VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Error Processing in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Performance monitoring refers to the detection of errors and correct responses in ongoing performance and the subsequent cognitive and behavioural adjustment of one's performance. Adequate performance monitoring is crucial to self-regulation and reinforcement learning, both of which are dysfunctional in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Although research has shown that children with ADHD adjust less than controls following errors, studies have not determined if this deficit is limited to performance monitoring of errors, termed error processing. One explanation for this deficit is that children with ADHD have a diminished ability to detect errors in their performance, suggesting that the provision of performance feedback would facilitate performance monitoring. Study 1 examined post-error and post-correct adjustment of reaction time in an ADHD and control group using a modified flanker task in two conditions, one with feedback and one without. Study 1 aimed to determine if ADHD participants display a general or specific performance monitoring deficit, and if any deficit could be improved by providing feedback. With feedback, ADHD participants showed similar post-correct adjustment, but significantly less post-error adjustment and accuracy than controls. Feedback significantly enhanced accuracy and post-error adjustment for controls, but not for ADHD participants. Results suggest that the ADHD deficit is specific to error processing and that it does not improve with feedback. Neurological theories and research denote the biological basis of error processing, proposing it as a marker of genetic risk (i.e., an endophenotype) for ADHD. Consistent with this hypothesis, Study 2 examined the familiality of error processing in ADHD participants, unaffected siblings of children with ADHD, and controls using the same methodology as Study 1. With feedback, ADHD participants and unaffected siblings displayed similar post-correct adjustment, but significantly less post-error adjustment and accuracy than controls. Notably, unaffected siblings and ADHD participants showed similarly atypical post-error adjustment and accuracy. Results indicate familiality of the error processing deficit in ADHD. Moreover, as post-error adjustment is a behavioral measure that is easily scalable and feasible for large-scale research, error processing as an endophenotype of ADHD is supported. Combined, results promote the inclusion of this deficit in the neurocognitive profile of ADHD.

Keywords: ADHD
error processing
performance monitoring
Advisor: Schachar, Russell J.
Europeanization, National Party Systems and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights: The Cases of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

In recent years, there has been a growing divergence in national policies towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons within a growing European Union (EU). This variation is surprising given that support of LGBT persons, and more specifically, of state recognition of gender-neutral partnerships has become a widely disseminated EU value. In explaining why this variation has occurred, this dissertation forwards two central arguments: First, the EU’s ability to achieve policy convergence in the sphere of LGBT rights across all 28 member states is limited by a lack ‘hard tools’ at the EU’s disposal. In absence of a larger horizontal equality directive, the EU must increasingly rely on elite persuasion to achieve its goals in member states. This contrasts with the reality in applicant states, such as Montenegro, where the promise of eventual membership in the EU provides strong external incentives to comply with policies supported by Brussels. As this thesis finds, such direct pressure is absent for countries already within the Union, and elevates the importance of domestic factors that can challenge pro-LGBT EU norms. Secondly, through a closer examination of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, it is argued that the stability of national party systems, measured through the number of political parties, ideological polarization and issue cleavages, as well as system volatility, can significantly shape whether a country adopts EU LGBT norms or not. The relative stability and more programmatic nature of the Estonian party system made it easier for a minimal number of elites to adopt EU-supported gender-neutral partnerships. By contrast, the highly volatile and unstable Latvian and Lithuanian party systems made the passage of laws touching on socially contentious issues, such as gay rights, extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible to pass, despite a supranational environment strongly encouraging such laws. While this analysis derives centrally from the Baltic countries, it may have larger generalizable potential, as many countries within the EU with underdeveloped or unstable party systems have shown resistance to adopting pro-EU LGBT laws.

Keywords: Estonia
Europeanization
Latvia
LGBT Rights
Lithuania
Party Systems
Advisor: Hansen, Randall
Modular AC Nanogrid with Four-quadrant Micro-inverters and High-efficiency DC-DC Conversion

A signicant portion of the population in developing countries live in remote communities, where the power infrastructure and the required capital investment to set up local grids do not exist. This is due to the fuel shipment and utilization costs required for fossil fuel based generators, which are traditionally used in these local grids, as well as high upfront costs associated with the centralized Energy Storage Systems (ESS). This dissertation targets modular AC nano-grids for these remote communities developed at minimal capital cost, where the generators are replaced with multiple inverters, connected to either Photovoltaic (PV) or battery modules, which can be gradually added to the nano-grid. A distributed droop-based control architecture is presented for the PV and battery Micro-Inverters (MIV) in order to achieve frequency and voltage stability, as well as active and reactive power sharing. The nano-grid voltage is regulated collectively in either one of four operational regions. Effective load sharing and transient handling are demonstrated experimentally by forming a nano-grid which consists of two custom 500 W MIVs. The MIVs forming the nano-grid have to meet certain requirements. A two-stage MIV architecture and control scheme with four-quadrant power-flow between the nano-grid, the PV/battery and optional short-term storage is presented. The short-term storage is realized using high energy-density Lithium-Ion Capacitor (LIC) technology. A real-time power smoothing algorithm utilizing LIC modules is developed and tested, while the performance of the 100 W MIV is experimentally verifed under closed-loop dynamic conditions. Two main limitations of the DAB topology, as the core of the MIV architecture's dc-dc stage, are addressed: 1) This topology demonstrates poor efficiency and limited regulation accuracy at low power. These are improved by introducing a modified topology to operate the DAB in Flyback mode, achieving up to an 8% increase in converter efficiency. 2) The DAB topology needs four digital isolators for driving the active switches on the other side of the isolation boundary. Two Phase-Locked-Loop (PLL) based synchronization schemes are introduced in order to reduce the number of required digital isolators, hence increasing reliability and reducing the implementation costs. One of these schemes is demonstrated on a discrete 150 W DAB prototype, while both of them are implemented on-chip in a 0.18um 80V BCD process. In addition, the power-stage of the primary-side of a 1 MHz, 50 W DAB converter is fully integrated on the same die. By using such a high switching frequency, the size of passive elements in the DAB is reduced, resulting in further cost reductions for the MIV. The results of this dissertation pave the way for affordable nano-grids with minimal capital cost, reliable performance and reduced complexity.

Keywords: Battery
Grid
Integrated
Inverter
Power Electronics
Solar
Advisor: Trescases, Olivier
Romantic Ekphrasis and the Intellectual Culture of Sensibility

This thesis examines the intersection of poetry about art, the culture of sensibility, and eighteenth-century aesthetic thought in Romantic literature. These converging discourses allowed poets to suggest insights into the necessary conditions of sympathetic exchange, and the limits of what sympathy can accomplish. This thesis proposes ambitious changes to our understanding of Romantic ekphrasis in order to offer a subtle but crucial change to our understanding of the culture of sensibility. It considers a broad range of Romantic ekphrases – some well-known poems by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, and some largely unstudied poems by Cowper, Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Hart Milman, Barry Cornwall, and others – reading these texts against multiple historical contexts. One of these contexts is the eighteenth-century idea that the visual arts represent only a single, “pregnant” moment, whereas literature represents successions of events. Moral philosophy and the philosophy of the sister arts are bound up with one another throughout the eighteenth century; David Hume’s formulation of sympathy as instinctive and visual comes to be associated with painting and sculpture, while Adam Smith’s formulation of it as an imagined reconstruction comes to be associated with literature. Another key context is the ekphrastic tradition, especially its understudied eighteenth-century portion. This thesis is the first study to adequately investigate the archive of eighteenth-century ekphrasis. In the light of these contexts, it argues that Romantic ekphrasis was a site of ongoing intellectual activity within the culture of sensibility. Romantic thinkers inherited a set of questions about the role of emotion and affect in ethical conduct, and about the role of the arts, not only in producing emotion, but also in shaping how we grapple intellectually with emotion. This thesis brings to light some of the intellectual tools that early nineteenth-century poets brought to bear on these questions.

Keywords: ekphrasis
poetry
romanticism
sensibility
Advisor: Weisman, Karen
Exploring the Attributes, Experiences, and Motivations of Female Public Elementary School Administrators of Colour in Ontario

EXPLORING THE ATTRIBUTES, EXPERIENCES, AND MOTIVATIONS OF FEMALE PUBLIC ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS OF COLOUR IN ONTARIO Doctor of Education 2016 Anjili Sophia Pant Graduate Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education University of Toronto Abstract This study explores how the attributes, experiences, and motivations of female public elementary school administrators of colour in Ontario have contributed to their entry into administration. Data were obtained through qualitative life-history interviews with 3 currently practicing, middle-aged administrators: 2 African Canadian (a principal and a vice-principal) and 1 South Asian (principal). Resilience theory was used to investigate internal and external attributes of the participants, disruptions they faced, and motivational factors that enabled them to become administrators. Cross-case analysis revealed relevant attributes the participants shared: focus, resourcefulness, independence, social competence, a capacity for hard work, self-discipline, optimism, a positive attitude, perseverance, and a willingness to learn. Barriers to their entrance into administration were: the interview process, the struggle to obtain Canadian credentials, politics, and difficulty having their leadership skills acknowledged. Motivations to enter administration were: encouragement from others, persistence after unsuccessful attempts to enter administration, being able to meet interviewers’ expectations, and a passion for the work. Among the findings were participants’ recommendations for aspiring female administrators of colour: Keep your ambitions to yourself. Know that it is a lonely job. Understand what the work entails. Recognize that administrative positions are not powerful ones. Avoid interacting only with people from your own ethnic background. Do not use the “race card” as an excuse for not succeeding in the interview process. Remain calm when discriminated against. Most importantly, pursue the necessary credentials: Prepare for administration early in your career (work at the family of schools level, community, culture and caring, and numeracy and literacy). Seek out a variety of mentors. Stay connected with people who support you. Master a specific skill. Be resourceful. Keep current with educational jargon. Continue to develop professionally. Write and present at workshops. Use the media to showcase your school and practice. Finally, support the advancement of quality women of colour. Suggestions for future research include: (a) repeat this study in 5 and 10 years; (b) examine leadership programs and determine whether women of colour are being hired; and (c) compare and contrast the career paths of women and men (both of colour and White).

Keywords: barriers to promotion and supports for promotion
Canadian study
female administrators of colour
public elementary school administrators of colour
public school administrators of colour
women administrators of colour
Advisor: Stiegelbauer, Suzanne
Disagreement About Beauty

I aim to give an original account of how we should respond to disagreement about beauty. The recent debate about ‘peer disagreement’ in epistemology offers two rough positions for how to respond when a peer disagrees: 1) remain ‘steadfast,’ maintaining confidence in my belief due to the fact that, from my first person perspective, I take her to be mistaken, and 2) be ‘conciliatory,’ revising confidence in my belief if I find no reason to think I am more likely to be right from a third personal step back. I argue that neither of these options captures what we need for the case of beauty. What has not yet been considered is that imagining the first person perspective of another may be important for responding rationally to disagreement, and may give disagreement some other kind of epistemic significance than simply lowering or maintaining confidence in one’s judgment. First, following Kant, I argue that the first person has special importance for judging beauty; we want to judge a thing’s beauty for ourselves, and we want others to come to agree with us on the basis of their own experience. In that case, stepping back to the third person would remove us from the arena wherein we could find the kind of agreement we are looking for. This supports a ‘steadfast’ response to disagreement, but that alone is not enough. Judgments of beauty are made in the plural first person, a perspective that speaks for everyone in voicing my own pleasure. That means others are always relevant as first person perspectives who ought to feel and judge in community with me. I am under some rational pressure to help them see what they are missing when we disagree, and I will argue that this requires an imaginative effort to better understand their aesthetic experience ‘from the inside’. While our aim in this imagining is to correct one another, it simultaneously opens each of us to the possibility of unexpected insights that could revise our own judgments instead. On the two options given in the peer disagreement debate, there doesn’t seem to be much room for the idea that I could both maintain confidence in my judgment and continue to take the other’s disagreement to have epistemic significance. I argue that this combination is possible and appropriate for beauty, for in that case it is the very confidence I have in my judgment that motivates me to try to imaginatively understand the other, and opens me to the epistemic vulnerability that comes with such an exercise.

Keywords: Aesthetics
Beauty
Disagreement
Epistemology
First Person
Kant
Advisor: Sedivy, Sonia
Rattan, Gurpreet
The Development of Surface Profile Models in Abrasive Slurry Jet Micro-machining of Brittle and Ductile materials

In low-pressure abrasive slurry jet micro-machining (ASJM), a slurry jet of fine abrasive particles is used to erode micro-sized features such as holes and channels in a variety of brittle and ductile materials with a high degree of accuracy and repeatability without the need for a patterned mask. ASJM causes no tool wear and thermal damage, applies small forces on the workpiece, allows multilevel etching on a single substrate and is relatively quick and inexpensive. In this study for the first time, the mechanics of micro-slurry jet erosion and its relation to the fluid flow of the impinging jet was investigated using a newly developed ASJM system. Existing surface evolution models, previously developed for abrasive air jet machining (AJM), were evaluated and modified through the use of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models for profile modeling of micro-channels and micro-holes machined with ASJM in brittle materials. A novel numerical-empirical model was also developed in order to compensate for the shortcoming of existing surface evolution models and provide a higher degree of accuracy in predicting the profiles of features in ductile materials machined with ASJM. In addition, the effect of process parameters on the minimum feature size attainable with ASJM as a maskless process was also examined and it was shown that the size of machined features could be further reduced.

Keywords: abrasive slurry jet micro-machining (ASJM)
micro-machining
solid particle erosion
Advisor: Spelt, Jan K.
Papini, Marcello
Strain-rate Dependent Fracture Load Prediction of Lead-free Solder Joints

The critical strain energy release rate at crack initiation, Jci, has been shown to govern the fracture of short solder joints. The present work measured Jci for 2 mm long SAC305 solder joints as a function of the strain rate and phase angle using DCB specimens. A drop tester was designed and built to perform the experiments at higher strain rates. Jci increased about 70% from quasi-static to strain rates of 0.05-1 s-1 (intermediate strain rates), and then decreased by more than 67% from intermediate strain rates to 42 s-1. In the all strain rate regimes, Jci substantially increased with the phase angle. Next, the effects of five significant processing parameters on Jci were investigated. Jci was found to be only a weak function of the solder composition, time above liquidus, and aging. The effects of solder thickness and local end geometry were found to be significant only at the higher strain rates. To investigate the discrepancy in fracture behavior of solder joints between DCB and Arcan specimens, Jci was measured using both of these specimens. Jci values obtained from Arcan-type specimens were much smaller than those obtained from DCB specimens. The modeling showed that the differences in the degree of constraint and plastic dissipation in the solder layers of these two specimens were responsible for this large difference. Finally, BGA test vehicles were assembled and prepared in different geometries. The specimens were loaded at two strain-rate regimes. A strain-rate dependent mode I cohesive zone model (CZM) was shown to be sufficient to predict the fracture load of these joints. Two different modeling approaches were used: the first method utilized mode I Jci obtained from the 2 mm model DCB specimens as the fracture energy in the CZM and the peak traction was calibrated using the calibration specimen; in the second approach, the peak traction was assumed to be the solder yield stress at the corresponding strain rate regime and the mode I fracture energy was obtained using the calibration specimen. The predicted fracture loads obtained from both methods were in reasonable agreement with the measured forces.

Advisor: Spelt, Jan K
Compact Discrete Representations for Scalable Similarity Search

Scalable similarity search on images, documents, and user activities benefits generic search, data visualization, and recommendation systems. This thesis concerns the design of algorithms and machine learning tools for faster and more accurate similarity search. The proposed techniques advocate the use of discrete codes for representing the similarity structure of data in a compact way. In particular, we will discuss how one can learn to map high-dimensional data onto binary codes with a metric learning approach. Then, we will describe a simple algorithm for fast exact nearest neighbor search in Hamming distance, which exhibits sub-linear query time performance. Going beyond binary codes, we will highlight a compositional generalization of k-means clustering which maps data points onto integer codes with storage and search costs that grow sub-linearly in the number of cluster centers. This representation improves upon binary codes, and provides an even more precise approximation of Euclidean distance. Experimental results are reported on multiple datasets including a dataset of SIFT descriptors with 1B entries.

Keywords: Big data
Clustering
Hashing
Machine Learning
Nearest neighbor search
Similarity search
Advisor: Fleet, David J
Teaching to Learn and Reciprocal Learning Among Associate Teachers in French as a Second Language Teaching Environments: A Multiple Case Study

French as a Second Language (FSL) teachers in Canada have historically faced deficits in pre-service and in-service professional learning opportunities intended to prepare them for the unique demands of their profession. As definitions of teacher professional learning expand to include informal and non-formal learning experiences, this multiple case study explores the potential of one heretofore underutilized source of professional learning to respond to such deficits. The research applies a Complexity framework to teacher learning (Davis Sumara, 2005) and language teaching (Larsen-Freeman Cameron, 2008) to study the reciprocal learning that associate teachers (ATs) experience when mentoring teacher candidates (TCs). These dynamic learning relationships are nested within the many systems in which ATs work and learn. Data collected from mind-maps, logs and semi-structured interviews with ATs (n=7) working in elementary and secondary Core French and French Immersion contexts was triangulated within and across cases. Findings show that the participants view the experience of being an AT as an integral contributor to their professional learning. ATs report that mentoring TCs motivates them to explore and apply current theory and refine both their practice and the articulation of that practice. Enhanced pursuit of self-identified learning goals, reinforcement of existing strengths and accentuated implementation of Ontario Ministry of Education initiatives are among the professional growth experiences that participants linked to their work as ATs. Implications call for educational institutions and regulatory bodies to accord increased recognition for the act of mentoring future teachers as a powerful source of ongoing professional learning and a catalyst for wide-reaching improvement in education.

Keywords: Complexity Theory
French as a Second Language
Mentorship
reciprocal learning
Teacher Education
teacher professional learning
Advisor: Piccardo, Enrica