VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
'Bringing Visibility to Disability': Rethinking Childhood Disability Online

Digitally mediated social environments have become important stages for the negotiation of everyday life, and have fundamentally changed the way people interact, communicate, and perform identity. This qualitative study employed a case study methodology to critically explore how disabled youth can use new media technologies as platforms for constructing and communicating identity. Oriented by Goffman’s dramaturgy and critical disability studies, the investigation looked at videos that were posted on a disability-specific video sharing site between 2010 and 2014. The institutional discourses underpinning the website were explored using a frame analysis of a subset of 20 videos created for promotional purposes by the sponsoring institution or designated as winning entries in an annual contest. A critical discourse analysis considered the performative responses of disabled youths in 30 other videos that provided autobiographical, first-person accounts and in-depth interviews conducted with one of the video creators. The objectives were: i) to illuminate how disabled youths’ presentations of self both shape and are shaped by dominant knowledge and power structures regarding disability and ability, and ii) to critically explore the multiple effects of video sharing technologies for shaping understandings of disability in the public sphere. The findings highlighted how disabled youth managed an idealized impression of self through practices that reproduced, resisted, or disrupted dominant disability and ableist discourses. While the videos exposed how dominant discourses may be internalized by youth, they also legitimized and brought visibility to alternate ways of being that were unconstrained by normative ideals or underpinned by binary constructions of disability/ability. Video sharing can give youth who are frequently unheard an opportunity to provide an account of self in the public domain that asserts their existence and value in ways that might not be possible in face-to-face interactions. The findings suggest that online interactional spaces can play a role in shaping understanding about disability, and can offer disabled youth a means to influence interactions and understandings about themselves, their bodies, and their worlds.

Keywords: computer mediated communication
critical disability studies
disability
identity
paediatric rehabilitation
video-sharing
Advisor: Renwick, Rebecca
Innovation and Commercial Information: A Delicate Balance

Canadian law concerning trade secrets and confidential information fosters innovation by achieving a delicate balance between employer and employee interests. The rich doctrinal landscape allows for a flexible approach to the scope of protection together with a thoughtful analysis of the underlying relational expectations of the parties. The balance of interests achieved fosters innovation by protecting commercial information while concurrently facilitating labour mobility. Criminal legislation, which transfers the cost of prosecution to the state, eliminates some subtleties of case law and threatens severe sanctions, would dampen innovation by upsetting the balance of interests in favour of employer-plaintiffs. This effect has been illustrated by empirical studies of the impact of fluctuating American legal protection of commercial information on employee mobility and innovation. Until such time as there is clear evidence that civil remedies are inadequate to protect the socio-economic order of Canada, the urge to invoke criminal sanctions should be rejected.

Keywords: "confidential information"
"employment law"
"trade secrets"
Advisor: Hadfield, Gillian
Courageous Leadership for Social Justice: Perceptions and Experiences of Veteran School Leaders

Abstract The inscription of courageous social justice practice in educational leadership is deeply embedded in the everyday struggle to advance just education and educational spaces. Despite the robust and controversial history of education, there is little research pertaining to the role of courage. This dearth is perplexing in light of the many socially just-minded school leaders who have persistently enacted numerous overt and discreet forms of social justice activism to shape the quality of education in an unsettling social order. A critical constructivist theoretical approach was used to explore how educational leaders employ courage to promote social justice. Based on qualitative interviews with 12 educational leaders, this research explores the perspectives of individuals who see courage as an indispensable value in their professional careers. Leaders’ approaches to social justice, their understandings of courage, the role of courage in their pursuit of socially just endeavours and the challenges which participants believe enmesh the assignment of leading courageously for social justice are addressed. Educational leaders’ acts of courage for social justice are informed by four interrelated themes: 1) Social Justice as a Particular Social Ideal, 2) The Intentional Nature of Everyday Courage, 3) The Emboldening Influence of Courage in Leadership and 4) Challenges to Employing Courage in School Leadership for Social Justice. Specific challenges are: Realities Surrounding Bureaucratic and Relational Tensions, Issues of Governing Authority, Issues of Trust, Issues of Conversational Incivility and Fear to Act on New Insights. In response to the afore-mentioned aspects, participants appeal to new school leaders to cultivate a courageous mindset. The appeal includes: 1) Resisting the Exceptionality Impulse, 2) Resisting Retreat and the Passion for Self-Distrust, 3) Resisting Uninformed (Gut) Leadership and 4) Being Faithful to the Bigger Picture. Keywords: Educational Leadership, Social Justice, Courage

Keywords: Courage
Educational Leadership
Social Justice
Advisor: Ryan, James
Assisting with API Design through Reusing Design Knowledge

With the rise in software ecosystem initiatives, developing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has become an increasingly common practice. One main concern in developing APIs is that they expose back-end systems and data towards clients. This exposure threatens critical non-functional requirements, such as security of the back-end systems, performance of the provided services, and privacy of the communications with clients. Although dealing with non-functional requirements during software design has been long studied, there is still no framework to specifically assist software developers with addressing these requirements in APIs. In this thesis, we introduce Rational API Designer (RAPID), an assistant that provides consultation about designing non-functional requirements in the architecture of APIs. We have equipped RAPID with a broad range of expert knowledge about API design, systematically collected and extracted from the literature. The API design knowledge has been encoded as a set of 156 catalogues using the Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) language, a multi-valued logic commonly used for describing non-functional and functional requirements of software systems. RAPID uses the API design catalogues in a step-wise refinement and selection procedure to arrive from a given requirement, to a set of design alternatives, to a final suggestion for a given API design specification. Seven well-experienced developers have blindly evaluated accuracy of RAPID’s consultations over seven different cases of API design and on providing design guidelines for thirty design questions. The results of evaluation show that RAPID’s recommendations meet acceptable standards of the majority of the evaluators 73.3% of the time. Moreover, analysis of evaluators’ comments suggests that more than one-third of the unacceptable ratings (34%) given to RAPID’s answers are due to valid but incomplete design guidelines. We thus expect that the accuracy of the consultations will increase as RAPID’s knowledge of API design is extended and refined. Software developers can use RAPID to receive design suggestions generated through reusing the knowledge of experts, or to add their own knowledge of API design to RAPID for future use of their peers.

Keywords: Application Programming Interfaces
Automated Software Design
Knowledge Bases
Non-Functional Requirements
Recommender Systems
Software Architecture
Advisor: Yu, Prof. Eric
Characterization of Novel Substrates of the Tankyrase and RNF146 Destruction Complex and Mechanisms of its Regulation

Poly-ADP-ribose is a post-translational modification that was first described over 50 years ago as a polymer derived from nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide or NAD. Since then, a family of 17 enzymes responsible for generating Poly-ADP-ribosylation or PARylation post translational modification has been identified and characterized. A unique member of this family of enzymes, called Poly-ADP-ribose Polymerases (PARPs), are Tankyrases. There are two mammalian Tankyrases, Tankyrase 1 and 2, whose domain organization include ankyrin repeat clusters which mediate enzyme-substrate interactions and a SAM domain which regulates oligomerization of Tankyrase into large macromolecular complexes. Tankyrases bind to proteins through a ‘RxxxxG’ peptide motif which facilities these proteins to undergo PARylation. A subset of Tankyrase substrates are recognized by an E3 ligase, RNF146, which facilities protein degradation through PARylation dependent ubiquitylation. The studies summarized in this thesis have focused on the identification of new proteins targets involved in the Tankyrase:RNF146 degradation pathway and investigates how Tankyrase PARylation is regulated through FIH dependent hydroxylation. I have identified SH3BP5 and SH3BP5L as new Tankyrase substrates that are targets of RNF146. I have shown that both substrates are guanine exchange factors for the small GTPase Rab11a. I have defined the minimal catalytic core of SH3BP5/L and shown it to be composed of a novel two α-helix GEF domain. My work has demonstrated that SH3BP5 and SH3BP5L are both required for optimal activation of Rab11a in epithelial cells during lumenogenesis and that their activities are repressed by Tankyrase-mediated PARylation. RNF146 regulates Rab11a activity by controlling Tankyrase protein abundance, marking the first time that RNF146 has been described as antagonistic towards Tankyrase function. I have demonstrated that FIH-mediated hydroxylation of Tankyrase affects the ability of substrates to bind to the ankyrin repeat clusters and inhibits autoPARylation and substrate PARylation yet does not affect protein degradation. Since PARylation dependant degradation is unaffected, it suggests that hydroxylation could affect the degradation independent functions of Tankyrase.

Keywords: ADP-Ribosylation
Poly-ADP-Ribose Polymerases
post-translational modification
Tankyrase
Advisor: Rottapel, Robert
The Shock and Awe of the Real: Political Performance and the War on Terror

This dissertation offers a transnational study of theatre and performance that responded to the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond. Looking at work by artists primarily from Arab and Middle Eastern diasporas working in the US, UK, Canada, and Europe, the study examines how modes of performance in live art, documentary theatre, and participatory performance respond to and comment on the power imbalances, racial formations, and political injustices of these conflicts. Many of these performances are characterized by a deliberate blurring of the distinctions between performance and reality. This has meant that playwrights crafted scripts from the real words of soldiers instead of writing plays; performance artists harmed their real bodies, replicating the violence of war; actors performed in public space; and media artists used new technology to connect audiences to real warzones. This embrace of the real contrasts with postmodern suspicion of hyper-reality—which characterized much political performance in the 1990s—and marks a shift in understandings of the relationship between performance and the real. These strategies allowed artists to contend with the way that war today is also a multimedia attack on the way that reality is constructed and perceived. The dissertation traces the historical antecedents of these aesthetics in postmodern criticism of prior generations of political performance and shows how these artists struggled to discover new aesthetic strategies to criticize war, racism, and violence.

Keywords: Afghanistan War
Iraq War
Islamophobia
Performance Studies
Theatre Studies
War on Terror
Advisor: Freeman, Barry
Corporate Governance, Corporate Culture, and Innovation

Mainstream corporate theory posits the standard shareholder-centered model (“SSM”) as the global normative standard for corporate governance and predicts convergence around a universalistic set of core principles and best practices, regardless of industry context; this thesis develops “knowledge primacy” as a production and knowledge-based critique of SSM. Knowledge primacy suggests optimal allocation of control in a firm’s governance structure is contingent upon, and an endogenous response to, the nature of its production process; it reviews empirical evidence and develops theory to support its hypothesis of an optimally inverse relationship between shareholder rights and the complexity of a firm’s production process, arising from: (i) problems of evaluation and control, and non-contractibility that increase with the knowledge formation, trust, and social exchange requirements of complex, knowledge-based production; and (ii) the tradeoff between lower agency costs and higher governance or “principal costs” associated with the allocation of control under conditions of “knowledge inversion” to cognitively unqualified public shareholders, resulting in net losses from the separation of knowledge and control. In certain production contexts, SSM is destructive of shareholder value, firm value, and social welfare. It rests upon a set of fundamentally ideological assumptions and assertions incongruent with the underlying logic, structure, and historical evolution of corporate law, which has accommodated the needs of increasingly complex production by shrinking the bundle of property rights associated with share ownership, thereby preserving optimal integration of knowledge and control. A neo-institutional perspective on organizations suggests that vestigial formal governance structures, such as shareholder meetings and shareholder votes, are institutionalized myths and ceremonies, retained and enacted as societally legitimated rationalized elements to provide cover for the decoupling of formal and informal controls required by complex production; the formal role of shareholders in the legal-rational structure of corporate governance may be largely symbolic, analogous to that of the Crown in the civic institutions of a constitutional monarchy such as Canada, or the “peppercorn” theory of consideration in the law of contract. The disruptive general implications of such a view for SSM are explored herein; knowledge primacy is compared and contrasted with director primacy and team production critiques of SSM.

Keywords: corporate culture
corporate governance
innovation
knowledge economy
neo-institutional theory
shareholder primacy
Advisor: Fadel, Mohammad
The Role of Automaticity in the Cognitive Control of Human Action - A Magnetoencephalographic Study

Prominent theories on human action control propose two parallel brain processes: one fast and automatic, the other slow and deliberative. The slow, conscious processes are thought to be mediated by frontal theta (4-8 Hz) oscillations. One theory suggests that theta acts as an alarm signaling the need for control, and that frontal areas simply maintain action goals, without sensitivity to behavioural differences for achieving those goals. In order to test these hypotheses of frontal theta and executive function, three experiments were conducted. First, to examine the sensitivity of theta to behavioural differences in goal-directed actions, we compared magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings of theta activity in twelve healthy adults during two similar tasks: Go/No-Go and Go/Switch, requiring global and selective inhibition, respectively. We observed no differences between these two types of inhibitory control, but did observe differences during error responses. We hypothesized that error-related theta differences may have reflected covert differences in cognitive requirements between the two types of inhibition. Based on these results, a second study was designed to modulate cognitive requirements using the well-defined measure of cognitive effort, pupil diameter (PD), in twelve healthy adults. We developed a novel task combining implicit stimulus pattern learning with a Go/Switch task. The results demonstrated that subjects quickly learned the pattern without conscious awareness. Furthermore, a distinction between PD and behaviour was observed, highlighting the limitations of behavioural measures alone in capturing cognitive processes during task performance. Finally, in order to quantify theta during modulations in cognitive control, the third experiment was conducted on sixteen healthy adults performing the implicit Go/Switch task during MEG and PD recordings. Theta modulations were strongly correlated (r = 0.91) with PD, and therefore inferred to reflect cognitive effort. Furthermore, theta demonstrated a relationship with signals in the sensorimotor cortex. These results suggest a functional role for frontal theta oscillations in cognitive processes, including sensitivity to cognitive load but not behavioural differences while coordinating responses within the sensorimotor cortex. Furthermore, increased theta during implicitly learned unconscious responding demonstrated that conscious awareness was not required for cognitive effort. These results are discussed with respect to theories of action control.

Keywords: executive function
inhibition
magnetoencephalography
motor control
oscillations
pupil
Advisor: Cheyne, Douglas O
Adaptive Techniques in Practical Quantum Key Distribution

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) can provide information-theoretically secure communications and is a strong candidate for the next generation of cryptography. However, in practice, the performance of QKD is limited by "practical imperfections" in realistic sources, channels, and detectors (such as multi-photon components or imperfect encoding from the sources, losses and misalignment in the channels, or dark counts in detectors). Addressing such practical imperfections is a crucial part of implementing QKD protocols with good performance in reality. There are two highly important future directions for QKD: (1) QKD over free space, which can allow secure communications between mobile platforms such as handheld systems, drones, planes, and even satellites, and (2) fibre-based QKD networks, which can simultaneously provide QKD service to numerous users at arbitrary locations. These directions are both highly promising, but so far they are limited by practical imperfections in the channels and devices, which pose huge challenges and limit their performance. In this thesis, we develop adaptive techniques with innovative protocol and algorithm design, as well as novel techniques such as machine learning, to address some of these key challenges, including (a) atmospheric turbulence in channels for free-space QKD, (b) asymmetric losses in channels for QKD network, and (c) efficient parameter optimization in real time, which is important for both free-space QKD and QKD networks. We believe that this work will pave the way to important implementations of free-space QKD and fibre-based QKD networks in the future.

Keywords: Free-space QKD
Machine Learning
Quantum Communication
Quantum Cryptography
Quantum Key Distribution
Quantum Network
Advisor: Lo, Hoi-Kwong
Role of Tafazzin in Hematopoiesis and Leukemogenesis

Tafazzin (TAZ) is a mitochondrial transacylase that remodels the mitochondrial cardiolipin into its mature form. Through a CRISPR screen, we identified TAZ as necessary for the growth and viability of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cells. Genetic inhibition of TAZ reduced stemness and increased differentiation of AML cells both in vitro and in vivo. In contrast, knockdown of TAZ did not impair normal hematopoiesis under basal conditions. Mechanistically, inhibition of TAZ decreased levels of cardiolipin but also altered global levels of intracellular phospholipids, including phosphatidylserine, which controlled AML stemness and differentiation by modulating toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling (Seneviratne et al., 2019).

Keywords: acute myeloid leukemia
cancer differentiation
cardiolipin
leukemia initiating cell
mitochondria
tafazzin
Advisor: Schimmer, Aaron D
Estimation of Hepatitis C Prognosis to Inform Treatment Prioritization Decisions

Chronic hepatitis C (CHC) is a leading cause of hepatic fibrosis and cirrhosis. Fortunately, treatment has been revolutionized by the recently introduced direct-acting antivirals (DAAs). However, prompt access to DAA therapy remains a challenge owing to exorbitant drug costs, as well as other health system constraints. Given that HCV disease progression is highly variable, delaying curative treatment could have varying levels of health impact for different CHC subpopulations. To address these issues, the three studies presented in this thesis aim to 1) derive updated estimates of the natural history of HCV, 2) explore the variability in disease progression, and 3) use these prognostic estimates to help inform decisions on the prioritization of highly effective but costly DAA therapy. The first study derived updated estimates of HCV-related liver disease progression (i.e., FPRs, or fibrosis progression rates) through a systematic review and meta-analysis of the current literature evaluating hepatic fibrosis in treatment-naive individuals with CHC; and explored sources of heterogeneity. Stratified analysis revealed substantial heterogeneity across study populations. The second study complemented the biopsy-based estimates of HCV disease progression derived in the first study by generating alternative estimates of prognosis (i.e., LSPR or liver stiffness progression rates) based on a newer non-invasive assessment of liver disease through a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature on transient elastography (TE)-based assessment of hepatic fibrosis in treatment-naive individuals with CHC. The study suggested that non-invasive prognosis of HCV is consistent with FPRs in predicting time-to-cirrhosis. However, the current literature was limited and more longitudinal studies of liver stiffness are needed to obtain refined estimates. The third study employed detailed information on HCV prognosis obtained from meta-regression models derived from the first study to help inform treatment prioritization decisions by quantifying the health impact (i.e., life expectancy and quality-adjusted life expectancy) associated with delaying DAA therapy for various CHC subgroups using decision-analytic methods. Taken together these studies present detailed prognostic information for various subpopulations of patients. The data presented in these studies should be a valuable resource for patients, clinicians, and clinical policymakers in the DAA era.

Keywords: Decision analysis
Hepatitis C
Markov model
Meta-analysis
Prognosis
Systematic review
Advisor: Krahn, Murray D.