VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Executive function, social-emotional skills, and academic competence in three preschool programmes: pathways to school readiness

Research findings indicate that executive function (EF), social-emotional skills, and pre-academic competence significantly promote children’s school readiness and later success. School readiness broadly refers to a combination of skills necessary to function successfully in school and lack thereof may increase the risk of children’s school problems. Therefore, it is essential for school systems to provide appropriate and timely support to the development of these fundamental skills. The present study focused on three particular preschool programmes: Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and the traditional play-based (British Columbia Early Learning Framework: BCEFL) programmes in Western Canada. Although they are popular, there is little empirical research that examines and compares the benefits of these programmes to the development of school readiness skills. As such, the present study aimed to 1) determine the effectiveness of these three preschool programmes in Western Canada on the development of children’s school readiness; and 2) examine other sources of influences in the child, family and school in relation to the development of school readiness skills.
Overall, 119 preschool children (48 Montessori, 42 Reggio Emilia, 29 BCELF) participated in the study. Observation was conducted once in the autumn of 2015 for each classroom using the CLASS observation tool. Teachers and parents of participating children filled in a series of questionnaires regarding the quality of their relationship with their child and their perceptions of daily EF and social-emotional skills of their child. The researcher also assessed individual children’s fluid intelligence, EF, and pre-academic competence.
The results showed that 1) although Montessori education appeared to be the most effective in facilitating numeracy skills, no curriculum stood out as notably more effective than any of the others at improving other areas of school readiness skills; 2) well-run classrooms where teachers were effective in time, behavioural, and attention management were most effective in promoting children’s numeracy skills; 3) EF, social-emotional skills, and pre-academic competence exhibited an overlapping developmental process over time; 4) relational quality in both home and school environments significantly affected the development of school readiness skills, especially social-emotional skills; and 5) adults’ perceptions of children’s EF and social-emotional skills had a significant consequence for how teachers and parents formed their relationships with their children.

Advisor: Evangelou, M
Malmberg, L
Characterizing the specificity of T follicular helper cell repertoire in human peripheral blood and tonsil samples

T follicular helper cells (Tfh) are specialized CD4+ T cells, primarily localized in germinal centers (GCs) in secondary lymphoid organs. These cells play a key role in supporting B cell responses and selection of affinity maturated antibodies. The majority of research to date on human Tfh cells has been restricted to circulating Tfh-like cells (cTfh) from peripheral blood because of difficulties in obtaining secondary lymphoid organs. However, the relationship between Tfh cells in lymph nodes (follicular Tfh) and cTfh cells as well as their distinctiveness from the CXCR5– memory CD4+ T cell compartment are still unclear. By using donor-matched blood and tonsil samples, this project aimed to investigate the relationship between peripheral and follicular Tfh cells and also between Tfh and non-Tfh cell populations.
Phenotypic analyses characterized and identified populations of blood (Tfh-Th1, Tfh-Th2 and ROM) and tonsil (Tfh-GC, Tfh-Th1, Tfh-Th2 and ROM) cells to be compared. Targeted sequence-based analysis of the T cell receptor (TCR) showed a repertoire overlap between peripheral Tfh subsets and tonsillar Tfh cells as well as the distinction between Tfh and the rest of CD4+ memory T cells. This was also confirmed in an antigen-specific system by comparing the peptide specificity and TCR repertoires of influenza virus haemagglutinin (HA) responsive Tfh and non-Tfh cells. Tfh and non-Tfh cell clones were also generated and their avidity characterized for use in Tfh and B cell co-cultures assays and for high resolution investigation of molecule trafficking in immune synapses. Correlation between peripheral and tonsillar compartments as well as distinction between Tfh and non-Tfh cells will inform the evaluation of Tfh responses in future clinical studies.

Keywords: CD4 T cells
T follicular helper cells
Advisor: McMichael, A
Borrow, P
Crossing the divided line: mathematical perception and the access problem

Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics holds that there are mind-independent, abstract objects which are the subject of mathematical inquiry. This view faces a vexed epistemological problem: given that humans are concrete, physical creatures squarely situated in space-time, how can we come to possess knowledge of these abstract objects? Gödel is famous for suggesting that we can have "something like a perception" of some mathematical objects, and this faculty for perception is how we gain (at least some) mathematical knowledge. The positing of such a capacity for mathematical perception was met with a critical reception. However, some contemporary philosophers have attempted to develop this project, including Penelope Maddy and Jaegwon Kim, as well as Max Jones more recently. These authors have gone a good way towards making mathematical perception more scientifically plausible. However, they have done so while working with a 'numberproperty' view| the view which says that '2' refers to a property instantiated by any two objects taken together. I argue that, for various reasons, such an account is undesirable. In this thesis, I investigate whether the project of basing mathematical epistemology on 'something like perception' can be divorced from the number-property view. I conclude that it can, and demonstrate why this is. The structure of the thesis runs as follows: In Chapter 1, I introduce the access problem and the perceptual approach to answering it. In Chapter 2, I look at the number-property approach to mathematical perception, and argue that it is wanting in a few crucial respects. In Chapter 3, I look at current research in cognitive neuroscience, and find it consistent with a number-object account of mathematical perception. In Chapter 4, I formalize the access problem for the number-object view in terms of information theory, and find that it is less serious than has been previously made out.

Keywords: Set-Theoretic Realism
Perception
Methodology for the conversion of tetramates to pyroglutamates, and a study of their biological activity

Highly functionalised pyroglutamates, molecules of interest for their biological uses and applications, are readily accessible from a bicyclic tetramic acid as a substrate for functionalisation at C3 and C4 of tetramic acid ring. These molecules have structural features common to pyroglutamate and pyrrolinone-containing natural products and this thesis particularly focuses on the development of novel routes to 3-substituted and 3,4-disubstituted pyroglutamic acid derivatives.
Chapter 1 represents an overview of antibacterial drug discovery and the need for the development of new antibiotics. It describes the importance of the pyroglutamate building block in natural product-inspired drug discovery. Preparation and application of 3-substituted pyroglutamate, pyrrolidinone, and pyroglutaminol derivatives have been extensively reviewed. Representative examples of lactam-derived natural products and their biological properties are also outlined.
Chapter 2 describes the synthetic strategy for the conversion of tetramates to pyrrolinones that allows stereospecific C3 arylation via Suzuki coupling. Conformationally constrained 3-aryl pyrrolidinone and pyroglutaminol derivatives are efficiently achievable from these newly developed 3-arylpyrrolinones under hydrogenation and N,O-acetal deprotection conditions, respectively. These synthetic routes permit the preparation of a large library of pyroglutamate derivatives. Alternatively, attempted Reformatsky conjugate addition conditions were unsuccessful for the C3 functionalisation of enones.
Chapter 3 effectively utilises the methodology developed in Chapter 2, for the synthesis of 3,4-disubstituted pyrrolinone and pyroglutamate derivatives. The use of an ethyl ester bicyclic tetramate or Weinreb amide did not work for the mesylation step as these tricarbonyls act as only a weak nucleophile and hence, further C4 functionalisation was thwarted.
Chapter 4 demonstrates a novel approach for the synthesis of bicyclic tetramic acids in a low-cost strategy using 2-methylpropanal as condensing reagent. The obtained tetramic acids are useful for a number of chemical transformations described in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.
The synthesised compounds were tested for antibacterial activity against multidrug resistant pathogens and disappointingly, all of them showed very little or no activity.

Advisor: Moloney, M
Anomalous diffusion in artificial lipid bilayers

Diffusion is a process essential to life. The way diffusion processes occur at, and within, the cell membrane is of particular importance for cellular signalling, transport and cellular integrity. However, within cell membranes, diffusion of lipids and proteins has been shown to be ‘anomalous’. In such cases the molecules do not conform to basic Brownian motion and instead show slower diffusion over long timescales. The cell exploits this to tightly control the movement of key molecules including receptors. Although it has been hypothesised that this is due to the complex, crowded environment found within the membrane, the physical basis for anomalous diffusion is not yet fully understood and certainly is not well controlled in current membrane mimics. In the present work, artificial lipid bilayers were used to produce platforms in which to exhibit, control and study anomalous diffusive processes. A combination of fluorescence and optimised interferometric scattering microscopies, allowed careful study of this diffusive behaviour over biologically relevant length and timescales.

Keywords: Artificial lipid bilayers
Biophysics
Interferometric scattering microscopy
Microscopy
Supported lipid bilayers
iSCAT
Anomalous diffusion
Advisor: Wallace, M
Bayley, H
Models and software for improving the profitability of pharmaceutical research

Pharmaceutical companies have to face huge risks and enormous costs of production before they can produce a drug. Efficient allocation of resources is essential to help in maximizing profits. Chen [14] and Yu and Gittins [66] describe a stochastic optimisation model (the OPRRAa model) and associated software for determining efficient allocations for a pre-clinical research project. This is the starting point for this thesis. We first look for the nature of optimal policies for the selection of successive candidate drugs using two restricted versions of the OPRRAa model, and investigate how these depend on the model parameters. To some extent these results are likely to be applicable to the OPRRAa model. We then extend the OPRRAa model by introducing further modelling for stages and incorporating feedback from clinical trials to update the success probabilities for the corresponding stages using a hierarchical Bayes setting. Computer software has been written to implement the optimisation calculations. We show that very large improvements in profitability are possible in realistic cases.

Advisor: Gittins, J
Assaying the biological role of the PKD1L1-PKD2 interaction

Polycystins are a family of transmembrane proteins found in metazoan species that play a plethora of roles, at multiple stages, throughout the lifespan of the animal organism. In human, two loci encoding polycystins, PKD1 and PKD2, were found to be causative of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease. Later studies identified these two genes in other organisms, such as mouse and zebrafish, which served as models for investigating the function and regulation of the two proteins. PKD1 and PKD2 behave as interacting partners and form cation-permeable channels, which are thought to control cellular proliferation. The interaction of the two proteins was shown to involve the respective coiled-coil (CC) domains of each protein, a typical protein-protein interaction domain. Later studies then determined that PKD2 is also able to interact with other PKD2 molecules through the CC domain, as well as other domains distributed throughout the protein.
PKD2 has also been shown to play a role in left-right (L-R) asymmetry determination, in partnership with a PKD1 paralog, PKD1L1 (PKD1-like-1). The two have also been suggested to interact, presumably through their respective CC domains. The aim of the work described in this thesis is to test the differences and similarities between the interaction mechanisms of PKD1-PKD2 and PKD1L1-PKD2, in order to better understand how these molecules perform their function.
I first investigated the molecular mechanisms involved in the PKD1L1-PKD2 interaction, through the use of biochemical techniques, by comparing the interaction of PKD2 WT or mutant proteins fragments with destabilized or truncated CCs. The results obtained suggest that the molecular mechanisms of interaction are likely different between the PKD1-PKD2 and PKD1L1-PKD2 complexes, in that the PKD1L1-PKD2 interaction does not appear to require the CC domain for interaction. I performed phenotypic analysis on embryos carrying truncation or insertion mutations in the region of Pkd2 encoding the CC region. The phenotypic data indicates, for the first time, a separation between the role played by PKD2 in L-R and kidney development. Furthermore, the results described in this thesis also indicate that the PKD2 CC performs distinct functions, at the molecular level, in different contexts.

Keywords: Micro-CT
PKD2
Situs analysis
Left-right
PKD1L1
Polycystins
Laterality
Polycystic kidney disease
Advisor: Norris, D
Srinivas, S
Criminalization in world politics: uncovering the historical construction of international crimes

This thesis examines the phenomenon of international criminalization. Specifically, it explores the process by which particular acts came to be established as international crimes in international society. Drawing upon constructivist International Relations scholarship on international norms and the socially constructed nature of international relations, it argues the process of international criminalization does not simply amount to a legal process, as existing accounts from the discipline of International Law suggest. Rather, it also embraces a social process that centres on international diplomatic negotiations amongst international diplomats and legal experts within multilateral organizations.
The thesis also argues the process of international criminalization consists of two stages: firstly, the emergence of an international criminal norm; and secondly, the translation of that international criminal norm into an international legal proscription. In the first stage, an international criminal norm develops once an international social consensus is obtained amongst diplomats and legal experts on the following: firstly, that an act deserves to be recognized as having the status of an international crime; and secondly, that an act ought to assume a specific form as an international crime. In the second stage, the international criminal norm is given legal expression by being made into a formal legal proscription under international law.
This two-stage process of international criminalization is then employed to analyze the historical emergence of two international crimes, namely, genocide and aggression. Through a historically-informed constructivist approach centring on archival research and a close reading of historical documents, the thesis demonstrates the establishment of these international crimes were preceded by the development of an international criminal norm. This, in turn, offers an alternative account of the criminalization of genocide and aggression, which emphasizes what existing accounts currently neglect, namely, the social dimensions of the process of international criminalization. The thesis also examines a negative instance of international criminalization. Through a focus on piracy, it shows how piracy, contrary to some views, cannot be regarded as an international crime because it did not undergo the process of international criminalization throughout its historical development.

Keywords: international criminal law
piracy
constructivism
international crimes
genocide
international criminalization
aggression
international criminal norms
Advisor: Welsh, J
Security, citizenship, and the politics of reform in Jamaica

This thesis examines the relationship between practices of citizenship and the challenges associated with the pursuit of, and threats to, security in contemporary Jamaica. This approach is accompanied by an unpacking of the ways in which people occupying different spaces in Jamaican society position themselves vis-à-vis the state. I argue that the security problem in Jamaica has to be understood in the context of a widening citizenship deficit, and the fact that there is a separate way, outside of the formal context of the state, for pursuing citizenship at the community level in what are referred to as garrison communities. This separate way has emerged in response to the failure of the Jamaican state to provide both citizenship and security to its most disadvantaged and disenfranchised members.
The state, the legal rights it is expected to provide, and the universalistic discourses which form the basis of citizenship in the West, have not served as the primary means by which citizenship has been constituted for all Jamaicans. The nature citizenship assumes is rooted in Jamaica’s colonial past, and since the postcolonial period has been tied to a rather uneven and unequal developmental trajectory, influenced by colour/class relations, space, political culture and identity as well as neoliberal policies and noticeable state failures. Through extralegal, dialectic, and contested practices, garrisons have become essential sites for realising citizenship. The local practices that inform the social order of the garrisons are decidedly in conflict with, and contest, the state’s legal-rational institutions, calling its legitimacy and the veracity of the social contract – derived from Rousseau – into question.
The theme of the thesis is pursued through an in-depth, multi-sited study, carried out in three communities, which explores the particularities, the everyday security experiences and discourses of people occupying different places and spaces in Jamaican society, and through consideration of the security policies and perspectives of policy elites and policy managers.
Nanomedicine: development of a tri-imageable nanoparticle for diagnostics

Targeted, controlled, and noninvasive delivery of therapeutics is a major goal of pharmaceutical development. However, few techniques allow imaging and controlled drug release at the cellular level. Herein, a potential targeted drug delivery platform with three imaging reporters has been developed by coupling the magnetic properties of ultrasmall superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (USPIOs) with near infrared fluorescence of Cy5.5 and γ-emissions of 111In that is chelated to a conjugated antibody. This silica-coated iron oxide nanoparticle (SCION) allows for verification of localization, characterization of nearby physiology, and quantification.
During each phase of development, the nanoparticles have been characterized for surface charge, structure, optical response, and magnetic properties. Although the size is an advantage for passive delivery, to actively direct SCIONs to a specific location (i.e. epithelial cancers or multiple sclerosis inflammatory foci), various antibodies have been attached to the particle surface. The chelator CHXA”-DTPA was conjugated to antibody for radioisotope labeling. Cell viability, biodistribution, pharmacokinetics, MR, optical, and nuclear imaging studies were conducted.
The results presented demonstrate SCION‟s potential for application in cell tracking and liver imaging, as well as its promise in the area of sentinel node imaging. In vivo optical and magnetic resonance imaging of athymic mice given intracutaneous injection of multimodal SCION in the foot pad reveal visualization of the primary draining lymph nodes. Unlike previous techniques, the particle could first be used to characterize lymph nodes by MR, followed by fluorescence identification during surgery, and further histology using its fluorescence and iron content.
As currently synthesized, the nanoparticles can be used for diagnostics; however, they can also be developed into a method of thermotherapy. Once the delivery construct is traced to its target location, its superparamagnetic properties can be exploited by the application of an AC magnetic field to heat tissue or activate a drug. Thus, with conjugates of this nanoparticle, it should be possible to target specific tissues, verify localization and then non-invasively activate multimodal therapies using extrinsic fields.

Advisor: Dobson, P
Fugger, L
Brechbiel, M
Choyke, P
The Chinese party-state's use of model worker narratives to legitimize reform and maintain order, 1977-1992

This dissertation investigates how and why the Chinese party-state used the figure of the “model worker” in the state-owned media in the period 1977-1992. Through close reading and digitally-aided analysis of articles published in the People’s Daily, the dissertation demonstrates that model workers were employed to frame and discuss the most important political, economic, and social issues of the period.
Through analysis of newspaper articles, the dissertation shows that the party-state sought very determinedly to alter popular norms and expectations so as to fit with the evolving reform policies, and model workers appeared frequently in these efforts. Under Hua Guofeng, and later Deng Xiaoping, the party-state sought to create a national community based on narratives of common past suffering, joy over the PRC’s athletic triumphs, and pride in the country’s improving ability to produce consumer goods. What characterizes the roles assigned to model workers in the narratives of the People’s Daily is that they invariably appear as moral paragons, particularly in their eagerness to suppress individual material desires so as to benefit the larger community. For this reason, model workers almost never appeared in stories about workers benefitting materially from the economic reforms, except when they could justify their newfound wealth through philanthropy.
The great number of articles devoted to influencing workers’ norms and expectations indicate entrenched popular resistance to the economic reforms. The sustained efforts of the People’s Daily, along with the many articles published in this period aiming to explain to local cadres how best to do "thought work" among the general population, also show how methodically the party-state leadership approached the task of changing popular norms and expectations.
Finally, the dissertation advances the claim that the concept of "porous personhood"—a concept borrowed from anthropology and further developed—presents a useful way of understanding why concerns about models and modelling have been so prevalent in the PRC. The dissertation demonstrates that porosity remains an important element of how personhood is made sense of in the contemporary period, and it is suggested that porous personhood may provide a useful lens through which to integrate cultural and psychological insights into the analyses of Chinese media policies and state-society relations.

Advisor: Murphy, R
Harrison, H