VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A high-frequency, soft-switching DC-DC converter for dynamic voltage scaling in VLSI loads

The monolithic implementation of a Zero-Voltage-Switching Quasi-Square Wave (ZVS-QSW) buck converter capable of meeting the future challenges of low-voltage point-of-load converters is presented. The design uses novel high-speed Dead-Time-Locked-Loops with precision dead-time control to achieve ZVS under dynamic loads and a variable output voltage. By eliminating switching losses, high efficiency is achieved at switching frequencies beyond 1MHz. The ZVS-QSW converter is implemented in a 0.18mum CMOS process and has a measured efficiency of 82% at 5MHz with a 1.4V output. In order to meet the demand for scalable performance, the Dynamic Voltage scaling concept is applied to the ZVS-QSW converter using a dual-mode configuration. In DVS, the supply voltage is scaled down to reduce power while satisfying a variable target clock frequency. An experimental DVS system is demonstrated using a state-of-the-art CPLD. The fully digital DVS controller can achieve the maximum Vdd transition in 30mus.
Out-of-core hydrodynamic simulations of cosmological structure formation

Astrophysical and cosmological structure formation are challenging problems because they involve dynamical and hydrodynamical processes that can span a large range in scale, mass, and energy. Hydrodynamic and N-body simulations are powerful tools with which to solve the nonlinear physics, and their continuing development and application is the focus of this thesis. I present a new approach to Eulerian computational fluid dynamics that is designed to work at high Mach numbers encountered in astrophysical simulations. The Eulerian conservation equations are solved in an adaptive frame moving with the fluid where Mach numbers are minimized. The Moving Frame code separately tracks local and bulk flow components, allowing thermodynamic variables to be accurately calculated in both subsonic and supersonic fluid. This thesis includes the first astrophysical application of Eulerian hydrodynamic simulations to model the formation of blue stragglers through stellar mergers. The off-axis collision of equal mass stars produces a single merger remnant. The merger of n = 3 polytropes results in substantial chemical mixing throughout the remnant, while the merger of realistic M = 0.8 M odot; main sequence stars produces significant mixing only outside of the core. The Out-of-core Hydro code is applied to running the largest Eulerian hydrodynamic simulation to date for studying the thermal history of the high redshift 3 le; z le; 7 intergalactic medium. The temperature-density and gas-dark matter density relations, as well as the scatter in these relations, are robustly quantified. Reionization and shock heating are observed to influence the temperature of the photoionized gas. An out-of-core hydrodynamic code has been developed for high resolution cosmological simulations. Out-of-core computation refers to the technique of using disk space as virtual memory and transferring data in and out of main memory at high I/O bandwidth. The code is based on a two-level mesh scheme where short-range physics is solved on a high-resolution, localized mesh while long-range physics is captured on a lower resolution, global mesh. Furthermore, a parallel particle-mesh N-body code is applied to simulating the clustering of dark matter halos. The PMFAST simulations show that that several bias parameters are consistent with being scale-invariant, a useful property for doing cosmology with galaxy clustering.
Envisioning doctoral music education for 21st century Thailand

Doctoral music education plays a key role in the preparation of scholarship in music teaching and learning, and in training teachers of future music educators who will be responsible for the growth of music education in the nation. Representing the highest academic degree in music offered in higher education, the doctoral degree is a degree for music educators who hope to be employed in teaching positions in colleges and universities. Due to the shortage of music educators, the paucity of graduate music programs in Thailand, and the lack of music teacher education research, there are several challenges for those who become involved in the preparation of doctoral students, to train them to practise at high levels in the Thai context. This pressing need provided the thrust for this research project. A study eliciting the opinions of graduate music educators was designed to emphasize and support the need for implementation of doctoral programs and preparation of training courses for future music teacher educators in Thailand. It aims to illuminate beliefs, recommendations, and perspectives on Thai doctoral music education programs, which should be developed as independently as possible from institutional and political constraints which sometimes influence curriculum decisions. The research was carried out during the fall of 2006 and the winter of 2007. Semi-structured in-depth face-to-face interviews with twenty-one full-time Thai music professors, who hold doctoral degrees in music, provided the richness of data collected. Through a grounded theory qualitative research approach, the salient categories of information supported by the interview transcriptions, emerged and provided answers to the central research question of the study. The findings of this research project, based on individual professional experiences, professional knowledge, social context, and institutional context of participants, include the discovery and articulation of a body of knowledge, perspectives, suggestions, and visions concerning doctoral music education programs. This research will assist us in envisioning the curriculum of doctoral education in music education for 21st century Thailand and will inform the practice of doctoral educators to prepare future music teacher educators to be responsive to the richness of Thai society.

Keywords: Music, Instruction and study
Interpersonal and psychosocial correlates of anorgasmia

Despite support for using relationship contexts in definitions of women's sexual concerns, adherence to linear views are maintained. The purpose of this study was to determine if there are interpersonal or psychosocial differences between women who experience difficulty with orgasm and those who do not. The results indicate low orgasmic women are less sexually satisfied and have less relationship satisfaction. Also, while low orgasmic women do not communicate any less about sexual or non-sexual issues, they are significantly less comfortable communicating with partners about sexual topics, especially oral sex. Furthermore, low orgasmic women tend to have less sexual self-awareness regarding their needs to achieve orgasm and tend to have a higher need for control during sexual encounters. The findings indicate both sexual self-awareness and sexual communication comfort are unique predictors of achieving orgasm and point out the strong interrelationships of the variables indicating the complexity of female sexual functioning and anorgasmia.
A Study of Electron Charge Transfer Reactions for Atomic Isobar Separation in Mass Spectrometry

In Mass Spectrometry it is often necessary to separate an isotope of interest from all other interfering species such as molecular or atomic isobars as they are a major limiting factor in many cases of studying isotopes of low abundance. Molecular isobars can be completely removed at high (MeV) energy as a result of the collisional ionization. However, atomic isobars are much harder to eliminate. Previous success in atomic isobar separation is largely due to the non-existence of certain negative ions of the critical isobars. The research in this thesis has targeted new methods for the isobar separation in cases when the atomic isobar is present and forms a stable negative ion. Electron charge transfer reactions have been known to play an important role in plasma physics for a long time. It is known that the cross sections for such processes are significant and applications of such reactions to isobar separation are possible. Limitations of singly charged ion charge transfer reactions for such applications have been assessed theoretically. It has been established that multiple scattering is the main limiting factor for significant isobar suppression. Charge transfer reactions between doubly charged ions and neutral atoms have been studied for the purpose of separation of 41K and 41Ca atomic isobars. The cross sections for the reactions between K++ and He, and Ca++ and He have been measured in the energy range from 1 to 100 keV. The selective properties of such reactions have been established. It has been determined that in general at keV energies a useful isobar attenuation factor can be obtained by such charge transfer reactions.
Albumin and fluid absorption by the gallbladder in man and in the pig

In order to study albumin absorption by the gallbladder in man, an in vitro model was first established in the pig and compared to in vivo function in the same species. Water and electrolyte transport as well as 125I-albumin absorption and protein secretion in vivo and in vitro were compared. Then similar in vitro studies were performed on human gallbladders obtained at surgery. The in vivo study in the pig was performed without disturbing the gallbladder except to tie a cannula in the cystic duct end. The in vitro model was identical in the pig and human gallbladders. Gallbladders were excised using a technique causing minimal injury and anoxia. They were oxygenated on both mucosal and serosal surfaces in a temperature-controlled environment. Luminal and external bath test solutions consisted of modified Ringers bicarbonate with added glucose; luminal solutions also contained 125I-albumin from different species depending on the study. Active absorption of sodium and water occurred in both types of studies in the pig but in vivo absorption rates were considerably greater than in vitro rates. Albumin absorption in vivo was substantial; although present in vitro, the absorption of albumin was diminished relatively more than electrolyte transport rates. Protein secretion rates into the gallbladder were similar in vitro and in vivo. The results of studies in the human gallbladders in vitro were similar to the pig, except albumin absorption was greater. Some human gallbladders were obtained from control patients and some from patients with cholesterol gallstones. There were no significant differences between the two groups for any of the variables studied, however the numbers were small and some control gallbladders were not normal gallbladders.
La política de la representación literaria personal en la narrativa de Alfredo Bryce Echenique

This thesis examines the presence of autobiographical references in Bryce Echenique's works of fiction and the problems and misunderstandings that have arisen in the act of reading as a result of the inclusion of these personal elements. Chapter 1 places Bryce Echenique within the broad context of Latin American literature, especially the “Post-boom,” and discusses the principal theories of autobiography. This chapter then traces the root of the problem of autobiographical reference in Bryce Echenique's novels to his own way of writing. His narrative is characterized by a strong element of orality, both the result of the author's technical achievement and the cause of misreadings of his work. The element of orality in La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña is studied as the key to its success while in El hombre que hablaba de Octavia de Cádiz it is the absence of orality that might explain some of the novel's shortcomings. Chapter 2 presents a discussion of intertextuality and studies two novels, Cortázar's Libro de Manuel and Sábato's Sobre héroes y tumbas, to investigate the intertextual relations between these two texts and Bryce's La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña. The study of intertextuality sheds light on some of Bryce's great preoccupations, such as the writer's social commitment and responsibility as well as the themes that should be treated in literature. Chapter 3 examines the relationship, mediated by irony, between the male and female characters. This chapter opens with a theoretical discussion of irony as one of the strategies that is most employed by Bryce in his novels. The chapter studies in detail the relationship between men and women in La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo and No me esperen en abril. Chapter 4 focuses on “Dos señoras conversan” and No me esperen en abril as examples of Bryce's intention of portraying his social origins in his narrative. While Bryce is interested in including his own family origins in his works and criticizing the unjust society that he knew so well, he is also committed to creating a narrative work of merit that stands out because of its literary style.
Rectifiable families of conics

In dimension 2, I have a complete description of sufficiently large rectifiable pencils of conics (Chapter 4). Conics from such pencil are the images of lines under some fractional quadratic map. Geometrically, almost all conics from a generic rectifiable pencil are characterized by the property that they have 3 points of tangency with the same curve dual to a cubic. Rectifiable pencils of curves appear, for example, in Riemannian geometry---geodesics passing through a given point are rectifiable by the inverse of the exponential map. More generally, E. Cartan's normal projective connections describe exactly point-wise rectifiable systems of curves. The study of such systems was motivated by the General Theory of Relativity. Many distinguished geometers of the past, including Blaschke, Cartan, Veblen and Thomas, worked on the subject. A set of curves with a common point (also called a pencil of curves) will be called rectifiable if there is a local diffeomorphism that maps all curves from this set to straight lines. In dimensions 2 and 3, a description of all sufficiently large rectifiable pencils of circles was known (A. Khovanskii and F. Izadi): all circles that form such pencils must share a second common point. It turns out that this is no longer true in dimension 4. However, I give a complete answer (Chapter 2), which is related to the quaternionic algebra (quaternionic Hopf fibrations). This answer gives rise to the following results. If a smooth diffeomorphism between an open subset of the 4-dimensional projective space and an open subset of the 4-dimensional sphere takes germs of lines to germs of circles, then it comes from a quaternionic Hopf fibration or from a classical model of a classical geometry. If all real geodesics of a Kahler metric on a part of the 2-dimensional complex space are arcs of circles, then this metric is a Fubini metric (a classical model of a space with constant holomorphic sectional curvature). In some special cases, an explicit description of rectifiable pencils of circles is given in terms of representations of Clifford algebras (Chapter 3). In any dimension, I reduce the description of sufficiently large rectifiable pencils of circles to the description of quadratic forms between spheres (Chapter 1). Quadratic forms between spheres were studied in relation with the Hurwitz problem about sums of squares (Hurwitz, 1898) and homotopy groups of spheres. In this thesis, I study rectifiable pencils of very simple algebraic curves---circles and, more generally, conics. Rectification problems for circles are motivated by nomography.
Resistance education: African/Black women shelter workers' perspectives

The silencing and exclusion of differently located African/Black women shelter workers' voices and experiences in the woman abuse community in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was the catalyst for this research. This dissertation examines the lived and worked experiences, and resistance of African/Black women shelter workers. It focuses on 18 differently located African/Black women who worked in shelters in Toronto between 1995 and 2005 during governmental cuts and organizational restructuring processes. This study re-centers and rehistoricizes these often-missing stories of African/Black women, their indigenous feminist knowledges, and their activism. The purpose of this study was to examine intersectional violence and resistance in woman abuse shelters. African/Black feminist, anti-colonial theorization and praxis are critical for resistance against intersectional forms of violence including racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, ageism, and other interlocking oppressions. "Resistance Education", a qualitative methodology developed and utilized in this study, provided an integrated, feminist/womanist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, analysis and praxis. The seven features of this methodological approach challenge traditional notions of Eurocentric "objective" research by re-centering the standpoint of African/Black women's voices, as well as the voices of other oppressed groups, in both research and education. This methodology, incorporating art-based strategies of resistance and activism, formulates and utilizes a method called "Creative Resistance". Collective witnessing, consciousness raising/sharing, and collective action provided individual and collective locations, identities, and agency, which supported revolutionary social change and transnational feminist actions. The "Identity Trichotomy" discussed in this study reveals the complexities of essentialized derogatory sameness, heterogeneous identities, and collective resistance. This research study contributes to feminist historical analysis of the larger violence against women communities as it provides the missing voices and stories of African/Black women shelter workers. It also adds innovation to qualitative methodology by providing another approach to doing feminist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, art-based research and resistance. This dissertation in itself is an act of resistance and revolutionary agency.
Cortical mechanisms of emotion regulation in young children responding to angry, neutral, and happy faces

The study of neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation is currently of great interest to developmental psychologists. In order to assess normative patterns and individual differences in mechanisms of emotion regulation mediated by the frontal cortices, we examined young children's event-related potentials (ERPs) across varying emotional conditions. EEG was recorded from thirteen 4–6-year-old children, who viewed on-screen pictures of angry, neutral, and happy faces while engaged in a go/no-go task. Peak medial-frontal ERPs following picture and response cue onset were compared across emotion face types and correlated with trait anxiety. As predicted, angry faces generated the largest and fastest ERPs. Source analysis indicated centromedial and right-inferior frontal sources contributing to the ERPs for angry faces. Following the response cue, ERPs were largest when responses were withheld. Finally, more anxious children showed faster ERPs for angry faces. These results are interpreted in terms of early-developing attentional mechanisms recruited to regulate anxiety.
Causes of death in active duty Canadian forces personnel

There may be misconceptions around the real causes of death in the Canadian Forces (CF) as public attention focuses on combat deaths. Objective. To compare the proportion of deaths from natural causes to traumatic causes in the CF. Methods. Retrospective chart review of all CF deaths (1983--2003), classifying deaths as either natural (neoplasm, cardiovascular and other) or traumatic (inadvertent, suicide, homicide or combat). Preventable deaths were assessed using explicit criteria. Results. A total of 1617 CF members died. Traumatic deaths constituted 56% (n=813) and natural deaths were 44% (n=651). Motor vehicle crashes caused 24% (n=351), neoplasms 22% (n=319), cardiovascular diseases 18% (n=259) and suicide 17% (n=248). Combat deaths were only 0.4% (n=6). Discussion. Combat deaths were rare. More military lives might be saved by focusing on prevention strategies for common causes of death including cancer, cardiovascular disease and motor vehicle collisions.
Visual functioning following prenatal exposure to organic solvents

Despite a large body of evidence demonstrating that the visual system is an important target for organic solvent toxicity in adults, little attention has been devoted to the visual functioning of children with prenatal solvent exposure. The aims of the current study were (1) to evaluate prospectively the impact of prenatal solvent exposure on selective aspects of infant visual functioning using visual evoked potential (VEP) techniques, (2) to examine potential dose-response relationships, and (3) to correlate deficits in vision with performance on the Mullen Scales of Early Learning administered between 14 and 24 months of age. Studied were 21 infants born to women who were exposed occupationally to solvents during pregnancy and 27 non-exposed infants. Mothers and their infants were recruited during pregnancy through the Motherisk Program, an antenatal counseling service in Toronto. In addition, 2 children born to a mother who abused volatile inhalants were examined as reference cases for dose-effect data. A sweep VEP technique was used to assess contrast sensitivity and grating acuity by presenting sinusoidal gratings that "swept" across a range of contrasts and spatial frequencies. A transient VEP technique was used to assess responses to equiluminant chromatic- and luminance-modulated sinusoidal gratings presented in pattern onset-offset format. Exposure level was estimated from questionnaire data obtained during pregnancy. Testers were masked to exposure status. Results showed a significant reduction in contrast sensitivity at low spatial frequencies in solvent-exposed infants compared to control infants (P = .001). Infants with high level exposure had significantly lower acuity than those with low exposure, suggesting evidence of a dose-response relation. Regarding colour vision, 26.3% of infants in the exposed group versus 0% in the control group produced abnormal VEP responses to the red-green stimulus (P
Shareholder liability for undercapitalization: from a shareholder responsibility and creditor protection perspective

This thesis deals with the question whether shareholders should be held liable for creditor default due to undercapitalization. Different approaches have been adopted in North America and Germany. I will introduce both approaches and develop a solution according to which shareholders should be held liable as a general proposition. This general proposition is limited by distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary creditors as well as responsible and non-responsible shareholders. In my paper I will set out more detailed some criteria required to hold shareholders liable for the undercapitalization and I will consider the practical concerns resulting from my approach, i.e. uncertainty arising from the process of determination of undercapitalization.

Keywords: Stockholders, Legal status, laws, etc
Stockholders, North America
Debtor and creditor, North America
Debtor and creditor, Germany
Stockholders, Legal status, laws, etc
Stockholders, Germany