motor nerve damage was developed by ligating the common peroneal nerve (CPN) at a superficial location over the head of the fibula near the knee joint in one leg. Muscle injury during the procedure was negligible and the procedure was very short. Long lasting behavioral allodynia, peaking on day seven, was observed after the ligation procedure. Two of the effector molecules downstream of excitatory glutamate neurotransmission are calcium-calmodulin stimulated neuronal membrane bound isoforms of adenylyl cyclase (AC) enzyme, AC1 and AC8. They differ in their calcium sensitivity and catalyze synthesis of cyclic AMP, which is an important second messenger that regulates post-translational modification of receptors, ion channels, and transcription factors and ultimately lead to further gene expression. Both AC1 and AC8 isoforms are known for their significant roles in behavioral sensitization after chronic subcutaneous inflammatory pain. However, chronic deep tissue pain and neuropathic pain are different from subcutaneous pain and are often refractory to conventional treatments. In the chronic muscle pain model, AC1-/-; AC8-/- mice showed significantly reduced mechanical allodynia compared to the wild type mice. In both the AC1-/- and AC-/-; AC8 -/- mice, mechanical allodynia was significantly reduced on day 7 after nerve injury when compared to the wild type mice. Excitatory synaptic transmission in layer II/III of ACC neurons was enhanced on day 7 after CPN ligation. In addition, paired pulse facilitation (PPF) of excitatory postsynaptic current (EPSC) was decreased. After CPN ligation, enhancement of excitatory synaptic transmission in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain region associated with the affective features of pain, was absent in the AC1-/- mice. In addition, in AC1-/- mice there was no reduction in PPF of EPSC following CPN ligation. These results suggest that in neuropathic pain, AC1 is likely responsible for the enhancement of synaptic transmission in the ACC.
The serpent, the word and the lie of the land: the discipline of living in the Great Sandy Desert of Australia

In this thesis, I direct my attention to two aims. I intend to provide an ethnographic description of an indigenous people's 'country' which is, among other things, a place where human beings and seemingly non-visible agents are said to co-exist and interact. This interaction has been occurring for an indeterminate period in a rather large area of the northern Great Sandy Desert and the southern margins of the Kimberley district of Western Australia. The people who consider this area to be their land are known by no single name; many of their customs are shared by others; they associate themselves and their country with several languages, some of which others identify with and speak as well. While common identity may seem an elusive quality for them, I intend to show that the character and geographic limits of the land that these people once habitually occupied are discernable in terms of durable conceptualizations which they share and use in publically understandable ways. For this purpose I use the concept chorology. One focus of this study lies at the level once the preserve of the tribe, the cultural bloc and, more recently, the language-owning group. A closer look at the concept of the Western Desert cultural bloc is long overdue, and part of my argument is that the inclusion of the northern Great Sandy Desert in this rubric has served to mask its character and distinctiveness. Secondly, I pursue the idea that, along with providing a living and serving as a semiotic resource, Aboriginal land as 'country' is a coherent creation of discourse and social practice. I advance a key proposition, suggested and variably incorporated in the writings of many others, that another, necessary element needs to be part of the analysis of Aboriginal 'territorial organisation', along with the band and its range, and the clan and its estate. This is 'country', an indigenous concept that I intend to analyse as a field of interpretation and inter-subject action. Thus, my second aim is to examine a region of Aboriginal Australia as the product of these cultural processes and also the place where claims to truth are made and influence is exerted, where individual identities are fashioned, and history is played out. One of the contributions I wish to make in this thesis is to show that the way these desert people act in their country and interact with other sentient beings they believe to be there have implications for broadening our understanding of the so-called 'Dreaming', particularly in reference to an indigenous ethos of action.
A proposal for the design of a specific tax for mining companies: The Peruvian experience

This paper deals with the discussion whether the Peruvian mining tax regime requires a specific mining tax. It argues that the proposal made by the Peruvian's Parliament for the creation of an excess profits tax cannot be considered a suitable model to tax profits obtained by the mining sector, since it misunderstands the characteristics of the excess profits tax and windfall profit tax enacted by the U.S. in which it is supposedly based. Subsequently, it proposes a specific tax for mining activities in Peru based on the mining taxes levied in the Province of Ontario, Canada, and Chile, and part of the mining taxation structure already in force in Peru. Finally, it emphasizes that any serious attempt to propose a specific tax for mining activities must respect the enforcement and liability of the legal stability agreements entered into by the Peruvian government and the mining companies.

Keywords: University of Toronto, Faculty of Law
Mining corporations, Taxation
Mining corporations, Peru
E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake): a descriptive bibliography

At a time when female and Native authors worked under significant social and economic constraints, E. Pauline Johnson (1861--1913) not only built a remarkably successful career, she managed to use her platform in order to challenge the male-dominated Eurocentric society from which she drew her audience. This popular author's literary stature has not always been certain, but today she is the "most widely anthologized Native poet in North America" (qtd. in Gerson, 2002) and the subject of numerous dissertations and journal articles. With the publication of Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake (2000), Gerson and Strong-Boag articulated a new approach to Johnson scholarship and provided, for the first time, an extensive listing of Johnson's ephemeral publications, manuscripts, and untraced works. Building on their scholarship, this project offers a detailed bibliographic treatment and publishing history for each of Johnson's separately published titles.

Keywords: Canadian literature
The landscape of false-positive transcription factor binding site predictions in yeast

A major shortcoming of most available methods for transcription factor binding site (TFBS) discovery is that they produce a high rate of false-positive motifs (FP-TFBS). Little attention thus far has been devoted to systematically identifying and characterizing FP-TFBS discovered in any organism. This study maps out the entire landscape of FP-TFBS discovered in promoter sequences of S. cerevisiae, and determines the extent to which TFBS and FP-TFBS from yeast can be discriminated. We found that the landscape of FP-TFBS can be described by 347 distinct clusters. Based on per-position degeneracy levels of profiles, we were able to discriminate a control set of 102 known yeast TFBS profiles from representatives of the FP-TFBS clusters with a sensitivity of 77% and specificity of 95%. We successfully conducted further experiments with human TFBS datasets to validate our approach.
Intelligent perception in virtual sensor networks and space robotics

In Part I of the thesis, we develop a prototype surveillance system featuring a visual sensor network comprising wide field-of-view (FOV) passive cameras and pan/tilt/zoom active cameras. Novel multicamera control strategies enable the camera nodes to collaborate both in tracking pedestrians of interest that move across the FOVs of different cameras and in acquiring close-up videos of pedestrians as they travel across extended areas. Impediments to deploying and experimenting with appropriately extensive camera networks in large, busy public spaces would make our research more or less infeasible in the real world. However, a unique centerpiece of our approach is the virtual vision paradigm, in which we employ a visually and behaviorally realistic simulator in the design and evaluation of our surveillance systems. In particular, we employ a virtual train station populated by autonomous, lifelike virtual pedestrians, wherein easily reconfigurable virtual cameras generate synthetic video feeds that emulate those acquired by real surveillance cameras monitoring public spaces. Intelligent perception is a fundamental requirement of systems that exhibit sophisticated autonomous operation in complex dynamic worlds. It combines low-level, bottom-up, data-driven vision with high-level, top-down, knowledge-based processes. This thesis develops two embodied, task-oriented vision systems that exhibit autonomous, intelligent, goal-driven behavior through intelligent perception. In Part II of the thesis, we develop a cognitively-controlled vision system that combines low-level object recognition and tracking with high-level symbolic reasoning to tackle difficult space robotics problems, specifically satellite rendezvous and docking. There is significant interest in performing these operations autonomously, and our work is a step in this direction. Reasoning and related elements, among them intention, context, and memory, contribute to improve performance. We demonstrate the vision system controlling a robotic arm that autonomously captures a free-flying satellite. To date, this is the only satellite-capturing system that relies exclusively on vision to estimate the pose of the satellite and can deal with an uncooperative satellite.
Electrically small left-handed antennas with vertical polarization

There is a demand for compact, low profile antennas for modern wireless devices. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop tools that antenna designers can use to create such antennas. The Left-Handed Material zero degree cell can be modified to allow for vias in the structure to radiate. This dissertation focuses on those vias and provides techniques to allow them to radiate in three different ways. The first technique allows the designer to match the input to the source. The second technique is a method of cascading LHM cells that also allows the antenna designer to match the input impedance. Lastly, LHM cells can be combined in a way that can exhibit a dual resonance. This dual resonance can be used to create a dual band antenna or a single band antenna with enhanced bandwidth.
Audio-visual influence on speech perception: A comparison of speech and singing

The importance of visual cues in speech perception is illustrated by the McGurk effect, whereby incongruent visual cues affect the perception speech sounds. It is unclear whether similar effects occur for sung materials. In Experiment 1, participants heard sequences of syllables (la-la-la-ba, la-la-la-ga) that were spoken or sung. Sung stimuli were ascending triads (do-mi-so) that returned to the tonic (do). Incongruent stimuli were created by combining an auditory /ba/ with a visual /ga/. Participants reported the final syllable. Results revealed overwhelming auditory dominance for spoken and for sung conditions. In Experiment 2, background noise was added to increase attention to visual cues. Auditory dominance prevailed in quiet but visual dominance prevailed in noise. In Experiment 3 the target syllable was isolated. As before, participants exhibited auditory dominance, but they had greater difficulty detecting sung syllables than spoken syllables that were presented in isolation. The contributions of visual and auditory cues from the preceding context are discussed.
The representation of disability by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) during the 2004 Summer Paralympic Games

The purpose of this project was to explore how the Canadian Paralympic athlete was represented by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and to consider the potential implications of these representations. This project used critical disability theory as its theoretical orientation. Garland-Thomson's (2000) work described four visual modes used to construct images of disability and relationships of power. Qualitative analysis was performed by analysing imagery, audio, and production techniques to determine the construction of specific codes of representation. Samples were selected from CBC's television coverage of the XII Paralympic Games. The analysis indicated the dominant code was athletic. This representation although desirable constructed a uni-dimensional representation that denies human complexity and creates negative repercussions for people with impairment who cannot or do not wish to be athletic. Uni-dimensional representations were reserved almost exclusively for female athletes while male athletes were represented more often and more favourably. Bodies that appeared more 'normal' or less impaired continued to be favoured, reinforcing the dominance of able-bodied, male hegemony.
Two Japanese language tourists' ESL experience of the functions of the comprehensible output hypothesis: the potential for learning through speaking

The spoken output of adult Japanese students in private Canadian ESL schools is under-researched. These 'language tourists' believe they can improve their English through spoken output despite literature suggesting they are inhibited about speaking. Swain (1985, 1995, 2005) claims language learning can occur through pushed output featuring noticing, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistic reflection. Krashen (1994, 1998, 2003) argues pushed output is anxiety-inducing and infrequent. This case study investigates two Japanese of different gender, proficiency, and class type. Observations of classes and social events, stimulated recalls, learner diaries, and semi-structured interviews provided quantitative and qualitative descriptions of the extent to which they produced spoken output; how that production varied by individual, learning context, activity type, and form and function of language; and what the participants' affective reactions were to the experience. Participants produced at a higher rate out of school than in, and experienced oral production anxiety as worthwhile
Monuments in verse: the poetry and poetics of Samuel Daniel

This thesis studies the major poetic works and critical writings of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writer Samuel Daniel. Daniel was lauded by his contemporaries as one of the finest writers of the age. He is now often considered to be a secondary figure to Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser, but in fact he was more often a pioneer than a follower, and his literary innovations had a pronounced impact on the literary development of the period. This thesis seeks a better understanding of this important and influential writer by examining his poetics, as they are manifested both in his practice and in his theory. Daniel's attitudes towards poetry are critically engaged; he confidently establishes himself early in his career as a technical virtuoso, and his subsequent works explore, in varied ways, both the power and the limitations of poetic writing. The thesis begins with a consideration of the 1592 sonnet sequence Delia, paying particular attention to its motifs of repetition and transformation. These motifs exemplify the poetic concerns that are the heart and purpose of the sequence. The discussion of the technical excellence of Delia is followed by questions about the relationship between text and reader in Delia's companion piece The Complaint of Rosamond. This poem examines the fate of poetry when subject to the interpretation of readers, demonstrating the vulnerability of both authors and their texts. Daniel's most ambitious poetic work, The Civil Wars , published between 1595 and 1609, ostensibly marks a transition from a focus on love to a focus on war, but, continuing with the absorption of Delia and Rosamond with ideas about poetry, The Civil Wars engages in debates about the relative values of poetry and history. Daniel explicitly champions history in verse over poetry, but in fact, often relies on poetic techniques in his epic. Musophilus (1599), a dialogue in verse, and the prose treatise A Defence of Ryme (1603) provide Daniel an opportunity to express his poetic attitudes more fully and directly. In these works, Daniel both develops his concerns about poetry and establishes the importance of a nationalist, humanist, and historically sensitive poetics.