VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The electrophysiological characterization of plant calcium channels and their role in calcium signaling

The identification and characterization of Ca$\sp{2+}$ channels in the vacuolar and the plasma membrane of higher plants was accomplished through the use of conventional patch clamp techniques. Intact vacuoles from sugar beet cells were isolated and used to identify Ca$\sp{2+}$ currents at the whole vacuole level and outside-out patches of membrane were used for single channel analysis. Permeability and selectivity studies strongly suggested that one of the channels identified in the vacuolar membrane could efficiently and selectively release Ca$\sp{2+}$ from the vacuole resulting in increased levels of cytosolic Ca$\sp{2+}.$ A second channel co-residing with the vacuolar-release channel is the SV (slow-vacuolar type) channel. Although this channel is active at non-physiological potentials, the Ca$\sp{2+}$ permeability of the SV channel suggests that it could be involved in the sequestration of Ca$\sp{2+}$ following an increase in cytosolic Ca$\sp{2+}$ levels. The proposed role of the SV channel in Ca$\sp{2+}$-induced Ca$\sp{2+}$-release is also discussed. Stimulus-induced fluctuations in cytosolic Ca$\sp{2+}$ are mediated by Ca$\sp{2+}$ channels located in both the vacuolar and plasma membrane. The role of a plasma membrane Ca$\sp{2+}$ channel in stimulus-response coupling and the mechanisms of channel regulation were investigated by exposing protoplasts isolated from tomato cell near-isogenic for the resistance gene Cf5 to elicitor preparations containing the avr5 gene from race 4 (IF$\sb4)$ of the fungus Cladosporium fulvum. The stimulation of Ca$\sp{2+}$ channels by IF$\sb4,$ was up-regulated by phosphorylation mediated by the action of a G protein. The concerted action of Ca$\sp{2+}$ channels in the vacuolar and plasma membrane in maintaining Ca$\sp{2-}$ homeostasis and the mechanisms by which plant cells generate and perceive a stimulus-specific Ca$\sp{2+}$ signal is discussed.
Arte e scrittura nella Firenze del Quattrocento, i commentarii di Lorenzo Ghiberti

Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great sculptor of the doors of the Baptistery in Florence dedicated himself in his late years to the compilation of a treatise on art, into which he poured all his knowledge and experience in the field. That work, known by the apocryphal title of Commentarii, and written between 1447-48 and 1455, the year of Ghiberti's death, is the last project of a man who lived as the chief protagonist in the artistic scene of early fifteenth-century Florence. Ghiberti's references vary from the classical sources on the art of antiquity, such as Pliny and Vitruvius, to the mediaeval ones on optics (Alhazen, in particular), to his own notes and sketches as he gathered them in his productive workshop. The dissertation provides a critical and philological reassessment of Ghiberti's Commentarii by means of a new transcription of the fifteenth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence (Fondo Principale II, I, 333, olim Magliabechiano XVII, 33), the only extant manuscript of Ghiberti's text. The philological work here carried out is the basis for a redefinition of the artistic and literary context in which Ghiberti's observations were produced and of the impact that some of the concepts which can be found in the text, such as the memoria-ingenium dichotomy, had on the artistic literature of the century from Leon Battista Alberti to Leonardo and beyond. The new structure of the Commentarii, as it appears after the present philological enquiry, proves to be tighter and possibly more influential on later art historians than has previously been recognized. The philological reassessment of Ghiberti's text suggests a reconsideration of the overall importance of the Commentarii in the development of the modern history of art, particularly vis-a-vis Vasari's Vite. Textual criticism, it is argued, is a necessary basis for the reassessment of art and literature in fifteenth-century Florence and of the role played by Ghiberti's Commentarii in such a cultural context.
Voices of victims, the experience of preparing a victim impact statement for use in court, as described by adolescent sexual abuse survivors

I set out to explore, with adolescent female victims of sexual abuse, their experiences of preparing a victim impact statement for inclusion in court at the time of their offenders' sentencing. My chosen methodology in the area of qualitative research was a narrative approach. I conducted in-depth interviews following 12 guiding open-ended questions with four young women who were interested in sharing these experiences with me. From a detailed transcript of each of these interviews, I constructed my interpretation of each participant's story or experience using their words. I met with each young woman again for clarity and feedback regarding what I had written. Their rich stories and my analysis of this data are represented here. Successive reading and careful examination of these stories yielded valuable insight into the thoughts and feelings of the narrators. Several themes emerged during this process. I have organized these themes under four headings: Preparing a Victim Impact Statement; Going Through the Court Process; Delivering a Victim Impact Statement; and Outcomes of the Experience. Understanding the various themes helps the reader to come closer to and make meaning of the experiences of these four young women. Without exception, the participants wished for their experiences to be shared in order to support and inform other survivors through the difficult court process. The completion and publication of this thesis is a significant step toward achieving this goal. Another outcome of this research is the production of a booklet entitled We're Not Victims: We're Survivors that compiles excerpts from each participant's story including insight and suggestions for others. The tabbed pamphlet format is intended to be very user-friendly and is designed as a tool that helping professionals can easily distribute.
Memory-system design considerations for dynamically-scheduled microprocessors

Dynamically-scheduled processors challenge hardware and software architects to develop designs that balance hardware complexity and compiler technology against performance targets. This dissertation presents a first thorough look at some of the issues introduced by this hardware complexity. The focus of the investigation of these issues is the register file and the other components of the data memory system. These components are: the lockup-free data cache, the stream buffers, and the interface to the lower levels of the memory system. The investigation is based on software models. These models incorporate the features of a dynamically-scheduled processor that affect the design of the data-memory components. The models represent a balance between accuracy and generality, and are used to identify performance trends and design relationships rather than to evaluate the performance of specific designs. The models are used to identify and explore the relationships between the following system aspects: the dispatch queue, the physical registers, the type of exceptions, the issue width of the processor and the number of functional units, the lockup-free data cache, the stream buffers, and the interface to the lower levels of the memory system. Implementation-related relationships are exposed through an analysis of how various design decisions impact the cycle time of a register file. Following from this analysis, an investigation of a novel architecture is conducted. The novelty of this architecture is the partitioning of key components to reduce the cycle time of the processor. A comprehensive examination is given of the software and hardware complexities the partitioning introduces. Static instruction scheduling algorithms are developed that address these complexities. Evaluation of these algorithms indicates that for the configurations considered, the partitioned architecture is competitive, and warrants further investigation. Finally, further insights into the novel architecture and dynamically-scheduled processors in general are developed through an analysis of the non-determinism introduced by dynamic scheduling, and the challenges this factor presents to computer architects who must design systems that can be used to full advantage by software. It is shown that static instruction scheduling for dynamically-scheduled processors is insolvable with known techniques.
Feminizing party organizations, the cases of the Parti socialiste français, the Parti québécois and the Ontario New Democratic Party

This thesis investigates the initiatives launched during the 1970s and early 1980s in three social democratic or left-of-centre parties, the Parti socialiste francais (PS), Parti quebecois (PQ) and Ontario New Democratic Party (ONDP), in order to increase women's share of local, intermediate and top party positions. While the PS has used positive discrimination (in the form of a quota), the PQ and ONDP have used affirmative action (in the form of support services for women aspiring to hold party office and numerical targets respectively). If one were to rank each party's approach to feminization from the most formal and compulsory to the least formal and voluntary, the PS would be first, the ONDP second and the PQ third. More specifically, the thesis examines the circumstances surrounding the official adoption of these pro-feminization measures and, above all, the impact they have had on women's numerical representation. Overall, longitudinal statistics reveal that feminization in terms of numbers has been low in the PS, moderate in the PQ and high in the ONDP. In other words, the ONDP numerical targets have been the most effective in boosting women's involvement in party life, and the PS quota has been the least effective. Although more effective than the PS quota, the PQ support services have not had as tangible an impact as the ONDP requirements. To explain why these three initiatives have produced different results, factors identified in previous studies of women's representation in traditional political institutions are examined. Such studies tend to consider factors both external and internal to political parties. External factors include: the discourse and activities of the second-wave women's movement with regards to the need for greater female political involvement and whether party support is stagnating/declining or expanding. The role that women's committees or secretariats play as female auxiliaries or feminist lobbies; how party men and women perceive the need for special measures to enhance women's share of positions; and the extent to which internal party structures (and, in particular, the selection process of officials) are centralized (or elite-controlled) or decentralized (or rank-and-file controlled) can be identified as internal factors. While the three cases highlight the crucial role of the women's movement in pressuring party organizations to take pro-feminization initiatives and in ensuring that these are carried out, they also suggest that internal factors account more directly than external factors for the low, moderate and high feminization of each party.
The design and evaluation of transparent user interfaces, from theory to practice

The central research issue addressed by this dissertation is how we can design systems where information on user interface tools is overlaid on the work product being developed with these tools. The interface tools typically appear in the display foreground while the data or work space being manipulated typically appear in the perceptual background. This represents a trade-off in focused foreground attention versus focused background attention. By better supporting human attention we hope to improve the fluency of work, where fluency is reflected in a more seamless integration between task goals, user interface tool manipulations to achieve these goals, and feedback from the data or work space being manipulated. This research specifically focuses on the design and evaluation of transparent user interface "layers" applied to graphical user interfaces. By allowing users to see through windows, menus, and tool palettes appearing in the perceptual foreground, an improved awareness of the underlying workspace and preservation of context are possible. However, transparent overlapping objects introduce visual interference which may degrade task performance, through reduced legibility. This dissertation explores a new interface technique (i.e., transparent layering) and, more importantly, undertakes a deeper investigation into the underlying issues that have implications for the design and use of this new technique. We have conducted a series of experiments, progressively more representative of the complex stimuli from real task domains. This enables us to systematically evaluate a variety of transparent user interfaces, while remaining confident of the applicability of the results to actual task contexts. We also describe prototypes and a case study evaluation of a working system using transparency based on our design parameters and experimental findings. Our findings indicate that similarity in both image color and in image content affect the levels of visual interference. Solid imagery in either the user interface tools (e.g., icons) or in the work space content (e.g., video, rendered models) are highly interference resistant and work well up to 75% transparent (i.e., 25% of foreground image and 75% of background content). Text and wire frame images (or line drawings) perform equally poorly but are highly usable up to 50% transparent, with no apparent performance penalty. Introducing contrasting outlining techniques improves the usability of transparent text menu interfaces up to 90% transparency. These results suggest that transparency is a usable and promising interface alternative. We suggest several methods of overcoming today's technical challenges in order to integrate transparency into existing applications.
Muscle fatigue during exposure to headward (+G¦Z)) acceleration

Pilots flying high performance fighter aircraft, are often subjected to high levels of headward (+G$\rm\sb{Z})$ accelerations of varying intensities and lengths of time. These high +G$\rm\sb{Z}$ accelerations can cause a decrease in head level blood pressure which can lead to loss of peripheral vision, total loss of vision and/or loss of consciousness. To increase blood pressure, the anti-G straining manoeuvre (AGSM), a voluntary self-protective manoeuvre, involving tensing of skeletal muscles, is performed. This manoeuvre can be very fatiguing. This series of experiments was designed to investigate the location and cause(s) of muscular fatigue occurring during the performance of the AGSM, using a +4-7G$\rm\sb{Z}$ simulated air combat manoeuvering (SACM) centrifuge profile to reproduce the cockpit environment. Four experiments, examining EMG, muscle force production, muscle and blood lactate and muscle glycogen, central fatigue and respiratory muscle EMG and performance, were carried out. There was some EMG evidence of muscle fatigue in vastus lateralis, vastus medialis and biceps femoris, but no mechanical evidence of fatigue of these muscles. EMG correlates of force production tended to be low to moderate, on average. There were statistically significant increases and decreases in muscle lactate and glycogen stores, respectively, but these were of insufficient magnitude to explain muscle fatigue. There was no evidence of central fatigue. There was, however, both mechanical and EMG evidence of respiratory muscle fatigue. In conclusion, it appears that average muscular effort is at best moderate during the AGSM at the levels of +G$\rm\sb{Z}$ used in this experimental series. In spite of evidence of decreased blood oxygen saturation, and its possible effects on the brain, there was no evidence of central fatigue. The respiratory musculature appears to be a prime candidate as the major limiting factor to G-tolerance time during SACM.
Art and social progress, the Toronto community of painters, 1933-1950

Art and Social Progress: The Toronto community of Painters, 1933-1950 revises appreciation for the post-Group of Seven generation of painters in Toronto whose two-decade leadership of a socially-conscious modernist movement of painting has been overlooked in histories of Canadian art. No manifesto or defined membership provides ready definition of this generation's collective effort during two decades of economic and political crisis to advance an art for society's sake in representational painting. The existence of the Toronto community of painters is posited on the evidence of a self-conscious reworking of motifs and compositions drawn from images of the land as it was lived in and worked by the Canadian people. Bertram Brooker, Charles Comfort, Carl Schaefer, Pegi Nicol MacLeod and Paraskeva Clark emerged as the key players in the evolution of this visual exchange with the formation, in 1933, of the Toronto-based Canadian Group of Painters. By the end of the Depression decade, Fred Hagan, Jack Bush, Aba Bayefsky, and Jack Nichols embraced the collective language. A shared belief in the social value of art for individual and communal well-being lay at the root of this exchange and the accompanying shift away from the Group of Seven's nationalistic landscape aesthetic to a new humanist aesthetic in modern Canadian painting. The socially-conscious artist in Toronto, like the social democratic reformer, defined humanist values according to the principles of order, balance and harmony established in antiquity as the building blocks of western civilization. The Toronto painters expressed these values at the level of design, presented by Canadian-based philosopher of aesthetics Walter Abell as the fundamental human principle of order and pattern made manifest by the abstract elements of composition. The Toronto community of painters' efforts to position themselves as guides to social progress faltered in the post-war years with widespread suspicion not only of the communist denominators of humanist values, but of an art that approached propagandist social communication. The result, ultimately, was the rise of abstraction as a language capable of circumventing partisan beliefs by restricting aesthetic experience to the materials of painterly expression.
Arithmetic disability of adults

The aim of this study was to investigate the numeracy skills of adults with arithmetic disability. The research involved comparisons among three groups: adults performing poorly in arithmetic (AD, n = 24); adults matched for chronological age who did not experience difficulties in arithmetic (NCA, n = 24); and a group of normally achieving students (NAL, n = 21) who were functioning at the same arithmetic level as the AD adults. Comparing this latter group with the AD adults provided an opportunity to test a developmental-lag model of individual differences in arithmetic related skills. To obtain a measure of their arithmetic skills, the participants were individually administered tests of computation, attitude regarding arithmetic, and reasoning in the domain of arithmetic. The findings suggested that AD adults were similar, both in computational skills and in terms of arithmetic related reasoning, to their younger counterparts of the same arithmetic level. Adults with an arithmetic disability as well as normally achieving children showed similar problems in solving arithmetic questions, whereas the error patterns of normally achieving adults were different. Adults with an arithmetic disability and normally achieving children showed lower self-confidence ratings before and after word-problem solving than the normally achieving adult group. The AD group reported significantly higher levels of math anxiety than the two comparison groups. It was concluded that the group differences of arithmetic performance in this study support a weak developmental lag model in which arithmetic disabilities represent an incomplete maturation. Future research directions and educational implications for adults with arithmetic disability are discussed.
Factors affecting the aspirations and expectations of university students in China

This survey study of Chinese university students' aspirations and expectations with regard to future occupations and further education endeavours to examine the main factors that help influence academic and career decisions in a fast evolving society. The study begins with a review of research on student aspirations from a number of nations and then considers the relevant Chinese studies on this topic. The concepts used in the research are drawn from the bulk of the international literature on student aspirations and the Chinese literature. Certain factors identified in the literature as significant for the formation of aspirations are utilized in this study as independent variables, and led us to research the aspirations of Chinese university students, from differing family backgrounds, in three geographical locations, at three administrative levels of higher education, in the Humanities and Sciences, and finally across gender lines. The study establishes by quantitative means the degree of significance of each of the factors, and verifies some dimensions of the center-periphery theory, with a widening gap in some areas between students in peripheral and center locations, and between students at the top and bottom of the administrative system. However, other dimensions do not correspond to the expectations that shaped this research project. The data is based on information gathered through a researcher administered questionnaire. The population for the study was drawn from nine universities situated in three geographical locations and under three levels of governmental administration. Students were selected by class, based on a male-female, Humanities-Science and first year - last year divisions. Assessment of the influence of the various factors on the academic and career decisions that Chinese students now face was arrived at through statistical analysis of the responses of the students and tabulated in light of the five main independent variables. Geography and gender proved to be two of the strongest influences shaping the students' desires and expectations. By comparison, we found family background (parental occupational status) and students' major field of study did not have such significant effects. The administrative level of the university where the student was enrolled also proved to be a moderately influential factor.