VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Frontline Measures: Evaluating HIV Prevention at AIDS Service Organizations

A key component in the response to HIV is the delivery of prevention programs by community-based organizations, especially those that reach communities most affected by the epidemic. The effectiveness of these programs remains hard to determine. In Ontario, there have been a number of efforts to support AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) with research and evaluation. Yet issues regarding evaluation and decision-making continue to pervade HIV prevention work, and this remains an area that is not widely researched. In order to expand understanding of HIV prevention program evaluation, I carried out a qualitative case study of two ASOs in Ontario and their HIV prevention program monitoring and evaluating (M) practices. Employing a constructivist approach, I conducted in-depth interviews with 23 ASO managers, staff, volunteers, and government funders, and reviewed approximately 100 documents. A Community Reference Group which included policymakers and people living with HIV provided advice on key stages of the research process.Despite differences in size of the organizations, there were common M practices: discrete one-time evaluations, routine monitoring, and tacit assessments. The ways in which these informed each other was complex. Tacit knowledge was drawn upon to make explicit information derived from M required by government funders meaningful. Overall, relationships were an important theme: relationships were an important indicator of programmatic success; and M practices were important in maintaining relationships between organizations and their funders. Accountability to government funders required M that was different than what was needed to maintain relationships with the communities these organizations served.A deeper understanding of M practices at ASOs can contribute to responses to the `evidence-based practice' movement. This research describes community-based discernment strategies that shed light on the knowledge-building processes in communities, which is an important part of `practice-based' and `community-defined' evidence. The lessons learned in this research may be a resource for evaluators, policymakers, and other stakeholders in HIV prevention.

Keywords: Evaluation
Health Promotion
HIV/AIDS
Prevention
Advisor: Cockerill, Rhonda
The Quality of Dying and Death in Advanced Cancer from the Perspective of Bereaved Caregivers

There were two main research goals of this project: 1) to increase the interpretability of quality of dying and death measures by exploring how respondents generate their evaluations; and 2) to measure the quality of dying and death in advanced cancer patients and consider the influence of specialized palliative care and place of death on this outcome.To understand how respondents evaluate dying and death, 22 caregivers of deceased cancer patients were asked to take part in a cognitive interview protocol after formulating the 31 quality ratings that contribute to the total Quality of Dying and Death (QODD) questionnaire score. Qualitative content analysis was applied to transcribed interviews. Results suggested that evaluations were based on multiple different perspectives and standards of comparison. Findings highlighted that the family should be the targeted unit of end-of-life care and attention should be paid to helping families anticipate and prepare for the realities of the dying process. To measure the quality of dying and death of patients with cancer and examine its relationship to receipt of palliative care and place of death, 402 caregivers of deceased cancer patients were interviewed with the QODD. Overall quality of dying and death was rated in the "neither good nor bad" to "almost perfect" range by 99.8% of caregivers. The lowest QODD subscale scores assessed symptom control and transcendence over death-related concerns. Multivariate analyses revealed that late or no specialized palliative care was associated with poorer death preparation and that home deaths were associated with better symptom control, death preparation, and overall quality of dying and death. Findings suggested that while home death was best, institutional deaths could also be of good quality, and also highlighted that symptom control and death-related distress are areas most in need of clinical attention. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the quality of dying and death construct, how it is evaluated, and the significant although small influence of location and palliative care on this outcome. Future directions include examination of quality of dying and death in other settings and the development of interventions that specifically target death-related distress.

Keywords: Bereavement
Cancer
End of life
Palliative Care
Quality of death
Advisor: Rodin, Gary
Quantitative Analysis of Acoustic Emission From Rock Fracture Experiments

This thesis aims to advance the methods of quantitative acoustic emission (AE) analysis by calibrating sensors, characterizing sources, and applying the results to solve engi- neering problems. In the first part of this thesis, we built a calibration apparatus and successfully calibrated two commercial AE sensors. The ErgoTech sensor was found to have broadband velocity sensitivity and the Panametrics V103 was sensitive to surface normal displacement. These calibration results were applied to two AE data sets from rock fracture experiments in order to characterize the sources of AE events. The first data set was from an in situ rock fracture experiment conducted at the Underground Research Laboratory (URL). The Mine-By experiment was a large scale excavation re- sponse test where both AE (10 kHz - 1 MHz) and microseismicity (MS) (1 Hz - 10 kHz) were monitored. Using the calibration information, magnitude, stress drop, dimension and energy were successfully estimated for 21 AE events recorded in the tensile region of the tunnel wall. Magnitudes were in the range -7.5

Keywords: acoustic emission
geophysics
non destructive testing
rock mechanics
seismology
ultrasonics
Advisor: Young, Paul
Telling Stories of Food, Community and Meaningful Lives in Post-1945 North Bay, Ontario

"Telling Stories of Food, Community and Meaningful Lives" uses the memories of nearly seventy women who lived in northern Ontario during the post-1945 period. These women represent a diverse cross-section of the population including English- and Franco-Ontarians, European immigrants as well as Anishinaabe and Métis peoples. Although northern Ontario has been understood as a white and masculine space, this project provides a corrective narrative by uniting the food stories of Euro-Canadian and Indigenous women to consider cross-cultural perspectives, inter-relationships as well as complex racial, colonial and religious dynamics. This project largely argues that women from diverse backgrounds used food to negotiate the physical, cultural and ideological spaces they inhabited. For these women, food and its related activities became a critical site for identity formation and a sense of belonging but also a source of fear, loneliness, exclusion and discrimination.Each chapter is organized to examine a facet of women's food experiences. Chapter 1 analyzes how the North and northern Ontario impacted the availability and cost of food, and the strategies women used to ensure they obtained food including berry-picking, hunting and fishing. In chapter 2, I combine women's memories and cooking literature to consider the ways women learned to cook as well as the imaginative, transformative and healing elements of preparing dishes. Chapter 3 discusses the complex connections between food and family relationships, as episodes of familial happiness were recalled alongside those of struggle, neglect and abuse. Chapter 4 looks at the consumption of food-related items and technologies as the fulfillment of creativity, desires and cultural norms as well as a symbolic movement away from the pains and struggles of their past. And finally, chapter 5 investigates the community building and interactions centered on the making, eating and sharing of food.

Keywords: community
food studies
northern Ontario
oral history and memory
women and gender
Advisor: Iacovetta, Franca
Policy Change, Public Benefit, and the Charities Act 2006 - A Case of the Emperor's New Clothes?

This thesis analyses the policy-making processes leading to the Charities Act 2006 that introduced a renewed focus on the "public benefit" that charities need to provide. It addresses the empirical puzzle why a period of over 400 years of stability in the definition of charitable status ended in 2006 and what factors caused the charity reform that culminated in the 2006 Act. The discussion centres on the two most affected groups of charities, which are fee-charging education and healthcare charities. For this purpose, the thesis compares two radical change theories, i.e. punctuated equilibrium theory (Baumgartner et al., 2011) and path dependency (Pierson, 2000a), and evaluates how they perform against the alternative account of gradual transformation theory (Streeck and Thelen, 2005). Empirical evidence is presented for each of the key stakeholders, the government, the charitable sector, the legal community, and the media. Throughout, the thesis adopts an interdisciplinary multi-method research outlook, including a specifically designed survey, systematic review, statistical analysis, content analysis and archival research. These data are corroborated through in-depth elite interviews with key personalities who were involved in the charity policy reform process. The "crucial case study" (Eckstein, 2009) is then juxtaposed to the parallel Scottish charity policy reform, leading to the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005, to corroborate the findings. In the light of the evidence, the thesis concludes that policy change theories need to differentiate between the concept of legal and political change in order to provide meaningful explanations. Moreover, it finds that welfare state traditions play a key role in charity policy change and that the English Charities Act 2006 is a further instance of the increased judicialisation of politics and the politicisation of judicial bodies. On a theoretical level, the thesis introduces a classification of change at different stages of the policy process.

Keywords: Charities Act 2006
Charity Law
Judicialisation of Politics
Policy Reform
Public Benefit
Advisor: Nevitte, Neil
Absent Mandate? The Role of Positional Issues in Canadian Elections

Positional issues are political issues that generate disagreement among citizens and divide the electorate. Voting theories conventionally assume that positional issues have little effect on how individuals vote and that parties have little incentive to develop issue-based electoral strategies. Such a characterization of electoral dynamics is particularly prevalent in Canada. An enduring view holds that Canadian parties engage in "brokerage politics" wherein they avoid taking clear policy stances in order to avoid alienating segments of a fragmented electorate.This thesis challenges the conventional characterization of Canadian electoral dynamics by revisiting the role and impact of positional issues on electoral strategy. First, the results show that once measure- ment accuracy is improved and the heterogeneity of issue effects is taken into consideration, positional issues have non-negligible effects on individual vote choice. Second, the thesis demonstrates that the behaviour of Canadian political parties does not fully correspond to the brokerage party model. Parties can and do engage in behaviour prescribed by political marketing theory, to which positional issues are central. Positional issues are at the core of an exchange between citizens who care about a small set of issues and political parties who target these citizens using micro-campaigns. Ultimately, this thesis shows that political parties can use positional issues to increase their room for electoral manoeuvre.

Keywords: Party behaviour
Political information
Political marketing
Voting behaviour
Advisor: Nevitte, Neil
Behavioural Ecology of Lake Trout: From Movement Ecology to Bioenergetics

The movement patterns of most organisms are directed to maximizing the success of habitat exploitation, which can be quantified by examining population-level parameters such as size and age at maturity, and the population bioenergetics. Similarly, the behavioural decisions of organisms are influenced and regulated by abiotic and biotic variables. For example, in temperate aquatic organisms such as fish, habitat use is limited by environmental conditions such as temperature and dissolved oxygen concentration, but also biotic variables like prey type, quantity and quality influence the habitat selection. This research investigates the behavioural movements of Lake Trout (Salvelinus namaycush), a top predator fish, in four lakes that differ in the prey community that support them. The study was completed using a relatively new telemetry-transmitter that measures acceleration on two axes of the fish body; providing an added possibility for studying the bioenergetics of this species. This thesis is divided into three main studies. First, a calibration of the acceleration-transmitters to use it as proxy of energy expenditure in this species was completed. Laboratory and field-based experiments were performed to validate the use of this type of transmitter, and they demonstrated that transmitter-reported acceleration, fish swimming speed, and oxygen consumption increased in parallel, supporting previous findings on the topic. Second, the vertical movement of Lake Trout associated to the known distribution of their prey was examined in the four lakes of interest. The patterns of diel movement were well explained when the distribution of prey was considered. The data showed evidence that Lake Trout are able to track the diel vertical movement of their prey, which would provide a metabolic advantage. Third, the bioenergetics of the four lake-populations were assessed and associated to the quality of prey. In general, Lake Trout were found to swim more actively in lakes where their prey is small and frequently located outside their preferred habitat of cold and well-oxygenated waters. Lakes with pelagic prey fishes, which are the preferred prey for Lake Trout, showed the lowest values of swimming activity, and highest proportion of time spent inactive. In general, this study provided evidence supporting the hypothesis that Lake Trout behavioural movements are associated with the food web composition of the lakes where they live.

Keywords: behaviour
bioenergetics
Lake Trout
movement
telemetry
Advisor: Shuter, Brian J
Jackson, Donald A
Branch Growth and Crown Dynamics in Northern Hardwood Forests

The canopy is one of the last frontiers of forest research, due to the difficulty of gaining direct access to tree crowns, and the difficulty of identifying and measuring individual tree crowns from a distance. These challenges have limited our understanding of both tree growth and stand dynamics. This thesis examines ontogenetic trends in the diameter growth of tree trunks and radial growth of tree crowns, using a combination of ground-based inventory data and in-situ measurements taken from a mobile canopy lift. The main goal was to determine whether and why growth declines once trees reach the canopy. The inventory data revealed that both diameter and crown growth rates follow a hump-shaped trend, and that the crown area of many large trees shrank over time, suggesting that the decline in expansion rates is the net effect of declining growth and increasing dieback. The in-situ measurements confirmed that dieback increases with tree size, suggesting that tree sway increases as trees grow larger, resulting in more frequent collisions between neighboring crowns. Indeed, dieback was higher in tree crowns located within 3 m of another crown, confirming that dieback is in part the result of inter-crown collisions. In-situ measurements of lateral branch growth were also taken before and after gap formation to examine species- and size-specific responses to canopy disturbance. Yellow birch did not respond significantly to gap formation, but sugar maple and beech did. On the other hand, small trees responded more to gap formation than large trees. Following release, small trees grew faster than large trees, but lateral growth did not vary with branch length or tree height, suggesting that growth declines due to increased reproduction, rather than increased support costs or hydraulic limitation. Indeed, in-situ measurements confirmed that large trees that produced a lot of seeds grew less than small trees that produced few seeds. Overall, this research indicates that disturbance acts in concert with declining growth and increased dieback to offset the size-asymmetry of light competition, favoring small trees that can grow laterally to exploit light in canopy gaps, as well as web of narrow spaces between crowns of canopy trees.

Advisor: Caspersen, John
Performance Spectra-based Design Methodology for Buildings Equipped with Supplemental Dampers

This thesis presents the development of the Performance Spectra-based Design Methodology, which is a direct performance-based design methodology for supplemental damping systems in low to medium-rise frame structures. The first few chapters of the thesis present the formulation of a powerful design tool called Performance Spectra (P-Spectra) as well as how the information obtained from the P-Spectra can be used to directly assess, optimize and generate designs that approximately meet pre-determined performance goals for multiple levels of seismic hazards. The theoretical developments are validated using extensive nonlinear time-history analysis of SDOF and MDOF systems equipped with hysteretic and viscous-viscoelastic damping systems. Furthermore, the P-Spectra methodology is extended to more advance damping systems and validated using numerical analyses and real-time hybrid tests. Applications of the method to the design of realistic frame structures show that the proposed P-Spectra methodology enables designers to directly generate supplemental damping designs that approximately meet the targeted performance without any design iterations and is hence invaluable to practicing engineers who wish to perform seismic upgrades using supplemental damping systems.

Keywords: Nonlinear Dyanmics
Passive Supplemental Dampers
Performance-based Design
Performance Spectra
Seismic Upgrade
Advisor: Christopoulos, Constantin
Applications of Effective Field Theory Techniques to Jet Physics

In this thesis we study jet production at large energies from leptonic collisions. We use the framework of effective theories of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) to examine the properties of jets and systematically improve calculations.We first develop a new formulation of soft-collinear effective theory (SCET), the appropriate effective theory for jets. In this formulation, soft and collinear degrees of freedom are described using QCD fields that interact with each other through light-like Wilson lines in external currents. This formulation gives a more intuitive picture of jet processes than the traditional formulation of SCET. In particular, we show how the decoupling of soft and collinear degrees of freedom that occurs at leading order in power counting is explicit to next-to-leading order and likely beyond. We then use this formulation to write the thrust rate in a factorized form at next-to-leading order in the thrust parameter. The rate involves an incomplete sum over final states due to phase space cuts that is enforced by a measurement operator. Subleading corrections require matching onto not only the next-to-next-to leading order SCET operators, but also matching onto subleading measurement operators. We derive the appropriate hard, jet, and soft functions and show they reproduce the expected subleading thrust rate.Next, we renormalize the next-to-leading order dijet operators used for the subleading thrust rate. Constraints on matching coefficients from current conservation and reparametrization invariance are shown. We also discuss the subtleties involved in regulating the infrared divergences of the individual loop diagrams in order to extract the ultraviolet divergences. The results can be used to increase the theoretical precision of the thrust rate.Finally, we study the (exclusive) k_perp and C/A jet algorithms in SCET. Regularizing the virtualites and rapidities of the individual graphs, we are able to write the order(\alpha_s) dijet cross section as the product of separate hard, jet, and soft contributions. We show how to reproduce the Sudakov form factor to next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy previously calculated by the coherent branching formalism. Our result only depends on the running of the hard function, and we comment that regularizing rapidities is not necessary in this case.

Keywords: Effective Field Theory
Quantum Chromodynamics
Advisor: Luke, Michael
Exploiting the Productivity of C4 Photosynthesis in Cool Temperate Climates: Mechanisms and Thresholds of Cold Tolerance in Miscanthus, Saccharum, and Spartina pectinata

Perennial grasses that use the C4 photosynthetic pathway are the best choice for terrestrial bioenergy and can help mitigate climate change. Much of the marginal land available for bioenergy occurs in cool temperate climates at high latitudes. To be productive in cool temperate climates, C4 perennial grasses must successfully overwinter the first growing season and produce leaves that tolerate spring chilling and frosts to harness the long photoperiods. Although there is nothing inherently cold sensitive about the C4 pathway, cold tolerant C4 grasses are rare and the additional C4 cycle and architecture introduce more potentially cold sensitive sites. In addition, the C4 cycle imposes a greater restriction in demand for energy and may predispose C4 grasses to chronic photoinhibition. Miscanthus x giganteus is a highly productive C4 perennial grass in cool temperate climates that is a model of photosynthetic chilling tolerance. Miscanthus is closely related to Saccharum a C4 genus that includes commercial sugarcane and energycane. Although M. x giganteus is chilling tolerant, it shows little tolerance of subzero temperatures with reports of winterkill in some cold climates. Spartina pectinata is a C4 perennial grass native to North America with a distribution up to 61°N latitude. The purpose of this thesis is to compare cold tolerance thresholds across these C4 perennial grasses and test hypotheses about the underlying physiology. First, this thesis demonstrates that M. x giganteus and another triploid Miscanthus hybrid have superior photosynthetic chilling tolerance over other Miscanthus hybrids and Saccharum genotypes. Across these genotypes, chronic photoinhibition or photoinactivation is closely associated with chilling sensitivity of net CO2 assimilation rate. Next, a more detailed investigation comparing M. x giganteus with the most chilling sensitive Miscanthus hybrid reveals Rubisco is the predominant limitation on net CO2 assimilation rate at cooler temperatures. Finally, this thesis compares the overwintering capacity, seasonal rhizome freezing tolerance, and leaf frost tolerance of S. pectinata and M. x giganteus in a first year field plot. Spartina pectinata shows greater overwinter survival and a fall/winter lethal temperature threshold of -24°C compared to -4°C for M. x giganteus, as well as greater spring leaf frost tolerance.

Keywords: Bioenergy
C4 Photosynthesis
Miscanthus
Perennial Grasses
Plant Cold Tolerance
Plant Physiological Ecology
Advisor: Sage, Rowan F