VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Workplace inequity in unionized social justice organizations: reflections on walking the talk

This interpretive study examines the gap between social justice principles and practice, focussing on how workplace inequity is produced in unionized social justice organizations. Starting with the author's experience and the experiences of other racialized, rank-and-file union women, this research considers how organizational and social practices produce racial, gender and class inequality in ten unionized social justice organizations based in Canada. Intersectional and postcolonial theories are used to analyse research participants' accounts in order to examine the complex ways in which multiple forms of inequality are created in workplace settings. Research participants' interpretations of their experiences are also a subject of enquiry in this study. The findings of this research offer suggestions for the development of strategies that unions and others can use to advance equity in the workplace.
Characterization and identification of the dual-lineage kinase, MUK/DLK in rat myocardium: a possible role in cardiac growth and hypertrophy

Our hypothesis was that cardiac expression of tyrosine kinases and related kinases might contribute to cardiac-specific changes in gene expression, leading to development of the hypertrophic phenotype in cardiac myocytes. cDNA fragments of the mixed lineage kinase MUK/DLK, and VEGFR-2 were recovered from PCR screen of TGF-β-stimulated neonatal rat cardiac myocytes, suggesting expression of these genes in primary cultures. VEGF demonstrated hypertrophic effects on primary cardiac-derived fibroblasts and cardiac-derived transformed fibroblasts, but not on cardiac myocytes. MUK/DLK steady-state mRNA is expressed under basal conditions in adult rat kidney and brain, but not in rat heart. MUK/DLK is induced in vivo by coronary artery ligation, and after the onset of hypertension in SHR rats. Expression of MUK/DLK is induced in neonatal rat cardiac myocyte cultures by addition of β-adrenergic agonists, norepinephrine and isoproterenol, by TGF-β and T3, and 8-bromo-cAMP, whereas α-adrenergic agonists do not induce expression of MUK/DLK. Expression levels of MUK/DLK are enriched in high-density cardiac myocytes. Forced expression of the full-length cDNA for MUK/DLK into neonatal rat cardiac myocytes potentiates the induction of beta-myosin heavy chain CAT with isoproterenol treatment five-fold. The addition of a kinase-deficient mutant of MUK/DLK did not potentiate this induction, suggesting the necessity of its functional kinase domain for activation of this surrogate endpoint for cardiac hypertrophy. Thus, MUK/DLK may act as an amplification point for beta-adrenergic-dependent hypertrophic signaling in rat myocardium.
Flight control design and simulation for aggressive nonlinear maneuvering

In aggressive nonlinear flight maneuvers, conventional linear time-invariant based flight control design approaches may not perform well. In this thesis, a nonlinear flight control design method, namely state-dependent Riccati equation, is investigated as an alternative to the conventional approach in these situations. Meanwhile, linear quadratic regulator theory is used as the conventional benchmark. The two approaches are compared through simulation of a dive recovery and collision avoidance maneuver on a flight training device. It was demonstrated in the experimental flight scenario that the chosen nonlinear approach was able to yield superior performance to the conventional benchmark.

Keywords: Aerospace engineering
Democratizing capacities of information technologies: Choices or obligations for the electronically based modernization of governments along the new Balkan borders of Europe

The democratic potential of Information and Communication Technologies has been of interest to transitional governments since mid 1990s. New challenges emerged with the stabilization of the Balkans and its reorientation towards peace, stability, democracy and a European future. The transformative power of technology does not exist in isolation, but grows in step with the transformative action taken by change agents. The more the democratic change process reaches a sustained level, the more it undermines the internal forces of reaction and increases the number of pressure points for cross-institutional cooperation and informatization. Only then can ICTs achieve their full potential in enabling democratic interaction and institutional change. Deeper analysis reveals that these factors are further shaped by intra-systemic power struggles between the agents of change and the status quo keepers that had captured critical parts of the state for private and covert purposes. Driven by a broader question of how ICTs influence democratic transitions, this study focuses on the problems in the pursuit of national Information Society policies, which require European e-governance standards for the candidate states. We examine the cases of Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro. Slovenia is used as a success case---the first Yugoslav successor state to become a full EU member and a leader in Information Society governance. Serbia and Montenegro are studied as problem cases, where early transitions began with strong commitments towards the informatization of their societies, yet failed because of the unexpected occurrences and internal blockages. Given that the EU has set criteria for the Information Society development in the candidate countries, we explore the reasons for significant variations in their ability to achieve these objectives. The main hypothesis is that, while successful informatization may be attributed partly to techno-economic factors, the critical impediments to the ICT-based modernization of institutions are non-technological in nature. We propose a two level explanation: on the state level, differences in the successful informatization of governance depend on the interplay of four factors---the nation state building process, the development of the knowledge economy, the quality of public administration and the role of political leadership.
Reconceptualizing development from women's standpoint in colonial relations

This study aims at reconceptualizing "Development" through investigation of local forms of social organization that articulate the work of women in Canada to the Development regime. The study exposes how historically-anchored social relations operated through the twentieth century to variously organize the lives of women, reappropriate their caring labour and reproduce distortions of difference among them. The investigation that formed the basis of this inquiry took as its starting point the "standpoint of women" as elaborated by sociologist and feminist thinker Dorothy E. Smith. Thirty-seven people who experienced the death of a family member on Lake Simcoe in the vicinity of the Town of Georgina between 1950 and 1999 were interviewed. Sixteen women, all of whom had each experienced the death of their male partner on the lake, were selected for indepth interviews. These interviews explored the grieving, self-care and life-reordering work each woman was required to do and did in the wake of her partner's death, and how the event of the death operated to articulate her work to larger social, economic, and political processes comprising the ruling apparatus. The interviews brought into focus similarities and differences in women's experiences, and illuminated the relationship of local peoples' colonial and imperial past to their globalized and globalizing present. Information gathered through interviewing guided subsequent investigation into institutional processes that shaped local experiences. The investigator used institutional ethnography as the mode of inquiry into a series of institutional work sites: (1) the Trent-Severn Waterway and the Indian Claims Commission; (2) the coroner's inquest into the drowning deaths of five Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen and the print media; (3) Hospice Georgina/Chippewa of Georgina Island volunteer caregiving services and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Social Services health care reform; (4) Transit Georgina and the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, Community Transportation Action Program. In addition to interviews, methods of investigation included historical archival research and analysis of organizational documents and other contemporaneous textual forms and knowledge practices.

Keywords: Women, History
Women, Social conditions
Feminism, History
Utterly erotic: Painting the male body and the erotic talk of the female spectator

In this thesis I examine conditions in which women who desire men express their erotic interests. Specifically, I discuss how images of the male body in paintings of mine elicited erotic responses and conversation among women who participated in focus groups that I convened. In contrast to claims in popular discourse, I show that visual encounters might form an important condition of stimulating women's erotic talk. I use a poststructuralist theoretical framework and methodology to examine how my paintings facilitated such discursive moments and I discuss the pedagogical value of these conversations. I show that with talk, or enactments of heterosexual desire in the company of other women, female sexuality is being contested, constructed, produced and proliferated. I argue that, in moments such as these, a pedagogy of sexuality is taking place where the notion of 'heterosexual desire' is reformulated, reconfigured and expanded upon.

Keywords: Sexual excitement
Women, Sexual behavior
Men in art, Psychological aspects
Women, Attitudes
Conversation
Institutional arrangements in a Regional Trading Bloc and their implications for successful regional integration: a case study of the CARICOM single market and economy

Regional Trading Blocs have become quite ubiquitous, with over 250 of them presently operating in the world trading system. There has been much study of the workings of trading blocs between developed nations, and between large developing nations but there is a paucity of literature on the special needs and considerations pertaining to trading blocs between small developing nations. This thesis hopes to address this deficiency in the literature. It does so by analyzing the institutional arrangements in the CARICOM Single Market and Economy, in order to determine the changes which are necessary for it to fulfill its goals of promoting trade liberalization in the multilateral trading system and also promoting the interests and development of its Member States.
Antonia Pulci and the practice of convent performance in Renaissance Italy

Theatre performance endemic to Italy during the Renaissance is typically thought to include such forms as the elaborate church feste, the comedia erudita, and the commedia dell'arte. While some women, such as the famous Isabella Andreini, achieved great acclaim for their highly skilled improvisation as commedia dell'arte actors from as early as the mid-sixteenth century, women did not generally appear elsewhere on stage until somewhat later, when the erudita reached the pinnacle of its popularity. A strong and vibrant tradition of performance within the context of female convents marks, however, a critical exception to this practice of exclusion. Within the intimate space of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century convent, women participated in all facets of theatre production. They functioned as what would now be termed playwrights, producers, directors, designers, actors, stage managers, wardrobe and properties personnel, technicians, crew, front of house, and audience. Not only were female characters now conceived within the realm of women's, rather than men's imaginations, but these characters were represented on stage using female, rather than male bodies. Furthermore, dressed, or perhaps only performing, ‘in drag,’ these women staged their versions of the speech, attitude, physicality, behaviour, and beliefs of men. For the first time in this history of western European theatre practice, the female body was one which never really ‘went away’. Although the role of women and the nature of their writing and religious experience during the efflorescence of the female religious movement has become a major concern to feminist historical research focusing upon the medieval and early-modern eras, the texts of these early-modern women playwrights and the staging of their plays within all-female religious communities are objects of study which have, until recently, remained almost entirely neglected. The virgin martyr plays of Antonia Pulci, a fifteenth-century Florentine woman who lived first a secular, and subsequently, a cloistered life, provide a point of access for an examination of convent drama and performance. Viewed within the context of contemporary staging conventions, aesthetic ideals, and religious values, these plays point to a complex understanding of female virginity and a heightened responsiveness to the exigencies of convent performance. By examining the historical specificity of Pulci's conceptual universe, and by exploring the ‘inherent theatricality’ of her virgin martyr plays, this study seeks to identify the basic features and functions of convent performance, while attending to questions concerning the emancipatory implications of this unique, all-female performance tradition.

Keywords: Convents, Italy
Nuns, Italy
Italian drama, History and criticism
Religious drama, Italian, History and criticism
Italian drama, Women authors
An unintended haven: the Jews of Trinidad, 1937 to 2003

This is a study of the Jewish community of Trinidad. While Trinidad had brushing contacts with Jews throughout its long history, there were almost no practicing Jews in twentieth century Trinidad until the mid-1930s. At that time anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe and Nazism in Germany drove many of Europe's Jews to seek shelter in any corner of the world willing to take them. Often the search was in vain; around the world doors were closing to Jews. In an atmosphere of increasingly panicked migration, about a thousand Jewish refugees found asylum in Trinidad. ...

Keywords: Jews, History
Jews, Trinidad and Tobago
If memory serves: Constructing the democratic project in Chile

Under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, human rights groups and victims of the regime, inside the country and in diaspora, embodied the counterpoint to institutional lies and violence from their position as a marginalized and persecuted constituency. As a significant byproduct to the human rights agenda, this sector retained memory and refused to relinquish truth to official state stories. In pursuing their own program for (re)democratization and the pursuit of justice and truth they preserved elements of material culture and created new evidentiary records which have the capacity to affect the composition of the national narrative. History, the story of the received past, and the ongoing (re)democratization project in Chile remain a site under construction. Many countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America have been engaged in democratic transitions following periods of dictatorship and war. Frequently, these transition governments have been the result of pacted agreements between divided constituencies in newly emergent, but unreconciled, civil societies. Prolonged exposure to repression, organized violence and war produced cultures of fear and consequent psychosocial obstacles to the construction of historical pasts. Remembrance and representation of massive human rights crimes present considerable challenges in any circumstance. In fragile transition societies, the social impact of cultures of fear can continue to affect collective memory and the recording of a historical past. Social psychologist Ignacio Martin Baro examined societies affected by dictatorship and war and explained that psychosocial trauma is composed of three constituent elements: organized violence, institutional lies, and social polarization. All three elements, and their legacies, influence the composition of an historical record.

Keywords: Human rights, Chile
Disappeared persons, Chile
Democracy, Chile
Memory, Chile
State-sponsored terrorism, Chile
The pattern of angiogenesis and osteogenesis in peri-implant healing compartments as a function of titanium implant surface modifications

Implant surface microtopography has been seen to influence bone-to-implant contact and the strength of that interface. Though angiogenesis is necessary for osteogenesis, little attention has been paid to this interrelationship. To further analyze these processes a BaSO4 radio-opaque vascular perfusion compound was developed to allow for simultaneous, non-destructive, 3D, qualitative, and quantitative analysis of bone and vasculature using MicroCT. Early time points of 2, 3, 4, 6 and 15 days were analyzed with a combination of BaSO4 vascular perfusion, MicroCT, BSEI, and/or block histology around dual surface gap healing implants in the rat femur. The BaSO 4 compound developed was found to have sufficient radio-density and perfusability to allow for simultaneous MicroCT and BSEI analysis of both bone and vasculature and block histology, of 6 and 15 day samples, demonstrated that implant surface texture does influence peri-implant osteogenesis, but at a level undetectable by the MicroCT and BSEI methods used.
Community-based urban environmental management: A case study of low-income settlements in Delhi, India

This thesis investigates community-based approaches to environmental management in a low-income area of Delhi, India. The research site consists of several neighbourhoods within Sultanpuri Resettlement Colony, a sprawling residential area situated on the northwestern fringe of the city that was established by the government during the 1970s for relocation of squatter households. Given that the level of planned infrastructure and services is fairly basic in Sultanpuri, the study focuses on collective action under the PLUS Project, a recent community-NGO-government collaboration to improve water supply, sanitation, solid waste management, and local municipal parks. The study is motivated by the general lack of documentation about environmental conditions in low-income settlements in urban India and the limited academic attention thus far. Further rationale is the largely unanswered matter of whether, and how, the urban poor can be reasonably expected to act together, either by mutual-help or with external assistance, to achieve a better-quality environment. The research design is a mixed-method case study comprising a community-wide household survey; several smaller purposive surveys of local residents; semi-structured interviews with NGO staff, government officials, and other informants; and a literature search. Social capital and collective action theories are utilized to characterize the prevailing social dynamics in the study community and to assess the inherent potential for collective action around local environmental management. Empirical findings show a somewhat low level of social capital in Sultanpuri, as evidenced by patterns of informal social interaction, associational life, and generalized trust. The outcomes of various collective activities, moreover, are found to be partial, in accord with social capital theory. However, the research highlights a number of shortcomings to the explanatory power of the social capital paradigm, in particular, the importance of human capital for collective action, and also raises important questions about the efficacy of the bottom-up, consensual approach to development in the dominant discourse.
Resonance-cone propagation in continuous transmission-line grids and microwave applications

This thesis presents a novel approach to synthesizing a hyperbolically dispersive metamaterial by forming a continuous (unloaded) periodic transmission-line grid with rectangular unit-cells over a ground plane. The dispersion properties of the hyperbolic grids are examined by performing periodic analysis. The hyperbolic dispersive effects occur in second and higher order harmonic bands because the periodicity of the grids is on the order of half-wavelength. Frequency-dependent phenomena associated with the hyperbolic dispersion such as resonance-cone formation and their negative refraction and focusing, are demonstrated by plane-wave and circuit simulations, and are experimentally verified in microstrip-based grids. It is shown that by exploiting the unique dispersion characteristics of the grids, spatial-filtering electromagnetic devices such as passive spectrum analyzers, multiplexers and demultiplexers can be designed. Representative microwave devices including a 3 GHz/6 GHz harmonic splitter and a 5.8/6.2 GHz diplexer are designed and practically implemented. Since these grids are synthesized by simply printing transmission lines, they are easy to fabricate at a low cost and are potentially scalable to millimeter and Tera-hertz frequencies.
Effect of salivary esterase on integrity and fracture toughness of resin-dentin interface

"Human Salivary Derived Esterase" (HSDE) degrades dental composite resin restorative materials. Hypothesis. HSDE degrades the resin-dentin interface to produce biodegradation by-products in amounts which are negatively correlated with a reduction in the interfacial fracture toughness of the resin-dentin bond. Methods. Mini short-rod specimens (n=10/group), fabricated using composite (Z250) and adhesive system (Scotchbond Multi Purposes), were either not incubated; or incubated in Phosphate-Buffered Saline (PBS) or HSDE media. Degradation products were isolated and specimens were fracture toughness tested following 30, 90 or 180-day incubation periods. Results and conclusions. Significantly higher amounts of methacrylic acid (MAA) and Bisphenol-A-bis [2, 3-dihydroxypropyl]-ether (Bis-HPPP) were produced in HSDE than in PBS. 180-day HSDE incubated specimens had a lower fracture toughness (KIci) than the non-incubated group (P<0.05). KIci values of PBS incubated groups were not significantly different from that of the non-incubated group. There was a significant negative correlation between the KIci values and Bis-HPPP production.