VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The lived experience of transfer students in a collaborative baccalaureate nursing program

Community college students who transfer to universities face innumerable challenges. These have been well documented in the American literature on transfer; however, there has been relatively little published research on transfer in Canada and a dearth of information about articulated professional programs with a collaborative curriculum. This study is intended to add to both the Canadian literature on transfer between community colleges and universities and the literature on inter-sectoral collaboration in professional education, more specifically in nursing education. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience of transfer students in a collaborative baccalaureate nursing program. Key elements comprising the foundation for the study are the literature on the development and evolution of college to university transfer in Canada and the United States, the organization and reform of nursing education, and the theoretical perspectives explaining persistence and transition in postsecondary education. Utilizing a naturalistic approach, both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered to elucidate the feelings, experiences and satisfaction of third year nursing students in a collaborative articulated program. Fifty-four students responded to a questionnaire and a subgroup of 13 students, selected through purposeful sampling, were interviewed. After an analysis and interpretation of the findings, several themes emerged. It was learned that transferring to university was not the smooth seamless transition expected by the students. For example, students experienced a professional transformation requiring a refraining of their nursing knowledge at university, a finding that is unique to this study. Also the process of transfer was found to cause significant stress. Even after adapting to the university geography, culture, and expectations, students in the closing month of their third year had not become fully incorporated into the mainstream of the university. However, in spite of all of the difficulties adjusting to the university, ultimately students were satisfied with their decision and the overall experience. In fact, they would recommend the program to a friend. On the basis of the findings and the students' suggestions, several general recommendations were made to provide a more seamless transition from college to university in collaborative articulated programs.

Keywords: Transfer students
College freshmen
Community colleges
Nursing, Study and teaching
Nursing schools
Nursing students
A synthesis-oriented omniscient manual editor for FPGA circuit design

Logic circuit designers for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) put increasing demands on Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools to provide higher logic circuit speeds than are possible using a traditional CAD flow. The problem with the traditional CAD flow lies in that the logic synthesis makes assumptions about how its logic optimizations will affect the speed of the logic circuit post-routing. These assumptions are not always realized by the place and route tool, which leads to a degradation in logic circuit speed. If the post-routing effect of a logic optimization was known, then better logic circuit optimization decisions could be made. This work refers to such knowledge as omniscience and explores its applications in the domain of manual physical synthesis. This work develops a manual editor, named Augur, which uses omniscience in the context of physical synthesis. The user is allowed to select physical synthesis transformations to improve the speed of the logic circuit. After each modification the user is instantly informed about the effect of the specified transformation on the speed of the logic circuit. Because of the manual nature of the editor the size of logic circuits is limited to 1000 logic elements. The manual editor was tested on a suite of 10 logic circuits, all implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-E device. The post-routing timing analysis performed with commercial tools shows that the application of omniscience improves the logic circuit maximum operating frequency by 9.9% on average, with a low area penalty. In addition, several new logic synthesis transformations are developed that arise from the architectural properties of the target device.
Contributions of recollection and familiarity to errorless and trial-and-error learning

The avoidance of errors at study, termed errorless learning (EL), has been shown to enhance memory performance relative to trial-and-error learning. However, the cognitive mechanisms that underpin these learning styles are debated. This study examines the contributions of recollection and familiarity to EL and trial-and-error using a variant of the process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991). Young and older adults were shown semantic cues and generated a target associate either without errors, or with errors. This was followed by recognition testing under conditions of inclusion (respond "yes" to any studied word) and exclusion (respond "yes" to words studied through EL OR respond "yes" to words studied through trial-and-error) which permit estimations of recollection and familiarity. Some proportion of prior learning errors (i.e. guesses generated by participants) were also present at recognition. For both young and older adults, trial-and-error led to an increase in recollection and decrease in familiarity relative to EL. However, this benefit of trial-and-error learning was offset among older adults by an increase relative to young adults in false alarms to learning errors at recognition. We argue that trial-and-error learning can confer memorial benefits when contextual reinstatement is relevant to the task. However, older adults may be impaired at discriminating errors from targets at retrieval. Results are discussed in terms of current cognitive models of EL.
Processes of cultural change: ceramics and interaction across the Middle to Late Woodland transition in south-central Ontario

The archaeology of the Rice Lake-Trent River Region in south-central Ontario provides a case study for the investigation of processes of cultural change involving social interaction. A synthesis of previous archaeological research indicates that the period encompassing the Middle to Late Woodland transition and Iroquoian origins is poorly known in this region. It nonetheless represents a time during which significant cultural changes were taking place. The processes of cultural change are explored by contrasting the migration and in situ development hypotheses for Iroquoian origins while incorporating the central role of social interaction. Analysis of data obtained through excavations at the Spillsbury Bay and Log Cabin Point Sites provides new information concerning the nature of Middle and early Late Woodland occupations in the region. The ceramic assemblages from these two sites are placed within the wider context of the regional scale in combination with previously excavated collections. Expectations for ceramic patterning derived from the cultural change scenarios are then evaluated against this regional database. This assessment is facilitated through the use of two statistical techniques: frequency distributions and correspondence analysis. The results clearly demonstrate both continuity and patterned change within the region. In addition to supporting the in situ hypothesis, analysis of the ceramic assemblages enables the establishment of a regional ceramic sequence. This sequence consists of three temporal phases of the Point Peninsula Tradition: Trent, Rice Lake, and Sandbanks; followed by the Early Ontario Iroquois Stage of the Ontario Iroquois Tradition. Interregional comparisons between Sandbanks ceramics and those of the contemporary Princess Point Complex in southwestern Ontario provide a broader perspective on the nature of the Middle to Late Woodland transition in the Northeast.

Keywords: Iroquoian Indians, Ontario, Southern
Indian pottery, Ontario, Southern
Indians of North America, Ontario, Southern
Local surface plasmons launched through AFM lithographic nanostructures and propagation of these fields monitored in real-time using a fluorescence near-field probe method

Surface Plasmons (SPs) are electromagnetic surface waves that propagate at a metal-dielectric interface. The SP field maintains maximum intensity at the interface and decays away exponentially in the directions perpendicular to the interface. SP fields are only detectable in the near-field region, precluding the use of conventional microscopes to observe such fields. Recently, a simplified method to detect the SP nearfield in the far-field has been created. This technique functions, as we have employed it, by spin coating a polymer-dye layer atop a plasmon carrying metal surface and monitoring the propagation of the SP in real-time through the dye fluorescence. It has been demonstrated that a SP mode can be launched through a grating, where the grating provides a mechanism to couple photon energy into a local SP mode, i.e. the SP mode is confined to the region around the grating. We have utilized a polymer template-chemical etching method to fabricate nanometer-sized gratings in an effort to couple photon energy into a SP mode.
Double concerto for violin, percussion and orchestra

The Concerto is a genuine Double Concerto, since the two soloists often play together, exchanging their musical ideas and characters. However, there are two separate cadenzas for each soloist, the percussion solo cadenza in the first and the violin solo cadenza in the third movement. There is a double cadenza in the first movement as well. Double Concerto for Violin, Percussion and Orchestra consists of three movements: Allegro con brio, Largo and Vivo, and it has a duration of eighteen minutes. The solo percussion plays on two different groups of instruments: idiophones (Marimba and Vibraphone) and membranophones (Bass Drum, four Tom-Toms and two Bongos set). With this instrumentation, the percussion solo gets to play virtuosic rhythmic passages but also lyrical and simple melodic lines. The first movement opens with the energetic solo percussion and orchestra introducing the pitch set: A-Bb-Eb-E. This pitch set leads to a different section that brings in a pitch set: C-C♯-F♯-G. Those two groups form together an octatonic scale. The third pitch set introduces remaining pitches of the chromatic scale: B-D-F-Ab, which form a diminished seventh chord. This set is introduced by the soloists competing with the entire orchestra still playing the first two sets. All three sets together create the climactic moment of the first movement. The slow movement is in ABA' ternary form. This dreamy movement also contains two contrasting pitch sets, which combined together complete the chromatic scale. The pitch sets are Db-Eb-Gb-Ab-Bb and A-B-C-D-E-F-G. The third movement brings back the rushing excitement from the first movement. This energetic movement, with its continuous eighth-note pulsation, brings the entire orchestra to a big culmination with a twelve-tone cluster in the orchestra. That overwhelming sound along with the virtuosic solo parts, bring the entire piece to the final tutti on A, the same pitch that opens the Concerto. In the fast movements the style is rhythmically vital and colorful with the slow movement being rather lyrical and emotional. The outer movements have related harmonic, rhythmic and pitch materials. The use of different pitch sets defines the overall structure and form of the Concerto.
Adaptive chirplet transform for the analysis of visual evoked potentials

Visual evoked potentials (VEPs) are electrical signals measured on the surface of the scalp in response to rapid and repetitive visual stimuli. These signals possess complex time-frequency structures and are difficult to characterize with conventional methods. In this work, we propose a new approach based on the adaptive chirplet transform (ACT) to represent a complete VEP response from the transient to the steady-state portion. Our implementation of the ACT involves both a windowed and a non-windowed approach. The non-windowed ACT employs a coarse-refinement algorithm to estimate multiple chirplets under low signal-to-noise ratio condition. The method decomposes VEPs into chirplet basis functions with four adjustable parameters (i.e., time-spread, chirp rate, time-center and frequency-center). We show how these parameters can be used to separate the transient from the steady-state portions of the response, arid that as few as three chirplets are required to represent a complete VEP signal. In the windowed ACT method, the signal is partitioned into equal-length non-overlapping segments before estimating one chirplet from each segment. The concept of the optimal window length with reference to the windowed ACT method is proposed and calculations are made in terms of the signal characteristics. Both the windowed and non-windowed methods reveal a similar pattern of the VEP response---that a short transient VEP precedes the steady-state VEP. It is shown, however, that the computational time of the windowed method is significantly lower. Finally, we demonstrate that the adaptive chirplet spectrogram (ACS) offers a clearer visualization of the time-frequency structure of the VEP signal than the conventional spectrogram, because the ACS avoids cross-term interference in the time-frequency plane. Possible applications of VEP chirplet analysis to on-line signal classification and the technical limitations of the ACT approach are also discussed.
Multiband encoding for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is often described as showing “exquisite anatomical detail” in standard applications such as studies of the central nervous system and the musculoskeletal system. It has been much more difficult to obtain such high-quality images of the heart. Constructing three-dimensional (3D) images with high spatial resolution, for applications such as the examination of the coronary blood vessels, currently requires an excessive scan duration (about one hour). Furthermore, it is currently infeasible to construct images with the spatial resolution necessary for promising applications such as the characterization of atherosclerotic plaque in the coronary arteries. The thesis is a study of a MRI methodology called multiband encoding . The aim is to enable greater flexibility and efficiency in the spatial encoding process, which is one of the steps in the MRI data acquisition, in order to address the challenges of 3D imaging in the heart. In particular, multiband encoding is proposed as a methodology with flexibility well suited to adaptive imaging. Each of the developments described in the thesis is intended to advance the capabilities of multiband encoding towards those of the conventional method for high-resolution 3D imaging in the heart, 3D Fourier encoding. This is based on the rationale that before multiband encoding can offer improvements over current methods, it must be shown that this methodology can provide the resolution, coverage and efficiency currently available with 3D Fourier imaging. The experiments in Chapters 2–4 led to the technique demonstrated at the end of chapter 4, which incorporates all of the advances described in the thesis. This technique was shown to be capable of imaging 32 contiguous slices of 2mm thickness, using radiofrequency excitation pulses just 1.86 ms in duration. Using this technique, the feasibility of adaptive-resolution imaging of the coronary arteries was demonstrated. These results have advanced multiband encoding further towards practical application. Also, the potential for adaptive spatial encoding has been shown, which will hopefully lead to new methods and new applications that seem infeasible with current MRI technology.
Maria Luisa Spaziani, Armanda Guiducci and Oliva Gualtieri Bernardi: the question of gender as a genre

The intention of this dissertation is to take the next step forward in exploring the literary output produced by Italian women and discover the differences that render them unique as poets opposed to the characteristics that make them similar. In particular, we focus on the poetic works of three Italian writers, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Armanda Guiducci and Oliva Gualtieri Bernardi and examine what role, if any, does gender play as a tool of evaluation. The point of departure is the idea that if post-modernism represents a reaction in the homogenizing influence of mass culture, what it has unleashed is an interest in the specific, the de-centered. This has meant an increased interest in new perspectives, or perspectives not previously included in what is know as the ‘canon’ in literature. Along with the social, political and economic changes that have occurred, the stage has been set, and a public has been created willing to hear these new voices and longing to read literature that speaks to and for them; among this category is women. Yet, this new ability to be heard has not been without problems. What has ensued is the amalgamation of women's literary production into few limited categories: women's literature, feminist literature, etc., thereby negating the unique characteristic of these writers. In “A Woman's Time,” (1986), Julia Kristeva addresses this problem In this article she does not speak of literary theory but rather feminism as an ideology, but nonetheless her paradigm of the generational cycles within a discussion of feminism can be applied to this subject in order to demonstrate the variety of voices and to illustrate the erroneousness of an assertion of unanimity. The criteria in choosing the poets to be examined was simple; I selected three with similar backgrounds and education to demonstrate that even with these parallelisms their work stands apart. Spaziani, Guiducci and Gualtieri fit these requirements, categories were then created to deal with the themes touched upon, such as maternity, and linguistic techniques employed by the poets, in order to carry out an in-depth analysis of their poetry in relation to one another.
Coming to know: an inquiry into cultural, familial and personal habitus

In this thesis, I embark on a personal journey through habitus, contemplating the effects of class, specifically, on success: is habitus enabling or restrictive? Can habitus evolve or is it static? What tensions arise when habitus does evolve? If, as most, we come to appreciate habitus as the 'fish does water' what of the 'fish out of water', when one's habitus is no longer familiar or can be taken for granted? Through the use of tableaux stories, I wish to offer a contextualized analysis of the evolution of habitus--with class as the dominant affector--within a tri-generational arc. I employ a hybrid methodology, using narrative and life history, to trouble the influence of habitus on the participants.

Keywords: Families
Social classes
Success
The isozymes of 3-deoxy-D-arabino-heptulosonate 7-phosphate synthase from Arabidopsis perform differential and overlapping roles in vivo and may be regulated by tyrosine

3-deoxy-D-arabino-heptulosonate 7-phosphate (DAHP) synthase catalyzes the first step of the shikimate pathway. Phenotypic analysis of T-DNA insertion lines indicated that the three DAHP synthases perform differential and overlapping roles in vivo. DHS1 may be involved in proper rosette development, DHS2 may be involved in lignin biosynthesis and DHS3 may be required for lignification of the floral stem. Plants deficient in DHS1 are sensitive to tyrosine supplementation, suggesting that the activity of DHS2 and/or DHS3 might be regulated by the aromatic amino acid. Results from an in vitro enzymatic assay and a microarray experiment reveal that neither DHS2 nor DHS3 are inhibited at the protein or transcriptional levels by tyrosine. This suggests that the activity of plant DAHP synthases could be regulated by tyrosine in a novel fashion, possibly by protein-protein interaction.
Deposition, consolidation, and strength of a non-plastic tailings paste for surface disposal

Various thickened tailings schemes have been implemented as environmentally attractive alternatives to conventional tailings slurry deposition in surface impoundments. The first site to dispose of a non-plastic tailings dewatered to a paste, which is pumped and deposited out the end of a pipe to form a stack, is at Bulyanhulu, Tanzania. Since design precedents did riot exist for such a facility, a field study was undertaken during start up to establish the framework for follow up laboratory investigations. Key areas were identified for research including deposition characteristics, consolidation behaviour, and strength. The paste behaviour was characterized through correlated results from laboratory experiments using a "50Ø Rheometer", a modified geotechnical laboratory vane, and flume tests. Test results of the Bulyanhulu paste identified a clear linear trend between the angle of repose and the vane shear strength. The use of these characterization tools helped to quantify the effects of changing the flocculating agents in, and temperature of, the paste. Traditional consolidation test results from three different tailings pastes were normalized onto one distinct curve using the void index concept. The normalized results for the non-plastic fine grained materials are different from those reported for clays. A normalized plot could reduce the amount of preliminary laboratory testing by providing better initial estimates for in situ void ratios and settlement for a given paste project. Dynamic compaction of paste, which is one method of strength gain in the field, was successfully modelled and monitored in the laboratory. Future investigations could examine the field scale implications of these findings. A standardized sample preparation procedure has been developed, with a high success rate, for both static and cyclic triaxial testing of non-plastic tailings pastes. Static and cyclic triaxial testing parameters have been established for the Bulyanhulu tailings paste, which are consistent with published data. The results are believed to be the first reported for non-plastic tailings paste in the context of a surface stack. The tests and procedures outlined have established the framework and starting points for further research, some of which has begun within the Lassonde Institute at the University of Toronto.