VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Governing Foreign Aid: Explaining Donor Responsiveness to Global Development Goals

In September 2015, the United Nations adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Foreign aid is crucial to achieving the SDGs in developing countries, as it can fill key funding gaps that the private sector or NGOs cannot. However, there exists a fair amount of variation in the impact of the SDGs on the aid policies and practices of major OECD donors. Drawing on case evidence, including elite interviews and qualitative document analysis, from three bilateral aid donors (Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom), this dissertation seeks to explain this variation and identify the causal mechanisms through which global goals influence aid policy and practice. I argue that the SDGs exert influence through a mechanism of show and tell in donor normative frameworks. Show and tell involves rhetorical performance that obligates performers to communicate their policies, practices and identities using a common script. The sensitivity of donors to this mechanism of show and tell is shaped by the perceived instrumentality of the SDGs in furthering donors’ specific reputational aspirations. When donors perceive that the SDGs will further their reputational aspirations they will show and tell a story about how their aid programs and even more fundamentally their donor identity are linked to the SDGs. This process of show and tell can lead to goal responsiveness because donors then link SDG implementation to the maintenance or achievement of particular donor identities. The variation in donors’ political commitment to the goals, then, is attributable to their differing sensitivity to the performative mechanism of show and tell which is in turn rooted in differing concerns for their reputation, and their perception of the SDGs utility in furthering their reputations. Donor governments who perceive that the SDGs are useful in achieving their desired reputation are more likely to be highly responsive to the goals.

Advisor: Bernstein, Steven
Empirical Models of Heuristic Search in AI Planning and Neural Sequence Decoding

Heuristic search algorithms are widely used in both AI planning and the decoding of sequences from deep neural networks. In recent years, several lines of work have highlighted different factors that impact the empirical performance of heuristic search algorithms. However, a principled empirical understanding of the search behavior of these heuristic search algorithms has yet to be developed. Empirical models, such as the phase transition and the heavy-tailed behavior, have been central to the development of empirical understanding of combinatorial search problems such as constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) and satisfiability (SAT). In this dissertation, we investigate the use of empirical models to explain the behavior of heuristic search algorithms in AI planning and neural sequence decoding and support the development of more efficient search algorithms. In AI planning, we develop empirical models for problem difficulty of greedy best first (GBFS), the most commonly used algorithm for satisficing planning. First, we establish the existence of a phase transition in the solubility of planning problems and investigate its implications to problem difficulty. Then, we demonstrate the heavy-tailed behavior of GBFS and provide a deeper understanding of the connection between constrainedness and local minima. Informed by our analysis, we develop a novel variant of GBFS that outperforms the baseline. In neural sequence decoding, we develop empirical models for the performance of beam search, the ubiquitous algorithm for decoding deep sequence models. First, we investigate the empirical problem of performance degradation in beam search. We present an explanatory model based on search discrepancies that generalizes previous observations on the behavior of beam search. Building on our analysis, we present two heuristic techniques that eliminate the problem. Next, we study goal-oriented sequence decoding and show that, similar to GBFS, we observe heavy-tailed behavior. We present a novel variant of goal-oriented beam search that exploits our insights and outperforms the baseline. Our work shows the importance of empirical models in the study and development of heuristic search algorithms and demonstrates that empirical models developed for CSPs and SAT can be adapted to AI planning and neural sequence decoding.

Keywords: AI Planning
Heuristic Search
Neural Sequence Decoding
Advisor: Beck, J. Christopher
Mental Health and Academic Performance in Postsecondary Education: Sociodemographic Risk Factors and Links to Childhood Adversity

A significant body of literature has demonstrated that marginalized sociodemographic groups are subject to increased frequency and severity of stress, deemed ‘minority stress,’ associated with discrimination, harassment, systemic barriers, and oppression (Meyer, 2003 2015). Furthermore, early childhood adversity has been shown to be linked to increased stress reactivity and reduced mental health outcomes in early adulthood and across lifespan development (Fergusson Lynskey, 1996; Lupien, McEwen, Gunnar, Heim, 2009; Shonkoff et al., 2012). Experiences of stress in academic settings, while performance-enhancing at low and moderate levels, has been shown to be detrimental to performance and learning at chronic or severe levels (Hartley, 2011; Keogh, Bond, Flaxman, 2006; Liston, McEwen, Casey, Posner, 2012b). This dissertation leverages an ecological systems theoretical framework to identify differences in stress, wellness and learning among marginalized sociodemographic postsecondary students in Canada, and individuals who have experienced adverse childhood experiences. In study one, National College Health Assessment (2016) data from 43,780 participants across 42 Canadian postsecondary education institutions were analyzed. Findings showed that students who identified with marginalized identities were significantly more likely to experience poor wellness during their postsecondary studies, and that wellness served as a mediator between identifying with a marginalized sociodemographic group and reduced academic performance. In study two, links between stress and academic performance during transition into university were examined through a survey administered at a large, research-intensive university in Southwestern Ontario. This research demonstrated that stress was negatively related to sense of belonging and academic performance during first-year university, and that sense of belonging partially mediated the negative relationship between stress and academic performance. Furthermore, students who experienced chaotic family environments and childhood adversity were shown to have increased levels of stress and reduced academic performance during their transition into university. Collectively, this research underscores the critical role that wellness plays in student learning and establishes imperatives for postsecondary institutions to engage in efforts to enhance equity, inclusion, and transitional supports that create wellness-promoting educational contexts supporting the learning of all students, with particular benefit to communities who are vulnerable to systemic barriers and stress.

Keywords: Childhood Adversity
Learning
Marginalization
Mental Health
Advisor: Martinussen, Rhonda
Using Autobiographical Narratives to Examine Successful and Unsuccessful Socialization Experiences

The goal of socialization is to have children accept parental values while simultaneously integrating them into their own sense of self. Ultimately, successful socialization is marked by behaviours that are internally driven rather than externally controlled. Researchers studying this process have often relied on using questionnaires in an attempt to uncover which parental behaviours facilitate internalization. Findings have shown that children are more likely to internalize parental values when parents model positive values, comfort during times of distress, use inductive discipline in response to misbehavior, engage in appropriate discussions, and respond to reasonable requests. However, it has recently been suggested that qualitative measures, such as autobiographical narratives, are ideal for studying how life events have been processed. Autobiographical narratives provide insight into which features of socialization are recalled as significant. For this reason, autobiographical narratives were used in the current study. The primary goal was to determine if the ways individuals recall socialization experiences reflect what has already been established using more traditional methods. Several features of socialization were considered, including, whether some values occurred more often in successful experiences, whether learning occurred across a variety of different domains, and whether some components of domains lead to higher internalization than others. Further, combinations of domains were also investigated. Autobiographical narratives of 474 emerging adults were analyzed. Participants provided two narratives, 1) a time when their caregiver was successful at teaching them a value and 2) a time when their caregiver was unsuccessful at teaching them a value. A domains-of-socialization framework was used to conceptualize socialization. Although several findings aligned with previous research, when narratives were used as the outcome measure, some novel findings occurred. Notably, lessons that pertained to being grateful for what you have and where you came from occurred more in successful experiences compared to unsuccessful experiences. Also, learning through participation/observation alone was associated with higher meaning making than when participation was accompanied by a discussion. Finally, no unsuccessful socialization experiences were reported to occur through modeling; thus learning through observation alone seems to be an effective, yet subtle, socialization technique that frequently lead to value internalization.

Keywords: Development
Narrative Analysis
Parenting
Socialization
Advisor: Grusec, Joan E
Assessing Occupational Exposure to Flame Retardants and Plasticizers using Silicone Passive Samplers and other Measurement Methods

Occupational exposure to the complex mixtures of semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs), including flame retardants (FRs) and plasticizers, used in personal care products and electronic and electrical equipment is a serious concern. This thesis documents occupational exposure to FRs and plasticizers in e-waste facilities and nail salons using silicone passive samplers and other measurement methods, including dust collection and active air sampling. The thesis advances the understanding of the use of silicone passive samplers for measuring SVOC exposure in personal exposure monitoring and assessment. Three silicone passive sampler configurations (brooches, wristbands and armbands) accumulated detectable amounts of FRs and plasticizers within a relatively short deployment time (~8 hours) in both e-waste and nail salon environments. Among these samplers, silicone brooches showed the strongest correlations with active air samplers for most compounds. The correlations between brooches and active air samplers were stronger in e-waste facilities than in nail salons. This thesis found that silicone brooches and wristbands can be useful for indicating internal exposure to SVOCs with relatively long biological half-lives, like decabromodiphenyl ether (BDE-209), but their uses for compounds with relatively short half-lives, like organophosphate esters (OPEs), is unclear. Overall, results suggest that silicone brooches and wristbands are valuable screening tools for qualitative exposure studies, but are not reliable for quantitative exposure measurement. The thesis contains the first reports of FR and plasticizer exposure at elevated levels in Canadian e-waste recycling facilities and nail salons. Higher exposures via air and dust to FRs were found in formal e-waste facilities in Ontario and Quebec compared to previous studies in formal and informal facilities across the globe. E-waste workers in an Ontario facility were exposed to FRs in respirable particles, raising concerns for worker health in e-waste environment. Exposure to some OPEs in nail salons at relatively high levels was an unexpected finding as these chemicals are known to be FRs and have not been reported to be used in personal care products. Results presented here call attention to FRs and plasticizers exposure among workers in e-waste facilities and nail salons where these chemicals are, largely, not addressed by current occupational exposure limits.

Keywords: Flame retardants
Occupational exposure
Plasticizers
Silicone passive samplers
Advisor: Diamond, Miriam L.
Arrandale, Victoria H.
Conquering Creoles: Power, Transculturation, and the Limits of Empire in New Spain, 1521-1625

This dissertation examines conquering creole consciousness through the voluminous pastoral and ethnographic writings of Mota y Escobar (1546-1625), a first-generation elite criollo of Hispanic descent, who served as Bishop of Guadalajara-Nueva Galicia (1598-1607) and Tlaxcala-Puebla (1608-1625). His generation, the first of the conquistador descendants, believed themselves entitled to extend and naturalize conqueror power as a form of perpetually inheritable privilege, in order to continue the construction of empire and cement their own place within it. Mota y Escobar’s cohort enjoyed the returns of their parents’ and grandparents’ institutionalization of Hispanic domination but experienced the Crown’s efforts to claw back the mercedes (rewards) that undergirded this naturalization. Mota y Escobar’s writings exemplify the ways in which creole power was made through transcultural agents who used Iberian epistemological constructs alongside distinctly novohispano goals, desires, and affect to assert their natural right to rule the colony. As mobile and strategic cultural agents, these creoles banded together around a sense of entitlement as the legitimate inheritors of New World wealth and power, and as the most effective conquerors, creators, and interpreters of New World order. Bearing out Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz’s vision of New World cultural transformations as processes of exchange, loss, and creation (transculturation), this dissertation shows criollo power as articulated and negotiated through colonial bureaucracy, reproduced through the rhetoric of whiteness, and managed through the practices of slavery, patronage, and wealth accumulation. It highlights Mota y Escobar’s efforts as a transcultural agent to communicate his sense of his place in the imperial structure using a language that moved flexibly between what was European and what was novohispano. To naturalize Hispanic control, power had to be made and remade constantly in the colony of New Spain, and conquering creoles like Mota y Escobar laboured to transform and translate European cultural codes into novohispanoorder. Conquering creoles revelled in their domination and marginalization of other racialized groups in New Spain, all the while romanticizing the criollo relationship to colonial space. A detailed examination of a member of this generation helps illustrate the logic of violence upon which criollismo was built.

Keywords: Colonialism
Criollos
Empire
Mexico
New Spain
Transculturation
Advisor: Newton, Melanie J.
Re-imagining the World: Sanctity and Materiality in the Vitae of Sixth-century Gaul

In the sixth-century, Gaul was undergoing a prolonged negotiation about how its communities should function, framed in terms of divine materiality, and it survives to us today in the period's most popular stories about itself: the Vitae of its saints. This thesis argues that hagiography in post-Roman Gaul was an arena in which updated frameworks for making sense of the world were put forward, and that a significant part of that undertaking was the establishment of a legitimizing logic for specific social structures and political arrangements. This was accomplished by identifying specific points of intersection between the divine and the material in order to establish tangible, particular points of meaning in an ontologically shifting world. The relationship between sensible material and story is socially produced but nonetheless deeply real by virtue of its ability to represent—make present—those stories as an embodied experience through Vitae that reveal themselves to be complex texts emerging from a cultural milieu steeped in the conventions of homiletics and exegesis.Four roughly contemporaneous Vitae form the thesis’ source material. The first two are monastic: the Vita patrum Iurensium, which narrates the founding of a monastic community through the lives of three of its first abbots, and the Vita abbatum Acaunensium, which describes the refounding of the monastery of Agaune by Sigismund of Burgundy. The remaining two texts take an urban setting, more episcopal than monastic in focus: the Vita of Amator, an early bishop of Auxerre, and that of Genovefa of Paris,a complex figure who straddled the categories of holy virgin, Roman aristocrat, and even perhaps (albeit never explicitly) urban bishop. This selection of texts, reasonably contemporary with one another, is contained enough to allow a robust exploration of each, while still diverse enough to offer a glimpse of the deep complexity and variety of hagiological projects that were at work in the world-defining project this thesis aims to explore.

Keywords: Gaul
Hagiography
Late Antique
Materiality
Medieval
Vitae
Advisor: Cochelin, Isabelle
Murray, Alexander C.
Disquisitions on quantum-enhanced polarimetry

It takes some convincing to realize that light has a polarization degree of freedom, as our eyes are usually ignorant of light's polarization. Since overcoming this hurdle of intuition, polarization has become a fantastic resource that can be easily manipulated both physically and mathematically, opening the door to a wide variety of applications. We have only recently begun to appreciate how many more doors are opened by the quantum mechanical degrees of freedom inherent to optical polarization. One use of optical polarization is for polarimetry: measuring the changes in light's polarization after it interacts with a material is an excellent procedure for nondestructively probing the characteristics and composition of the intervening material. More sensitive measurements require brighter probe light; however, sufficiently intense light will begin to destroy the sample being probed. In this thesis, we seek to provide more sensitive polarimetry without resorting to bright beams of light. Tailoring the quantum properties of various states of light has been shown to increase their usefulness for other estimation protocols and we show how to extend this paradigm to quantum enhancements in polarimetry. We begin by finding the quantum states underlying classical polarization. Each particular set of classical polarization properties corresponds to a large variety of quantum states. Next, we establish quantum descriptions of classical polarization transformations corresponding to arbitrary Jones and Mueller matrices, including quantum mechanical insights into the distinction between processes that can and cannot be described by Jones matrices. We propose candidates for the most likely quantum states underlying classical decompositions into polarized and unpolarized fractions, carefully inspecting how these quantum states behave under polarization transformations. This language allows us to inspect quantum-enhanced sensing in the multiparameter context of polarimetry. We show the dramatic possibilities for quantum enhancements in any metrological scenario that is mathematically equivalent to a rotation, of which polarization rotations are a primary example; in contrast, we also show most attenuating and depolarizing polarization transformations to forbid such dramatic enhancements. Finally, we discuss polarization and its generalizations in the context of generating quantum entanglement via linear optics. These applications serve as mere examples of the usefulness promised by light’s quantum polarization degrees of freedom.

Keywords: Polarimetry
Polarization
Quantum optics
Sensing and metrology
Advisor: James, Daniel FV
Firms' Access to External Capital Markets

This thesis examines external forces that impact firms' willingness and ability to raise external funds in the capital markets. Chapter 1 introduces the research topics that the thesis addresses and briefly outlines their findings. Chapter 2 examines a regulation that was designed to increase the number of private firms choosing to go public in the United States, but which actually resulted in fewer firms completing initial public offerings. Specifically, the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act was enacted to reduce the costs of going public for small firms by reducing the amount of required disclosure and allowing these firms to test the waters before filing public documents. This Chapter argues that these changes exacerbated information asymmetry in favour of firms over investors, discouraging all but the best firms from going public. Chapter 3 examines the impact of passive investors on firms' bond issuance decisions. This Chapter hypothesizes that firms take advantage of the presence of passive demand by issuing index-eligible bonds with features that favour firms. It shows empirically that firms care whether their bonds are index-eligible, and that as the level of passive demand increases, firms are more likely to issue bonds and the bonds they issue are larger and have lower spreads. By focusing on changes in index thresholds, the Chapter then shows that while bonds become larger, bond issuance decreases, consistent with some firms `reaching' to be included in the index while other firms opt out of the bond market. Chapter 4 examines two forms of seasoned equity offerings, which differ in terms of risk taken by financial intermediaries. Specifically, the Chapter compares bought deals, where underwriters buy shares from an issuer at a fixed price and then find buyers or risk holding the shares as inventory, to marketed deals, where underwriters build a book of interested buyers but do not take on any price or inventory risk. This Chapter examines why underwriters choose one form of intermediation over the other, and how bought deals change the way surplus is divided among firms, investors and underwriters and can result in inefficient seasoned equity offerings.

Advisor: Davydenko, Sergei