VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Opportunities and Challenges: Identity Development and Lived Experiences among Chinese Immigrant Young Gay Men in Toronto

This grounded theory study sets out to explore identity development and lived experiences among Chinese immigrant young gay men, with a focus on their migration journey and intersectional social locations. Eighteen Chinese gay men who were aged 18-28 and had moved from Mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan to Canada participated in semi-structured individual interviews conducted in either Mandarin or English. Findings indicate that these gay men migrated to Canada for an array of reasons, citing “living in a LGBT-friendly country” as only one of many factors. Recent socioeconomic and cultural changes in Chinese societies have led many participants to revise their original perception of “the West is better.” On the other hand, the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in Chinese societies is noted throughout the interviews. Situated in this socio-cultural context, the participants’ current state of ethnocultural identity is found to be in-between, consisting of constant transitions between Canadian culture and Chinese culture over time and across contexts. Their sexual identity generally followed a linear progression and achieved a uniform and settled state with selective, pragmatic disclosure. Yet, various interpersonal and environmental factors were highlighted to bear upon their process of self-identifying as gay. Several themes regarding intersectionality emerged from the data. First, study participants do not experience conflicts between their sexual and cultural identities. Second, the intersectionality is context-specific. While rejecting the ubiquitous existence of intersectional oppression, study participants have experienced a certain form of marginalization that occurs in the context of disclosing their gay identity to their Chinese friends/families and finding a dating partner within a gay community. Third, participants consider the label of “double minority” oversimplified and derogatory, indicating that their intersectional identities can serve as a source of social support. Based on the research findings, implications for social work theory, research, and practice are discussed.

Advisor: Fang, Lin
An Investigation into Factors that Differentiate Reading Comprehension Skill Profiles of Young Adolescent Students

Provincial literacy scores in Ontario provide results of academic achievement but little is known about achievement gaps between groups of students. This study focused on better understanding studentsâ reading comprehension skill profiles based on whether they met the provincial standard or not using data from a provincial reading achievement assessment. The study examined the differences in reading skill mastery among Grade 6 students, using Cognitive Diagnostic Modeling (CDM) that provided a much finer grained representation of studentsâ reading comprehension skills than traditional aggregated-test scoring (Jang, 2009). The responses of 122,269 Grade 6 Ontario students who wrote the 2012 English version of the provincially mandated reading achievement test developed by EQAO in 2012 were considered. This study examined differences in reading profiles among struggling adolescent readers based on their status of either Learning Disability (LD), participation within an English as a Second Language/English Literacy Development (ESL/ELD) program, as well as having both an LD and participation in a ESL/ELD program. Based on the findings, this study discusses how achievement groups show different patterns of mastery. Students who met or exceeded the provincial standard showed a strength in implicit understanding of text whereas struggling readers, that is, those who did not meet the provincial standard, most often mastered vocabulary, explicit understanding, and inference making over implicit understanding and making inferences. Overall, students most often mastered the skills of understanding vocabulary, explicit understanding, and making inferences over implicit understanding and textual organization. However, when studentsâ skill mastery profiles were considered according to LD, ESL/ELD, and a combined LD-ESL/ELD status, distinctive patterns of mastery were not evident as had been hypothesized. Put together, students achieving a Level 1 and Level 2 and students achieving a Level 3 and Level 4 showed similar skill master profiles, regardless of their status. The study further discusses how intervention focusing on building implicit understanding of text may help struggling readers increase their reading comprehension.

Keywords: assessment
cognitive diagnostic modeling
English as a second language
learning disabilities
reading comprehension
struggling readers
Advisor: Jang, Eunice E
Spaces in Between: A Swing-Informed Approach to Performing Jazz- and Blues-Influenced Western Art Music for Violin

This dissertation explores issues related to performing art music for the violin that references jazz and blues. Because western notation cannot convey many subtleties of rhythm, typical scores provide imprecise instructions for creating swing, which is for many a defining feature of jazz and the blues. Moreover, since swing is not one sound or rhythmic sense, scores convey little about how a composer understands it. My aim is to help performers better realize a composer’s conceptualization of swing. Following an overview of scholarship on swing, I analyze the “Blues” movement from Ravel’s Violin Sonata No.2, Copland’s Nocturne and Ukulele Serenade, and the “Socrates: Alcibiades” movement from Bernstein’s Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium.” To understand how each composer conceptualized and notated swing, I explore jazz and blues recordings that are representative of their respective time periods. My analysis of each composer’s notion and notation of swing is supplemented by interviews with expert jazz musicians, who assessed several recorded versions of the pieces. Their comments helped me pinpoint and analyze key factors that contributed to their preferences. Although certain subtle processes emerged as fundamental to a swing-informed approach, it became clear that a strict “how-to” guide to performing swing was problematic. I also found that less rhythmic alteration can actually be the best strategy for creating swing. To further explore how classically trained violinists can convey swing, I explore five playing techniques. They are not far removed from accepted classical methods and do not require radical reworking of playing mechanics or the music. However, as I argue, they do clarify jazz violin practices and provide possibilities for expressing swing’s sensibilities. While the swing-informed approach provided is a general guideline to performing swing-influenced pieces for violin, it is my hope that the methodology will be a blueprint for performers of any instrument who wish to make informed choices that facilitate the realization of composers’ “high-level” intentions.

Keywords: Blues
Groove
Jazz
Performance
Swing
Violin
Advisor: Packman, Jeff
Nonmusical Correlates of Musical Ability

Researchers frequently examine whether training and competence in music is associated with nonmusical factors, often with the aim of identifying whether musical ability overlaps with other abilities (especially language), and whether music lessons have consequences that extend beyond musical ability. Correlational designs preclude conclusions of causation because preexisting differences in personality, general cognition, music aptitude, and demographics could determine natural musical abilities and the decision to take music lessons for long durations. Here, we measured preexisting factors that are theoretically relevant, as well as music training, which allowed for better interpretation of correlational data. The first four studies recruited samples of undergraduates. Study 1 examined music perception as a function of music training and nonmusical factors (demographics, general cognitive ability, and personality). We then examined associations of musical expertise with intelligence (Study 2), speech perception (Study 3), and higher-order language (i.e., reading, Study 4), asking whether such associations are better attributable to training effects or preexisting musical aptitude. The final study measured personality, general cognition, speech, and high-order language (grammar) ability in a sample of children for a developmental comparison. Overall, results were generally consistent across age groups with ample evidence for associations of musical skills with personality, general cognition, and language that are independent of music training. Musical and language abilities â except for reading ability in adults â were associated irrespective of demographics and general cognitive abilities, a finding that is consistent with the proposal of special overlap between the two domains. By contrast, evidence for training effects was limited. For musical skills, nonmusical factors were just as important as music training, although music training may mediate these associations. For children, music training was associated with intelligence but not with language skills. Considered as a whole, associations between musical and nonmusical abilities appear to be more reflective of preexisting factors than of training effects.

Keywords: domain specificity
gene-environment interaction
musical aptitude
music training
plasticity
transfer
Advisor: Schellenberg, E. Glenn
Related Party Transactions

Related party transactions (hereafter RPTs) are common business practices. If misused, however, they can result in significant losses for investors. This study attempts to examine empirical issues pertaining to RPTs. Specifically, the paper has two goals. The main goal is related to a 2006 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation mandating public firms to disclose their governance policies on RPTs. I intend to investigate whether firms change their RPT behaviors in response to this mandated RPT governance disclosure and whether investors update the implied cost of capital on these RPT behaviors accordingly. Employing hand-collected RPT data for S 1500 firms, I find the initiation of RPT governance disclosure significantly reduces the occurrence of RPTs, suggesting an ex-post improvement in RPT governance. This reduction is more pronounced on firms with higher agency costs. I also find the types of RPTs and the identities of related parties play a role in the detected disclosure effect, suggesting certain types of RPTS could be more likely to be used as expropriation. Furthermore, I document that the disclosure of RPT governance reduces the implied costs of capital premium (ICC) associated with RPTs. Taken together, this analysis provides initial evidence about the effects of the SEC’s 2006 regulation on RPT governance disclosures, and shows how the disclosures on RPT governance can enhance firms’ governance on RPT activities and whether investors could recognize the firm behavior change by reducing firms’ implied cost of capital. The second goal is to assess whether independent directors’ compensation is associated with the occurrence of RPTs. Studying independent directors attracts my interest because they are responsible for reviewing and approving RPTs in most companies. By decomposing independent directors’ compensation into the market-level component and the over-compensated component, I show that firms with over-compensated directors or with a lower portion of equity-based compensation in contrast to cash-based compensation incur more RPTs. These results suggest that independent directors’ overcompensation reduce directors’ independence and equity-based compensation aligns directors’ interests with those of shareholders, consistent with the private benefit theory. This study provides novel evidence that appropriate directors’ compensation design can better control RPT behaviors.

Keywords: Compensation
Financial Dislcosure
Implied Cost of Capital
Regulation
Related Party Transactions
Advisor: Hope, Ole-Kristian
Neutron and X-ray Diffraction Studies of Structure and Magnetism in α-RuCl3

The magnetic ground state of the honeycomb magnet α-RuCl3 has been explored using magnetic neutron and x-ray diffraction techniques. These results are discussed in the context of the growing body of work exploring magnetism of this material and its relation to the Kitaev magnetic Hamiltonian. Single crystal samples of α-RuCl3 were grown using chemical vapour transport techniques and magnetic neutron diffraction measurements were conducted on a multi-crystal array to determine the magnetic order. Below the 7~K ordering temperature, magnetic superlattice peaks due to zigzag magnetic order were detected, with an estimated ordered moment that was smaller than expected for spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ moments. This magnetic ordering is consistent with the presence of a substantial Kitaev interaction, and the small ordered moment suggests that significant fluctuations are present. The magnetic order was also investigated in the presence of an in-plane external magnetic field. The high field phase diagram for $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$ was established using a combination of neutron diffraction, magnetization, and heat capacity measurements. The loss of zigzag order was confirmed above a high field transition at 8~T and it was found that the material enters into a phase with gapped magnetic excitations. In the low field phase, the zigzag magnetic ordering temperature tended to zero when approaching the critical field, and in the high field phase the gap size was found to vanish at finite field. This vanishing of experimentally determined energy scales at the critical field suggests the presence of a field-driven quantum phase transition. A previously uncharacterized low field transition was also found and was associated with a change in magnetic domain populations. Resonant magnetic x-ray diffraction measurements were conducted on a single crystal sample of $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$ with incident photon energies at the ruthenium L$_2$ and L$_3$ edges. These results confirmed that the resonant enhancement at the L$_3$ edge is at least an order of magnitude larger than that at the L$_2$ edge, an important finding in support of the j$_{eff}=\frac{1}{2}$ picture for the ruthenium valence electron states.

Advisor: Kim, Young-June
A Mixed Methods Cross-Cultural Investigation of Conversational Turn Taking in Families of Children with Hearing Loss

This study compares the communicative interactions of families of children with and without hearing loss in Vietnam to those used in Canada as an example of how language socialization practices influence parent-child communication in order for speech-language pathologists to create more culturally appropriate intervention techniques. Taking a mixed methods approach, quantitative data was collected using the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System conversational turn count (CTC). A protocol to validate the CTC with Vietnamese speakers was conducted as part of this project. Qualitative interviews focused on language were conducted with the childrenâ s parents. CTC for Vietnamese families was found to be valid for use (rs(18)=.70, p

Keywords: Child Language
Hearing Loss
LENA System
Mixed Methods
Vietnamese
Advisor: Eriks-Brophy, Alice
Canadian Contract Law Teaching and the Failure to Operationalize: Theory Practice, Realism Formalism, and Aspiration Reality in Contemporary Legal Education

This dissertation examines the attitudes, pedagogical practices, and teaching materials of Canadian contract law professors to better understand the relationship between theory and practice in legal education. Professors express a widespread aspiration to translate theory into practice – to incorporate theoretical and critical perspectives as a means of producing “better lawyers.” However, an analysis of the substantive theoretical attitudes about law reveals that this aspiration is imperfectly realized. When professors describe their beliefs about law, they overwhelmingly express strong commitments to realist and critical ideas, drawn largely from American legal thought, that emphasize law’s contingency and indeterminacy, and that construe considerations of policy, context, and politics as central to an understanding of law. However, the attitudes about law reflected in key manifestations of “practice” reveal an apparently contradictory set of commitments. Professors describe and conceive of legal reasoning, which can be considered a foundational practice shared by legal professionals, in a way that foregrounds formalist attitudes of law. These conceptions treat judicial reasoning seriously, privilege the importance of doctrine, and emphasize the determination of relevance with reference to an internally coherent set of rules – all of which effectively marginalizes considerations of policy, politics, and context. Moreover, the way professors teach, how they formulate their learning objectives, the decisions they make about substance, and the materials they use all put into practice these formalist ideas, rather than the realist and critical attitudes to which professors are purportedly committed. A similar tension arises as between critical introductory statements in Canadian contract law casebooks and the casebooks’ more conventional presentation of substance, as viewed through the remedies chapters. These observations imply that Canadian legal thought may be characterized by theoretical eclecticism co-existing with methodological homogeneity, a failure to operationalize theoretical commitments. Moreover, the dynamics reveal a complex interplay between structure and agency in legal education in which professors participate affirmatively in reproducing the structures that condition them. This complex interplay partially accounts for the tenacity of conventional categories, concepts, and pedagogical formulae, and is a crucial factor to understand in the pursuit of any transformative vision for legal education.

Keywords: Casebooks
Contract Law
Legal Consciousness
Legal Education
Legal History
Legal Thought
Advisor: Nedelsky, Jennifer
Design and Development of Glass-Fibre-Reinforced Polymer and Ultra-High-Performance Fibre-Reinforced Concrete Guideway Girders

An innovative design for prefabricated rail guideway girders is developed and validated. The proposed concept uses compositely acting glass-fibre-reinforced polymer (GFRP) and ultra-high-performance fibre-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC), achieving a girder that is 30% lighter than state-of-the-art prestressed concrete designs. Questions regarding the structural behaviour of compositely acting GFRP–UHPFRC are addressed through prototyping and experimental studies. A robust structural connector for GFRP–UHPFRC, which can be fabricated during the same vacuum infusion process that produces the GFRP shell, is developed and tested. The tensile fatigue behaviour of UHPFRC is characterized through a series of direct tension cyclic tests, showing that for peak cyclic tensile stress below 7.5MPa, there is no progressive damage to the UHPFRC. The intrinsic damping of UHPFRC is investigated through a series of free-vibration tests, demonstrating that a loss factor of η = 0.04 is typical for UHPFRC under tensile cyclic loading, with higher values possible under reversed cyclic and short-duration loading. The unprecedented lightness of the proposed guideway, together with the high strength of GFRP, means that serviceability and fatigue limit states govern the dimensioning of the girders. This calls for a rational means of assessing the vibration response of the guideway system, from the points of view of passenger comfort and girder fatigue life. A frequency-domain method for the analysis of train-girder interaction dynamics is developed and presented. Relative to existing analysis methods, this approach eliminates the need for Monte Carlo simulation of random track irregularities, and allows for rapid assessment of the effects of long-term deformations.

Keywords: Bridge Engineering
Fatigue
GFRP
Rail Guideway
Structural Dynamics
UHPFRC
Advisor: Gauvreau, Paul
Nash Equilibrium Seeking Over Networks

The problem of Nash equilibrium seeking is investigated in a networked game. The game is defined as being played by a collection of a finite number of players whose cost functions are dependent on the actions of any subset of players in the network. This dependency is captured by a graph referred to as an interference graph. According to the topology of this graph, we design distributed algorithms to find a Nash equilibrium of the game. We focus on distributed algorithms since the players are only aware of imperfect information about some local playersâ actions. The players are allowed to communicate with the local neighbors, through a communication graph, to update their information as iterations proceed. Based on the topology of the interference graph, we find a limit over the communication graph for the sake of dissemination of the required information between the players. The proposed algorithms are based on projected gradient-based method by using diminishing and constant step sizes. The aim of using different step sizes is to leverage various aspects of convergence such as accuracy and speed. It is shown that while, the diminishing step sizes drive the algorithm as close as possible to the Nash equilibrium of the game, a large number of iterations is required as the step sizes diminish after each iteration. The algorithms with constant step sizes, on the other hand, are not harmed by this issue, however, the iterates of those algorithms fluctuate around the Nash equilibrium of the game and never reach the exact point but with an error. To remedy this problem for the algorithms with constant step sizes, we derive a novel method similar to ADMM techniques used in the context of distributed consensus optimization problems. A penalty term is considered for the projected gradient algorithm to annihilate the error term. Finally, we focus on games with coupled constraints in which, playersâ actions belong to a set which is dependent on the other playersâ actions in the network. Our objective is to find a generalized Nash equilibrium in a special subclass of games referred to as jointly convex games. We consider the coupled constraints to be affine equality constraints which are shared between all players. The proposed ADMM technique is then employed to derive a projected gradient-based method to find a variational equilibrium of the game which is in fact identical to the generalized Nash equilibrium.

Advisor: Pavel, Lacra