VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Investigating the effects of lesson study

Research has implicated teacher knowledge and beliefs as obstacles hindering efforts to reform mathematics instruction. Recently, sonic North American teachers have adopted Japanese lesson study despite the absence of research on the effectiveness or the mechanisms of lesson study. A model explicating possible mechanisms of lesson study was developed and examined qualitatively by analysing four teachers' lesson study sessions and pre and post-knowledge and interviews. All four teachers demonstrated increased mathematical understanding and knowledge of student understandings. Two teachers provided evidence of integrating some reform mathematics practices into their classroom, with corresponding changes in beliefs about mathematics and learning. Joint planning with rich mathematical problems helped teachers build their mathematical understanding and knowledge of student conceptions. Jointly observing lessons expanded the teachers' knowledge of student understandings often changing the teachers' understanding of the mathematics. Changes in beliefs and working knowledge of new teaching strategies developed indirectly from other changes.
Child protection and the discursive construction of the pedophile: genealogical investigations

In this thesis, I make use of genealogy to investigate the social construction of a moral panic surrounding the sexual abuse of children. The focus of my work is the discursive construction of the "pedophile." I wish to investigate how the figure of the pedophile serves as a catalyst and engine for multiple social effects that impact on our understanding of issues surrounding child protection, sexual abuse, families, policing, and human sexuality, to name a few. I will focus on the emergence and operation of discourses of the pedophile as a "constitutive outside" to dominant discourses of the social and the family. Representations of the abject subject that is the pedophile also serve as a nodal point for social anxieties which become concentrated and telescoped onto particular social actors. This thesis is an attempt to make some space for critical examinations of a set of social and discursive practices that assemble an image of the pedophile and the threat it signifies. I hope this thesis will serve as a way to expose the ideological work behind our culture's maintenance of this figure, and to point to some of the effects that particular configurations of knowledge about pedophilia authorize with respect to the management of this phenomena.

Keywords: Child molesters
Pedophilia
Children and sex
Joint transmit-receive linear optimization for multiuser MIMO wireless comunications

Proposals for 4G wireless communications technologies demand drastic capacity increases and performance improvements. These needs can be satisfied by taking advantage of the structure of channels in systems with multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver. This thesis uses spatial multiplexing and diversity techniques at the transmitter and receiver to increase capacity and to improve reliability. Many existing techniques apply only to the single-user domain; in this thesis, we consider two iterative approaches in the multiuser downlink. These methods attempt to minimize total mean squared error while providing increased data throughput. One approach approximates the problem as a series of single-user subproblems; the other uses a numerical approach for gradient descent. Both solutions focus on low-complexity linear transformations at the transmitter and receiver to satisfy implementation requirements. The proposed methods provide improved performance and increased flexibility of system design when compared to existing multiuser techniques.
Effects of near-ambient utlraviolet-B radiation on seedling tolerance of extreme temperatures

Ultraviolet-B radiation (UVB, 280–320nm) induces many plant defense compounds, including phenols. This study tested the hypothesis that UVB may precondition seedlings against temperature extremes. The effects of a prior treatment with low, ambient or twice-ambient levels of UVB on high and low temperature tolerance were investigated in cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) and two conifer species: jack pine (Pinus banksiana Lamb.) and black spruce (Picea mariana Mill., BSP). Exposure to UVB increased the accumulation of UV-absorbing phenols in all species. Low and ambient levels of UVB enhanced heat tolerance in cucumber. This was demonstrated by the decline in Membrane Injury Index (MII), improved survival and faster recovery of stressed seedlings. In contrast, twice-ambient levels of UVB increased lipid peroxidation and the plants became more heat-sensitive. UVB pretreatment reduced needle browning in black spruce and MII in both conifer seedlings when they were challenged by a later heat and freezing stress. A logistic model was developed to describe MII response to a range of stress temperatures. MII varied depending on the UVB dose, exposure duration and type of stress. A longer exposure to low and ambient levels of UVB was more effective in reducing MII, compared to a higher dose or a shorter exposure. Such a reduction in MII was more pronounced during freezing than under heat stress. Phenylalanine-ammonia-lyase (PAL) inhibitor, 2-amainoindan-2-phosphonic acid (AIP), suppressed the accumulation of phenolic compounds in UVB irradiated jack pine seedling. This, in turn, diminished the ability of UVB pretreatment to reduce MII under freezing temperatures. A functioning phenol biosynthetic pathway was, therefore, essential for UVB to induce frost hardening. These results suggest that at lower doses, UVB increases stress tolerance by promoting phenol production in plants. UVB pretreatment also improved survival and biomass accumulation in black spruce, although not in jack pine, when the seedlings were transplanted to a boreal clear-cut in northern Ontario. Given the deficiency of ambient UVB in most greenhouses, supplemental UVB may be used to harden seedlings before they are transplanted into the field.
The Metis of the northwest: towards a definition of a rights-bearing community for a mobile people

In R. v. Powley, the first Métis harvesting rights case to reach the Supreme Court of Canada, the Métis rights-bearing group was defined as a group of people living together in a stable and continuous community in the same geographic area. This thesis argues that the test is wrong on the facts and in law. On the facts, it is inconsistent with the historic Métis society, which was highly mobile over a very large territory. In law, the test is wrong because it is not necessary to prove occupation in order to prove harvesting rights. Proving the existence of a stable and continuous community requires proof of occupation. The court's test requires Métis to identify fictional communities and prove that they are a historic and continuing fact.
Bethe free energy and contrastive divergence approximations for undirected graphical models

As the machine learning community tackles more complex and harder problems, the graphical models needed to solve such problems become larger and more complicated. As a result performing inference and learning exactly for such graphical models become ever more expensive, and approximate inference and learning techniques become ever more prominent. There are a variety of techniques for approximate inference and learning in the literature. This thesis contributes some new ideas in the products of experts (PoEs) class of models (Hinton, 2002), and the Bethe free energy approximations (Yedidia et al., 2001). For PoEs, our contribution is in developing new PoE models for continuous-valued domains. We developed RBMrate, a model for discretized continuous-valued data. We applied it to face recognition to demonstrate its abilities. We also developed energy-based models (EBMs)—flexible probabilistic models where the building blocks consist of energy terms computed using a feed-forward network. We show that standard square noiseless independent components analysis (ICA) (Bell and Sejnowski, 1995) can be viewed as a restricted form of EBMs. Extending this relationship with ICA, we describe sparse and over-complete representations of data where the inference process is trivial since it is simply an EBM. For Bethe free energy approximations, our contribution is a theory relating belief propagation and iterative scaling. We show that both belief propagation and iterative scaling updates can be derived as fixed point equations for constrained minimization of the Bethe free energy. This allows us to develop a new algorithm to directly minimize the Bethe free energy, and to apply the Bethe free energy to learning in addition to inference. We also describe improvements to the efficiency of standard learning algorithms for undirected graphical models (Jiroušek and Přeučil, 1995).
A study of the principles and practices of community based vocational rehabilitation and its implications for Ethiopia

This study investigates the conceptual frameworks for understanding disability and strategies for vocational rehabilitation of people with disabilities from various world perspectives. It examines the state of rehabilitation of persons with disabilities in Ethiopia. The thesis argues that institutional based rehabilitation has not proved to be a sufficient strategy for rehabilitation, while on the other hand community based rehabilitation is in many ways a better strategy for rehabilitation of people with disabilities in Ethiopia. The study covers the most pressing issues of disability rehabilitation with a special focus on vocational rehabilitation and establishes theoretical grounds or guidelines for choosing between community based rehabilitation and institutional based rehabilitation. Finally, the thesis suggests strategies for addressing disability issues, and models for planning, establishing, managing and evaluating vocational rehabilitation services as part of the community based rehabilitation programs in Ethiopia.

Keywords: Vocational rehabilitation, Ethiopia
Comparison of MDO architectures within a universal framework

A new MDO framework has been developed in Python to provide an ideal platform for comparisons relating the performance of various MDO architectures. Specifically, it eliminates the need for reformulation while solving MDO problems in multiple disciplines. Once a problem has been implemented, its solution can be obtained from any architecture present in the framework. In addition to providing a performance comparison of the more common architectures, the modular design of the framework allows rapid testing of newly developed architectures. Results generated from this study provide a strong foundation for identifying the performance trends of various architectures with a variety of problem classes.
Experience in early childhood education programs and later school adjustment: the role of parent involvement

This study reports on the long-term impact of a parenting and school readiness program on children's academic achievement when the children were 7 to 9 years of age. Children who attended the program had their current academic records compared with children who had other types of early childhood education experience. The program's impact on parents' sense of efficacy, perceived role in their children's education, and level of involvement was investigated via a questionnaire using scales developed by Kathleen Hoover-Dempsey and colleagues, and by Epstein, Salinas and Horsey (1994). Analyses examined whether previous participation in the program is associated with high levels of parent involvement and whether involvement is associated with high levels of academic achievement in children. Analyses also examined relations among parent involvement constructs and determined whether the relations, found by Reed, Hoover-Dempsey and Flynn (2001) are the same for the multi-ethnic sample in this study.

Keywords: Parenting, Study and teaching
Parenting, Ontario
Education, Parent participation
Education, Ontario
Readiness for school, Ontario
Academic achievement, Ontario
Early childhood education, Parent participation
Early childhood education, Ontario
Molecular genetics of malignant brain tumours in children

The study of familial tumour syndromes has revealed the underlying mechanisms of more common sporadic neoplasms; this is best illustrated by familial retinoblastoma. Familial syndromes have been described in which affected individuals are at increased risk of developing medulloblastoma and/or supratentorial primitive neuroectodermal tumours. Determination of the underlying genetic defects in these families has revealed genes and signal transduction pathways important in central nervous system (CNS) neoplasia. We have characterized the molecular genetics of two genes which are associated with brain tumours in children. In the first case, we identified a family with multiple pediatric brain tumours, including CNS rhabdoid tumour and choroid plexus carcinoma. Renal and CNS rhabdoid tumours show LOH at chromosome 22q11. The hSNF5/INI1 gene on chromosome 22q11 acts as a tumour-suppressor gene (TSG) in renal rhabdoid tumours. We describe a family in which affected and some unaffected family members have a germline truncating mutation of hSNF5/INI1. Tumour tissue shows loss of the wild-type hSNF5/INI1 allele, in keeping with a TSG. These findings suggest that germline mutations in hSNF5/INI1 are associated with a novel autosomal dominant syndrome with incomplete penetrance that predisposes to malignant pediatric brain tumours. The second gene participates in the Hedgehog (Hh) and WNT/wingless signaling pathways that direct the embryonic development of diverse organisms and are disrupted in a variety of malignancies. We identified germline and sporadic mutations in the human Suppressor of Fused (HSUFU ) gene in children with medulloblastoma. The mutations predict truncated proteins that are unable to export the GLI (Hh) or β-catenin (WNT) oncogenes from the nucleus to the cytoplasm, resulting in the activation of both pathways. HSUFU is a newly identified TSG that predisposes to medulloblastoma by modulating the Hh and WNT signaling pathways via a novel mechanism of action. Drosophila Costal-2 is a downstream inhibitor of Hh signaling. Costal-2 mutant embryos are virtual phenocopies of ptc mutant embryos. While both Gorlin syndrome and desmoplastic medulloblastoma map to chromosome 9q, they often are not found to have PTCH mutations. We have cloned a family of mammalian kinesin-like genes highly homologous to costal-2. hCOSTAL-2a maps to chromosome 9q21, making it a putative candidate TSG.
The construction of the Embodiment Scale for Women

This study involved the construction and initial psychometric test of the Embodiment Scale for Women (ESW). The ESW is designed to assess both the state of embodiment, as well as the social experiences that contribute to either connection (embodiment) or disconnection (disembodiment) from the body, in young women. In the first stage of the study, items were developed from transcripts and reports obtained from an earlier qualitative study that described several young women's experiences of living in their bodies. Items were developed to assess a woman's level of physical freedom, mental freedom, social power, connection to others, and overall level, or state, of embodiment. In the second stage, a sample of 92 women completed the ESW and other measures of health and well being to test the psychometric properties of the ESW. Results showed support for both the reliability and construct validity of the ESW.
Variational theory for two-fluid hydrodynamic modes in trapped Fermi gases

Strongly interacting two-component Fermi gases have become a powerful tool for studying many-body physics. The interactions between the components can be varied widely, allowing the full crossover from BCS to BEC superfluids to be explored. In the strong interaction region at unitarity, the behaviour of the system becomes independent of microscopic details of the interaction. Hence, these Fermi gases can be used as a testing ground for microscopic theories of strongly-interacting Fermi matter. We propose that the out-of-phase two-fluid modes can be excited and measured in a two-photon Bragg scattering experiment, which measures the density response function. We investigate the structure of the two-fluid density response function at unitarity within our variational approach. The out-of-phase modes are found to have appreciable weight at intermediate temperatures in the superfluid phase and should be observable in Bragg scattering experiments. In this thesis, we study the Landau two-fluid hydrodynamic modes of a trapped Fermi gas superfluid, including the "out-of-phase" oscillations of the superfluid and normal fluid components. These modes are the analogue of second sound in superfluid 4He, and have so far not been observed in trapped Fermi gas superfluids. An important part of this thesis is the development of a new variational method of solving the two-fluid equations for gases confined in a harmonic trap. The solution of the resulting algebraic equations for the two-fluid mode frequencies requires detailed knowledge of the local thermodynamic quantities in a trap. In contrast to "classical" BCS and BEC superfluids such as 3He and 4He, both fermionic and bosonic thermal excitations contribute significantly to the thermodynamics close to unitarity. The fact that these excitations are coupled at finite temperatures means that one cannot write down simple expressions for thermodynamic quantities in terms of the spectrum of these excitations. Our calculations of thermodynamic quantities involve essentially ab initio calculations based on the microscopic theory developed by Nozieres and Schmitt-Rink, applied to a nonuniform trapped gas using a local density approximation.

Keywords: Condensed matter, Physics
Atoms
The production of nature in planning for urban expansion: A cultural landscape study of new urban growth in Oakville, Ontario

The city's edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. The visible, physical edge of rapidly urbanizing cities is emotionally charged, representing prosperity to some, and sprawl and environmental destruction to others. My dissertation is a cultural landscape study of city expansion at the edge of the Toronto-centred region, where urban growth pressures are as intense as anywhere in North America or Europe. My research reveals that ideas about the countryside are produced against the city, and these ideas are discussed in terms of ecology and natural heritage. This is a study of the cultural politics of the meaning of landscape in a contemporary planning process where local area planning comes face-to-face with the global environmental imagination. In the Town of Oakville, a wealthy suburb in the Toronto metropolitan area, a planning process to urbanize the last remaining countryside of the town has been underway for the past two decades. In the end, the decision to urbanize has been in lock-step with the decision to conserve: through the creation of a large natural heritage system (almost 900 hectares or more than 2,000 acres), fully one-third of the planning area, development of the remainder of the lands can take place. While pastoral ideas of the romantic countryside underlie the valuation of this landscape, representations of ecological sensitivity by environmental science were politically the most successful. Local area politics have undergone a revolution resulting from the negotiation over the future of this countryside. Using discourse analysis (text analysis of public planning process documents and popular media), participant observation of public meetings, and interviews with informants, my research reveals that cultural attitudes toward growth and conservation are informed by symbolic landscapes of country and city and these are implicated in the production of real landscapes and places. As planning practitioners and academics involved in the political process of shaping landscape change at the city's edge, it is difficult to represent those opinions of the public and other participants in the planning process that are not supported by scientific, empirical study. The lens of cultural landscape provides tools to understand and recognize cultural value, meaning and symbolism in edge landscapes and to engage with them in areas which are being planned for change.
Grid generation in iterative dynamic programming

In solving optimal control problems with iterative dynamic programming (IDP), frequently a single grid point can be used to establish very accurately the optimal control policy. There are some problems, however, that require the use of more than a single grid point. The efficiencies of evenly perturbed control policies (EPCPs) and randomly perturbed control policies (RPCPs) to generate the grid points are compared and the advantages of RPCPs over EPCPs are illustrated using four optimal control problems. The reliability of IDP in obtaining the optimum was greater with the use of RPCPs for grid generation. The computation times required to obtain the optimum with sufficient accuracy were reduced due to the reduction in the required number of grid points, control candidates and passes. The use of RPCPs was found to be more efficient in selecting the best range of penalty factors to handle the constraints and in solving very difficult problems than the use of EPCPs.
Triple fortification of salt with iodine, iron and vitamin A

Triple fortified salt with iodine, iron and vitamin A can simultaneously combat iodine, iron and vitamin A deficiency disorders, which collectively impacts over 3 billion people. The feasibility of incorporating the three micronutrients of iodine, iron and vitamin A into table salt was thus investigated in this study. The best formulation for triple fortification retained around 75% and 95% vitamin A and iodine, respectively, with around 5% iron conversion after 3 months of storage at 40°C and 100% relative humidity. The stable formulations consisted of 40% soy stearine encapsulated potassium iodide, ferrous fumarate and vitamin A durarome in the presence of antioxidant and stabilizer. Vitamin A palmitate was found to be the most stable form of vitamin A among vitamin A acetate, vitamin A palmitate and beta-carotene. The use of an antioxidant had a significant impact on improving the stability of vitamin A. 40% soy stearine encapsulated vitamin A palmitate degradation follows a zero-order kinetics.
The impact of collective efficacy on issue interpretation and strategic decision-making processes and outcomes

This dissertation examined possible relationships among group decision-making processes and outcomes, the interpretation of strategic issues, and collective efficacy. The relationship between collective efficacy and each of the seven steps of Janis' vigilant information processing model is hypothesized to be curvilinear, such that moderate efficacy is more likely to lead to adequate performance of each of the steps, relative to both low and high efficacy. A positive, linear relationship is further hypothesized to exist between collective efficacy and two issue interpretation variables, called positive-gain and controllability. A negative, linear relationship is also hypothesized to exist between collective efficacy and managerial perceptions of risk. These hypotheses, and others, were tested using 52 student groups participating in a business simulation that requires a strategic response to an industry deregulation. Results suggest that there is a curvilinear relationship between collective efficacy and several of the most important steps in an effective decision-making process, including the extent to which a decision-making group (a) identifies decision objectives, (b) generates a comprehensive list of alternatives, and (c) examines costs, risks, and benefits of the preferred option. Results also partially supported the relationship between collective efficacy and controllability, but are not consistent with a relationship between positive-gain perceptions or risk perceptions. Based on the results, the researcher argues that collective efficacy should be considered an important variable in strategic decision-making models.