VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Modern appeals to history and tradition: Montesquieu and Burke

Many contemporary critics of liberalism have objected to this doctrine's unhistorical understanding of individual autonomy and liberty. In order to assess the merit of these criticisms it would be profitable to return to the early and seminal attempts of Montesquieu and Burke to ground individual liberty in particular histories and traditions. Montesquieu has at various times been labeled a liberal or a conservative, while Burke's reputation is that of a staunch conservative. Yet recently both have been mined for their seemingly capacious notions of liberty. Both of them make careful and nuanced arguments regarding the conditions for liberty, and both have flexible notions of liberty, which include aspects of the ancien regime and of the liberal democratic regimes that eventually followed. Upon careful scrutiny, however, it is difficult to conclude that either of these political thinkers offers a convincing account of embedded liberalism, at once sensitive to historical difference and careful to offer a principled standard for liberty. Montesquieu's purportedly moderate liberalism proves to be no more capacious than that of Hobbes and Locke, while Burke's spirited attempt to salvage respect for tradition coupled with his attack on reason results in unwitting historicism. Efforts to promote moderation and statesmanship on modern liberal grounds are problematic. Montesquieu and Burke agree that political life is for the sake of comfortable self-preservation, and argue that pre-rational affection is crucial for achieving this goal. Our history and traditions help form our sensibilities in such a way as to make possible regulated liberty. Although Montesquieu and Burke offer rich accounts of political life, they both fall short of providing plausible alternatives to the individualistic and universalistic liberalism of Hobbes and Locke. Montesquieu's attempt to account for the irrational historical and social forces that form political character blurs the line between nature and history, and thus makes more difficult the application of a natural standard by which to judge our political affections and commitments. For Burke, nature and history become so confounded as to make impossible standards of liberty or goodness by nature.
The legitimacy of cross-border pharmacy from Canada to the United States

Sanctioning cross-border pharmacy---the dispensing of prescription drugs by Canadian pharmacies to U.S. patients---is a legitimate option for U.S. and Canadian policymakers. Safety concerns have been exaggerated. Patient interests are better served by a regime of regulated imports than by prohibition. Similarly, opposition by Canadian provincial Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons and Colleges of Pharmacists to member participation in cross-border pharmacy is unjustified. Economic considerations do not compel prohibition of cross-border pharmacy but rather raise political questions of priority and values. Canadian interests in preserving domestic supplies can be protected through legal, political, and practical measures. Canada is better situated to resist price increases firms might seek in response to cross-border pharmacy than has been acknowledged.

Keywords: Pharmaceutical industry, Law and legislation
Pharmaceutical industry, Canada
Pharmacy, Supplies
Internet in medicine
Pharmaceutical industry, Law and legislation
Pharmaceutical industry, United States
Early identification of mild traumatic brain injury

Accurate diagnosis of mTBI is important in guiding appropriate acute management and follow-up care along with determining incidence rates. The research objectives were: (1) To investigate how mTBI is diagnosed in the primary care setting; (2) To determine the mTBI incidence rate in Ontario; (3) To investigate the use of CT scans in patients with suspected mTBI. This study involved a respective review of three-months of patient charts in 2002 from 12 EDs and 19 FP clinics. The study identified 876 potential mTBI patients. 360 of 876 cases had discrepant diagnoses from the primary care physicians and the secondary reviewer (kappa=0.19). The calculated incidence rate of mTBI from these data was 493 to 653/100,000. Significant predictors of CT scan prescription were seen in urban ED (OR=5.14;p0.001), documented LOC /or PTA (OR=4.83;p0.001), vomiting (OR=2.56;p0.01), arrival by ambulance (OR=2.15;p0.001), nausea (OR=1.92;p=0.02) and older age (OR=1.02;p0.01).
Don't trust anyone outside your pack: Initial trust formation in an online social activist network

This study explored initial trust formation in a computer-mediated social action network. Little research has been directed towards exploring trust development in this context. This study employed an online focus group and direct observation to examine the risks, interdependencies and trust antecedents that influenced the acceptance of applicants to an online social action network. The risks and interdependencies inherent in the organization's social action projects, combined with the limited identity cues available online, influenced not only the organization's choice of trust antecedents but also where these pre-conditions were found. Although online information provided cues for shared social identity, it was insufficient to extend initial trust to prospective members. Ultimately the decision to trust an applicant was based on real world reputation and third party endorsement by a trusted colleague. Further research is required to examine the impact of information and communication technology on trust formation in contextually diverse online communities.

Keywords: Trust
Computer networks, Social aspects
Internet, Social aspects
Interpersonal relations
Organizational behavior
Self-actualization (Psychology)
Music at a time like this: music therapy cancer support groups

Cancer is a serious, potentially life-limiting and life-threatening disease and illness that profoundly affects individuals, and their families and friends. Business-as-usual is irreparably altered, never to be considered "normal" in the same way again. Music at a Time Like This chronicles a music therapy support group study for adult cancer patients that voices experience from the patients' perspectives. The study is a hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry about the meaning of the music therapy support group. Ten individuals, recruited from hospital and community cancer facilities, participated in eight weekly music therapy support group sessions from May to June, 2004. Participants talked about feeling lonely and isolated as cancer patients. They experienced the music therapy support group as profound, nonverbal connection to themselves, to each other, and connection to something larger---the music---that was beyond themselves. The experience of improvised music-making in music therapy support groups was particularly empowering and provided feelings of control during a time of loss-of-control inflicted by the disease and its experience as illness. Music therapy research is, by definition, arts-based. The representation of this inquiry is, furthermore, arts-informed because the findings are portrayed in a literary form that is intended to be accessible to a wide readership beyond the academy and the music therapy profession. Substantive content is located throughout the thesis text, including endnotes and appendices. Nonverbal visual and auditory elements are incorporated to portray the participants' experiences directly and to heighten the reader's phenomenological engagement. These include a melodic-poetic transcription---a song---based on the compression and synthesis of the research findings. A CD player is required to access the audio compact disc that accompanies the hard paper copy of this thesis. The colour images and audio data can be accessed on-line at http://hdl.handle.net/1807/4797. The computer must have a suitable sound card and speakers or earphones. This arts-informed representation more fully conveys the tone of the project. It honours the creativity, courage and integrity of the research participants and the music they created together. An arts-informed representation embodies the risks taken and expands the notion of research, including ways of knowing, what can be known and how this can be represented.* *This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer.
De-centering colonial schooling: towards reforming indigenous education

"De-Centering Colonial Schooling: Towards Reforming Indigenous Education" delineates the complexities surrounding Indigenous knowledge and education. It does this through examining an educational reform initiative that attempts to re-centre Indigenous knowledge in education from colonial schooling practices in Alaskan village communities. It (a) unravels the complexities of the term Indigenous knowledge through assessing the various modes of production that are a part of making up the social formation of Alaska Native villages; (b) examines the historical factors that are responsible for the subjugation of Indigenous knowledge in Alaskan Native village schools since 1784; and (c) explores the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative as an educational reform initiative that attempts to address the contemporary juncture of local needs and state educational standards in Alaskan village communities. Such an examination aspires to inform educational reform in the Canadian North and in international contexts.

Keywords: Indigenous peoples, Education
Indigenous peoples, Education
Indigenous peoples, Alaska
Education, Colonial
Preliminary analysis of three previously uncharacterized linker histone-like genes in Arabidopsis thaliana

This study was undertaken to identify and study novel linker histone variants in Arabidopsis thaliana. It was specifically focussed on determining tissue specificity, and possibly identifying an Arabidopsis cognate of a meiosis-specific, linker-histone-like protein called meiotin-1, previously characterized in Lilium longiflorum. Amino acid sequence similarity to the linker histone globular domain identified five candidate proteins. Two of those candidates (BT and F20) showed weak similarity to Meiotin-1, and were selected for further study; a third gene (BTBB) was also included, due to its close similarity to BT. Analysis of the three genes indicated that they were unlikely to encode meiotin-1 cognates. Semi-quantitative RT-PCR showed no meiosis-specificity in the expression of any of the genes, but BTBB did appear to be expressed in tissues undergoing active division. These novel genes probably encode chromatin associated proteins; BT and BTBB appear to be related to plant HMGA proteins, while the function of F20 remains elusive.
Information literacy and education policy: an instrumental case study of the Ontario public school curriculum

This instrumental case study explores the Ontario Ministry of Education's information literacy curriculum policy for kindergarten to grade twelve. The central issue investigated is the development of information literacy policy as depicted by the Ministry, and not the detailed implementation impacts of this policy. A rhetorical analysis of relevant policy documents and interviews with twelve policy makers constitute the methodological framework. This research found that teacher librarian advocates and the Ministry's funding priorities and emphasis on standardized literacy testing have significant impacts on information literacy policy development. The current state of school libraries in Canada also impacts information literacy policy as does the teacher librarian community's advocacy network, how teacher librarians are trained and how teacher librarians are able to mesh their goals with those of the Ministry. This research reveals that current information literacy policy in Ontario fosters a learning environment based on inequitable access to information skills.

Keywords: Information literacy, Government policy
Information literacy, Ontario
Mapping a post-queer terrain: radicalizing poststructural bodies

What would it mean to engage a post-queer time and space? How can the body become post-queer? Mapping a Post-Queer Terrain radically reconceptualizes bodies of poststructuralist discourse through a critical exploration of bodily materiality, subjectivity, and culture. This project makes an original contribution to the existing queer corpus through an inquiry into the post-queer that exposes the body as a virtual becoming. Although queer theory continues to offer a critical and necessary politics, in agreement with Jean Bobby Noble, the vulnerability of queer is upheld in its circulation as a centripetal or centrifugal term. This project makes a new flow of (knowledge) production with queer theory using Bakhtin and Deleuze and Guattari to read through Foucault and Butler. It is structured nomadically and is virtually directed where it continuously makes and breaks theoretical and philosophical connections. I argue that the Foucauldian body is prediscursive (culture on body) and the Butlerian body is discursive (culture with body) in order to claim the Bakhtinian body as dialogical (body as culture). I read through Butler's performativity using Russian linguistics (Bakhtin) to rethink the body as an utterance where agency is a creative potential. I expand this analysis using Deleuze and Guattari to suggest that the "individual" body is produced at the core of capitalist production. I use a schizoanalytic lens to assert the (capitalist) body as an ongoing tension between desiring-machines and the body without organs (BwO). I expand my argument that the post-queer body is a dialogical-becoming through a masochistically informed reading of citizenship discourse. I reread what it means to be a citizen of radical and plural democracy (Laclau and Mouffe) where I argue that body-citizens are defined by their surplus value and negotiated through bodily intensifications. I ultimately apply post-queer theorizations to a reading of higher educational spaces to explore how academic bodies become intelligible body-citizens through the intensity of research, teaching, and service practices that define academic life. I conclude that (academic) bodies are masochistic citizens of the (academic) civilized capitalist machine. Mapping a Post-Queer Terrain creates opportunities to explore the virtual potentialities of bodies as dialogical-becomings.
Secular rights and monopolies of morality: reframing the legal discourse of abortion in the Philippines

This thesis introduces and develops the idea of "secular spaces." It proposes a role for the courts in protecting such spaces, and supporting core values behind secularism, rather than engaging in mechanical line-drawing exercises between state and church, the secular and the religious. This idea of secular space is not premised on a complete disentanglement of secular and religious realms but rather builds on the idea of a social space benefiting from state protection as well as from non-intervention. It is a contested and an overlapping space but one which can allow the courts a more meaningful vantage point from which to exercise their role in promoting the values behind secularism and secular state practices. Because the issue of abortion in the Philippines spans both spheres, public/private and secular/religious, the courts need to consider a broader approach in their judgments, one that remains attentive to the Constitutional framework of both religious freedom and women's human rights. The challenge here is to view the issue of abortion and the resulting rights contest not solely or primarily as a competition for legitimacy in which all debates, even the ethical, can and ought to be settled with finality before the courts of law.

Keywords: Abortion, Law and legislation
Abortion, Philippines
Abortion, Moral and ethical aspects
Abortion, Philippines
Secularism, Philippines
Victimization and bullying in children with attention-deficit

This study explored the occurrence of victimization and bullying among 9–14 year old children with and without Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The relationship between attributional style, victimization and bullying was also explored by having children complete self-report measures. Parents and teachers provided ratings of bullying behaviour. Children with ADHD reported higher overall levels of victimization and equivalent levels of bullying behaviour as children without the disorder. Children with ADHD were also categorized as victims, bullies, and provocative victims significantly more often and reported higher levels of verbal, relational and physical aggression than comparison children. Verbal aggression was experienced more often than relational and physical aggression. When examining children's attributional styles for negative social outcomes, attributions to task difficulty accounted for the most variance in self-reported victimization and attributions to own personal qualities accounted for the most variance in self-reported bullying for children with and without ADHD.

Keywords: Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
Bullies, Attitudes
Victims, Attitudes
Attribution (Social psychology) in children
Can a growth hormone-derived peptide (AOD9604) prevent bone loss and fragility in a rat model of osteoporosis?

A synthetic human Growth Hormone (hGH) 16AA C-terminus peptide, AOD9604 (AOD, Tyr-hGH171--191), has been shown to modulate fat metabolism and is currently being developed as a novel weight-loss drug. However, intact hGH affects the skeleton as well as lipids. This current study identified similar skeletal effects with the hGH peptide and assessed the ability of AOD to prevent OVX-induced bone loss and fragility. Two different dosages (0.25mg/kg/day, AOD-0.25 and 0.5mg/kg/day, AOD-0.5) of orally administered drug were administered over a 12-wk period in the ovariectomized (OVX) rat. Bone mass, mechanics, material and structural parameters were assessed. Overall, we evidenced that both doses of AOD prevented OVX-induced fragility and bone loss in cortical bone. In trabecular bone, AOD-0.25 prevented OVX-induced fragility and attenuated bone formation and bone loss and these trabecular improvements were not evident with AOD-0.5.
The role of progesterone metabolites and psychosocial factors in mood during pregnancy and postpartum: a biopsychosocial model

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a potentially devastating mood disorder that affects up to 15% of childbearing women. Although a number of putative biological and psychosocial risk factors for PPD have previously been identified, causal relationships between these variables and PPD have not been established. Further, previous work in this area has largely ignored the overlap between “biological” and “psychosocial” risk factors. The present work set out to test a model of postpartum mood disturbance in 150 women to quantify potential interactions between biological and psychosocial variables, specifically through their effects on stress. First, hormonal variables, and specifically centrally active progesterone (FROG) metabolites, were investigated in relation to perinatal mood. Results suggested that depressed women may have marginally increased PROG synthesis, and reduced PROG metabolism, relative to healthy subjects. Demographic, psychosocial and clinical predictors for depression during late pregnancy and postpartum were then identified. Multiple linear regression revealed psychosocial factors such as lack of social support to be most closely correlated with current depression, and psychiatric history and prenatal depression to be the strongest predictors of depression. Because of the potential role for anxiolytic progesterone metabolites in PPD, the prevalence of symptoms of anxiety was then examined in this population. Nearly half of women with PPD showed comorbid anxiety, and this anxiety accounted for 35%–50% of the total score on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. Finally, structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques were used to test a model of perinatal mood disturbance which proposed that risks that are assumed to be predominantly biological (e.g., hormone levels) influence mood and anxiety indirectly through interactions with risks that are assumed to be predominantly psychosocial (e.g., social support). Results of the modeling suggest that biological variables, and specifically PROD, play a statistically significant though subtle role in mediating mood during late pregnancy and postpartum. This role is an indirect one, mediated through differential sensitivity to psychosocial stressors. If this is correct, it would explain past difficulties in isolating hormonal risk factors in research which did not simultaneously measure non-biological factors.
Living an elementary school curriculum: rethinking reform through a narrative classroom inquiry with a teacher and her students into the learning of mathematics : life lessons from Bay Street Community School

This study, situated in a long-term Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research Project, explores teacher knowledge and reform in education. I work with one teacher, Janine O'Neil, examining her mathematics education practice as it unfolds in her classroom. My study spans two years of classroom participation and observation followed by another year of research in Bay Street Community School's larger community. My research phenomena emerges in response to the reform environment shaping the North American context of education. I examine how reforms to mathematics education are experienced in an elementary classroom. As my narrative classroom inquiry progresses, complexities of classroom life with Janine and her students in Room 34/35 enfold me. The complexities create tensions that are layered throughout my research and writing. Section I, a narrative analysis, begins with a description of a grade 3/4 mathematics lesson, Remembrance Day Math. Then, I explore the meaning of this classroom experience using a three-dimensional axes of narrative inquiry: place, temporality and the personal and social relationship. The importance of teaching and learning mathematics as contextualized in experience emerges as a pivotal understanding. Section II, a curricular analysis, begins with a description of a grade 3/4 mathematics lesson based on an exploratory activity into relationships between whole numbers, fractions, and ratios (third grade), and a problem-solving activity (fourth grade). Using the notion of curriculum commonplaces to reconstruct a mathematics education experience in an elementary classroom, I analyze this lesson from the perspectives of the teacher, social milieu, subject matter, and learner. I find that classroom curriculum results from the negotiation of tensions between the learner, curriculum, and community needs. Section III, a narrative reconceptualization of reform in education, consists of three chapters. The first is a study into the relationship between personal and social influences in the construction of teacher knowledge. The second is an account of a school-based reform and how this initiative becomes part of a teacher's practice. I argue that framing notions of education reform in terms of learning and growth is beneficial. The final chapter looks backward into and forward from this inquiry.

Keywords: Elementary schools, Curricula
Education, Elementary, Curricula
Mathematics, Study and teaching (Elementary)
Educational change