VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Moving Towards Thought: Theatricality, Technology, and the Theatre

Inspired by the question of what forces us to think and employing the Deleuzian concepts of affect and the new, this thesis argues that the technologies used in theatre production construct an affective encounter from which new thinking may emerge. Moreover, this thesis maintains that a consideration of the affective encounter is a productive means of further understanding theatricality because the experience of theatricality is rooted in the affective encounter. This argument brings together theatricality and thinking through the experience of affect that is produced by the technologies used in performance. Technology becomes an integral element to this project because it is positioned as the disruptive element that incites the affective encounter from which theatricality and new thinking may emerge.This examination of the relationship between thought, technology, and theatricality is grounded by an analysis of theatre productions by The Builders Association, Troika Ranch, Toni Dove, and Marie Brassard. It is further structured by an evaluation of ways that technology shapes and reshapes understandings of space, presence and event; each of which are significant elements in our conceptualizations of theatricality. More specifically, the individual chapters consider how technologies used in performance produce disruptions that open spaces for thinking the new. This is done through an examination of the ways that screens articulate the disjuncture inherent to theatrical space; how vocal mediation challenges conceptions of presence as an originary site; and how the theatrical event is reconstituted by the use of technologies that place the spectator in the midst of a "happening" that intensifies and disrupts their common sensuous experience. The empirical material of performance is used in this thesis as a means of working through the larger philosophical concerns of the project including: questions of thought, the new, and the role that technology plays in the creation and experience of theatricality. Building upon established discourses of intermedial performance, theatricality, and affect, this thesis outlines an expression of the creative potential of spectatorship, and is ultimately invested in considering how active participation may move the spectator to think the new.

Keywords: Deleuze
Technology
Theatre
Theatricality
Advisor: Tamara, Trojanowska
Characterization of Muscle Contraction with Second Harmonic Generation Microscopy

Muscle cells have the ability to change length and generate force due to orchestrated action of myosin nanomotors that cause sliding of actin filaments along myosin filaments in the sarcomeres, the fundamental contractile units, of myocytes. The correlated action of hundreds of sarcomeres is needed to produce the myocyte contractions. This study probes the molecular structure of the myofilaments and investigates the movement correlations between sarcomeres during contraction. In this study, second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy is employed for imaging striated myocytes. Myosin filaments in striated myocytes inherently have a nonzero second-order susceptibility,

Keywords: Birefringence in Muscle
Muscle Contraction
Sarcomere Syncronization
Second Harmonic Generation
Advisor: Virginijus, Barzda
A Longitudinal Examination of the Interrelationship of Multiple Health Behaviours

Background: Evaluating the interrelationship of health behaviours could assist in the development of effective public health interventions. Furthermore, the ability to identify cognitive mediating mechanisms that may influence multiple behavioural change requires further evaluation. Purpose: The objectives of this nationally representative multi-wave longitudinal analysis were: (1) to evaluate co-variation among health behaviours; specifically alcohol consumption, leisure-time physical activity, and smoking, and (2) to examine whether mastery acts as a mediating cognitive mechanism that facilitates multiple health behaviour change.Methods: Secondary data analysis was conducted on the first seven cycles of the Canadian National Population Health Survey. Data collection began in 1994/1995 and has continued biennially to 2006/2007. This longitudinal sample consisted of 15,167 Canadians 12 years of age or older. Alcohol consumption, leisure-time physical activity, and smoking were assessed as continuous variables. Parallel process growth curve models were used to analyze co-variation between health behaviours as well as to evaluate the potential mediating effects of perceived mastery. Results: An increase in leisure-time physical activity was associated with a greater reduction in tobacco use, while a flatter positive trajectory in alcohol consumption was associated with a steeper decline in tobacco use. Co-variation between alcohol consumption and leisure-time physical activity did not reach statistical significance. For the most part, mastery was unsuccessful in mediating the interrelationship of multiple behavioural changes.Conclusions: Health behaviours are not independent, but rather interrelated. Although one could argue that the estimated magnitude of such behavioural changes were quite small, modest and attainable behavioural changes at the population level can have considerable effects on the morbidity, mortality, and health care costs. In order to optimize limited prevention resources, these results suggest that population level intervention efforts targeting multiple modifiable behavioural risk factors may not need to occur simultaneously.

Keywords: Alcohol Consumption
Physical Activity
Public Health
Smoking
Advisor: Guy, Faulkner
Noncovalent and Reversible Covalent Interactions as the Basis for Reaction Development

Noncovalent and reversible covalent interactions are of central importance to the fields of catalysis and supramolecular chemistry. The work presented in this thesis focuses on our interests in furthering the understanding and utility of halogen bonding (XB) and boron-diol interactions. Chapter 1 describes the development of tridentate halogen bond donor receptors that were used to assess the strengths of various XB interactions. By exploiting the chelate effect of these tridentate receptors, XB association constants varying by four orders of magnitude were obtained, enabling comparisons to other noncovalent interactions, such as hydrogen bonding and anion-π interactions. Furthermore, free energy relationships between computed and experimental data were apparent over the wide range of electronically diverse donors studied.A review of organoboron acid-based catalysts is presented in Chapter 2. Their ability to function as Lewis acids and to activate carbonyl pronucleophiles, carboxylic acids and hydroxyl groups is discussed, alongside the advantages and limitations associated with their use as catalysts.Chapter 3 describes the development of novel borinic acid catalysts for the regioselective functionalization of di- and polyols under mild reaction conditions. This work builds on the group's previous finding that diphenylborinic acid can reversibly bind to diols. Through the formation of a tetracoordinate `ate'-compex, the bound oxygens are activated as nucleophiles. 9-Hetero-10-boraanthracene-derived borinic acids were found to be less prone to oxidative decomposition than diphenylborinic acid, thus lowering reaction times and improving catalyst turnover. Furthermore, the physical properties of the boraanthracenes were studied through X-ray crystallography, NMR, UV-vis and fluorescence spectroscopy.Chapter 4 describes studies aimed at using 9-hetero-10-boraanthracenes as substrates for Suzuki-Miyaura cross-couplings (SMCs). Using this methodology, benzannulated heterocycles were synthesized via a twofold SMC. Despite a slow transmetallation step, this process enabled the step- and atom-economial synthesis of medium-sized heterocycles.Finally, Chapter 5 details our current approaches towards expanding the scope of electrophiles that can be used for borinic acid catalyzed diol functionalizations. Monoallylations of diols were achieved in high yields using Pd/B dual catalysis. We are currently expanding this concept towards the desymmetrization of meso-diols through the development of chiral Pd-ligands.

Keywords: borinic acids
halogen bonding
organoboron catalysis
Suzuki-Miyaura cross-couplings
Advisor: Mark, S Taylor
French Romance and English Piety: Genre and Codex in Insular Romance

This dissertation explores what the interplay of romance and religious literature in England from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries can reveal about the origins and development of medieval romance. Drawing upon codicological evidence, it favors a more fluid definition of romance that recognizes it as both a category of generic difference distinct from but also linked to the saint's life, chronicle, or chanson de geste, and as a mode of translation that has its roots in the origins of the term romanz as a marker of linguistic difference used to distinguish French from Latin. It argues that the interconnections of romance and religious literature should be viewed as part of the process of translating or adapting a text, whether into a new language or for a new audience. The first section examines how French hagiographical works adopt motifs and themes associated with romance in the translation of their Latin sources. Chapter 1 focuses on Wace's use of courtly imagery, expanded descriptions, and doubling in the Vie de Sainte Marguerite, Conception Nostre Dame, and Vie de Saint Nicolas and how these alterations to his source material anticipate qualities that would become features of the romance genre. The second chapter discusses the generic hybridity in Marie de France's Vie Seinte Audree, in which allusions to the lais cast Saint Audrey as a mal mariĂŠe, and the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz, in which the emphasis on Owein's status as a knight offers a suitable alternative to the religious life. The second section assesses the use of hagiographic and religious elements in romances. The third chapter traces the use of hagiography in three Anglo-Norman romances - the Roman de Horn, Roman de Waldef, and Gui de Warewic - to contextualize the significant generic shift that occurs in the attribution of saintly qualities to the hero Guy of Warwick in the latest of the three texts. Concentrating on the role of the relics, the final chapter looks at how the Middle English adaptations of the chanson de geste Fierabras reflect developments in devotional culture, England's involvement in the Hundred Years War, and the rise of English as a literary language. The combination of codicological and literary approaches in this study foregrounds the processes of translation, adaptation, and transmission that operated in the literary networks of medieval England to broaden our understanding of medieval genres, as well as the place of French language, literature, and culture.

Keywords: Anglo-Norman
Manuscript studies
Medieval English literature
Medieval romance
Middle English
Religious literature
Advisor: Suzanne, Conklin Akbari
Synthesis and Site-specific Functionalizations of Aziridine-2-Carboxylic Acid-containing Cyclic Peptides

Peptide macrocycles belong to a privileged subclass of compounds, having found applications that range from drug discovery to nanomaterials. However these ring-shaped molecules are difficult, and often impossible to prepare using traditional synthetic methods. As such, a great deal of research has emerged on developing novel solutions to address these challenges in synthesis. Aside from these contemporary strategies, which primarily focus on methods of ring-closure, there still exist few approaches that enable site-specific modification at a late stage of synthesis. We therefore sought to address this paucity through the incorporation of the strained, aziridine-2-carboxylic acid (Azy) residue into the backbone of cyclic tetrapeptides. By way of ring-opening with azide and thiol nucleophiles, we have demonstrated that highly regioselective structural modifications can be accomplished through that generation of macrocycles equipped with a β-amino acid residue. Furthermore, we have capitalized on the reduced amidicity of the distorted aziridine amide bond in the development of a novel backbone modification strategy of an Azy-containing macrocyclic scaffold through the site-specific integration of various amino acid-containing fragments. Our efforts have unveiled a unique trend in the regioselectivity of N-acyl aziridine ring-opening reactions, and we have thus proposed a model to rationalize our findings. Finally, through our experience in the synthesis of Azy-containing derivatives, we have developed a highly scalable and reproducible strategy for the synthesis of elusive dimeric aziridine aldehyde analogues.

Keywords: Aziridine-2-carboxylic acid
Aziridine aldehydes
Aziridine ring-opening
Cyclic peptides
Site-specific integration
Advisor: Andrei, K Yudin
The Development of a Sensor to Determine Velocity in Liquid Aluminum

This thesis presents two sensor designs to determine velocity of liquid aluminum. These sensors are referred to as Sensor1 and Sensor2 where the principle of operation is based on forced convective heat transfer. Sensor1 is constructed of one material while Sensor2 is comprised of two materials, the geometry of both is that of a circular cylinder. The immersion of the sensor into the flow can be classified as a circular cylinder in liquid aluminum crossflow. A calculation of the localized Nusselt number acting on the surface of the sensor produces an estimate of the magnitude and direction of velocity. The localized Nusselt number estimate is provided by more than one thermocouple temperature measurement from within the sensor. The Sensor1 and Sensor2 concepts were constructed and tested in flowing liquid aluminum and numerical models were developed to study the heat transfer between the liquid and sensor.A peculiarity of this liquid metal system is that aluminum may solidify and subsequently melt onto the surface of the sensors; the solid aluminum is referred to as shell. The growth of the shell depends on various conditions, one examined in this work is the thermal resistance at the Sensor1-aluminum interface. An enthalpy numerical model is used to show that the thermal resistance at the Sensor1-aluminum interface has an important effect on the solidification and melting times of shell. The numerical model is validated with experimental measurements of localized shell solidification and melting times.To estimate the velocity of liquid aluminum the solidification of shell must be suppressed. By incorporating two materials of drastically different thermal properties, various regions of Sensor2 may be treated as lumped systems, this mathematical treatment provides fast estimates of the localized Nusselt number, hence the velocity can be determined in real-time. The modified Nusselt number estimated by Sensor2 is a sum of the thermal resistance from the thermal boundary layer and thermal resistance at the Sensor2-aluminum interface. By numerically modeling the flow of liquid aluminum over the Sensor2 design and by comparing these results to experimental data, the thermal resistance at the Sensor2-aluminum interface is estimated. A technique to determine the magnitude and direction of velocity from the local Nusselt number of the Sensor2 design is presented.

Keywords: Circular Cylinder
Inverse Heat Transfer
Liquid Aluminum
Nusselt Number
Solidification and Melting
Thermal Resistance
Advisor: Stavros, A Argyropoulos
Three Essays in International Trade

This thesis presents three papers on international trade. The first chapter examines how trade liberalization affects firms when labor market institutions differ across countries. One would expect the country with higher labor costs to have a lower proportion of firms that enter the export market. That need not be the case when labor market institutions differ across countries. Different distortions affect the mark-up charged by firms in a heterogeneous manner. Since the distortions differ across countries, so do the mark-ups. I use this finding to show that trade liberalization can lower the survival cut-off and the average productivity of active firms in one of the countries, two of the results that are central to the canonical Melitz (2003) model.The second chapter studies the affiliate location decision of multinational corporations (MNCs). Using hand-collected data on French MNCs, I find that they are more likely to opt for a wholesale affiliate relative to a manufacturing affiliate in more distant countries. I show theoretically and confirm empirically that this result is due to the fact that MNCs locate their wholesale affiliates in geographic proximity to their manufacturing affiliates. The former thereby serve as conduits to the exports of the latter, rather than to the exports of the parent company.The third chapter studies firms' export market entry decision. Using data on Peruvian firms, I find that the Great Recession did not reduce the number of new exporters. This appears to contradict the belief that large fixed costs are the primary barrier to export market participation. I show that two temporary marginal cost shocks can explain continued entry: an inventory draw-down and a fall in shipping costs. This indicates that firms can test out export markets in response to temporary marginal cost shocks, and cast doubt upon the large fixed cost hypothesis.

Advisor: Daniel, Trefler
The Role of the Second Heart Field in Zebrafish Heart Development

The vertebrate heart forms from two distinct progenitor populations called the First Heart Field (FHF) and Second Heart Field (SHF). FHF progenitors differentiate first to form the initial beating heart tube. SHF progenitors differentiate later than FHF progenitors and contribute to distinct parts of the developing vertebrate heart. Heart structures derived from the SHF are perturbed in congenital heart defects, which affect approximately 0.5% of newborns. Here I provide data pertaining to the identification, visualization, and regulation of the SHF in the vertebrate teleost zebrafish (Danio rerio). I developed a photoconversion assay to observe and quantify SHF cell addition to the developing heart. I discovered that SHF cell addition occurred continuously between 20 hours post fertilization (hpf) and 48hpf to both the atrium and the ventricle. I identified a transgenic, nppa:EGFP, as a novel marker of SHF progenitors, allowing us to visualize the SHF progenitors before differentiation and addition to the developing heart. FGF signaling was required for SHF progenitor establishment and SHF cell addition to the heart tube. mef2cb was shown to be required for zebrafish SHF development. mef2cb expression marked SHF cells fated to be added to the ventricle, with inhibition of mef2cb resulting in a strong reduction in SHF cell addition. I also identified hey2 as a novel negative regulator of the zebrafish SHF. hey2 expression was observed in candidate SHF progenitors and hey2 inhibition resulted in an increase of SHF progenitors and SHF cell addition. My studies demonstrated that the SHF is an integral part of zebrafish heart development and that zebrafish SHF development shows many similarities this process in mammals. This places the zebrafish as a new and strong model system for the study of SHF development and its role in congenital heart disease.

Advisor: Ian, Scott
Production and Perception of Vocalic Sequences in Mexican Spanish

This dissertation investigates variation in the production and perception of vocalic sequences in Mexican Spanish, with an emphasis on the relationship between this variation and the occurrence of exceptional hiatuses. The dissertation aims to demonstrate that:(i) The phonetic variation responsible for the occurrence of exceptional hiatuses is present in all Spanish varieties, including highly diphthongizing varieties (like Mexican Spanish). (ii) The phonetic variation leading to the production of exceptional hiatuses is rooted in patterns of articulation. (iii) Variation in the production of diphthongs, hiatuses and exceptional hiatuses is related to variation in their perception. Three studies were conducted to test these goals. The studies used a variety of experimental and statistical techniques (including duration and formant normalization procedures, electro-magnetic articulography, discriminant analysis, signal detection measures, and AX perception tasks) to provide and evaluate acoustic (Chapter 3), articulation (Chapter 4) and perception (Chapter 5) data. In support of the first and second goals, the acoustic and articulation results uncover sequence-specific and speaker-specific variation in the production of diphthongs and hiatuses, as well as the presence of exceptional hiatuses. The articulation results also offer evidence for the articulatory stability of diphthongs and tentatively suggest that the actions of the Tongue Tip (TT) are crucial for achieving the Diphthong-Hiatus contrast and for diphthongization. While the results of the perception study do not support the third research goal of establishing a production-perception link for vocalic sequences in Mexican Spanish, they reveal an unexpected, possibly dialect-specific Vowel effect which merits further investigation. Overall, the main findings of this dissertation support the idea that the occurrence of exceptional hiatuses stems from coarticulatory variation found in all Spanish varieties. These findings challenge the assumption of an underlying syllabicity contrast between diphthongs and exceptional hiatuses and question the need for a special category of exceptional hiatuses.

Advisor: Laura, Colantoni
Mapping Organic Molecular Motions with RF Compressed Femtosecond Electron Diffraction

This thesis reports on the development of a novel ultrabright femtosecond electron diffraction setup and its application towards monitoring primitive atomic motions during a photoinduced phase transition in an organic molecular crystal. By using the time-dependent electric field of a 3 GHz radio-frequency cylindrical cavity, high flux electron bunches are compressed to a few hundred femtoseconds in duration. A grating-enhanced ponderomotive scattering technique is used to fully characterize the temporal characteristics of the high brightness electron pulses. A minimum temporal instrument response of 420 femtoseconds (full-width-half-maximum) for 200 femtocoulomb electron bunches is reported. The instrument response is limited by the synchronization jitter between the radio-frequency waves and the laser oscillator. To mitigate this problem, a photo-triggered streak camera is used to first characterize the arrival time jitter of the electron pulses and then `time-stamp' the precise arrival time of each individual electron pulse with respect to the laser. This reduces the synchronization contribution to the instrument response time down to 30 femtoseconds RMS (root-mean-square). This new electron source is used to study the molecular dynamics of a photoinduced insulator-to-metal phase transition in the organic crystal (EDO-TTF)

Keywords: Mapping Molecular Motions
Ultrafast Electron Diffraction
Ultrafast Molecular Crystallography
Ultrafast Science
Ultrafast Structure Dynamics
Advisor: Dwayne, Miller R J