VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Beyond the Carbon Curse: a Study of the Governance Foundations of Climate Change Politics in Australia, Canada and Norway

Without risking hyperbole, climate change is the greatest political challenge humanity has ever faced. The world must achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century if the most catastrophic damage is to be avoided. The prospect of environmental transformation is most remote for major fossil fuel-exporting countries. Yet amongst the world’s largest exporters of carbon, three countries are more likely to make a transition: Australia, Canada and Norway. Across these three countries, significant climate policy variation exists. Norway developed an early, broad, diverse and durable suite of climate policies compared to Australia and Canada. In this dissertation, I explain the climate policy variation of these three countries and why responses from sympathetic governments were able to make headway and entrench policies in some cases but not others. A novel analytical framework is created to explain these outcomes using within-case process tracing and a comparative case study. Data is obtained largely through interviews with 124 informants and primary document analysis. My central finding is that the governance foundations of climate policy are critical in explaining climate policy. State strength matters. A strong and democratic state has the potential to assuage the political risk facing economic and regime elites from climate policy. It can restructure policy networks to empower civil society so that transformative climate policy is more likely to be announced and implemented. State strength can explain why switching governments in Australia and to some degree in Canada, as opposed to Norway, meant slow shifts and easy reversal. This dissertation contributes in several ways to the scholarship on comparative environmental politics and green state political theory. First, it foregrounds the role of the state in comparative environmental politics by emphasizing the unique and critical role that states play in providing the governance foundations needed to domestically decarbonize. Second, it theorizes linkages that can reconcile the green state literature with the economic growth imperative and the biogeochemical limits of the planet. Lastly, it provides theoretical insights into the transformative and democratic role of the strong state in addressing climate change by stressing inclusivity throughout the policymaking process.

Keywords: climate change
energy policy
fossil fuels
governance
political economy
public policy
Advisor: Bernstein, Steven
Integrating Yoga into Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Path and Practice

The present study investigates the processes of integrating yoga into Western counselling and psychotherapy practices within Canadian contexts. This was accomplished by interviewing 10 mental health professionals who integrate yoga into their counselling and psychotherapy practices. Data was analyzed using the grounded theory methods and three core themes were identified in the processes of integration. The first core theme, therapist’s preparation for integrating yoga into counselling and psychotherapy, describes the ways in which therapists prepare themselves for integrating yoga into their therapy practices. The second core theme, the therapist preparing clients to practice yoga in session, explains the ways in which therapists prepare their clients to practice yoga in counselling and psychotherapy sessions. The third core theme, the practice of integrating yoga into counselling and psychotherapy, describes the specific yoga practices and approaches that are brought into therapy practice. A mid-level theory on the process of integration is presented as the Tri-Process Model of Integrating Yoga into Counselling and Psychotherapy. This study has important implications for addressing the limitations of Western counselling and psychotherapy and provides therapists with an understanding of how to incorporate more holistic and body-oriented approaches in counselling and psychotherapy practice.

Keywords: Counselling
holistic
mind body
Psychotherapy
spirituality
Yoga
Advisor: Moodley, Roy
Regulation of Folate Transport at the Blood-brain Barrier: A Novel Strategy for the Treatment of Childhood Neurological Disorders Associated with Cerebral Folate Deficiency

Folates are crucial for the maintenance of central nervous system homeostasis. Folate transport is mediated by three major pathways, i.e., folate receptor alpha (FRα), proton-coupled folate transporter (PCFT) and reduced folate carrier (RFC), known to be regulated by transcription factors. Brain folate delivery occurs predominantly at the choroid plexus through concerted actions of FRα and PCFT; inactivation of these transport systems causes cerebral folate deficiency resulting in early childhood neurodegeneration. Increasing brain folate permeability or finding alternative routes for brain folate transport could lead to therapeutic benefits. The overall goal of this PhD thesis was to characterize folate transport at the blood-brain barrier (BBB) by examining the role and regulation of folate transporters (i.e., RFC) in brain folate uptake. The objectives of this thesis were to: i) determine RFC functional expression in several in vitro (primary or immortalized cultures of human/rodent brain microvessel endothelial cells) and ex vivo (isolated mouse brain capillaries) BBB models, ii) investigate the role of transcription factors, particularly vitamin D receptor (VDR) and nuclear respiratory factor 1 (NRF-1), in the regulation of RFC in various BBB model systems, and iii) examine in vivo, using Folr1 (FRα) knockout mice, the relative contribution of RFC in overall brain folate uptake. We initially demonstrated that RFC is functionally expressed in in vitro systems representative of human (hCMEC/D3 cells) and rodent (mouse brain capillaries) BBB, and that activation of VDR by its ligand, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 or calcitriol, significantly increased RFC mRNA and protein expression as well as function. We further showed in vivo, using Folr1 knockout mice, that loss of FRα substantially decreased folate delivery to the brain, but transport was restored through calcitriol administration. Additionally, we provided in vitro and in vivo evidence that RFC expression and transport activity is inducible by another transcription factor, NRF-1. These findings demonstrate that augmenting RFC functional expression through interaction with specific transcription factors could constitute a novel strategy for enhancing brain folate delivery. Modulating folate uptake at the BBB may have clinical significance due to the lack of established optimal therapy for neurometabolic disorders caused by loss of FRα or PCFT function.

Keywords: blood-brain barrier
brain folate transport
folate deficiency
reduced folate carrier
transcription factors
Advisor: Bendayan, Reina
Forest Disturbances and Climate Feedbacks in a Mixedwood Boreal Forest

Boreal forests play a critical role in global climate via important biophysical and biogeochemical feedbacks. Large-scale disturbances, particularly ﬁre and harvesting, signiﬁcantly affect these feedbacks by altering the surface and stand attributes, and can impact boreal forests’ role in the global climate system. Surface- and stand-attribute-driven feedbacks change rapidly in early successional stages, making them challenging to model. As the frequency and intensity of disturbances in boreal forests are predicted to increase, a vast landscape with proportionally more young forests is likely to result. Understanding these feedbacks during early stand development is thus more critical than ever before. Scarcity of data on key biophysical (e.g., albedo, soil temperature) and biogeochemical (e.g., soil greenhouse gas ﬂuxes) processes during early stand development has been noted, particularly in mixedwood boreal forests. Using a series of micrometeorological towers in ﬁre and harvesting chronosequences of a mixedwood boreal forest of northwestern Ontario, we studied combined effects of vegetation cover and climate warming on the surface soil (~2 cm depth) temperature in post-disturbance stands, and the patterns and drivers of surface albedo and soil CO2 and CH4 ﬂuxes during early stand development stages in post-ﬁre and post-harvest stands. A proxy-year analysis indicated that surface soil temperature in winter and spring was lower in a warm year compared to a baseline year, and the magnitude of this difference varied with vegetation cover (Chapter 2). Albedo differences between post-ﬁre and post-harvest stands were most pronounced during winter and spring and primarily driven by stand age and species composition (Chapter 3). We also found that CO2 efﬂuxes were lower in post-ﬁre stands compared to post-harvest stands; post-ﬁre stands were never a source, but some young post-harvest stands were a net source of CH4 . The magnitude in ﬂux difference between post-ﬁre and post-harvest stands varied with stand age and was affected by environmental variables such as soil temperature, moisture, pH, and litter depth (Chapter 4). These ﬁndings are critical for understanding dynamics in soil temperature, albedo, and soil carbon ﬂuxes during early successional stages and useful for climate-smart boreal forest management.

Keywords: albedo
boreal forest
forest fire
greenhouse gas flux
harvesting
soil temperature
Advisor: Thomas, Sean C
Loom and Laconic: Hardware Accelerators for Deep Learning Algorithms

DNNs have been finding a growing number of applications including image classification, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Given the growing importance of DNN workloads and their high computation and memory demands, specialized hardware accelerators have emerged. While a few different types of DNNs exist, CNNs are dominating image-based applications. Of particular interest are applications where CNNs are used for inference on input images or video frames. The bulk of the work performed by CNNs during inference is due to large matrix-vector product computations. Accordingly, this thesis examines the data characteristics of these computations, identifying computations that can be omitted without affecting the final output and thus network accuracy. Specifically, this thesis characterizes several ineffectual computation avoidance policies that target the value sparsity, bit level sparsity, and variant precision requirements of CNNs. This thesis measures potential performance improvement of CNNs with these policies, and proposes two accelerators, Loom and Laconic, that target the policies with the largest potential improvement. Loom exploits profile-derived per-layer precisions for both activations and weights to improve the performance and energy efficiency of neural networks. Further, at runtime Loom trims activation and weight precisions at a much smaller than a layer granularity to fit their actual value content. It processes both activations and weights bit-serially and compensates for the increased per operation latency by exploiting the abundant parallelism in the convolution operation. On average, across several image classification CNNs and for a configuration that can perform the equivalent of 128 8b×8b multiply-accumulate operations per cycle, Loom outperforms a bit-parallel accelerator [19] by 3.6× without any loss in accuracy while being 2.7× more energy efficient. Laconic targets bit-sparsity in both activations and weights. It decomposes multiplications down to the bit level, and eliminates the multiplications corresponding to the zero bits. This method produces numerically identical results and does not affect overall accuracy. Laconic works with out-of-the-box dense networks and does not require intervention from the Machine Learning expert; however, it rewards optimizations such as pruning and quantization. Laconic benefits from approximation techniques that reduce the constituent powers of two used to represent a number.

Keywords: Acceleration
Deep Learning
Hardware
Machine Learning
Advisor: Moshovos, Andreas
Faith and Reason: Biopolitical Pastoralism and the Making of the Modern Paleolithic Subject

Dietary advice is produced and circulated through a variety of sites that include, but are not limited to, nutritional guidelines produced by governmental organizations, such as Canada’s Food Guide, or books written by proponents of popular diets, such as the Atkins diet. Through these various forms of dietary advice, individuals engage not only with instructions on what (and what not) to eat but also with ideas about health and the body. In the context of contemporary health politics, these instructions largely render individuals responsible for maintaining or enhancing their health. My research examines dietary advice as a biopedagogical mechanism through which individual and population health is governed. I use Foucauldian informed critical discourse analysis to examine a website promoting the Paleo Diet® (www.thepaleodiet.com); a site produced by a self-proclaimed ‘leading expert’ of the modern Paleo movement, Dr. Loren Cordain. My findings suggest that there are three prevailing discursive constructions mediating the Paleo Diet® website: i) how the website is constructed as an authoritative text and how Dr. Cordain is positioned as the leading expert in service of legitimizing this text; ii) how the Paleo diet is constructed as the “ideal” way of eating and living; and, iii) how the body is constructed as a site of personal redemption and transformation. Through an analysis of these findings, I argue that as a biopedagogical site, the website relies on practices of truth telling, biopastoral relations, and virtual confession to instruct an “evolutionary” and “genetic” regime of truth about the individual and species body. Further, the body is rendered a pedagogical site that dieters can form a disciplinary alliance in governing health and constituting themselves as modern-Paleolithic biocitizens.

Keywords: Biocitizenship
Biopedagogy
Discourse Analysis
Media
Paleo Diet
Pastoral Power
Advisor: Robertson, Ann
Preclinical Evaluation of a Novel Anti-leukemic Mechanism

Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous disease that is associated with a remarkably diverse group of genetic mutations that contribute to its biological complexity directly, or indirectly by triggering downstream cellular reactions. Given these complexities, identification of a single therapeutic strategy that can be effective against a wide range of AML subgroups remains challenging and very few effective novel antileukemic agents have been developed in the past 30 years. Consequently, the overall outcome of patients with AML remains poor. Despite aggressive chemotherapies, AML patients may not achieve remission even after two courses of induction (primary non-responders). Here, our retrospective data indicate that in primary non-responders with AML, remissions following a third induction course are uncommon and short-lived if not consolidated by stem cell transplant (SCT) . Thus, our data indicates that a 3rd induction should only be offered to primary non-responders with AML if an SCT strategy is in place. Collectively, this background highlights an urgent need for development of novel antileukemic strategies. ClpP is a mitochondrial protease that is overexpressed in leukemic cells from approximately half of patients with AML. It degrades damaged or misfolded proteins inside mitochondria and has a central role in maintaining the integrity of mitochondrial metabolism by functioning as a protein quality control mediator. Herein, through genetic and chemical investigations, we demonstrate that ClpP activation results in prominent anti-leukemia and anti-lymphoma effects. We identified a new class of antineoplastic compounds -imipridones- as potent ClpP activators. ClpP activation induces cell death in leukemia and lymphoma cells and stem cells and exerts antitumor effects in vivo whereas normal hematopoietic cells display resistance. In primary AML samples, sensitivity to ClpP activators correlates with pre-treatment ClpP expression level. Mechanistically, binding of imipridones to ClpP enhances proteolysis by enlarging the axial pores of the enzyme. ClpP activation impairs oxidative phosphorylation through reductions in respiratory chain complex subunits and abrogates mitochondrial morphology and function. The currently most potent ClpP activators, imipridones, are being evaluated in clinical trials. Our approach provides groundwork for further development of ClpP activators and represents a first-in-class therapeutic strategy for a subset of hematologic malignancies.

Keywords: AML
ClpP
imipridone
mitochondria
primary non-responders
Advisor: Schimmer, Aaron D
Experimental Study of Physical and Mechanical Properties of a Cemented Mine Tailings

The mechanical properties and behavior of mine backfill need to be better understood in order to increase the reliability of engineered backfill designs in deep and high stress mining conditions. The thesis makes a detailed examination of Cemented Paste Backfill (CPB) from the Williams mine with a range of cement contents, curing times, and confining stresses relevant to underground mining. The first major contribution is understanding how cement hydration alters the density of the backfill’s solid components. This understanding facilitates precise and accurate determination of cured backfill’s bulk properties, which is critical to accurate interpretations in the context of the next two contributions. The second major contribution is evaluating CPB response to isotropic compression at hydrostatic pressures up to 6.5 MPa, which is particularly relevant when considering how the backfill provides regional ground support during mine-wide ground closure with ongoing ore extraction. Equations of state are developed to quantify the initial elastic response, the onset of bond crushing, and the transition to a compacted state under large confining stress. The final major contribution is understanding CPB shear strength under drained triaxial loading, which is relevant to geomechanical backfill design for mining under, beside or through previously placed backfill. Backfill response is characterized by initially contractive behavior up to a Characteristic State of volumetric strain reversal, leading to peak dilation rate at the Failure State. Equations of state are developed to quantify this behavior. The combined state equations for isotropic and triaxial loading can form the basis for future constitutive models of backfill behavior. Such constitutive models, when incorporated into numerical analysis codes, will provide more confident back-analyses of observed backfill performance, and more realistic assessments of backfill behavior under different proposed mining scenarios. Each of these contributions is novel to CPB research, but also complements the broader body of literature on naturally and artificially cemented soils. Equally important, the thesis provides a framework to examine the mechanical properties and behavior of backfills from other mining operations.

Keywords: Cemented Paste Backfill
Isotropic Consolidation
Tailings
Triaxial Test
Advisor: Grabinsky, Murray
Morphemes without Morphs: A Theory of Syntactic Arrangements and Phonological Processes

The thesis presents the theory of Morphemes without Morphs (MWM). Words are argued to be made up of abstract items (morphemes), arranged into hierarchical structures; however, these items do not stand in a straightforward exponence relationship with phonological pieces. Abstract morphemes are visible in the phonology, and condition the application of base-altering morphological realization rules, assumed to be a subset of the ordinary rules of the phonology. Application of morphological realization rules requires the conditioning morpheme to be suitably local to the base; deletion of inner morphemes will cause more peripheral morphemes to become suitably local in the course of a derivation. Rules are extrinsically ordered, but the attestable orderings are highly constrained, due to the above considerations. A subset of rules is designated as cyclic, with such rules applying before the noncyclic ones; this conception of cyclicity allows the theory to account for classic Mirror Principle effects, which would otherwise pose a problem. The theory is applied to a range of morphological phenomena: mobile affixation, Mirror Principle violations, exceptional triggering in morphophonology, and others. Implications for the relationship between morphology and phonology are discussed; since MWM treats morphological realization rules as a kind of phonological rule, and since these rules are extrinsically ordered, a wider range of interactions between morphology and phonology is predicted than is usually assumed; it is argued that this prediction is borne out. The theory offers a straightforward solution to the problem of nonconcatenative morphology, while maintaining the hypothesis that the terminal nodes of syntactic structures are morphemes, not words. In contrast to current approaches that adopt the Concatenativist Hypothesis, this thesis takes the A-Morphous view that the phonological material of a word (segments, autosegments, etc.) cannot be divided into units with morphological affiliation—but crucially departs from this view in recognizing the existence of abstract morphological structure. The theory thus brings together schools of thought usually considered to be opposed: in its syntactic assumptions, MWM belongs to the “item-and-arrangement” camp of morphological theory; but in its phonological assumptions, the theory has decidedly “item-and-process” inclinations.

Keywords: cyclicity
exponence
Mirror Principle
morphemes
morphophonology
nonconcatenative morphology
Advisor: Rice, Keren
The Role of the Intestinal Immune System in Diet-induced Obesity and Insulin Resistance

Chronic low-grade inflammation of metabolic tissues is thought to be a major driver of obesity related insulin resistance and metabolic disease. While changes to the immune profile in adipose tissue during obesity has been extensively studied, alterations to the intestinal immune system and the contribution of these cells to metabolic disease remain largely unknown. This thesis aims to elucidate the immunological changes within the intestine during obesity-related insulin resistance with focus on the adaptive component of the intestinal immune system. Indeed, our main findings indicated a shift towards a pro-inflammatory environment within the intestine during high fat diet feeding in mice mainly characterized by increased IFNγ producing Th1 and CD8+ T cells, and reductions in regulatory T cells and IgA+ B and plasma cells. Mechanistic interactions between diet, gut microbiota, intestinal barrier and the intestinal immune system were also explored to delineate the implication of the intestinal network on the overall manifestation of metabolic disease. Existing therapies for metabolic disease such as metformin and bariatric surgery protocols were shown to influence the immunological environment within the intestine, while gut-specific anti-inflammatory therapies, namely 5-aminosalicylic acid, demonstrated promise in ameliorating obesity-related insulin resistance in preclinical models.

Keywords: Diabetes
Gut Immune System
Immunometabolism
Insulin Resistance
Obesity
Advisor: Winer, Daniel A