VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The decade of uncertainty: educational change in Poland

Recent events in Eastern and Central Europe have dramatically changed the educational landscape in Poland. The fall of communism was among the most decisive events of the late 20th century. The collapse of communist ideology and economy enabled deep societal change in Central Europe, which in turn triggered massive restructuring of education. The transition decade became an unprecedented laboratory for tracing educational change in a revolutionary era of systemic shift from communism to liberal democracy. In this thesis, I describe the decade of societal and educational change in the 1990s Poland. Methodologically, this work is a national case study of the education system. I analyze the domains of primary and secondary education, which underwent the deepest transformation. In this work, I am interested in intertwined global, regional, and local forces that influence the Polish education system. In times of societal upheaval, the connections between education, society, and the world prove to be particularly strong. I attempt to show how the sudden global and regional exposure of a formerly isolated country facilitated educational change and internationalized education. I cite many international examples to show convergence and globalization of Polish education. Throughout my work, I ask whether changes in Polish education constituted a revolution. The answer is positive. It was a revolution with the power to transform the entire society. It was a revolution in teaching. Grand changes in education occurred in a compressed time span. A true revolution happened not in human minds, but intechnical and organizational tools Polish citizens used to build liberal democracy. Grandiose alterations in human minds are still happening, but slowly and less spectacularly. Regardless of its attitudinal or organizational form, change drove the decade of uncertainty. In this thesis, I suggest that Poland's joining the world was a 'core' change that, as in a domino theory, triggered a societal metamorphosis. As confirmation, I present a detailed case study of profound change in citizenship education. To illustrate internationalization of Polish education, I portray global citizenship education as an expression of, and a direct response to, the new global order.

Keywords: Education and state, Poland
Educational sociology, Poland
Educational innovations, Poland
Instructional systems, Poland
Education and globalization, Poland
"We can't all be Oprah": how Black women negotiate entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship has come to occupy a significant position in how nations define themselves and their citizens. Although, the ideal entrepreneur, like Oprah Winfrey, is far removed from today's reality, individuals are increasingly called upon to be entrepreneurial. This study of entrepreneurship goes behind the allure of Oprah, a complex and gendered version of the self-made man, and examines how processes of race, class and gender simultaneously operate to structure this labour market niche. I argue that Black women's histories of slavery, indentured labour and migration have profoundly shaped their experiences as entrepreneurs. Moving away from the Black ethnic enclave, a restrictive spatial conceptualization of Black business activity in Canada, this study re-conceptualizes Black women's participation in entrepreneurship as being inextricably linked to waged work. Despite formidable obstacles, entrepreneurship is alluring to Black women because it offers them freedom and independence from continued race, class and gender victimization. Through the examination of empirical evidence, such as, government documents, a survey, websites, and data derived from fifty-three interviews with women entrepreneurs of Afro-Caribbean descent in various industries in Ontario, this research more specifically examines how entrepreneurship (as a status of work and an ideology) is used to negotiate the labour market. Entrepreneurship allows Black women to have greater mobility and economic independence. They use the space of entrepreneurship to deploy a counter-discourse of race, which is both liberating and exclusionary. As an intensely political space, entrepreneurship provides the opportunity for the making of community as opposed to the individual making of self. As entrepreneurs, Black women also have the ability to fashion themselves into respectable professional workers, an identity that has long been denied to them. Despite it being a partial refuge, entrepreneurship is nonetheless a tenuous space. Black women must negotiate their visibility and independent status as well as the various meanings that are attached to the categories of entrepreneur and self-employed. Although entrepreneurship offers a way for Black women to survive, thrive and challenge oppressive systems, it remains a racialized, contested and contradictory space where power is negotiated.
Cardiovascular and sympathoadrenal effects of "new pressor protein"role of angiotensin converting enzyme, neutral endopeptidase and substance P

NPP (related to βFXIIa) increases adrenal medullary catecholamine (AMC) release, blood pressure (BP) & heart rate (HR) in bioassay rats. These effects are potentiated by ACE inhibition with Captopril & ganglion blockade (GB), suggesting a non-cholinergic, probably peptidergic mechanism for AMC release. Major findings of this thesis are: (1) NPP's actions and potentiating effects of GB are Captopril dose-dependent. With high Captopril, NPP's maximal effects are observed without GB, suggesting that GB is not essential for NPP to act, but useful for studying its mechanism of action. (2) Inhibition of neutral endopeptidase potentiates NPP's BP effects. HR is potentiated less and catecholamine levels are unaffected, suggesting that NPP's effects may also result from direct actions of preserved peptides on vasculature. (3) Substance P is a possible mediator of NPP's actions. A link is proposed between NPP (βFXIIa) & sympatho-adrenal stimulation mediated by peptides sensitive to metallopeptidases—a new cardiovascular axis?
The role of cyanobacteria in pulp and paper waste-treatment systems

This study investigated the role of cyanobacteria in pulp and paper secondary waste-treatment systems, focusing on community and physiological characteristics as well as impacts to waste-treatment efficiency. I found cyanobacteria to be important members of the microbial community in geographically dispersed aerated stabilization basin (ASB) and activated sludge (AS) systems. Similar cyanobacterial taxa tended to dominate these communities and in some cases, biomass was equal to or greater than bacterial biomass. Although pulp and paper waste-treatment systems were severely light-limited, shade-adapted cyanobacterial communities were found to fix appreciable amounts of inorganic carbon via photosynthesis. All cyanobacterial species isolated from pulp and paper waste-treatment systems could take up glucose in the light and dark, and a number of representative taxa could grow mixotrophically. None of the cyanobacterial isolates were capable of mineralizing appreciable amounts of pulp and paper contaminants. Further studies using whole effluent from three mills showed that the softwood-based wastewaters had decreased removal of toxicity with increased cyanobacterial biomass. In contrast, the hardwood-based wastewater had increased removal of toxicity when cyanobacterial biomass increased. Cyanobacteria and their extracellular organic compounds (EOC) were shown to inhibit or stimulate bacterial degradation of organic contaminants (phenol and dichloroacetate), depending on the cyanobacterial and bacterial species. These variable impacts of cyanobacteria on toxicity removal and biodegradation efficiency suggest a complex, but important role during the biological treatment of pulp and paper wastewater.
Retinal arteriolar and middle cerebral artery responses to combined hypercarbic - hyperoxic stimuli

Purpose. To compare retinal and cerebral VR to identical series of hypercarbic and combined hypercarbic-hyperoxic stimuli. Methods. Retinal arteriole (RA) diameter and blood velocity were measured in 12 young healthy volunteers using laser Doppler velocimetry and simultaneous vessel densitometry; middle cerebral artery (MCA) blood velocity was measured using transcranial Doppler ultrasound. Results. In the retinal circulation, oxygen reverses carbon dioxide--induced vasodilation in a concentration dependent manner. While hypercarbia induced greater vasodilation in MCA than RA, MCA blood velocity was unaffected by increases in PETO 2. Conclusions. A combined hypercarbic-hyperoxic gas mixture, which is moderately hyperoxic, is suggested to increase retinal oxygenation without inducing vasoconstriction. Retinal VR to combined hypercarbic-hyperoxiic stimuli differs substantially from that of the cerebral circulation. Careful interpretation of diagnostic comparisons between the cerebral and retinal blood flow is needed. Retinal vascular status assessment is suggested prior to therapeutic breathing gas manipulations.
Drama in teacher education: student teachers, teachers, and students constructing collaborative approaches to classroom management using Forum Theatre

My work as an associate teacher has made me aware of student teachers' concerns about classroom management. A teacher may have confidence in a well-developed lesson plan, but be anxious about delivering that plan successfully in front of students. This study investigated the effectiveness of a type of theatre, called Forum Theatre, as a potential method of preparing student teachers, in all disciplines, for the classroom experience. Forum Theatre's interactive, experiential, and collective approach brings together student teachers, experienced teachers, and high school students to investigate classroom management issues in a safe, yet structured atmosphere. A Forum session begins with a short performance where the problem situation is presented. Through discussion and re-enactment of the situation, student teachers can learn about and apply classroom management techniques by actively improvising potential solutions to the problem presented thereby rehearsing for the lived reality of the classroom.

Keywords: Teachers, Training of
Drama in education
Student teachers, Attitudes
Classroom environment
Classroom management
Performance
An exploration of the relationship between mindfulness and forgiveness

It was hypothesized that mindfulness training, in addition to decreasing stress, would increase levels of forgiveness for a recent hurt, levels of self-forgiveness, and empathy. These hypotheses were tested by comparing a group of individuals who completed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programs with a group of individuals on an MBSR waitlist and a group of students. All participants in the study were volunteers previously unfamiliar with mindfulness meditation. All participants completed the NEO PI R at outset. Measures of other-forgiveness (Enright Forgiveness Inventory, Enright, 1994), self-forgiveness (Forgiveness of Self, Mauger, 1992), state and trait anxiety (STAI, Spielberger et al., 1970), mindfulness (MAAS, Ryan and Brown, 2003), and perspective taking and empathic concern (IRI, Davis, 1983) were completed pre and post program for the MBSR group participants and at equivalent time intervals for control group participants. The results were in the expected direction. Significant mean differences were observed on other-forgiveness, self-forgiveness, state and trait anxiety, and mindfulness, between the MBSR group and control groups, controlling for scores at outset and appropriate covariates. However, no differences among groups were observed on empathy. Correlations between total practice time for the MBSR group and changes on dependent variables were not significant. The effect size for self-forgiveness (partial eta squared = .36) was moderate and the effect size for other-forgiveness was small (partial eta squared = .117). This suggests that individuals seeking therapy for issues of forgiveness might benefit from mindfulness training and therefore that further research is warranted into the counselling uses of MBSR and mindfulness training. Limitations of the study were discussed.
Logical foundations of active databases

Classical database management systems (DBMSs) have been enhanced over the past fifteen years with the addition of rule-based programming to obtain active DBMSs. Active behavior is mainly characterized by a rule language and an execution model. Execution models go hand in hand with advanced transaction models (ATMs) which relax the so-called ACID (Atomicity-Consistency-Isolation-Durability) properties. Both rule languages and execution models have been proposed in an ad hoc way to deal with applications which are not easily implementable using the classical DBMSs. Therefore an open problem in this area is to formally account for active behavior using a uniform formalism. This thesis gives logical foundations to active databases using the situation calculus, a logic for reasoning about actions. Our approach appeals to theories in which one may refer to all past database states. We give a logical semantics to an ATM by specifying this as a theory of the situation calculus called basic relational theory, which is a set of sentences suitable for referring to past database states in the context of database transactions. We express the properties of the ATM as formulas of the same calculus. Such properties are logically entailed by the basic relational theory that captures the ATM. We illustrate our framework by formalizing various transaction models. Next, we introduce active relational theories , which extend basic relational theories by capturing typical aspects of active behavior found in existing active DBMSs. We give a formal semantics to various features of active behavior by using active relational theories. We capture the most popular active rules, the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules, as programs written in a situation calculus based logic programming language that accounts for parallelism and we also write transaction programs in the same language. We provide an abstract ECA rule interpreter for executing transaction programs that have active relational theories as background axioms. We also classify various execution semantics for ECA rules. Finally, we give a method for implementing active relational theories in Prolog.
A Gauss-Bonnet theorem, Chern classes and an adjunction formula for reductive groups

My thesis is about geometry of reductive groups. The purpose is to extend some well-known geometric results that hold for the complex torus parl0;C* parr0;n to the case of an arbitrary complex reductive group. The thesis consists of two parts. The first part contains an analog of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem for constructible sheaves equivariant under the adjoint action. This theorem relates the Euler characteristic of a sheaf to the Gaussian degrees of the components of its characteristic cycle. As a corollary I get that a perverse sheaf equivariant under the adjoint action has nonnegative Euler characteristic. The common feature of the results and constructions of my thesis is that I use a group action to extend to noncompact setting such classical results as the Gauss-Bonnet theorem and the adjunction formula. In the second part, I modify one of the classical definitions of the Chern classes to construct noncompact analogs of the Chern classes for equivariant vector bundles over reductive groups. These Chern classes have the same properties as the usual Chern classes. Using the Chern classes of the tangent bundle, I obtain an adjunction formula for the Euler characteristic of hypersurfaces in arbitrary reductive groups.
The critical pedagogy of youth experiences with drama and videomaking

This research contributes to the fields of critical pedagogy, drama, and media education by showing what and how hybrid-culture youth can learn from collective creation experiences in drama and videomaking. The narrative mode allows youth to learn and develop multiple intelligences, literacies, and their understanding of the drama's topic and self and other in experiential, and aesthetic ways. I examine the capacity for a critical pedagogical approach in drama and media education to deepen youth's critical thinking and understanding of self and other. Educator-learner relationships in drama education, power relations, role-playing, culture, identity, difference, freedom, and conflict, are addressed in relationship to videomaking and drama endeavours. Finally, I discuss implications for conducting research with youth as well as those for curriculum, teaching, and learning.

Keywords: Critical pedagogy
Education, Aims and objectives
Drama in education
Video recordings, Study and teaching
Teacher-student relationships
Characterization of SAD-1 kinase activity and genetic pathway in the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans

Neurons are highly polarized cells that communicate through synapses. Identified in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), the serine/threonine kinase SAD-1 was the first molecule known to regulate both neuronal polarity and synaptic structure in vivo. For my Master's thesis, I studied the kinase activity of SAD-1 and its candidate regulators in C. elegans nervous system. Selective temporal inactivation of the SAD-1 kinase with pharmacogenetics demonstrates that its kinase activity is essential for the proper formation of neuronal polarity and synaptic marker morphology but largely dispensable for their maintenance. Genetic analyses indicate that candidate regulators of the SAD-1 kinase, PAR-1, PAR-4, and STRD-1, all regulate neuronal polarity and synaptic marker morphology. However, while strd-1 appears to function exclusively in the sad-1 pathway, par-1 and par-4 can function independently of sad-1. These data suggest that par-1, par-4, sad-1, and strd-1 regulate neuronal polarity and synaptic marker morphology in multiple genetic pathways.
A study on the foaming behavior of thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) blends

More than ever before, the automotive industry is using thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) blends to manufacture exterior plastic applications such as bumper fascias and cladding. Recent efforts to improve TPO foaming technologies have been motivated, in part, by the need to lower production costs, develop lighter-weight materials, and promote better fuel economy. The goal of this research is to improve on the fundamental understanding of the cell nucleation and growth patterns that characterize TPO blend systems.

Keywords: Chemical engineering
Graph clustering with restricted neighbourhood search

The object of this thesis is to outline the graph clustering problem and its applications, and to present the RNSC algorithm and its results in detail along with promising avenues of future research. Given a graph G = (V, E), a clustering of G is a partitioning of V that induces a set of subgraphs C1, C2 ..., Ck. These subgraphs are known as clusters. A good clustering induces clusters that are both dense and sparsely inter-connected, and represents a natural grouping of the vertices into highly interrelated sets. By assigning cost functions to the set of clusterings of a graph, we can apply local search techniques to the clustering problem in order to find a solution of low cost. We employ a specialized local search method to create the RNSC (Restricted Neighbourhood Search Clustering) algorithm, a new randomized algorithm that generates significantly lower-cost clusterings than previous approaches.
Building stewardship capacity service beyond self

The purpose of this investigation is to reveal how participants understand stewardship. Secondly it reveals their personal relationship with stewardship, as they understand it. The third topic of inquiry focuses on the variables or influences in the participants' lives that mediate their actions in respect to stewardship—as they understand it. The fourth area of concern includes the variables or influences that would need to change before the participants apply their understanding of stewardship in their lives. Participants responded to questions like, why are some people aware of and use their gifts while others do not seem to know what they are capable of doing? What blocks awareness? What needs to be done to encourage more stewards among us? What would you say or do? The demographics of the participants include disparate geographic locations, diversity in age, a gender-balanced perspective and diverse socio-economic positions. The problem investigated is the promotion of unbridled consumerism and competitiveness and how these have contributed to the demise of stewardship. Consequently many individuals and groups continue to act unconsciously or without concern for how their actions or inactions impact others. Included in the investigation is an examination of moral philosophy and religious teachings that describe the interconnectedness of human life and the necessity of consciousness, action, and spirit in co-creating healthy communities. The results of the study describe influences that contribute to the development of stewardship disposition. The responses of participants and the review of the literature reveal a combination of mediating factors that play a role: spiritual direction, work experience, status at work or in the community, family values, or significant others. The study concludes by saying that stewardship applies to people in all sectors. Managing individual gifts is essential as each action and inaction impacts the ‘whole inhabited world’ through interdependence. The study recommends ways that facilitation and education can be used effectively to raise consciousness levels, address responsibility, increase accountability, create positive results, activate the sense of wholeness, engender rippling social benefits and increase wellness in generations to come.

Keywords: Christian stewardship
Self (Philosophy)
Self-knowledge, Theory of
Ethics