VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Development of a haptic-robotic platform for moderate level upper-limb stroke rehabilitation

Reaching motion is important as it is the basic motion used for many activities of daily living, and in providing support and anchoring for other body movements (e.g., pushing down to help stand up or using the rails on stairs for support). However, this type of motor function is often lost when a person suffers a stroke or other neurological impairment. Consequently, we are proposing a haptic-enabled exercise system to assist therapists perform upper-limb reaching motion therapy for moderate-level stroke patients. This work will extend on existing knowledge by studying: (1) an anthropometrically inspired haptic exercise platform; (2) an unobtrusive upper-body postural sensing system; and (3) an elbow stimulation device. Trials with eight experienced therapists demonstrated that the proof-of-concept system is capable of delivering upper-limb reaching therapy. It was suggested that the project proceed to clinical trials for efficacy study.
A new approach for eye detection in remote gaze-estimation systems

Neural network and face symmetry algorithms were developed for eye detection and eye identification (i.e. left eye or right eye). A convolutional neural network (CNN) with six layers was designed and trained to detect and identify eyes in video images from a remote gaze estimation system. To improve the eye identification performance of the CNN, a face symmetry algorithm that is based on the symmetry of local facial features was designed and integrated with the CNN into a single structure. Experiments with 3 subjects showed that for the full range of expected head movements, the CNN achieved an eye detection rate of 95.2% with a false alarm rate of 2.65 × 10-4%. The combined CNN and face symmetry algorithm for eye identification achieved an identification rate of 99.4% with a rejection rate (i.e. eyes that cannot be identified) of 0.6%.
The role of Harakiri in the regulation of preimplantation embryo development

Bcl-2 family members are key determinants of cell fate during preimplantation development. We speculated that two known developmental insults, human tubal fluid medium (HTF) and hyperglycaemia, can alter Bcl-x splicing to produce pro-apoptotic Bcl-xS to counter anti-apoptotic Bcl-xL. We hypothesized that pro-apoptotic Hrk/DP5 will be induced to sequester Bcl-x L, further enhancing apoptotic signalling. Lastly, we hypothesized that Hrk/DP5-deficiency would improve embryo viability under normal and stress conditions. Hrk/DP5 wildtype and knockout ICR embryos were subjected to stress conditions. Developmental progression, Hrk/DP5 mRNA expression, Bcl-x splicing, and cell parameters were assessed. Our data suggest that Hrk/DP5 induction contributed to embryo demise triggered by HTF in vitro and hyperglycaemia in vivo. Alteration of Bcl-x splicing contributed to embryo demise induced by HTF and hyperglycaemia, both in vitro. Surprisingly, Hrk/DP5 deficiency severely impaired fertility under in vivo hyperglycaemic conditions. Overall, Hrk/DP5 contributes to preimplantation embryo developmental competence although further studies are required.
Effect of axial preloads on confined concrete

Specimens measuring 54 mm x 110 mm were used to conduct 110 triaxial tests. Experimental variables included unconfined concrete strength, lateral confining pressure, level of axial preload and load path. The concretes used had unconfined strengths of 36, 84 and 120 MPa. Confinements ranged between 0.05f'c and 0.4f' c and the axial preloads were as high as 0.8f' c. The effects of axial preloads on concrete prior to applying confinement are evaluated to determine whether columns subjected to significant axial loads should be retrofitted. Results of the testing program are used to analyze the expansion ratio (lateral strain to axial strain) under various conditions and to develop an analytical model. Results indicated that axial preloads up to 0.8f' c had no significant effect on performance at peak and only a minor effect on ductility. The expansion ratio had two unique behaviours and was modelled based on the results obtained.
Gene regulation in growth plate chondrocytes by the parathyroid hormone 1 receptor and the beta2-adrenergic receptor

The skeletal structure is an essential organ to our body. It supports our weight and provides attachment points for muscles and tendons allowing body movement. Endochondral bone development is the major process by which long bones develop and grow. This dissertation focuses on studying the signaling pathways that regulate gene expression in growth plate chondrocytes during endochondral bone development. I showed that both the extracellular signal-regulated kinases (ERK)1/2 and p38 mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinases can mediate beta 1-integrin stimulation of two key marker genes for hypertrophic chondrocytes: Indian hedgehog (Ihh) and type X collagen in CFK-2 chondrocytes. In addition, I demonstrated that activation of the parathyroid hormone 1 receptor (PTH1R) by PTH can directly inhibit the expression of Ihh, which is mainly mediated by PTH inhibition of the ERK1/2 activity. Although PTH was able to stimulate the MAP kinase phosphatase-1 (MKP-1) protein expression, PTH inhibition of the ERK1/2 activity was mediated by PTH inhibition of the c-Raf activity. Furthermore, I for the first time characterized the expression of beta-adrenergic receptor (AR) on primary fetal murine chondrocytes using RT-PCR, immunohistochemistry and functional assays. beta2-AR is the only adrenergic receptor subtype expressed on primary chondrocytes, and isoproterenol activation of the receptor stimulated the adenylyl cyclase activity and CREB phosphorylation. Isoproterenol also transiently activated ERK1/2 activity and stimulated MKP-1 protein expression. Similar to PTH1R, beta 2-AR also inhibited the expression of Ihh and type X collagen in primary chondrocytes, and these effects were mimicked by forskolin, an adenylyl cyclase activator. This study demonstrated the essential roles that the MAP kinase signaling pathways and the adenylyl cyclase/PKA signaling pathway play during endochondral bone development. It highlighted the importance of the cell interaction with the extracellular matrix during chondrocyte hypertrophic differentiation. It also delineated the signaling pathway that mediates the PTH1R direct inhibition of the Ihh mRNA. It characterized for the first time the expression and function of beta2-AR in primary chondrocytes, which has opened up a new avenue of investigation of endochondral bone development by the sympathetic nervous system.

Keywords: Cytology
Pharmacology
Cellular automata simulation of vehicle dynamics in park-and-ride facilities

Many cities provide park-and-ride facilities to alleviate congestion at downtown areas. A thorough understanding of the vehicle dynamics within such facilities will benefit both transportation planners in travel demand forecasting and designers in evaluating facility layouts. This thesis presents a microscopic park-and-ride simulation model using the Cellular Automata (CA) approach. Different techniques of CA applications in traffic and pedestrian modelling are analyzed and applied in the study. The park-and-ride model is composed of five fundamental components. These components together simulate a variety of driver actions such as making parking choice decisions and steering control of vehicles. With Kipling South lot as the testing site, the morning period traffic is simulated. The model is able to generate a realistic simulation of vehicle dynamics within the facility and reasonable values of travel time and parking occupation trends. Two different parking lot designs are also compared using the simulation results.
La rhetorique dionysiaque dans l'oeuvre de Baudelaire

Cette etude a pour but d'examiner le commerce de l'excessif---du rhapsodique---dans l'oeuvre poetique et critique de Baudelaire et d'analyser les differentes manieres dont la rhetorique dionysiaque se construit dans ces textes. Pour ce faire, nous aborderons les textes primaires a travers la theorie developpee par Francois Rastier, notamment sa semantique interpretative. Approche theorique complete dans la mesure ou elle unifie la syntaxe profonde, la semantique et la pragmatique, la semantique interpretative presente des strategies pour etudier le sens textuel en deca comme au-dela de la phrase. Cette microsemantique permet d'aller plus loin qu'une simple lecture descriptive des textes pour les interpreter. Une analyse des procedures semantiques privilegiees par Baudelaire nous permettra de repondre aux questions qui justifient cette etude: qu'est-ce qui constitue une rhetorique dionysiaque? Quelles sont les caracteristiques d'une rhetorique dionysiaque, et d'une rhetorique dionysiaque uniquement baudelairienne? Quels principes peut-on degager de la rhetorique baudelairienne concue dans son integralite?Dans l'esprit de cette recherche, la these se divise en quatre chapitres. Le premier chapitre assied la these en donnant une vue d'ensemble des themes abordes. En prenant comme point de depart le principe esthetique de Baudelaire---la multiplication de l'individualite a travers les effets de l'ivresse et la recherche de la catharsis---nous considerons le contenu dionysiaque de l'oeuvre comme un appareil de masques rhetoriques. Le deuxieme chapitre se propose d'examiner l'aspect fragmentaire qui caracterise l'oeuvre baudelairienne au niveau tropique. Le troisieme chapitre s'interesse aux figures de repetition, aux figures de suppression et aux figures de construction et definit leur role dans l'agencement de la rhetorique dionysiaque. Le quatrieme chapitre aborde l'esthetique de Baudelaire a partir de la figure du thyrse pour en degager une rhetorique de la preeminence de l'arabesque.
An object-oriented approach to urban land-cover and land-use classification

The greater availability of remotely sensed high-resolution imagery and recent advances in object-oriented analysis allows for more detail than ever before in urban image classification. This thesis explores object-oriented land-cover and land-use classifications with 1-meter resolution Ikonos imagery for an area in Mississauga, Ontario. First, three different ways of classifying land cover, with varying inclusion of ancillary building and road data, are examined. Second, the spatial relations of the land-cover information are examined to derive land use. Formal accuracy assessments, as well as statistical and visual evaluations, for the land-cover and land-use classifications show that the object-oriented approach works well for classifying an urban area. The results of this thesis confirm the observed trend in the literature to move away from the traditional pixel-based techniques for urban image classification in exchange for object-oriented classification methods; which include shape, textural, and contextual information in addition to spectral information.
Transcriptional cooperation by the TGFbeta and Wnt signalling pathways in development and cancer

Growth factors of Transforming factor beta (TGFbeta) and Wnt signalling pathways are secreted morphogenic factors critical to normal embryonic development in metazoan organisms. In Xenopus frogs, cortical rotation of the fertilized oocyte causes an overlap of signalling determinants of both pathways leading to synergistic induction of genes marking the Spemann organizer, the region that initiates gastrulation and specifies the anterior-to-posterior axis of the embryo. In post-natal organisms, active signalling from both pathways is found in a number of tissues, contributing to their homeostatic maintenance and proper physiology and architecture. While mutations affecting components of both pathways have been extensively documented in malignancies the TGFbeta pathway has generally been regarded as having tumour-suppressive functions, while the aberrant activation of the Wnt pathway is considered oncogenic. The work presented here first delineates the molecular mechanism of transcriptional cooperation between TGFbeta and Wnt. We show that the TGFbeta mediators Smad2, Smad3, and Smad4 physically associate with members of the LEF1/TCF family of DNA-binding transcription factors, proteins that mediate the activation of Wnt target genes via association with beta-catenin. The interaction is mediated by the Smad MH1 and MH2 domains, and the HMG-box DNA-binding domain of LEF1. Physical association of Smads and LEF1/TCFs following stimulation of the TGFbeta and Wnt pathways targets the Xtwin gene promoter, which contains binding sites for both families of proteins, causing synergistic transcriptional activation. Next, we perform a microarray screen that identified putative cooperative target genes of TGFbeta and Wnt3a signalling in mammalian cells. A subset of the genes identified were shown to be overexpressed in tumours from MMTV-Wnt1 mice as well as in intestinal adenomas from MinAPC/+ mice, two models in which the Wnt/beta-catenin pathway is activated. One target, InhibinbetaA, is strongly activated in a synergisitc fashion by TGFbeta and Wnt3a, is highly overexpressed in Wnt and Min tumours/adenomas, is also widely over-expressed in most intestinal tumours as assessed by the use of a Tumour Profiling Array. The expression of InhibinbetaA, along with that of Gpc1, another TGFbeta/Wnt target, was also highly correlated with the expression of Axin2 and cyclinD1, two well-established target of the Wnt/beta-catenin pathway.
Intracellular trafficking of Shiga-like Toxin I: modeling the retrotranslocation of its cytotoxic domain in yeast

Shiga-like Toxin I (Slt-I) is a ribosome-inactivating protein produced by pathogenic strains of Escherichia coli responsible for outbreaks of hemmorhagic colitis and hemolytic uremic syndrome. Slt-I is a member of a family of protein toxins that share an AB(x) tertiary structure and must route in a retrograde fashion to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) before relocating their enzymatic subunit to the cytosol. The mechanism by which these ER-routing toxins (ERTs) deliver their enzymatic subunit to the cytosol is unknown but believed to be common to all ERTs. It has been hypothesized that the enzymatic subunit is recognized by the ER-associated degradation (ERAD) pathway responsible for recognizing misfolded protein substrates in the ER and retrotranslocating them to the cytosol for degradation. This process is typically accompanied by the conjugation of ubiquitin to lysine residues. The paucity of lysine residues in the enzymatic subunit of ERTs has been raised as a possible mechanism for the subversion of degradation in the cytosol following retrotranslocation. Studying the behaviour of the enzymatic subunit of ERTs directly in the ER of eukaryotic cells is made difficult by the complexity of routing in mammalian cell culture systems. We designed a model system in the simple eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae where the fully enzymatic A1 domain of Slt-I was expressed and targeted to the ER before ribosome-inactivation could occur. The presence of the enzymatic domain in the cytosol was lethal to the host and served as the basis for identifying toxin domain(s) as well as host components responsible for mediating the retrotranslocative process. Using this assay, the region spanning residues 240 to 245 (LNCHHH) was identified as the minimal peptide motif involved in retrotranslocation. Several known components of ERAD pathway were not involved in this process and a screen of an array of yeast strains harbouring deletions of non-essential genes did not identify new components. The significance of the retrotranslocative peptide motif in the A1 fragment of Slt-I and the lack of involvement of non-essential host components in retrotranslocation is discussed in the context of other ERTs as well as recent findings concerning the role of essential ER-resident proteins.
Investigation into the scattering response of mineral ore deposits in heterogeneous environments by means of two-dimensional and three-dimensional seismic modelling

The goal of this thesis was to investigate the possibility of directly detecting massive sulphide deposits in hardrock media using seismic methods. Initial numerical modelling has shown that sulphides scatter seismic energy characteristically depending on shape, size and composition; it is suggested that amplitude/phase characteristics can be used to locate and define sulphide orebodies with seismic data. This thesis expands on these results with the improvement of heterogeneous models based on available data to more realistically simulate an orebody embedded in crystalline material. The first part of the project discusses a means of assessing heterogeneity with borehole logs. Analysis of the various lithologies of Sudbury and other impact structures has shown that despite differences in age and morphology, the brecciated basement beneath impact craters is characterized by small scale lengths, as opposed to the large scale lengths often encountered in non-impacted crystalline rocks. The character of seismic profiles is invariably linked to these scale lengths: seismograms range from relatively transparent to highly reflective (noisy), depending on the ratio of seismic wavelength to heterogeneity scale length. This variability is the key to the success or failure of seismic methods in crystalline environments. Elastic finite difference models of scattering media demonstrate the difference between favourable and unfavourable seismic exploration settings: when the ratio of scale length to seismic wavelength is sim;1, large amounts of scattering noise are generated that reduce the signal to noise ratio of surface recorded data. When simple bodies representing sulphide deposits are placed in the heterogeneous models, they are detected provided that (1) the deposit has a large enough impedance contrast, (2) it is larger than the dominant seismic wavelength, and (3) its dimensions are either smaller or greater than the dominant scale of heterogeneity of the host rocks. Deep within a large scale length medium however, travel-time and amplitude fluctuations of a seismic wavefront significantly alter the expected reflected response of the sulphide. Finally, it is demonstrated that based on all available information from the Sudbury structure, sulphide deposits within the footwall will be seismically detectable provided they present a step impedance contrast with host material.
Visual enhancement of auditory detection in quiet

Current literature strongly suggests that auditory perception and detection can be enhanced by signals received in the visual modality. However, most studies on this topic have typically used either really simple signals where one is described as irrelevant' or 'uninformative' relative to the other (single noise bursts and light flashes) or complex interrelated audio-visual signals (speech). The experiments in this thesis fill in the gap between these two extremes through the use of sinusoidally amplitude modulated (SAM) audio and visual signals. This choice of stimulus allows us to design experiments to study the effects of the temporal characteristics of the signals on cross-modal enhancement. As well, this work provides insight into the underlying process in the brain that integrates information from different senses into a coherent whole. The findings in this thesis may be applied to the design of multimodal warning signals.
In-line UV-visible spectroscopy of additive concentrations in polymer melts during extrusion

The objective of this work was to develop an in-line monitoring system employing uv-visible spectroscopy to quantitatively measure the concentration of mixtures of additives during polymer extrusion. This has not been previously attempted in the published literature even for solitary additives. An inexpensive, practical, robust, monitoring system was developed and demonstrated using commonly used antioxidants, heat stabilizers and UV stabilizers as well as two polymers, (poly(vinyl chloride) and polyethylene). The system consists of an extruder/monitor interface, a fiber-optic-assisted, charge-coupled device spectrometer and customized analysis software. Transmittance was shown to provide superior resolution to transflectance except when particles were present. Novel software applied corrections to the data in “real-time” and eliminated instrumental measurement drift while providing high quality spectra. With a root mean square error of prediction of 0.00038 and 0.00062 weight fraction for a heat and uv stabilizer, respectively, Partial Least Squares models provided the best results for additive concentrations.
A study of one EFl pre-service program in Taiwan

The present study is designed to be a case study of one particular teacher education program in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Taiwan, where teacher education programs are centrally directed by the Ministry of Education. The aim of this study is to look into the nature and content of the newly developed elementary school EFL teacher education program from the perspectives of (a) pre-service teachers, (b) practicing teachers, and (c) teacher educators. I also attempt to illuminate their concerns about EFL teacher education programs at the elementary school level. In order to describe the content and form of the four-year elementary EFL pre-service teacher program, which was in its second year of implementation at the time of this study, it is necessary to understand how teachers and teacher educators conceptualized and utilized their experiences of formal teacher education programs as well as of their teaching practice (Freeman & Richards, 1996). Accordingly, twelve informants, four pre-service teachers, four practicing teachers, and four teacher educators were included in this study. Using empirical data gathered from (a) individual interviews with pre-service teachers, practicing teachers, and teacher educators; (b) focus group interviews; and (c) pre-service teachers' journals, the present study intends to gain insights into the experiences of EFL practicing teachers, pre-service teachers and teacher educators, and their thoughts about elementary EFL teacher education programs. Their perceptions of the usefulness of teacher preparation programs in EFL and the effectiveness in their teaching practices are explored. The findings of the present study show that the teacher educators, practicing teachers, and pre-service teachers had different perceptions of elementary EFL pre-service teacher education in Taiwan, and the suitability of the components in the present program remained a moot point. As well, the practicing and pre-service teachers perceived a gap between theory and practice in teacher education programs, and were uncertain about the role of formal pre-service teacher education in their learning to teach. It is also found that the practicing teachers emphasized experiential knowledge in the construction of teacher knowledge, while the pre-service teachers practical knowledge and applications of theoretical knowledge to actual teaching. Finally, viable implications for change in elementary EFL teacher education are discussed. It is an attempt to help to improve the implementation of elementary EFL teacher education programs in Taiwan in particular, and to contribute to the understanding and knowledge of EFL teacher education and teacher development in general.

Keywords: English language, Study and teaching
English language, Taiwan
Teachers, Training of
Teachers, Taiwan
English teachers, Taiwan
English teachers, In-service training
English teachers, Taiwan