VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Driven apart: the construction of women as worker-citizens and mother-citizens in Canadian employment and child care policies, 1940-1988

This thesis examines how Canadian women have campaigned for federal employment equity and child care policies in order to enjoy equal employment opportunities with men. It demonstrates how women articulated these double-edged demands through the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW) and the Royal Commission on Equality in Employment (RCEE). It shows that while both royal commissions called on the federal government to take up women's double-edged demands, the policy response has been uneven. Federal policies to eradicate sex discrimination at work and promote employment equity have been developed. By contrast, a publicly-funded system of child care has never been included within the federal welfare state. Drawing on forty interviews and analysis of a range of primary documents the thesis argues that the federal response to women's demands was narrowed by the meta-discourse of worker-citizenship that underpinned the Canadian welfare state. This prioritised the equal, non-discriminatory treatment of worker-citizens and defined employment inequality as a problem located in the public sphere. Although the federal government promoted the equal treatment of worker-citizens once they entered the labour market, it was less willing to address the inequalities of access many women experience as a result of assuming paid employment while caring for dependent children. Federal policy responses to women's double-edged demands were driven further apart by the costs of each policy, government structures, jurisdictional tensions over child care and the pattern of women's mobilisation on employment equity and child care during the 1980s. This Canadian case study illuminates (i) current feminist debates about whether women's roles as worker-citizens and mother-citizens can be reconciled in public policy; (ii) the multi-dimensional nature of potential policy issues. It argues that royal commissions have been critical sites for women to voice concerns about the complex nature of gender inequality in employment, and challenge prevailing assumptions that the problem can be resolved through the equal treatment of men and women in the public sphere.
Non-hierarchical organizing and international women's NGOs: An exploratory study

The primary goal of this research project was to examine how non-hierarchy operates in women's/feminist international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Using grounded theory method, the study looked at nine women's/feminist INGOs that had experience with non-hierarchical organizing. The sources of data included in-depth, unstructured interviews with 20 female key informants from the participating INGOs, a wide variety of organizational documents, and video materials. Along with the organizational INGO analysis, this research addressed a series of conceptual questions pertaining to hierarchy, non-hierarchy, feminism, women's/feminist organizations, and international women's movement.

Keywords: Social service
Women's studies
Organizational behavior
Some investigations into energy-based models

Three questions about various energy-based probability models are asked and answered. The first is whether the Contrastive Divergence algorithm computes the gradient of any function at all---the answer is no. The second is whether there is a tractable Monte Carlo approximation to the gradient for variational learning in a large class of models including Sigmoid Belief Networks---the answer is yes. The third is how we might do early stopping for Restricted Boltzmann Machines, which have intractable objective functions---the problem is studied thoroughly, some old algorithms are reviewed and some new and better ones are introduced, and the way is pointed to the ultimate algorithm for this problem.
Hedgehog signalling in cartilage neoplasia

Chondrosarcomas are malignant cartilage tumours that often arise from benign precursor lesions known as enchondromas. Some cases of multiple enchondromas are caused by a mutation in the parathyroid hormone related protein receptor (PTHR1), resulting in constitutive activation of Hedgehog (HH) mediated signalling. 120 chondrosarcoma xenografts from 12 different human malignancies were established in NOD-SCID mice. Treatment with triparanol, an inhibitor of HH signalling, resulted in a 60% decrease in tumour volume, a 30% decrease in cellularity, and a 20% reduction in proliferation rate. Thus, it is demonstrated that HH signalling is active and regulates tumour cell proliferation in chondrosarcomas. These results raise the intriguing possibility that the pharmacological blockade of HH signalling could be used as an effective treatment for chondrosarcomas, a malignancy for which there are currently no universally effective non-surgical management options.
The formation of African Union: Analysis of the role of ideas and supranational entrepreneurs in interstate cooperation

The study seeks to explain why post colonial governments agreed to commit themselves to institutional mechanisms that set limits on core sovereign prerogatives of their states and undermine the international norm of territorial integrity of states. It is ironic that African governments would establish and commit to institutional mechanisms that undercut the international norm that has protected the existence of post-colonial states. I argue that the Pan-African solidarity norm provided structural and regulative framework for Africrats---i.e., Organization of African Unity (OAU) bureaucrats---to influence African governments to commit their states to the institutional mechanisms. Africrats put together the institutional mechanisms which is now called the African Union. They then used the OAU's rules, norms, decision-making procedures, and resources to engineer the interests of a majority of African political leaders in the institutional mechanisms and also influenced representatives of African states to adopt them to guide interstate cooperation in continental Africa.
After the fact: contemporary feminist fiction and historical trauma

During the 1980s and 1990s, novels dealing with past traumatic experiences in both the public and private spheres appeared with some regularity. These works depict historical atrocities, including slavery and genocide, as well as varying forms of interpersonal violence, and notably childhood sexual abuse. They draw on the growing body of interdisciplinary research and theory which has come to be known as trauma studies, an area of concern heavily inflected by psychoanalytic approaches to memory and narration. Many trauma novels take the form of historical fiction, narrated in the first-person by fictional or fictionalized survivors whose accounts bear witness to the need for violent actions to be admitted into public consciousness. This dissertation proposes that concerns about the construction of identities, chiefly in terms of gender, race, and sexuality, have been grafted onto past events, creating a testimonial and explicitly feminist form of fiction authored by women writers from a range of cultural backgrounds. These novels frequently deal with women survivors, highlighting the relationships between narration, gender, and trauma. The works I examine—Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Joy Kogawa's Obasan , Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies—stress that both trauma and recovery have collective as well as individual dimensions. These novels are explicitly pedagogical, teaching lessons about historical events and emphasizing the need for an ethical engagement with the past. They make claims on readers to function as the receivers of painful and complicated stories, in order to assist in the creation of historical memory. These five Canadian and American novels respond to recent questions raised in a variety of disciplines and contexts about the nature of historical storytelling. With the exception of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, they counter the dominance of postmodern approaches to historical recreation, focussing instead on the significance of telling apparently transparent, if not always verifiable, truths about the past. These works are acutely interested in the telling of trauma as a socially constructed and meaningful act, one requiring the active participation of both a witness and an engaged listener. Reciting accounts of trauma, and listening to these horrifying narratives, are the primary activities depicted by the novels I study.
Decreased hippocampal GAP-43 immunoreactivity in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia

Background. Impairment of neuroplasticity is recognized as important to bipolar disorder pathogenesis. Mood stabilizers have been shown to prevent structural brain changes and promote cell viability in bipolar disorder and animal studies. GAP-43 is a marker of neuronal plasticity and cellular resiliency. Methods. Fixed hippocampal sections obtained from the Stanley Foundation Neuropathology Consortium of bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, and controls were subjected to GAP-43 immunohistochemistry. Results. Significantly decreased GA-P-43 immunoreactivity was found in the hilar region of subjects with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia compared to controls. GAP-43 immunoreactivity levels in the stratum oriens of CA3 were higher in bipolar disorder subjects treated with mood stabilizers at time of death compared to subjects not treated with mood stabilizers and also controls. Conclusions. Impaired neuroplasticity may occur in the hippocampus of bipolar disorder. Mood stabilizers may exert neuroprotective and neurotrophic effects in this region in the treatment of bipolar disorder.
Seventeenth-century Venetian opera: the collaborative context of a commercial, synaesthesic art form.

The purpose of this dissertation is to study and interpret the social context of the opera theatre industry that developed in Venice between 1637 and 1680. This study aims to bring together a number of perspectives and topics related to the industry in order to develop a clear understanding of opera's place in Venetian society and culture. Beginning with a study of the predominant role of the librettist in opera production, I provide a sketch of the philosophical and aesthetic basis for their generative work, including a brief overview of Baroque aesthetic philosophy's ideal of "total music theatre" drawn from Renaissance humanism. "Total music theatre" is a term I coined to refer to the many different means required to create a parvus mundus or a miniature version of reality, creating a multi-faceted art form that I describe, metaphorically, as "synaesthesia". To this end, I provide studies of theatrical design, sets and machinery, and various forms of publicity. Emphasizing the culture of magnificence and the close connections to Venetian opera's origins as part of Carnival (Carnevale), I provide detailed studies of outstanding performers, commonly-used character types, themes, and musical forms, as well as an in-depth study of the role of women on stage and in the audience. The latter study is an effective means of illuminating the commercial opera industry as both a social process and a cultural form drawn from Venice's position in the Renaissance world. An integral part of the Venetian mythology is its connections to antiquity, including Roman, Greek, or Byzantine traditions, which can be seen in the librettos. As a whole, this dissertation is intended to provide a clear contextualization of the aesthetic behind this operatic repertoire and to illuminate how the aesthetic was implemented in a collaborative commercial musical and theatrical art form.
It wasn't just bowling on Wednesdays: ins and outs of engagement in radical activism

0This thesis is an analysis of the experiences of young women living in North America who have been involved in radical anti-capitalist social movements. It is a reflection on how our political perspectives have formed, and what experiences in our lives have inspired or enraged us to act. This thesis explores these questions in relation to movements for social change, by examining the ways in which local struggles for social change mediate the dialogic relationship between a person's identity and larger global and historical forces. The research first focuses on their individual stories of questioning imposed or expected identities, and coming to have a different sense of who they are and what they want. It then moves away from biographical narrative to reflect on reproduction of systems of domination and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within movements, and how these dynamics influenced participants' continued participation or decisions to disengage.
A distributed publish/subscribe system supporting XML

This thesis addresses the content-based routing problem for the XML publish/subscribe systems, in which a stream of XML documents is routed through a network of brokers to a set of subscribers who indicate their interests as subscriptions in the form of XPath expressions. To reduce the network bandwidth, the brokers need an efficient routing scheme to selectively deliver events only to the subscribers whose interests are matched. Moreover, for a distributed publish/subscribe system with a large volume of subscribers, system's scalability and efficiency demands an efficient subscription sharing mechanism among the brokers, and for each broker the ability to aggregate a larger set of subscriptions to a smaller set. This thesis presents a content-based routing protocol for XML publish/subscribe systems. The proposed protocol implements a smart subscription propagation scheme applying advertisement propagation and cover-relation among subscriptions. This thesis also develops a NFA-based cover-relation algorithm for the XPath expressions.
"A stronger and more independent self": single, middle-class British women emigrants to the Canadian West, 1880-1930

This thesis tells the stories of ninety-one single, middle-class British women who emigrated to Western Canada between 1880 and 1930, and compares their experiences with contemporary women's emigration literature. This project maps out the economic, cultural and physical space that the ‘last, best West’ offered these women. The three analytical frameworks used to explore this space are the ideas and experiences of singleness; the social hierarchies of class, race, gender, and nationality; and the landscape of the Western Canadian frontier. The emigration literature which was produced between 1880 and 1910 characterized single, middle-class British women as potential wives and mothers, and advocated home-help work for strangers as the best form of employment for them. Most of the women studied here rejected this model of emigration, coming out instead to join relatives, most often their unmarried brothers. Between 1911 and 1930, the emigration literature came to more accurately reflect the expanding range of waged work in which educated women engaged. The image of the happy, permanently single woman also appeared in the literature. The rhetoric of imperialism and motherhood, however, continued unabated as threats to Britain's imperial power multiplied. Women found that while they might bring some British culture to the frontier, they were, in turn, significantly transformed by their new lives in Western Canada. The principal finding of this thesis is that single, middle-class British women did find space in the West, gaining financial independence, free choice of residence and association, and the freedom to choose between lifelong singleness and marriage. This space was defined in three important ways. First, the primacy of women's roles as future wives and mothers shaped the female labour market. Second, this space was shaped by the evolving nature of social hierarchies; more egalitarian notions of social class made it acceptable for these middle-class women to work for wages, while racial and ethnic hierarchies gave them privileged positions in Western communities. Finally, the landscape of the West came to represent the new opportunities, choices and freedom which single middle-class British women found there.
The role of FCRgamma in double negative T regulatory cell function and their expansion by lentivirally-transduced dendritic cells

We hypothesize that FcRgamma has a required to maintain alphabetaTCR +CD4-CD8- double-negative (DN) T regulatory (Treg) cell function in lymphoproliferative and transplant models, and that FcRgamma-sufficient DN Treg cells could be expanded by lentivirally-transduced dendritic cells (DCs). FcRgamma-deficient lpr mice were created and the phenotype demonstrated by increased mortality and accelerated lymphoproliferation, with a marked increase in peripheral DN T cells. Compared to FcRgamma +/+ lpr DN T cells, the expanded DN T cells from FcRgamma -/- lpr mice were hyperproliferative and had lower ability to suppress CD8+ T cells both in vitro and in vivo. These results indicate that FcRgamma deficiency significantly impairs DN T regulatory cell function and this further decrease in regulatory function combined with their hyperproliferative phenotype contribute to the exacerbation of lymphoproliferative disease observed in FcRgamma-deficient lpr mice. To further examine the function of FcRgamma, we demonstrated that FcRgamma-deficient DN T cells were unable to prolong donor-specific allograft survival when adoptively transferred to recipient mice. Molecular analysis determined that within DN Treg cells, FcRgamma associates with the TCR complex and that both FcRgamma and Syk are phosphorylated in response to TCR crosslinking. These results indicate that FcRgamma deficiency significantly impairs the ability of DN Treg cells to down-regulate allogeneic immune responses both in vitro and in vivo and that FcRgamma plays a role in mediating TCR signaling in DN Treg cells. In the final part of the study I investigated the hypothesis that recipient-derived DCs transduced with donor MHC class I molecules can serve to expand antigen-specific FcRgamma-sufficient DN Treg cells. Mature DCs transduced with a Lentiviral vector that engineered expression of MHC class I Ld effectively expanded both FcRgamma -/- and FcRgamma+/+ DN T cells. However, after expansion, only the FcRgamma+/+ DN Treg cells maintain their ability to suppress CD8+ T cells in vitro. Furthermore, adoptive transfer of the ex vivo expanded FcRgamma+/+ DN Treg cells prolonged Ld+ skin grafts, while expanded FcRgamma-/- had no significant effect. In conclusion, we found that FcRgamma has a role in DN Treg cell function and FcRgamma-sufficient DN Treg cells can be expanded by lentivirally-transduced DCs.
Energy transport to the interface during water evaporation

Purified evaporating water was investigated for the presence of thermocapillary convection by measuring the temperature field near a spherical interface maintained at the mouth of a polymethyl methacrylate funnel with a maximum height of 1 mm. Energy conducted to the interface met the energy requirements for evaporation at the observed rate. The lack of evidence of mixing at the liquid-vapor interface and the energy balance suggested thermocapillary convection was absent or supplied a negligible amount of energy. The Marangoni number, as defined by Pearson, was between 8,377 and 25,761, much larger than 80, the critical value for the onset of thermocapillary convection. Statistical rate theory was applied to determine the saturation vapor pressure. The results agreed with documented values within the measurement uncertainty. The vapor-phase pressure boundary for these experiments was approximately 120 Pa, below which ice formed at the liquid-vapor interface.
What form of collaboration is best for nursing?: qualitative case studies comparing college-university partnerships

Collaboration among colleges and universities has been a topic of discussion for decades, with government, consumers and employers voicing support for seamless education, while maintaining the binary system enjoyed in Ontario. Although the literature review provides types of collaborations and elements of successful relationships, there is little published research on the lived experiences of senior faculty and administrators in any Ontario college-university partnerships, specifically, Collaborative Nursing. The purpose of this study is to explore the lived experiences of senior faculty and administrators, the challenges, barriers, and successes, and to establish whether one form of partnership is best for Collaborative Nursing Programs in Ontario. The goal is to elucidate fundamental components of successful relationships; thereby, providing a framework for developing and maintaining future partnerships, regardless of program. Key components of this study include a review of college-university cooperations, types of partnerships agreements, and theoretical concepts explaining successful relationships and predictive problems. The background chapter discusses Ontario's binary system, the evolution of nursing education, and the role of the provincial government in these initiatives. Incorporating a mixed methodology, quantitative data was collected from 17 colleges and 7 universities responding to the survey. Utilizing a naturalistic qualitative approach of inquiry and criteria-based sampling, 30 individuals participated in the four case studies. From the analysis and interpretation of the findings, it was learned that, although college and university professors and administrators were committed to the joint-program and the entry-to-practice requirements, relationship development was neither smooth nor easy. In comparing the four cases to the conceptual framework, it was found that most partnerships did incorporate some success elements, and many struggled with predictive problems in institutional differences, inflexibility, and conflicting external directives. In spite of their difficulties, differences in opinions and approaches, participants supported the concept of partnerships and joint-program delivery. It was discovered that partners who incorporated many of the conceptual elements, had open and honest communication, and diligently worked through differences, reaped successful relationships. Recommendations promote the use of the conceptual framework in developing and sustaining successful partnerships; several support cooperation between colleges and universities in overcoming barriers. Collaboration is a brilliant concept! (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)