VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Tragic Moral Conflict and Endangered Species Recovery

Given the state of the art of conservation, and given the rapidity with which species are disappearing as the result of human economic activities, members of the societies that encourage and benefit from these activities, and that undertake the species recovery process, often face a terrible choice: either 1) intensively manage species populations and ecological communities by killing, harming, making vulnerable to harm, or controlling the most important aspects of the lives of many individual animals; or 2) allow entire species to go extinct. I call situations in which people face this kind of choice recovery predicaments. Such predicaments seem to be tragic moral conflicts, or situations in which whatever one does—even the right act that is right on the whole—will be seriously wrong. This dissertation explores whether working from within Kant’s deontology, Ross’s deontology, or utilitarianism excuses environmental ethics for neglecting the problem of tragic moral conflict, or for failing to recognize recovery predicaments as tragic moral conflicts. It asks three questions of each theory. Does it have what it takes to admit that the right act can be wrong in some way? If so, does it have what it takes to admit that the right act can be seriously wrong? And if it does, can it interpret recovery predicaments as situations in which whatever one does will be tragically wrong? The dissertation argues that, for each theory, the answer to the first two questions is yes. None of the theories excuses us for ignoring the problem of tragic moral conflict. For both Ross’s and Kant’s deontologies, the answer to the third question is also yes, but for utilitarianism, the answer is indeterminate. This means that from within utilitarianism, we cannot say whether a recovery predicament is a tragic moral conflict, but from within the other two theories we can say that it is.

Keywords: animal ethics
endangered species
Immanuel Kant
moral conflict
utilitarianism
W.D. Ross
Advisor: Sumner, Wayne
Walsh, Denis
Wealth Destruction Effects of Annual Management Forecasts

Exploiting exogenous variations in annual earnings guidance, I find evidence that an increase in annual guidance leads managers to engage in more short-term oriented actions. Specifically, I find that relative to firms that do not provide annual earnings guidance, firms that provide annual guidance decrease SGA expenses, R expenditures, and capital expenditures significantly in an attempt to meet earnings targets set by their own forecasts. The investment cuts help firms avoid missing earnings guidance but subsequently result in a gradual decline in firm growth, reduction in innovation activities, and long-term shareholder value destruction. I provide several pieces of mutually corroborating evidence that suggest an alternative mechanism other than earnings guidance is unlikely to drive the results. The findings have implications for firm strategy, policy-making, and academic research on management forecast accuracy.

Advisor: Callen, Jeffrey L.
Mohanram, Partha S.
Transforming Climate Resilience: A Case Study of Myanmar Migrants in Phuket, Thailand

Climate resilience is a system’s ability to absorb climate change disturbances and reorganize in a way that the system retains the same function and identity. The concept of climate resilience is widely criticized for its neutral and post-political approach to planning for climate change. Resilience practitioners typically conduct vulnerability assessments to identify how institutions, systems, and actors are at risk from climate change. However, because practitioners focus on climate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacities of essential infrastructure systems, such as settlement areas, water supply networks, and food systems, practitioners tend to overlook the inherently political nature of vulnerability and the broader social structures that create or reinforce it, especially for marginalized people. My research on the lives of 80 Myanmar migrants in Phuket, Thailand serves as a case study for the importance of taking a directly political approach to planning for climate resilience. In this thesis, I describe the vulnerabilities of Myanmar migrants in Phuket as embodied structural violence, which refers to the economic, political, and cultural dynamics that systematically cause human suffering and constrain human agency to meet personal needs and goals. Resilience practitioners in Phuket can apply a structural violence lens, particularly during the vulnerability assessment process, to identify and address social structures that create vulnerabilities, including elitism, nepotism, fragmentation, and discrimination in Thailand. Unfortunately, people who are underrepresented in policymaking and planning process in Thailand, including Myanmar migrants, are often the ones to bear the disproportionate costs of climate change. Thus, resilience practitioners must advocate for an explicitly political, inclusive, and participatory approach; for example, one that incorporates the experiences and knowledge of all inhabitants in Phuket. Through my research, I also add to the discourse of planning for migrant communities, especially at a time when renowned international institutions, such as the United Nations, are highlighting significant planning and policymaking challenges linked to climate change-induced migration.

Keywords: Climate resilience
Migration
Myanmar
Phuket
Structural violence
Thailand
Advisor: Daniere, Amrita
REPRODUCTIVE ECOLOGY AND GENETICS OF PLANT INVASIONS: A CASE STUDY OF LYTHRUM SALICARIA (PURPLE LOOSESTRIFE)

Biological invasions provide a valuable context for studying contemporary evolution. Because reproduction is a key process determining invasion success, investigations of the reproductive ecology and genetics of populations are particularly insightful. My Ph.D. thesis is comprised of five inter-related studies on Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife), a tristylous plant from Eurasia that has invaded wetlands in North America during the past 150 years. The specific questions I addressed, using computer simulations, surveys of natural populations, and glasshouse and field experiments, concerned the mechanisms governing the frequencies of mating types in populations, the characteristics and functional significance of partial self-incompatibility, the influence of floral morph structure and demography on mating and fertility, and the occurrence and significance of inbreeding depression for invading populations. Stochastic computer models incorporating morph-specific self-compatibility and tetrasomic inheritance revealed patterns of morph-frequency variation and asymmetric morph loss consistent with data from L. salicaria, including a survey I conducted in Ontario of 114 populations that revealed stochastic loss of the S-morph from small populations. Glasshouse experiments involving controlled self- and cross-pollination demonstrated that ~34% of L. salicaria plants exhibited partial self-incompatibility, that this trait was weakly heritable, and was stable in expression over two years. Progeny testing of open-pollinated families in six populations and isolated plants in a field experiment revealed high rates of inter-morph mating demonstrating that L. salicaria is robust to demographic variation associated with colonization. Cumulative estimates of inbreeding depression (δ) in a four-year experiment, three under field conditions, revealed δ = 0.48 and 0.68, depending on how multiplicative fitness was estimated. The values were consistent with the outcrossed mating system of populations and high enough to oppose the spread of self-fertilization, unless pollinators or mates limit fertility, but lower than is frequently reported in other outcrossing plant species. In summary, this research provides novel information on the mechanisms that maintain tristyly in invasive populations of L. salicaria, despite the occurrence of partial self- incompatibility. High rates of inter-morph mating promoted by reliable bee-mediated pollinator service limit opportunities for the breakdown of the polymorphism, an evolutionary transition that has commonly occurred in other invasive tristylous species.

Advisor: Barrett, Spencer CH
An Investigation of Sociodemographic and Functional Influences on Academic Outcomes in a Canadian University and in a Cross-National Comparison

Postsecondary institutions worldwide are concerned about rising rates of student underperformance and drop-out. Research suggests that several sociodemographic, psychosocial and academic functioning factors may be contributory. The extent of the problem and the type of contributors also appear to vary by world region and citizenship status. The main objectives of the current research were to evaluate the relative impact of key contributing factors (derived from published literature) on academic outcomes among local-born, immigrant and international students in a Canadian university, and in a cross-national comparison between Canadian and Malaysian university students. A series of three inter-related investigations were conducted at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). Statistical methods included linear and logistic regression analyses to identify contributors to academic outcomes. The first study evaluated retrospective data from UTSC administrative records that contained only a few demographic variables. It found that non-Canadian citizenship status was associated with negative academic outcomes, and that gender and first language were influential across student groups. The second study was a prospective evaluation at UTSC using a large set of variables drawn from the literature. It found that several psychosocial variables were associated with academic failure across student groups, but citizenship, gender and first language had no impact. The third study was a prospective, cross-national comparison between UTSC and UKM using a similar set of variables. It found that while local-born Canadians were mostly affected by psychosocial determinants, local-born Malaysians were more influenced by factors related to academic functioning. Taken together, the results suggest that irrespective of students’ backgrounds, psychosocial and academic functioning factors are more relevant to their academic outcomes than sociodemographic factors. Further, students’ life experiences, i.e. family and societal environments, major life events, and adjustments to postsecondary life, appear to be key influences on their academic outcomes, as reflected by these factors. The findings are also a good fit with several Western-developed theories of student development that had been little evaluated in non-Western world regions or with non-local-born students previously. The results may also have significant implications for institutional retention strategies to enhance student well-being and academic success.

Keywords: Canada
Immigrant students
International students
Malaysia
Postsecondary academic outcomes
Predictors
Advisor: Ravindran, Arun V
Stratification in the Canadian Legal Profession: The Role of Social Capital and Social Isolation in Shaping Lawyers’ Careers

The North American legal profession has traditionally excluded marginalized social groups via formal entry barriers and other social closure mechanisms. While many of these obstacles have eroded over time and the legal profession is more heterogeneous today than in the past, formal and informal obstacles maintain the ongoing professional dominance of white men from privileged social backgrounds. Although lawyers represent a powerful and elite social group, the legal profession’s internal hierarchies reflect the unequal distribution of status, opportunities, and rewards among its members, making it an important site for examining professional stratification. Using a national survey of a cohort of recent entrants to the Canadian legal profession, I examine stratification in the legal profession and the mechanisms that sustain workplace disparities and discrimination. I find that traditional hierarchies persist and that new lines of demarcation have emerged. Moreover, I find that social capital and social isolation are key mechanisms driving divergent outcomes and experiences for traditionally disadvantaged groups of lawyers in their early careers. Specifically, I find that spending time with partners and other senior attorneys increases earnings and decreases experiences of workplace discrimination; having a woman mentor and a higher proportion of racial and ethnic minorities in the workplace reduce the odds of experiencing discrimination; and having a racial/ethnic minority mentor increases the odds of expressing mobility intentions for lawyers working in private law firms. Workplace relationships operate as both assets and liabilities in lawyers’ careers; having partners notice and invest in you and being surrounded by coworkers and mentors who ‘look like you’ can bolster the careers of lawyers from traditionally disadvantaged groups, yet socially similar mentors can also exacerbate the consequences of outsider status if they too are outsiders within the profession. Thus, social capital both facilitates and constrains lawyers’ careers and stratification in the legal profession.

Advisor: Dinovitzer, Ronit
Flexibility in the Federal System? Institutional Innovation and Indigenous Nations’ Self-Determination in the US and Canadian Far North

Since the early 1970s, Indigenous nations in northern Canada and the United States have secured a heightened level of governing autonomy through the creation of new institutions of self- and shared-rule. While much attention has been devoted to the political factors that allowed for development of these institutions, and their operation within the federal governance framework, this thesis argues that these new institutions have important political implications that have, as yet, been largely unexplored. The settlement of modern land claim agreements, beginning in the 1970s, was a response by the United States and Canadian federal governments to Indigenous demands for self-determination. The decision to settle modern land claim agreements marked a move away from the dominant policy paradigm of assimilation, and into a new paradigm that recognized Indigenous goals for economic self-determination, and which is increasingly responsive to Indigenous demands for political self-determination through self-government. This ideational shift enabled the development of new sites of Indigenous authority within the federal political system. By building a comparative analysis of the political dynamics across four cases—the Northwest Arctic and North Slope regions in Alaska, and the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in regions in the Northwest Territories—this thesis argues that early decisions by the state have had significant, and reinforcing, effects on the development of the institutional spaces for Indigenous minority nations. How these institutions were designed and implemented has had important implications for the degree to which they reinforce or reconstitute conceptions of national or cultural identity. It also has important implications for the degree to which these new institutions are successful at reducing conflicts between the minority nation and the state. By developing a novel framework of minority national conflict, I am able to illustrate how these decisions influence contemporary political dynamics.

Keywords: Federalism
Indigenous Politics
Multinational Federalism
Policy Change
Public Policy
Advisor: Skogstad, Grace
Molecular Mechanisms of Self-Recognition by CD1d- and CD1c-Restricted Alpha/Beta T Cell Receptors

Adoptive T cell immunotherapy has demonstrated clinically relevant efficacy in treating malignant and infectious diseases. However, most of these therapies have focused on enhancing, or generating de novo, effector functions of conventional T cells recognizing human leukocyte antigen (HLA) molecules. Given the heterogeneity of HLA alleles, mismatched patients are ineligible for current HLA-restricted adoptive T cell therapies. The family of CD1 molecules are monomorphic homologs of HLA class I, and their restricted T cells possess unique T cell receptor (TCR) specificities against an entirely different class of antigens. CD1 molecules present lipid antigens and offer a new front of targets for HLA-unrestricted T cell therapies. This thesis first examined the differences between the recognition of human and mouse CD1d-lipid complexes by murine invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cell receptors. Murine HLA-restricted TCRs have been safely used in the clinic, but the cross-species reactivity of mouse iNKT TCRs has not been studied in detail. Next, how residues encoded at a particular complementarity-determining region (CDR)3β position of human iNKT TCRs impacted the overall structure and function of the TCR was investigated. Encoding serine or arginine at the third position of CDR3β influenced self-lipid recognition, possibly by an indirect mechanism via modulating the TCRα chain conformation. Finally, the molecular identity of TCRs restricted by other members of the CD1 family is largely unknown compared to CD1d-restricted iNKT TCRs. In the last chapter, a novel molecular motif, TRBV4-1, associated with autoreactivity of human CD1c-restricted TCRs was identified. Together, these data advance our understanding of CD1-self-lipid-TCR interactions, potentially facilitating the development of immunotherapies targeting CD1 in malignancies and autoimmunity.

Keywords: CD1
self-recognition
T cell receptor
Advisor: Hirano, Naoto
Temporal-controlled Release of Bioactive Molecules for Dentin-pulp Engineering Using Nano-systems

The two available current treatment options for dental pulp infection of a tooth are either tooth extraction or root canal treatment. The root canal treatment leads to permanent loss in pulp vitality and compromise in the mechanical integrity of tooth. A potential method to restore pulp vitality is by stimulating the endogenous stem cells from apical papilla (SCAP) of tooth, so as to participate in tissue regeneration or repair. Bioactive molecules (BM) play a key role in tissue regeneration, although their application in tissue engineering presents different challenges. Some of the major challenges of using exogenous BM are their short half-life and their requirement in a spatiotemporal controlled manner over a prolonged period during regeneration or repair. This study was aimed to (1) synthesize and characterize nano-systems capable of releasing mono/dual BM in a temporal-controlled manner over a minimum period of two weeks and (2) assess the ability of these nano-systems to enhance migration, adherence, proliferation and odontogenic differentiation of SCAP in root canal dentin. Two bioactive polymers, namely chitosan and sodium alginate were used owing to their inherent physicochemical and biological properties. Bovine serum albumin (BSA) and dexamethasone (Dex) were discretely loaded on chitosan nanoparticles (CSnp) by two methods, namely encapsulation and adsorption. BSA encapsulated CSnp (BSA-CSnpI) showed release of BSA for four weeks and significantly enhanced alkaline phosphatase activity of SCAP (p

Keywords: Bioactive molecules
Chitosan nanoparticles
Odontogenic differentiation
Regenerative endodontics
Stem cells from apical papilla
Temporal-controlled release
Advisor: Kishen, Anil
Securities Enforcement: An evaluation of recent legislative changes

Typically approached in terms of efficiency, accountability, deterrence, and the best interests of the public, recent research has attempted to determine whether public or private enforcement provides more investor protection and effective market discipline. Instead of pitting public and private enforcement against each other and suggesting that one offers a superior approach, this research work determines that each serves essential and complementary roles in protecting the interests of the investing public. Although a comparative approach between Canadian capital markets and those in the United States will be used, the principal objective is to analyze how the current financial context and recent legislative changes have influenced the Canadian securities landscape. Are recent developments in Canadian securities regulation (public enforcement) truly effective?

Keywords: Business Law
Canada
Capital Market
Enforcement
Law
Securities
Advisor: Anand, Anita
Persistent ergativity: Agreement and splits in Tsimshianic

This thesis presents a morphosyntactic analysis of agreement patterns in the Tsimshianic language family (primarily Gitksan, with some focus on Coast Tsimshian). These ergative languages demonstrate several distinct splits in the distribution of agreement, conditioned by differences in clause type, nominal type, and person. Despite the presence of such agreement splits, the ergative pattern of agreement is largely unaffected: I refer to this property as persistent ergativity, as opposed to split ergativity. A pattern of particular interest is that of agreement switch (Kalin 2014; Kalin and van Urk 2015), or pivoting ergativity (Davis to appear). In this type of split, the morphological paradigm used to mark ergative in one context is used to mark absolutive in another context, with the overall ergative/absolutive alignment of the system remaining unchanged. At the heart of the proposed analysis is the use of feature relativization to generate several different arrays of potential agreement targets. I propose that agreement in Tsimshianic can be modeled with an ergative agreement probe on v which consistently agrees with the transitive subject, plus a higher agreement probe with several options for how it may be relativized, and consequently several potential agreement distributions: absolutive, nominative, or ergative. In particular, I analyze agreement switch as the result of the high probe agreeing directly with the lower ergative probe. This is accomplished by relativizing the higher agreement probe to uninterpretable phi-features, found exclusively on the lower phi-agreement probe. I capitalize on several familiar featural distinctions (including the interpretable/uninterpretable distinction), and apply them in new ways through feature relativization to generate typologically unusual splits without affecting the ergative pattern of v-agreement. The proposed analysis is novel among accounts of Tsimshianic in its approach to the factor conditioning the clause type split, and in its connection between agreement and A'-patterns. It is furthermore comprehensive, in explicitly accounting for agreement and word order patterns across both the Interior and Coast branches of the family. The analysis of the complex agreement patterns presented is of interest to theories of ergativity, as well as theories on the mechanics of features and agreement systems.

Keywords: agreement
ergativity
features
gitksan
syntax
tsimshianic
Advisor: Bejar, Susana
Selling What No One Can Buy

Through legal process theory, this thesis examines Parliament’s deliberations leading up to the enactment of Bill C-36, which was introduced to govern the exchange of sexual services for consideration after the Supreme Court of Canada’s landmark decision in Bedford v Canada. Grounded in legislative principles and functions, Part I’s “objective-perceptual” approach to legislative intent conceives of Parliament as an institution comprised of rational, reason-giving agents who must have a reasoned apprehension to legislate. Part II evaluates the evidence, argument, and participation at Committee Hearings to demonstrate that Parliament’s democratic, legal, and institutional legitimacy deteriorated from misapprehending polls, social science, and testimony. After analyzing Bill C-36’s Preamble and legislative objectives at Part III’s outset, the connection between the form and content of law is illustrated by arguing that s 213(1.1) of the Criminal Code has an invalid purpose, which in turn shows the inextricable link between rationality and legitimacy.

Keywords: Bedford v Canada
legal process theory
legal reasoning
Lon Fuller
Parliament
prostitution and sex work
Advisor: Stewart, Hamish