VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
An Investigation of the Journey of Care Related to Secondary Health Conditions for Community-dwelling Persons with Spinal Cord Injury

This thesis comprises an in-depth analysis of the journey of care in managing secondary health conditions (SHCs) for community dwelling persons with a spinal cord injury (SCI) in Ontario. Persons with SCI are at high risk of preventable secondary health conditions. The Network Episode Model was used to help conceptually guide the thesis. To determine whether potentially preventable SHCs may be related to emergency department (ED) use, in the first study, I examined patterns of emergency department use (ED) such as the number of visits by year post injury and characteristics of these visits (e.g., acuity level, timing of visits, reasons for visits). Results from this study suggest that the ED is being used as an inappropriate substitute for primary health care for individuals with traumatic SCI. In the second study, to better understand care provision in the community, I examined the caregiving networks, in particular the structure and roles of informal care. While networks are smaller for persons with SCI compared to the general population, these ties are strong, which is essential when the roles involve a level of trust and flexibility. These informal networks serve as critical key players and secondary team members. Finally, in the third study, the journey of care related to SHCs was examined at the micro (individual level), meso (care provider level) and macro (health system level). Significant challenges at the macro health system level were identified such as rigid policies, wait-times for services, funding and social inequities. These analyses have led to a better understanding of the journey of care, which seems to be a challenging and an uphill struggle for persons with SCI, care providers, and community-based advocates. If we are to make significant gains in minimizing the incidence and severity of SHCs, we need to tailor efforts at the health system.

Keywords: spinal cord injury
health services
Advisor: Jaglal, Susan
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Integrated Network of Adaptive Traffic Signal Controllers (MARLIN-ATSC)

The population is steadily increasing worldwide resulting in intractable traffic congestion in dense urban areas. Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) has shown strong potential to effectively alleviate urban traffic congestion by adjusting the signal timing plans in real-time in response to traffic fluctuations to achieve the desired objectives (e.g., minimizing delay). Efficient and robust ATSC can be designed using a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach in which each controller (agent) is responsible for the control of traffic lights around a single traffic junction. Applying MARL approaches to ATSC problem is associated with a few challenges as agents typically react to changes in the environment at the individual level but the overall behaviour of all agents may not be optimal. This dissertation presents the development and evaluation of a novel system of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Integrated Network of Adaptive Traffic Signal Controllers (MARLIN-ATSC). The MARLIN-ATSC control system is developed to provide a self-learning ATSC using a synergetic combination of reinforcement learning approaches and game theory. MARLIN-ATSC operates in two modes: (1) independent mode, i.e. each intersection controller operates independently of other agents; and (2) integrated mode, where each controller coordinates the signal control actions with the neighbouring intersections. The system was tested on three networks (i.e., small, medium, large-scale) to ensure seamless transferability of the system design and results. The large-scale application was conducted on a computerized testbed network of 60 intersections in the lower downtown core of the City of Toronto for the morning rush hour handling 25,000 trips. The results show unprecedented reduction in the average intersection delay ranging from 27% in mode 1 to 39% in mode 2 at the network level; and travel time savings of 15% in mode 1 and 26% in mode 2, along the busiest routes in downtown Toronto. The thesis shows how mathematical modelling of the traffic control problem as a stochastic control problem, combined with the utilisation of artificial intelligence techniques such as reinforcement learning in a game-theory setup, can provide highly useful and economically inexpensive solutions to real-life problems such as urban traffic congestion.

Keywords: Traffic Signal Control
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Advisor: Abdulhai, Baher
Modulation of Clr-b Ligand for the Inhibitory NKR-P1B NK Cell Receptor in Response to Transformation and Genotoxic Stress

Innate immunity is an important first-line defense against infectious disease and malignancies. Natural killer (NK) cells are large granular lymphocytes that are critical for the innate immune response. NK cells recognize target cells undergoing pathological alterations such as viral infection and transformation, through germline-encoded receptors. The recognition of targets undergoing genotoxic stress or transformation by NK cells has been limited to the upregulation of stimulatory NKG2DL and “missing-self” recognition of MHC-I. The ligand pair NKR-P1B:Clr-b participates in “missing-self” recognition of tumour and infected cells, but the role of this axis in sensing stressed cells remains unknown. This thesis focuses on the modulation of Clr-b by genotoxic stress and transformation In the first data chapter, we show that Clr-b is downregulated at the transcript and protein level upon genotoxic stress, in a time- and dose-dependent manner in tumour cells and fibroblasts. This loss occurs upon exposure to a variety of genotoxic agents with the exception of γ-irradiation and radiomimetics. The loss of surface Clr-b results in disinhibition of target cells using 51Cr-release assays and BWZ reporter assays. ii In the next chapter, we investigate the mechanism(s) by which this phenotype occurs. Genotoxic stress-induced Clr-b downregulation is not modulated entirely by classical DNA damage response effectors including ATM, ATR, Chk1, Chk2 and p53. Furthermore, the loss of transcript can by uncoupled from the loss of surface protein following administration of proteasomal inhibitors. Lastly, inhibition of the autocatalytic hammerhead ribozyme harboured within the 3’UTR of the Clr-b transcript can abrogate genotoxic stress-induced Clr-b downregulation. In the final chapter, we investigate the effect of oncogenic stress mediated through H-RasV12 on Clr-b expression in NIH3T3 fibroblasts. H-RasV12-mediated Clr-b downregulation occurs through the MEK-Erk pathway and can be inhibited through pharmacological inhibition of MEK1/2 or shRNA knockdown of Erk2. However, Erk2 alone is not sufficient to induce Clr-b downregulation and requires activation from upstream signals. All together, our results explore the role of genotoxic stress and transformation on the modulation of Clr-b, ligand for the NKR-P1B. This work begins to shed light on the role of NKR-P1B:Clr-b system in “missing-self” recognition of target cells undergoing pathological alterations.

Keywords: NK cell
genotoxic stress
transformation
missing-self recognition
Advisor: Carlyle, James
"When you witness an evil act, you should stop it with your hand." Citizenship Learning and Engagement of Muslim Youth Activists in Toronto, Canada

This thesis is about being young, Muslim and politically engaged in contemporary Toronto, Canada. Young Muslims attempting to come to terms with the complex and contradictory promises of Canadian citizenship must confront what it means to "be Canadian"—a national identity marked by historical legacies of oppressions, and shaped by ideals of western liberal democracy. Post-9/11 Canada is marked by intensified suspicion and repression of Muslims and those who “look like” Muslims. This thesis examines how 18 young people, ages16 to 29, who self-identity as “Muslim” and “activist” learned “to reflect and act upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1970). Through life history interview methods, this study attempts to capture how the participants had come to their political activism, critical experiences of learning inside and outside of schools that they understood as influential in shaping their political subjectivities and practices, the range of issues of injustice that concerned them, and the various actions they took to address those issues. The young Muslims expressed concern for and acted on access to quality affordable housing, police brutality, gender-based violence, Islamophobia and other forms of hate, and the question of Palestine. Their actions included creating safe spaces, (dis-) engaging formal systems of governance and public authority, providing public education, producing cultural narratives, and engaging in various forms of direct action. Their voices and stories maintain centrality throughout this work. This thesis is based on a broad definition of “education” that encompasses formal and non-formal education and informal learning. It is also based on the premise that “all education is citizenship education.” It demonstrates how the young Muslims’ multiple learning experiences in families, neighborhoods, communities, youth subcultures, social movements and school--embedded in histories of war and migration—enable them to name and to take action to transform the concrete situations of oppression that impact them and their communities. Particularly important for the young Muslims were the cultural and political spaces in which they were able to critically and collectively explore and question their lived experiences, identities, and binding solidarities.

Keywords: Muslim youth
Citizenship
Youth citizenship
Citizenship learning
Citizenship education
Social activism
Political activism
Immigrant youth
Muslim diaspora
Muslims in Canada
Muslim feminisms
Citizenship education in Canada
Transnational Communities
Advisor: Mundy, Karen
Pierre-Yvon Barré, ses collaborations et la (re)naissance du vaudeville : l’hybridité d’un répertoire dramatique protéiforme

La liberté des théâtres français déclarée après la Révolution engendre l’ouverture de multiples salles de spectacle, dont le Théâtre du Vaudeville (1792). Cette thèse met en lumière les débuts du vaudeville en tant que genre dramatique qui se développe sur cette scène si peu explorée, jusqu’à date, par les critiques du théâtre. C’est ici qu’à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, des auteurs comme Barré, Piis, Radet et Desfontaines, entre autres, produisent un vaste répertoire de pièces en vaudevilles, ouvrages hybrides où sont visibles les marques d’un passé forain mélangées à des éléments annonçant le vaudeville du XIXe siècle. Notre étude se penche sur l’hybridité matérielle des comédies en vaudevilles (issue du mélange de prose et de musique les caractérisant) et sur l’hybridité générique (provenant de l’emploi intertextuel et hypertextuel d’œuvres savantes au sein de pièces dites légères). Afin de mieux cerner le vaudeville tel qu’il se présente à l’époque qui nous intéresse (1780-1807), cette thèse offre, tout d’abord, un aperçu qui se veut complet des origines du vaudeville et des différentes influences ayant agi sur lui selon le contexte historique, dramatique et politique dans lequel il s’était retrouvé. Deuxièmement, l’étude des comédies-parades nous laisse explorer la fonction de la chanson dans ce corpus où figurent de vieux timbres populaires et des airs de compositions plus récentes, d’opéras-comiques principalement. Troisièmement, nous analysons des pièces à hommages engendrés principalement par l’emploi d’érudits comme personnages référentiels (Voltaire, Rousseau, Racine). Finalement, nous présentons des analyses de ce même type d’apothéoses dramatiques adressées à la scène comique (Scarron, Favart, Lesage, Vadé). Nos recherches montrent qu’une véritable interthéâtralité s’établit entre les différentes salles de l’époque par des renvois plus ou moins explicites au sein des pièces à des représentations sur d’autres scènes parisiennes, amplifiant le caractère anecdotique de ce genre connu comme étant un théâtre d’actualité.

Keywords: Vaudeville
Hybridité
Hybridité matérielle
Hybridité générique
Hypertextualité
Métathéâtralité
Interthéâtralité
Pièces en vaudevilles
Comédies-parades
Airs et timbres musicaux
Pièces à hommages (Voltaire, Rousseau, Racine)
Apothéoses dramatiques (Scarron, Favart, Lesage, Vadé)
Théâtre du Vaudeville (1792)
Pierre-Yvon Barré
Pierre-Antoine-Augustin de Piis
Jean-Baptiste Radet
François-Georges Fouques Deshayes dit Desfontaines
Vaudevillistes
Ancien Régime
Révolution française
Théâtre de la Foire
Théâtre des Boulevards
Advisor: Elkabas, Charles
Staging Canlit: Reinterpreting the Canadian Literary in English-language Stage Adaptations of Canadian Fiction and Poetry from 1975-2011

This dissertation examines theatrical adaptations of Canadian fiction and poetry performed on Canadian stages between 1975 and 2011. Treating the phenomenon of Canadian literary stage adaptations as a response to specifically Canadian environments of production and reception, this study considers how contextual pressures – whether the result of broad national, economic, and aesthetic trends, or unique material factors – have shaped adapters’ and audiences’ “horizons of expectations” in ways that promote the prioritization of particular visions of “Canadian literariness.” Through the use of three primary case studies comprising five theatrical adaptations, I identify several formal preoccupations that emerge in theatrical adaptation as the result of the Canadian theatre’s engagement with the perceived “literariness” of Canadian literature. In my first case study, I read the 1978 NDWT touring production of James Reaney’s adaptation of John Richardson’s novel Wacousta; Or, The Prophecy as a response to the concerns of thematic criticism, cultural nationalism, and related narratives of cultural maturation prevalent in the period. I then turn to the Canadian Opera Company’s 2004 adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and the 2007 National Arts Centre and Royal Shakespeare Company co-production of The Penelopiad. I argue that in the unique case of Margaret Atwood, as a result of the author’s literary celebrity and cultural iconicity, the success of stage adaptations based on Atwood’s novels is linked to adaptive strategies that prioritize the creation of a literary surrogate for the author on stage. Then, using Necessary Angel’s 1989 adaptation of Coming Through Slaughter and their 2011 adaptation of Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, I consider how Ondaatje’s experimentalism has contributed to adapters’ decisions to mine the transmedial and experiential possibilities that “poeticity” offers the theatre. Finally, synthesizing the points of connection that emerge from my case studies and the broader body of Canadian literary stage adaptations, I propose features that frame a range of contemporary adaptive practices, including the priority given by adapters and audiences to Canadian stories (or narrative content), Canadian storytellers (narrators, and the process of narration), and Canadian storytelling (in the form of metatheatrical, intermedial, and interdisciplinary approaches).

Keywords: adaptation
Canadian fiction
Canadian poetry
Canadian theatre history
theatrical adaptations
Margaret Atwood
Michael Ondaatje
John Richardson
literariness in stage adaptations
literary adaptations
Advisor: Barton, Bruce
Modernism, Age, and the Growth of the Subject

“Modernism, Age, and the Growth of the Subject” examines discourses of aging in modernist literature, charting metaphors of age in which cultural norms, genres, and somehow even subjectivity itself have become older. Despite the common association of modernist writing with youth and rebellion, most of the best-known modernist characters are middle-aged people: the protagonists of Woolf’s later novels, beginning with Mrs. Dalloway, are almost all aging women, and Joyce was only able to write Ulysses by shifting his focus from the soaring ambitions of the young Stephen Dedalus to the thoughtful and bumbling figure of the middle-aged Leopold Bloom. Henry James provocatively described the “new” age by claiming “the novel is older now, and so are the young.” Examining texts by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Winifred Holtby, Samuel Butler, Sigmund Freud, and T. S. Eliot, I show how modernists re-imagine processes of maturation and growth at the levels of individual, history, and species, understanding a state of maturity as a metonymy for the age of their own age. Older modernist characters are often better able to navigate the vicissitudes of twentieth-century life than their younger counterparts because they have more distance from the ideological norms which they imbibed in their youth. The mature modernist consciousness is marked by the ability to critically sift and re-inherit the personal and historical past, and often by an increased openness to the forces of the unconscious mind. Critiquing Victorian models of maturity for their buttressing of authoritative, conventionally “adult” social positions, and the corresponding emphasis on the potential of youth to achieve great things, modernist maturity runs against the cultural grain, suggesting that only those conventionally understood as failures and outsiders can be genuinely mature. Modernist maturity dwells in the state of what Giorgio Agamben calls “impotentiality,” as these authors delineate a communitarian “ethics of maturity” by associating their adult characters not with fulfilled individual potential, but with new possibilities for inter-personal connection and ethical action that emerge only when the individual has forsaken investment in his or her personal future.

Keywords: Modernist Literature
Aging
Advisor: Cuddy-Keane, Melba
Using Value of Information Methods to Determine Optimal Designs for Research in Diagnostic Tests and Multi-stage Randomized Clinical Trials

Value of Information (VOI) methods are based on Bayesian decision theory and provide decision makers with a methodological framework to explicitly consider the uncertainty surrounding decision making and to evaluate the need for further research. VOI methods can be used to determine the optimal sample sizes for new research studies that maximize the expected net gain (ENG), i:e. the di erence between the expected value of information provided by the trial and the expected cost of doing it. The purpose of this thesis is to develop new methodologies in VOI research for clinical trials and diagnostic research studies. The rst project is to determine the optimal sample size for multi-stage randomized clinical trials from an industry perspective using VOI methods. A model is proposed for the expected total pro t that includes consideration of per-patient pro t, disease incidence,time horizon, trial duration, market share, and the relationship between the trial results and probability of regulatory approval. The proposed method includes multistage adaptive designs with a speci c solution for two-stage design. With an example, it is demonstrated that signi cant increases in ENG can be achieved by using multi-stage designs and a smaller expected total sample size and less cost will be required. The second project is the development of VOI methods for diagnostic research. Suppose the new research study is proposed to improve the estimation of sensitivity and speci city. The optimal sample sizes for new studies can be determined at the highest ENG considering both independent and correlated sensitivity and speci city. The methods include evaluating a single diagnostic test as well as comparing two diagnostic tests. Normal approximation methods are proposed for di erent scenario. The examples and numerical simulation demonstrate that the normal approximation methods are a good tool for sample size calculation to maximize the ENG for the new research study. VOI methods are relatively new. The methods developed in this thesis will contribute to statistical tools for decision making and help health planners to better evaluate the need for more research studies and determine the optimal sample sizes associated with them.

Keywords: Value of Information
Statistical Methods
Advisor: Andrew, Willan
Binding too Much Rather than too Little: Age Differences in Attentional Control and the Implications for Associative Memory

This thesis investigated whether older adults’ reduced attentional control leads to hyper-binding or the obligatory formation of overly broad associations between events occurring in close temporal and spatial contiguity. Study 1 explored whether older, but not younger, adults form associations between co-occurring targets and distractors. Studies 2 and 3 explored whether this hyper-binding effect extends to sequential co-occurrences. Study 1 examined whether older adults’ lessened inhibitory control leads them to inadvertently form associations between co-occurring targets and distractors. Participants first performed a 1-back task on pictures overlapped with irrelevant words and were later given a paired-associates memory task that surreptitiously included preserved and disrupted pairs from the 1-back task. Older adults showed a memory advantage for preserved pairs and a disadvantage for disrupted pairs, while younger adults performed similarly across pair type, suggesting that older adults alone encode irrelevant co-occurrences in the environment. Study 2 examined whether older adults also encode sequential co-occurrences that are entirely contained within distracting information, regularities that younger adults manage to ignore. Participants viewed a series of red and green objects and performed a 1-back task on one of the colours. Both age groups showed similar learning of statistical regularities contained within the attended stream. However, only older adults showed learning of regularities contained within the unattended stream. Finally, Study 3 examined whether older adults form associations across successive pairs within a paired-associate learning task. Participants learned a list of word pairs and then received an associative recognition task in which rearranged pairs had originally occurred either close together or far apart in the study list. Unlike younger adults, older adults made more false alarms to near repairings than to far repairings, suggesting that older adults alone had inadvertently formed associations across successive pairs at study.

Keywords: attention
inhibition
associative memory
aging
binding
Advisor: Hasher, Lynn
Grady, Cheryl
Bicultural Stress and Disordered Eating in Arab-Canadian Women: Clarifying the Roles of Acculturation, Ethnic Identity, Acculturative Distress and Cultural Value Conflicts

In this study, relationships between disordered eating and body shape challenges in relation to three culturally related variables of acculturation, ethnic identity, and bicultural stress and conflict were examined in a sample of 196 Arab-Canadian women. A series of correlational analyses and hierarchical regressions were performed. Results showed that bicultural stress and conflict predicted a significant amount of variability in disordered eating and body shape concerns, including internalization of the thinness ideal, over and above both ethnic identity and acculturation. Furthermore, significant three way-interactions revealed that bicultural stress and conflict moderated the relationships among Arab-Orientation and Anglo-Orientation as predictors of disordered eating symptoms. Bicultural stress and conflict also moderated the relationships among ethnic identity and acculturation as predictors of eating disorder symptoms. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Keywords: Eating Disorders
Arabs
Arab-Canadian
Disordered Eating
Acculturation
Ethnic Identity
Acculturative Stress
Bicultural Stress
Advisor: Piran, Niva