VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Precedents in Canadian and American Constitutional Culture: A Comparative Essay

This thesis explores the place of constitutional precedents in contemporary Canadian and American constitutional culture. The author identifies four elements that explain the relative indifference in Canada to the problem of stability and change in the interpretation of constitutional rights and freedoms: the lack of a historical constitutional narrative in Canadian constitutional culture, the lack of meaningful â super precedentsâ , the structure of the proportionality analysis under the Oakes test and the adherence to a less formalist and more openly political conception of constitutional adjudication. These elements are contrasted with the American experience in which precedents are central to any constitutional discourse. The comparison tries to make explicit how these differences are linked to different assumptions and expectations about the rule of law and the role of the judiciary in adapting the legal traditions of these two Common Law countries to the challenges of written constitutionalism.

Keywords: Comparative law
constitutional culture
Constitutional law
Precedents
proportionality
stare decisis
Advisor: Schneiderman, David
The Intersection of Child Maltreatment and Behaviour Problems: Implications for Child Welfare Service Providers

Evidence suggests that child maltreatment is associated with externalizing, antisocial, and criminal behaviour, although the mechanisms explaining this association remain poorly understood. The purpose of this thesis research is twofold: to deepen current understanding of the relationship between maltreatment and behaviour problems, and to understand the potential intervening role of child welfare services in influencing this relationship. With few Canadian studies in this area, an aim of this research is to provide a foundation from which future research can expand. Three academic papers comprise this research. The first paper entails a comprehensive analysis and application of relevant theories to understanding the association between maltreatment and behaviour problems. The second paper utilizes data from the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (OIS-2013) to examine whether dimensions of maltreatment and cumulative risk explain why certain maltreated young people exhibit behaviour problems and others do not. The third paper uses OIS-2013 data to provide a snapshot of the child welfare services delivered to maltreated children and youth who exhibit aggressive and/or criminal behaviour. The findings indicate that the relationship between maltreatment and behaviour problems is complex and dependent on processes at every level of childrenâ s ecologies. Aggressive children were more likely to experience severe and co-occurring forms of maltreatment and to experience higher levels of cumulative child risks. In adolescence, youth exhibiting aggressive or criminal behaviour commonly experienced abandonment, a form of neglect in which caregivers are not willing or able to remain a caregiver. While aggression in younger children was not associated with an increased likelihood of receiving child welfare services, maltreated adolescents displaying aggressive behaviour were significantly more likely to be placed in out-of-home care, often in restrictive settings. These findings are discussed with respect to their implications for child welfare practitioners, policy makers, administrators, researchers, and educators.

Keywords: Behaviour problems
Child maltreatment
Child protection
Child welfare
Youth crime
Youth justice
Advisor: Mishna, Faye
Characterizing Novel Regulators of MYC-dependent Tumorigenesis

The MYC oncogene has been the subject of intense study for over 30 years due its important role in tumorigenesis. MYC is a nuclear transcription factor that can regulate the expression of a multitude of target genes, and its expression in tumours is often associated with poor prognosis. Recent reports have suggested that both protein complexes and post-translational modification (PTM) of MYC are important for regulating the activity and functions of this potent oncogene. The overall goal of my PhD was to gain novel insights into how MYC drives tumorigenesis by characterizing the MYC Box (MB) interactome using BioID and by identifying novel post-translational modification of MYC. In total, 336 proteins were identified as putative MYC interactors, and a subset of these proteins were identified to have a dependency on a specific MB deletion. Of the six MBs interrogated, MBII was further confirmed, and MB0 was newly identified as being essential for MYC to drive tumorigenesis. MBII and MB0 have distinct interactomes; whereas MBII interacts with TIP60 and STAGA complexes, MB0 interactors include members of the general transcriptional machinery. I have also investigated the role of post-translational modifications in the regulation of MYC activity, including SUMOylation and phosphorylation, and have identified both known and novel post-translational modifications of MYC. Signaling through a pair of newly described phospho-residues, serine-303 and threonine-304, resulted in the negative regulation of MYC activity. Finally, I have identified and characterized a site of MYC SUMOylation on lysine-326. Overall, these studies have provided novel insights into the PTMs and protein interactors that are required for MYC to drive transformation.

Keywords: cancer
c-MYC
interactome
post-translational modifications
Advisor: Penn, Linda Z
Meds on the Menu: The Covert Administration of Psychotropic Medication to Adult Inpatients Determined to be Decisionally-Incapable in Ontario's Psychiatric Settings

Drawing on the fields of human rights and public health, this research explores the covert administration of medication: the concealment of medication in food or drink so that it will be consumed undetected. Adopting a rights-based approach, it explores multiple understandings of the impact of the practice on inpatients' rights-experiences. Relying on critical approaches, it also explores the practice's underlying socio-political-legal structures. The common themes of policies, protocols or guidelines that govern its practice in Ontario are identified. Focus groups and individual interviews were held with three groups of stakeholders (nurses, legal experts and psychiatrists), relying on fictional clinical scenarios. Few policies, protocols or guidelines govern the practice in Ontario's psychiatric settings. The practice impairs access to knowledge by patients and substitute decision-makers. It also precludes healthcare practitioners' access to information about side effects and underlying reasons for medication refusal. It may interfere with therapeutic relationships and patients' meaningful recovery as they transfer from hospital without knowledge of the fact of the covert medication. It may be characterized as autonomy restoring since patients may become capable of making treatment decisions after having received the medication surreptitiously. Covert medication reflects an inflexible approach to capacity determination; it is distinguishable from approaches that imagine capacity as able to be fostered with support. It is primarily concerned with the management of "risky" inpatients in the short-term. The practice relies on a faith that medication will be effective, deferring to medical decision-making. While covert medication is understood to have "something to do" with rights, there is confusion about how those rights play out on the ground. Institutional silences underlie and reinforce the practice. This research will support the development of effective, safe and appropriate approaches to treatment non-adherence that maximize patient dignity. Most pressing, this research concludes that the covert administration of medication warrants an overt discussion.

Advisor: Ferris, Lorraine
Model Fitting for Motion Segmentation

The problem of rigid motion segmentation of trajectory data under orthography has been long solved for non-degenerate motions in the absence of noise. But because real trajectory data often incorporates noise, tracking failures, motion degeneracies and motion dependencies, recently proposed motion segmentation methods resort to non-trivial representations to achieve state of the art accuracies, at the expense of a large computational cost. This thesis proposes a method that dramatically reduces this cost (by two orders of magnitude) with minimal segmentation accuracy loss (from 98.8% achieved by the state of the art, to 97% achieved by our method on the standard Hopkins 155 dataset). Computational efficiency comes from the use of a simple but powerful motion model that explicitly incorporates mechanisms to deal with noise, outliers and motion degeneracies. Subsets of these motion models with the best balance between prediction accuracy and model complexity are efficiently ranked from a pool of candidates. Top scoring model combinations are then merged using an averaging technique to produce the final segmentation result.

Keywords: Model Fitting
Motion Segmentation
Advisor: Jepson, Allan D
QUATERNARY SULFUR CYCLE DYNAMICS

The past 3 million years of Earth history are characterized by dramatic changes, which greatly affected the biogeochemical cycling of elements like carbon, sulfur and phosphorous. Here I investigate the effect of these changes on sulfur fluxes and microbially mediated sulfur cycling in marine sediments. Climate driven sea level fluctuations and dynamic topography have greatly affected the areal extent of the continental shelf during the Quaternary. In turn this affects organic matter burial rates and the relative importance of different organic matter remineralization pathways. Since microbial sulfur cycling is the dominant organic matter re-mineralization pathway in marine sediments, this must have affected marine sulfur cycling. Furthermore, previous studies suggested that Quaternary sea level fluctuations caused a considerable increase in the erosion of shelf sediments, which is closely tied to the re-oxidation of pyrite. Here, I use the marine barite record of sulfur and oxygen isotope ratios (d34S and d18O) of seawater sulfate for the past 4Ma to evaluate the implications of Quaternary sea level changes on the sulfur cycling. Quantitative interpretation of d34S and d18O data suggests that erosion during sea level lowstands was only partly compensated by increased sedimentation during times of rising sea levels and sea level highstands. Furthermore, my findings indicate that shelf systems reached a new equilibrium state about 700 kyr ago, which considerably slowed or terminated erosion of shelf sediments. Modeling results also show that microbial sulfur cycling changes proportionally with shelf area, resulting in a 15% reduction of microbial sulfur cycling over the last 2 Ma. This results in a 1-1.5 / drop in the marine sulfate d18O isotope value. While further work is needed to understand how shelf area changes affect the cycling of carbon, phosphorous and other elements, results presented here highlight the dynamic role of continental shelves in the global biogeochemical cycles.

Keywords: geochemical modeling
stable isotopes
sulfur cycle
Advisor: Wortmann, Ulrich G
Cooperating Oncogenic Alterations in Aggressive Pten-Deficient Breast Cancer

PTEN is one of the most frequently inactivated tumor suppressors in human malignancies including breast cancer, and its mutation or loss is often implicated in advanced cancers and therapy resistance. Yet, germline mutations in PTEN induce non-malignant hamartomas in humans and mouse tumors with a wide spectrum of aggressiveness, indicating context-dependent effects. To develop effective anti-cancer therapies, a better understanding of how mutational events cooperate with PTEN-loss is required. In this thesis, I show that most tumors derived from Pten-deleted mammary epithelium were highly differentiated and lacked transplantable tumor initiating cells following FACS isolation or transient propagation under non-adherent conditions. Surprisingly, a rare group of Pten-deficient tumors with distinct histology did contain transplantable TICs. In comparing these two tumor groups, I identified low miR-143/145 expression as a critical factor that determined transplantability. Knockdown of miR-143/145 in Pten-deficient tumor cells promoted secondary tumor engraftment, RAS pathway activation and sensitivity to MEK inhibitors. In basal-like breast cancer, 7% showed combined loss of PTEN and miR-145 as well as poor clinical outcomes. Thus, Pten loss can initiate benign or aggressive mammary tumors depending on miR-143/145 status. Patients with basal-like tumors and low-Pten/miR-143/145 expression should be identified and prioritized for aggressive therapy. Pten-deletion also cooperated with p53R270H mutation, resulting in diverse tumors including basal-like and claudin-low. Compared to mammary tumors arising from Ptenf:p53f mice, Ptenf:p53R270H mammary tumors were more capable of undergoing mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET) and possessed greater metastatic potential. Together, these findings identified important oncogenic events that cooperate with PTEN-loss to induce aggressive breast cancer, enhance metastatic progression and influence response to therapy, and have significant implications for personalized breast cancer treatment.

Keywords: Breast
Mouse model
p53
PTEN
Advisor: Zacksenhaus, Eldad
Halogen Bonding Polymers: Synthesis, Binding Studies, and Solution-Phase Assembly

This work explores interpolymer halogen bonding to direct solution-phase self-assembly. Halogen bonding is an attractive, non-covalent interaction between a halogen bond donor which bears an electron deficient halogen atom and a Lewis basic halogen bond acceptor. The donor halogen receives electron density from the Lewis base acceptor. Halogen bonding has received significant attention in materials chemistry but examples of polymeric donors are infrequent. Solution-phase polymer nanostructures are of interest for catalysis, drug delivery, and stimuli responsive materials. They have previously been formed through other non-covalent interactions but not by halogen bonding. This work contributes to the fields of halogen bonding and polymer chemistry through the synthesis of polymeric donors, the characterization of their interpolymer complexation with a polymeric acceptor, and the establishment of conditions yielding well defined solution-phase assemblies of complementary polymeric halogen bond donors and acceptors. Herein, the first examples of RAFT polymerization of halogen bond donors are described for methacrylate and styrene derivatives. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and 19F NMR titrations are employed to characterize interpolymer halogen bonding with polymeric acceptor PDMAEMA. Acceptor chain length dependent trends in binding affinity and occupancy of donor sites are established for polymer solutions. Assembly of the donors with block copolymers of the acceptor (PEO-b-PDMAEMA) was performed by multiple solvent switching protocols. Going from DMSO to water resulted in kinetically controlled morphologies, whereas a slow solvent changing procedure from acetone to acetonitrile to water allowed access to a rich variety of structures, including two infrequently reported inverted morphologies (hexagonal and bicontinuous). To further demonstrate the utility of halogen bonding, multicompartmental assemblies were formed with cores composed of both halogen bonding and non-halogen bonding segments. Halogen bonding and hydrophobic domains were assembled in stages using a multi-step assembly process with a donor homopolymer and a triblock terpolymer bearing an acceptor block, a hydrophobic non-halogen bonding block, and a corona block.

Keywords: Halogen Bonding
Intermolecular Interactions
Inverse Micelles
Multicompartmental
Polymer Nanoparticles
Self Assembly
Advisor: Taylor, Mark S
Investigating factors that govern T cell and dendritic cell function as therapeutic strategies for immune therapy

In 1909, Paul Ehrlich first suggested that the immune system protects against cancer. Over a century later, significant progress has been made towards understanding the interplay between the immune system and cancer, as well as many other diseases. Cancer immunotherapy is a burgeoning field of research that has great potential to complement or replace existing treatments. However, much remains to be understood in defining the precise factors that regulate immune function, particularly in the context of the complex tumor microenvironment. Dendritic cells and T cells, the prototypical immune populations involved in the generation of an adaptive, cytotoxic T cell response, play an important role in tumor immune surveillance. The activity of these immune subsets in a tumor, however, is frequently inhibited. Thus, identifying strategies to restore immune activity in the immunosuppressive tumor environment will serve to augment immune therapies for cancer. In the first part of this thesis, we show that Casitas B lymphoma b (Cbl-b), a crucial negative regulator of T cell activation, is regulated downstream of the phosphoinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)-protein kinase B/Akt (PKB) signaling pathway in T cells. Glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK-3), one of the first targets identified for PKB, was found to phosphorylate Cbl-b, modulating its expression. In the second part of this thesis, we clarify the role of the master cellular sensor of hypoxia, hypoxia-inducible factor 1 alpha (HIF-1Îą), in dendritic cells. HIF-1Îą plays an important role in cancer biology, but has also been shown to have opposing effects on immune function in a cell- and context-dependent manner. We found that enforced HIF-1Îą expression in bone marrow-derived dendritic cell (BMDC) cultures promotes the differentiation of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), an immunosuppressive population. Altogether, these data suggest two potential targets for modulating immune function and augmenting anti-tumor responses in immune therapy.

Keywords: cancer
Cbl-b
dendritic cell
HIF-1a
immunotherapy
T cell
Advisor: Ohashi, Pamela S
Development of a More Robust Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Brain Computer Interface: Single-Trial Classification of Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Signals Arising from Multiple Cortical Regions

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has been gaining increasing attention as a brain-computer interface (BCI) modality. However, communication rates offered by this technology are not yet practical for clinical implementation. This thesis investigates the feasibility of enhancing the speed and accuracy attainable by NIRS-BCIs. To date, most studies have utilized activity from a single cortical region, particularly the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC), to discern two non-motor-based mental states. However, cognitive processes require coordination between several, spatially-distributed areas. Additional cortical information may help improve classification of mental states, particularly combinations of more than two. Furthermore, testing has largely focused on offline analyses, despite the possibility of enhanced cortical control attainable with feedback. Lastly, NIRS-BCI work has primarily involved able-bodied participants, most of which were offline. In an initial offline study, we investigated the value of utilizing cortical activity measured from multiple brain regions to differentiate all possible combinations of two cognitive tasks and rest. With prefrontal and parietal measurements, average binary and ternary accuracies exceeded 80% and 70%, respectively. Accuracies and information transfer rates (ITRs) improved significantly with the inclusion of measurements beyond the aPFC. A second study was conducted to evaluate ternary classification accuracies achievable in an online system that offered classification feedback. An average online accuracy of 74.2 Âą 14.8% was attained, representing further improvements in NIRS-BCI speed and accuracy. In a final study, we tested an online system developed for a candidate BCI user with severe, congenital muscular impairments. The binary system made use of prefrontal measurements beyond the aPFC and was tailored for the user prior to each online session. Offline and online accuracies of 66.9 Âą 9.11% and 63.33%, respectively, were achieved. Collectively, these findings demonstrate the value of considering multiple brain regions and offering online classification feedback to realize a faster and more accurate NIRS-BCI.

Keywords: brain-computer interface
near-infrared spectroscopy
online
parietal
prefrontal
single-trial classification
Advisor: Chau, Tom
Sanctuary Lost? Exposing the Reality of the “Sanctuary-City” Debate Liberal States-Rights’ Litigation

The Trump Administration seeks to withhold federal funding from “sanctuary cities.” It also has returned to the Secure Communities Program, which has led to a 150% arrest-rate increase of the migrants who would otherwise be integrated into “sanctuary” jurisdictions. Liberal voices have responded in legal and academic terms, but they have not reframed the administration’s powerful anti-immigrant narrative. This rhetorical mismatch has obscured fundamental aspects of the debate—namely, the power of states to make community policing decisions and the effectiveness of such policies. Moreover, liberals’ approach to states-rights’ litigation is incomplete. The aspects of Executive Order 13,768 that are receiving the most attention (funding) can be rebuffed, yet aspects that pose grave, indirect harm to integrationist policies (S-Comm) are not being addressed. Liberals should continue states-rights’ litigation but also assert an integrationist counter-narrative and use litigation as a form of non-cooperation designed to prompt a return to enforcement priorities.

Keywords: Executive Order 13
768
immigration federalism
sanctuary cities
states' rights
Tenth Amendment
Advisor: Schneiderman, David