VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Ten years after: stories of teacher development

This is a story not only of their retention but also of the growth of seven teachers' knowledge of the practical art of teaching from 1992--2002. I present my arts-based narrative inquiry in terms of five stories of teacher development: a story of how I came to the topic of teacher development; a story of teacher education literature; a story of six of my colleagues and how the research was conducted; a story of conversations, wherein we seven teachers respond to the experience of development in our own words; and finally a story comparing the modern story of teacher development with our personal stories and both classical and popular myths. The major finding of the study is that genuine or authentic teacher development was not acknowledged as an outcome of institutional professional development initiatives over a ten year period. The professional development of the seven teachers was shown rather to consist of highly personalized, often unanticipated, and ongoing processes. Their development was shown to occur mainly in non-formal and non-institutional settings. Modernist teacher education programs were shown, in contrast, to be limited in their usefulness for planning, conducting, and explaining personally relevant teacher development. By drawing upon an arts-based narrative framework, the mythic significances of the teachers' experiences were recognized and contrasted with the underlying societal myths implicit in modern mass education and teacher education programs. Asynchronous Computer Mediated Communication (ACMC) was used as a research tool for reflective journalling. ACMC in the form of world wide web logs promoted our conversational exchanges. This inquiry is itself an example of self-authored collaborative development and the enriched understanding of teaching obtained by seven teachers.

Keywords: Teaching
Teachers, Training of
Classroom management
Educational innovations
Latent inhibition goes social: reducing the expression of the attractiveness stereotype

The present research explored whether inhibitory mechanisms derived from latent inhibition (LI) can interfere with stereotype expression. In particular, five studies explored whether irrelevant pre-exposure to attractive and unattractive individuals influenced selective attention mechanisms to subsequently guide attention away from stimulus features related to attractiveness. Inherent in this logic is the notion that if attention is guided away from stimulus features related to attractiveness, biased interpretations and discriminatory responses resulting from the activation of evaluations and stereotype content associated with attractiveness may be circumvented. Study 5 explored this issue using a modified evaluative priming procedure that included stereotype and non-stereotype traits as target words. LI interfered with the automatic activation of evaluations under these stimulus conditions. This finding suggests, therefore, that the failure to observe a moderating effect of LI on explicit personality judgments may have been caused by specific processes evoked during the person perception task. Findings are discussed in terms of how chronic cognitive associations pertaining to stereotypes interact with attentional mechanisms in social judgment processes. Study 1 demonstrated LI using the attractiveness of perceived individuals as the target stimulus. Participants who had experienced irrelevant pre-exposure to attractive and unattractive individuals had more difficulty subsequently learning a contingency based on attractiveness than participants who had no such pre-exposure. Study 2 revealed that irrelevant pre-exposure to attractive and unattractive individuals subsequently interferes with automatic activation of evaluations on the basis of attractiveness when indexed by an evaluative priming procedure. Studies 3 and 4, however, revealed that irrelevant pre-exposure to attractive and unattractive individuals failed to moderate the influence of attractiveness on explicit personality judgments. One possible reason for this disparity in effects is that processes evoked by the person perception task rendered attractiveness very salient, and this salience may call attention back to this construct even when LI has guided attention away from it. It was also possible, however, that the stimulus conditions created by the presentation of stereotype target traits in combination with clearly attractive and unattractive faces was responsible for the failure of LI to mitigate stereotype expression.
Looking in the mirror, looking in the curriculum: the perpetuation of Eurocentric images

This thesis will explore, through a lens of sociology and education, the ongoing results of the attempted destruction of Native peoples of North America through assimilation and genocide. It will examine the impact of white appropriation of Native imagery in the residential school system and the current Ontario curriculum. Using an anti-racist approach this thesis will investigate the continuing presence of colonial mindset in our society, pointing out the problems of not creating a holistic learning environment where students are learners, and teachers act as guides. It will be argued that resistance to Eurocentric images involve work on many fronts, from analysis of cultural, political and economic practices, globally and locally, to active work in classroom settings. Positive images put forward by Native activists, authors, storytellers and educators, thus demonstrating the re-emergence of traditional leadership patterns among Aboriginals, will contribute to the rebuilding of Native people's sense of autonomy.

Keywords: Indigenous peoples, Social conditions
Indigenous peoples, Canada
Indigenous peoples, Cultural assimilation
Indigenous peoples, Canada
Indigenous peoples, Education
Indigenous peoples, Canada
Indigenous peoples, Colonies
Indigenous peoples, Great Britain
Imperialism
Eurocentrism, Canada
Adaptive demodulation using rateless codes

This thesis introduces a new rate-adaptive system, Adaptive Demodulation (ADM), in which the receiver demodulates only those bits that have a high probability of being correct, treating non-demodulated bits as erasures. Several sets of decision regions, derived using composite hypothesis testing, are proposed for 16-QAM and 16-PSK which allow for the simple implementation of this demodulation strategy. The optimality of the proposed decision regions in selecting the most likely subset of bits from any received symbol is proven. It is demonstrated that encoding the data with a Luby Transform (LT) code allows for simple reconstruction of the message regardless of the erasure pattern introduced from the non-demodulated bits. Also demonstrated is the strong performance of 16-QAM for this application compared to other power efficient constellations and the near-optimality of using Gray mapping even under the proposed alternate sets of decision regions. The adaptive demodulation methodology is extended to the differentially coherent demodulation of 16-DPSK and 16-DAPSK, for which optimal demodulation strategies are derived. A methodology is presented for the receiver to effectively choose its operating region based on the observed instantaneous signal to noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver. Techniques for designing the degree distributions of the LT code used with the system are presented and analyzed for a simple binary message passing decoder, a ternary message passing decoder, a more general min-sum decoder, and a full belief propagation decoder. It is shown that for LT codes operating over binary symmetric channels, the min-sum decoder has performance identical to the ternary decoder. Numerical results for the spectral efficiency of the ADM system for both uncoded and coded bits are presented and compared to the performance of current rate-adaptive systems.
Product models for sequences

This thesis introduces a series of new graphical models for time series. These models all incorporate the idea of constructing a complex time series density model by combining the densities of many simpler models. The first of these, a product of hidden Markov models (PoHMM), is a graphical model whose density over a sequence is the product of the density of many small hidden Markov models (HMM's). Because each HMM in the PoHMM has its own hidden state variable the PoHMM has a distributed hidden state which allows for more compact descriptions of complex observations. In addition, the product formulation makes the hidden state of each constituent HMM independent conditioned on the data, allowing for efficient inference. However, maximum likelihood learning is complicated by the normalizing constant of the product distribution, which couples all the parameters in the PoHMM. The thesis presents the contrastive divergence algorithm, an approximate, sampling method for performing maximum likelihood learning in a PoHMM and other product models. Experiments comparing a PoHMM trained using contrastive divergence to a standard sized HMM, trained by EM, show the PoHMM to be superior in modelling complex structure and long range structure in sequences. The second model, the relative density network (RDN), is a supervised network which learns the relevant features of a class of data by using many small HMM's. Unlike, other methods of supervised classification of sequences, it does not insist on using a single model for each data class, but uses multiple models, and lets the network decide how to allocate them among the classes. A set of experimental comparisons with other HMM based supervised learning schemes on a problem in speaker recognition shows it to have better classification performance. The last model, the spiking Boltzmann machine, is also a product model. It uses a combination of binary and continuous hidden state representation, with smooth temporal dynamics so that it may model slowly varying signals. An example with synthetic data shows that it can learn to model and predict simple dynamic image sequences.
The moral sense in Hume's "Treatise" and Cicero's "De Officiis."

In this essay I argue for a Ciceronian interpretation of Hume's notion of the moral sense by showing the influence of Cicero's De Officiis on the moral sense school and on Hume himself. I argue that Cicero's account of the moral sense can be seen in Hume's Treatise and that by understanding Hume in light of De Officiis we can correct some misinterpretations of Hume and address various questions in moral philosophy. I begin by showing the importance of a Ciceronian understanding of Hume, then I argue for the Ciceronian influence on the moral sense school Hume is associated with. Given these reasons, and talking Hume in his famous letter to Hutcheson seriously, I give a Ciceronian interpretation of the moral sense in Hume. Finally, I show how assuming a Ciceronian view of the moral sense in the Treatise resolves some general problems in moral philosophy, focusing on arguments by Michael Smith and J.L. Mackie, and some specific questions about interpreting Hume, focusing on Jonathan Harrison and Francis Snare.
The CRTC's 2004 incentive scheme for Canadian English-language television drama: a triumph of rhetoric over reason in policy implementation

This paper analyzes the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission's ("CRTC") 2004 incentive program to increase the production of, the viewing to, and the expenditures on, high quality, original, English-language Canadian drama programming on Canadian private television. After exploring the economic, structural, technological and legal factors that militate against the success of English-language Canadian drama, this paper explores the history of regulatory measures implemented to support Canadian television drama and the legislated policy imperatives which have been relied upon to sustain them. The CRTC's 2004 incentive scheme is then described and critiqued, ultimately revealing that the program's practical shortcomings and its weak policy justifications will likely serve to undermine its success in achieving its stated goals.

Keywords: Television plays, Canadian
Television programs, Law and legislation
Television programs, Canada
"Bringing international criminal law home": the normative contribution of the international criminal court treaty regime

This thesis explores the contribution of the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty regime in the pursuit of universal international criminal accountability. It argues that in order to make international criminal law effective, domestic Courts or other judicial bodies must be able to secure the presence of the accused to stand trial. However, this thesis demonstrates that achieving the voluntary compliance of States with requests for the surrender of an indicted individual has often been difficult. In response to this problem, this thesis proposes that a voluntarist system, such as the ICC treaty regime, has the potential to help. This is because the international treaty regime reflects a shared commitment by States to key norms of international criminal law, and has a high degree of legitimacy. This thesis argues that the ICC treaty regime offers the best chance for achieving widespread compliance with the "surrender norm," and for "bringing international criminal law home."

Keywords: International criminal courts
International crimes
The personal support worker: improving work experience : a comparison across two health care sectors

The societal movement away from a reliance on acute institutional health care to in-home care has had a considerable impact on the home care sector. This change is due to a number of factors, including a shortage of nurses and physicians and a demographic shift resulting in a growing number of elderly patients. The home care sector is largely staffed by the Personal Support Worker (PSW), who is becoming a key figure in the health care industry. The objective of this study was to compare and contrast the work experience of the PSW in two health care sectors, Long-Term Care Homes and Community Services, in order to recommend possible changes aimed at improving their work experience and reducing their turnover. The research was framed by highlighting the effects of major demographic shifts, which have resulted in a structural problem compromising the ability of both government and families to provide adequate, high quality care. As well, feminist theory of paid and unpaid work is used to demonstrate why and how PSWs have come to find themselves in this field. Examples of change theory are presented to illustrate that despite structural changes, research findings could be applied to strengthen the PSW profession and retention. The term "Pareto Care" was coined to illustrate the relationship between the PSW and the health care system. The data collection involves both quantitative and qualitative methods. Two hundred and ninety-six PSWs were surveyed about their training, job duties/skills, working conditions and compensation. In addition, face-to-face focus group sessions were conducted with PSWs, educators and employers, in order to put the survey findings in a larger context, as well as to validate the conclusions. It was concluded that health care practices are dominated by the fact that caregiving continues to be women's work and has a history of being undervalued. Distinct differences were found between the two health care sectors in several aspects of the PSW work experience. These differences have implications for employers, educators and government with respect to the future attraction and retention of this worker to the health care field. Key thematic findings in the areas of training, preventive-care, employer practices and government initiatives are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Toward a global development investment accord: balancing private rights and public welfare at the WTO Doha round and beyond

This thesis conducts a survey and analysis of international investment law disciplines dealing with the treatment of foreign direct investment under NAFTA, the European Union and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The purpose of this analysis is to synthesize from that experience appropriate normative suggestions for modalities for a potential multilateral global investment discipline under the World Trade Organization in response to the Doha WTO Ministerial Declaration. It is suggested that economic growth and regulatory efficiency may be optimized by providing for the direct effect of private rights and corollary responsibilities through an approach to investor-state dispute resolution which, in so doing, recognizes the importance of private rights while preserving the primacy of public welfare values.
Investigating teacher leadership as a means of building school capacity

The purpose of this research was to investigate teacher leadership as a means of building the capacity of one school to respond to the diverse learning needs of all students. This school was selected because the quantitative data collected in a larger study on impact of Secondary School Reform in Ontario schools, indicated that this school had established collaborative networks and strong relationships. It appeared that an environment had been created in this school where the expectations for teachers to work as school-wide leaders had become the norm. A shared leadership model had been established and teachers worked within that model through Management Learning Teams (MLT) to become school-wide leaders. Using a qualitative approach that included a combination of observation of teachers in action in their MLTs as well as follow-up interviews, the dynamics of how teachers work as leaders was examined. Data were gathered about the nature of the leadership activities that teachers were involved with outside the classroom, how teacher leaders influenced one another, how communities of learning were facilitated and how teachers leaders overcame the obstacles they encountered. The strongest theme that emerged is that principal and teacher leadership are inseparable as means of enhancing school capacity. Both the principal and the teachers must adopt new roles as leaders within the school and these new roles must be part of a shared leadership model that outlines the communication and flow of information to all the members of the school. Central to this model was the connection between administration as the strategic leaders of the school and the teachers as the leaders in the classroom. Creating structures that were built into the daily routines of the school empowered teachers to become involved and impact the decisions that were being made about a variety of different teaching and learning issues. However, in spite of the many opportunities for collaboration it became evident that professional autonomy still seems to play a powerful role in limiting the degree to which teacher leaders could influence a change of instructional practice that may lead to improved student learning.

Keywords: Educational leadership, Ontario
High school teachers, Ontario
School improvement programs, Ontario
School management and organization, Ontario
Dignity, work and health

Further, I show that how an affront to dignity is experienced by a worker depends on the meaning that is attributed to it. This meaning is mediated by social contextual factors such as power relations and social perceptions of the event. Workers were also able to enhance their dignity at work when they had a sense of accomplishment about their work or how they did it. I use the term achieving dignity to describe this situation. Further, this sense of accomplishment was linked with positive appraisals from others. Workers felt well-regarded by others when they were granted influence or autonomy, or when they received positive appraisals concerning their work or their skills. All of these positive symbolic appraisals can enhance worker dignity. The purpose of this study is to further our understanding of work, stress, and health relationships through an exploration of how stress is generated and experienced at the lowest levels of organizational hierarchies. This study uses a qualitative study design. Twenty-five individuals employed in the service sector were interviewed for the study. Through analysis, dignity emerged as a central theme related to workers' experiences of stress. I conceptualized two facets of dignity: affronts to dignity and achieving dignity. Workers experienced affronts to dignity when they felt disrespected as persons and perceived that their personal worth was under attack. Varied events were experienced by workers as affronts to their dignity, such as when workers felt verbally insulted, intentionally harmed, or treated in any way that showed disregard for their basic human needs. All of these events socially signify disrespect. This research revealed that threats to dignity can threaten worker well-being. Workers who experienced affronts to their dignity or whose efforts to achieve dignity were thwarted explained how these experiences had a detrimental effect on their sense of physical, psychological, and emotional well-being. Further, I show how power may protect workers from experiencing various threats to their dignity. This suggests that workers who lack power are most likely to experience various threats to their dignity and to experience stress because of this.
Parents' involvement in youth justice proceedings from the perspective of youth: a pilot study

The Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act recognizes the important role of parents in young people's legal proceedings. Yet, there has been little empirical research on the predictors of parental involvement in the youth justice system. In the present study, 47 male young offenders were interviewed about their experiences with parents prior to and during judicial proceedings, to examine the factors associated with young people's perceptions of parental involvement in legal contexts. Results indicated that parental warmth and general involvement in a young person's life were significantly related to parental participation in the youth justice system. However, multiple regression analyses showed that parental warmth offered little additional predictive power beyond that contributed by parents' general involvement. Findings are discussed in terms of both theoretical and practical implications, and directions for future research are outlined.

Keywords: Juvenile justice, Administration of, Parent participation
Juvenile delinquency, Canada
Teenagers, Legal status, laws, etc
Teenagers, Canada
Juvenile delinquency, Psychological aspects
Juvenile courts, Canada
Craniofacial effects of alendronate treatment in growing osteogenesis imperfecta mice

Bisphosphonates have shown promise in reducing fractures in children with osteogenesis imperfecta (OI). To date, effects of these drugs on the growing craniofacial skeleton have not been investigated. To address this, alendronate (ALN) was evaluated in the growing oim/oim mouse, a model of moderate-to-severe OI. Wildtype (+/+) and oim/oim mice received saline or ALN at a dosage of 26 μg ALN/kg/day from 6-12 weeks of age. Skulls (n=49) were scanned at 12 weeks with microCT to create 3D reconstructions. Cranial and mandibular landmarks were digitized and statistical shape analysis methods compared cranial and mandibular size and shape between groups. Back-scattered electron imaging of the spheno-occipital synchondrosis evaluated drug effects on bone quality. oim/oim mice exhibited significant skull dysmorphology with parallels to human OI. The anti-resorptive activity of ALN does not appear to compromise craniofacial growth. ALN treatment normalized FM morphology in oim/oim mice through improvements in skull bone quality.