VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Improved Real-time Helicopter Flight Dynamics Modelling

The University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies has a number of previously developed real-time helicopter models for piloted simulations. An area of concern with physics-based helicopter models is that they often have an inaccurate off-axis response to cyclic control inputs compared to flight test data. To explain the cause of this problem, several theories have been put forth in the literature concerning which aspects are modelled incorrectly or not at all, including blade elasticity, rotor wake distortion and curvature, and unsteady aerodynamic effects. In this thesis these modelling improvements were implemented and their effectiveness evaluated. To include blade elasticity, a rotor model was developed using a Ritz expansion approach with constrained elastic modes. The effect of including these features on the on-axis and off-axis response of the UTIAS helicopter models was examined. The various improvements were successful in altering the off-axis response, with notable improvements in some areas, without disrupting the on-axis response. In some conditions, the magnitude of change due to flexibility was greater than differences noted due to dynamic wake distortion or unsteady aerodynamics. The best results were obtained when blade flexibility and wake distortion were used together, which is also the most physically accurate model. The impact of these changes was also evaluated from a pilot-in-the-loop perspective, quantifying the perceived changes using simulation fidelity ratings. Since this is a newly developed metric, the simulator was first evaluated using the original baseline vehicle models. Through this process, experience could be gained in the usage of the fidelity rating scale, while also examining what effect changes to the dynamics had on the overall simulator fidelity rating obtained. While an improved match to flight test data was found to lead to a higher rated fidelity, there was a limit to how high these improvements could increase the fidelity rating. A number of the possible contributors to the ratings achieved were further explored, which for the UTIAS Flight Research Simulator primarily include the motion system fidelity and the collimated stereoscopic visual environment.

Keywords: Dynamics
Helicopter
Modelling
Simulation
Advisor: Grant, Peter R
Inuit Family Perspectives and Stories about Sexual Health and Relationships in Nunavut

Background: High rates of the sexually transmitted infections of chlamydia and gonorrhea were a concern among community members in Nunavut. The goal of this study was to explore the perspectives of Inuit youth and parents on the topic of sexual health and relationships. Method: This qualitative participatory research study was conducted within an Indigenous knowledge framework with a focus on Inuit ways of knowing and story-telling. Interviews were conducted in 2011 in 3 Nunavut communities with 17 Inuit youth 16-19 years of age and 20 Inuit parents who had at least 1 teenage son or daughter between 13-19 years of age. Results: Parents in the linked their understandings of sexual health with a series of relocation events, which occurred in the Canadian Arctic in the mid 20th century. These relocation events led to widespread disruption of Inuit families, kinships, and attachments by separating young children from their primary caregivers for extended periods of time. The traditional communication pathway about sexual health and relationships was disrupted for many families during this time. Concurrent experiences of child sexual abuse among the parents in this study compounded the trauma of being separated from their families. Severed family attachments during the settlement period and child sexual abuse were the primary factors discussed by parents in this study as contributing to the current state of sexual health in Nunavut. Youth participants identified parents/caregivers as the preferred source of knowledge about sexual health and relationships, even if they were not learning from them at the present time. They also related sexual decision-making among youth to the broader community context and determinants of health, such as poverty. Conclusion: Taking these findings into account, rebuilding and strengthening family and community relationships can make significant positive contributions to sexual health and relationships by providing supportive networks for adolescents and revitalizing millennia old pathways for knowledge sharing. Directions for public health include supporting parent-adolescent dialogue about sexual health; incorporating holistic individual and collective empowerment-based models for sexual health promotion; and supporting parents to heal from trauma and strengthen family relationships.

Keywords: attachment
Indigenous
Inuit
relationships
sexual health
trauma
Advisor: Gesink, Dionne
Conflict and Creativity in Jewish Modern Orthodox Girls’ Education: Navigating Tradition and Modernity

This study investigates Jewish Modern Orthodox girls’ dissonant, creative and adaptive responses to their religious and gender identities as they negotiate the tensions between authority and autonomy in an all-girls’ high school. It considers how the school, as a socializing agent, plays a role in this development. This study is framed by a post-structural research agenda that explores the complexity of religious practices in modernity, and a feminist post-structural body of research around alternative girlhoods in modernity. This ethnographic study contends with the notion that the presence of autonomy and other modern values such as egalitarianism, are a necessary challenge to the girls’ capacity to accept religious and patriarchal authority in a self-affirming way. Instead, it found that girls accept or creatively adapt to, and rarely dissent from, aspects of religion’s authority, while still maintaining their expectation of autonomy and egalitarianism. They achieved this state through a complex and creative re-structuring of normative religious categories in their religious lives, rather than through a bifurcation of the competing discourses, as had been posited in previous research. Existing gender norms in Modern Orthodox society reinforced the girls’ lack of dissonance. Even where girls bifurcated between their religious and social lives in order to maintain each, aspects of creativity emerged. For example, in their non-ritual lives inequality was an anathema, but they were not bothered by ritual inequity. They accepted and even supported their exclusion from certain rituals because they felt it afforded them more, not less autonomy, by freeing them from unwanted religious responsibilities. In this way, they used existing patriarchal structures to achieve what they understood as a personal advantage. Several themes emerged from this study. First, modern religious practitioners who live within divergent discourses re-form and re-create traditional categories in order to live holistic modern-religious lives within the inherited structures of traditional religion. Second, gender plays a role both in supporting existing norms, but also afford opportunities to challenging them. Third, despite the strong presence of autonomy amongst the girls, dissonance toward religious authority was surprisingly low.

Keywords: discourse
education
gender
Judaism
religious education
Advisor: Portelli, John
The Effects of a Supplemental Early Reading Intervention on the Literacy Development of Kindergarten Children Exhibiting Concurrent Weaknesses in Attention and Emergent Literacy Skills

This study investigated the effects of a supplemental prereading intervention on the early literacy skills of kindergarten children with co-existing weaknesses in emergent literacy skills and attention. Four children (3 boys, 1 girl) received one-on-one tutoring 4 days a week for approximately 18 weeks. A multiple-baseline across individuals design was used to analyze the effects of the intervention on children’s letter knowledge and phonemic awareness. Biweekly progress monitoring was conducted using curriculum-based measures throughout the baseline and intervention phases. Maintenance of skills was assessed six weeks after the conclusion of the program. The results indicated that children’s letter knowledge and phonemic awareness skills improved over time. The findings support the use of targeted early intervention to improve the emergent literacy skills of kindergarten students who are inattentive and at risk for reading failure.

Keywords: Emergent literacy
Inattention
Intervention
Kindergarten
Advisor: Martinussen, Rhonda
Droplet Impact and Penetration onto Structured Pore Network Geometries

The impact of the water droplet on permeable substrate has been studied experimentally and numerically. Reynolds number (Re) and Weber number (We) are found to be the governing non- dimensional numbers. Porosity of the substrate is the geometry parameter studied in this thesis. Impact and penetration of the water droplet has been studied experimentally on structured parallel holes on a solid substrate to track penetration in the presence of capillarity. Liquid penetration into the holes was initially rapid, driven by the inertia of the impacting liquid and then much slower, caused by capillary forces that drew in the liquid. The rate of liquid movement was predicted by a simple model that included liquid pressure, surface tension and viscous effects. The area of liquid, solid contact inside the holes was significant, varying from 5% to 30% of the total droplet-substrate contact area as droplet height was raised from 1 cm to 5 cm. The enhanced contact area increased the surface energy of the droplet and reduced the energy available for droplet recoil. Physics of capillary penetration in our experimental studies extended our research to model droplet impact and penetration into structured permeable geometries using ANSYS-FLUENT 14.0. The significant objective of the numerical studies is characterization of the ratio of penetrated volume rather than droplet initial volume. Porosity of the substrate has been studied to evaluate the effect of this value in penetration regime. Investigating the effect of impact inertia achieved by changing Re number from 50 to 2000 and penetrated volume showed that increasing Re number increases liquid penetrated into the pore network. Spreading diameter and droplet height showed similar oscillatory behaviors, but larger degree in height rather than spreading diameter. In the end, dynamic of bubble formation at range of Re has been observed. Small bubbles start forming at Re = 200. By increasing Re to 500 entrapped bubbles into the pore network starts to disappear due to the larger degree of momentum of the impact which pushes the bubbles closer to the liquid/gas interface. For Re > 1000, formation of bubbles changes from spherical small form to large slug form.

Keywords: Capillary
Droplet Impact
Inertia
Penetration
Porous Substrate
Advisor: Ashgriz, Nasser
Chandra, Sanjeev
Generalized Summation-by-parts Operators for First and Second Derivatives

Higher-order methods represent an attractive means of efficiently solving partial differential equations (PDEs) for certain classes of problems. The theory of classical finite-difference (FD) summation-by-parts (SBP) operators with weak imposition of boundary conditions using simultaneous approximation terms (SATs) is extended in several new directions. The SBP-SAT approach is advantageous as it leads to provably consistent, conservative, and stable higher-order discretizations, gives a straightforward means to develop numerical boundary conditions and inter-block coupling, and results in efficient parallel schemes with constant communication overhead, regardless of the order of the scheme. We develop a framework for generalized SBP (GSBP) operators that extends the theory of classical FD-SBP operators to operators with one or more of the following characteristics: i) non-repeating interior operator, ii) nonuniform nodal distribution in the computational domain, and iii) operators that exclude one or both boundary nodes. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of first-derivative GSBP operators are derived. For diagonal-norm operators, we show that if a quadrature rule with positive weights exists, then an associated GSBP operator is guaranteed to exist. This reduces the search for diagonal-norm GSBP operators to the search for quadrature rules with positive weights. Furthermore, we prove that dense-norm GSBP operators on n distinct nodes of up to order n - 1 always exist. The framework enables one to show that many known operators have the SBP property and gives a straightforward methodology for the construction of novel operators. We extend the GSBP framework to include approximations to the second derivative with a variable coefficient and develop GSBP operators more accurate than the application of the first-derivative operator twice that lead to stable discretizations of PDEs with cross-derivative terms. We propose a novel decomposition of classical FD-SBP operators that leads to efficient implementations and simplifies the construction of Jacobian matrices. We show how to construct SATs, derive various novel operators, and demonstrate that they have preferential error characteristics relative to classical FD-SBP operators in the context of the linear convection and linear convection-diffusion equations.

Keywords: discontinuous Galerkin
finite difference
partial differential equations
second derivative
simultaneous approximation terms
summation by parts
Advisor: Zingg, David W.
The Unity of Being: Groundwork for a Theory of Obligations to Other Animals

Is there a condition that we recognize in other animals that we must uphold as having absolute value, and that can limit our conduct as a matter of moral imperative? Animals are excluded from direct concern in Kant’s moral philosophy because they do not share in the condition that grounds the moral imperative, namely, the capacity to determine one’s own ends through reason. The reason we value our capacity for free election, however, is because it is the means by which we, as free beings, become unified with our own end. The condition of absolute worth that we must uphold, therefore, is in the unity of our purpose in our being. Animals, as an end of nature, are unified with their own end in their original condition and, therefore, share in the condition that all rational beings must uphold as an absolute value and an end in itself.

Keywords: "Animal rights"
Animals
Kant
Korsgaard
Law
Obligations
Advisor: Benson, Peter
The UNCITRAL Legislative Guide, Model Law and Three Country Comparison

The UNCITRAL encourages States to implement a comprehensive secured transactions regime. In addition to the Legislative Guide on Secured Transactions, the UNCITRAL recently started drafting a model law. This thesis will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of model law reform. The reforms in Belgium, New Zealand and Australia show that model law reform can help States avoid drafting mistakes and make good policy choices. The implementation of a well-drafted and well-functioning model law can also increase economic efficiency and international economic appeal which can help outweigh the transition costs associated with model law reform. Model law reform does not solve all issues related to secured transactions reform, but recent reforms highlight the potential benefits of model law reform. The previous examples can help support the UNCITRAL’s project to draft a model law.

Keywords: Comperative Law
Model law reform
Secured Transactions
UNCITRAL
Advisor: Duggan, Anthony
Choosing Mastectomy: A Qualitative Exploration of the Increasing Mastectomy Rates in Women with Early-stage Breast Cancer

Context: Rates of Unilateral (UM) and contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) for early-stage breast cancer (ESBC) have been increasing. Numerous factors for this rise have been suggested including the surgeon's preference, the patient's choice and the external environment. Objectives: A grounded theory study explored women's decision-making processes in their treatment for ESBC, and elucidated the role of the surgeon and the practice environment in the increasing rates. The Health-Belief Model was applied, discerning those factors influential in surgical decision-making shaping women's choice for UM+/-CPM. Design: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with patients to understand their experiences and decision-making which resulted in undergoing UM+/-CPM. Similarly, semi-structured interviews were conducted with general surgeons exploring their treatment approaches to ESBC. Theoretical sampling identified suitable candidates. Data were collected until saturation was reached. Constant comparative analysis identified key concepts. Results: 29 patients and 45 surgeons completed interviews. The `overwhelming threat' of breast cancer `was the dominant theme. Despite surgeons describing the high survivability of ESBC, patients misperceived the threat of death from their cancer, and strived to eliminate this threat by choosing UM+/-CPM. Surgeons described breast-conserving therapy (BCT) and UM as equivalent treatment options for ESBC, and frequently recommended BCT. Despite this, women requested UM+/-CPM. CPM was discouraged, as surgeons described no survival advantage and increased operative risks. Experiential knowledge was the most influential factor in patients' decision-making. Previous negative experiences of family and friends with breast cancer, translated into an overestimated risk of recurrence, contralateral cancer, metastasis and subsequent death. Patients' perceived the risks and severity of ESBC to be great, and believed that by choosing UM+/-CPM they would eliminate the threat of breast cancer. Most women did not perceive any risks of undergoing UM+/-CPM, yet many experienced concerns with disturbed skin sensation, cosmesis and body image. Conclusion: Previous cancer experiences and experiential knowledge are extremely influential in women undergoing UM+/-CPM. Women overestimated their risk and misperceived the benefit of UM+/-CPM as they thought it would substantially improve their cancer outcomes. As undergoing UM+/-CPM is not without risks improved discussion of patient sources of information and fears around survival may benefit surgical consultations, facilitating informed decision-making.

Keywords: Breast Cancer
Decision-Making
Mastectomy
Qualitative
Risk Perception
Surgery
Advisor: Baxter, Nancy N
Wright, Frances C
In-between Categories of Law: a Gender Variant Analysis of Anti-discrimination Law and Litigation

This thesis offers a gender variant perspective on Anti-Discrimination legislation and litigation. Using queer theory, feminist legal theory and critical race theory, this thesis analyzes current debates within the trans movement regarding the use of rights based litigation and the fight for inclusion. I argue that gender variant people’s exclusion from resources and opportunities is inextricably linked, legally and affectively, to gender performance. I will show how performative aspects of the law can be brought forward by applying an “intrasectional” analysis of the protected classes relating to gender variant people within anti-discrimination law and litigation (ADL), and set the stage for the claim that ADL more broadly is intertwined with performativity. Reading the notion of performativity into legal analysis, this thesis suggests the possibility of strategic use of the existing legal rights as an instrument for change.

Keywords: Anti-Discrmination
Arab-Jewish
Mizrahi
Performativity
Queer
Transgener
Advisor: Cossman, Brenda
Examining the Delineation of Jurisdiction Between Human Rights and Labour Arbitration After Figliola and Penner

There has been a long-time debate over whether issues conclusively decided at labour arbitration should be subject to a subsequent proceeding before a human rights tribunal. The author examines Supreme Court of Canada decisions dealing with re-litigation of issues before multiple decision-makers, and demonstrates how they are interpreted by the human rights tribunal. This paper identifies principles from cases before other decision-makers that can be applied to the problem of shared jurisdiction between labour arbitration and human rights.

Keywords: human rights
jurisdiction
labour arbitration
Advisor: Rittich, Kerry
Making More Valid Estimates of Treatment Effect using Observational Data in Uncommon Disease. The Warfarin in Scleroderma-associated Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Model.

Objectives. The aim of this dissertation is to develop and apply methods to make more valid estimates of treatment effect using observational data in uncommon disease. The objectives were 1) using strategies that reduce the threat of potential biases on the elicited response, to develop and evaluate the feasibility, validity and reliability of a revised belief elicitation method for Bayesian priors; 2) to determine expert clinicians’ beliefs regarding the effect of warfarin on survival in systemic sclerosis associated pulmonary arterial hypertension (SSc-PAH) and idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH) (expressed as prior probability distributions), and determine the importance of factors that influence experts’ use of warfarin for SSc-PAH and IPAH; 3) a) use data from experts to derive a propensity score in a Bayesian context, and, b) combine observed survival data from 2 large, inception cohorts with the prior probability distributions derived from experts, to evaluate the effect of warfarin on survival in SSc-PAH and IPAH. Methods. The methods include systematic review of the literature, application of principles of psychometric science, cross-sectional elicitation of experts’ beliefs, analysis of retrospective observational cohort data with a survival outcome using propensity score modeling and Bayesian inference. Results. I have developed a scientific method to quantifiably elicit experts’ beliefs in the form of Bayesian priors that can be included in models of treatment effect. This method incorporates strategies that reduce the effect of potential biases, and has demonstrable feasibility, validity and reliability. I have developed methods in a Bayesian framework to make propensity-score adjusted estimates of treatment effect using observational data with a survival end point. I have determined experts’ beliefs regarding the effect of warfarin on survival on SSc-PAH and IPAH, and have determined factors that influence experts’ use of warfarin in SSc-PAH and IPAH. Using these methods, I have found that warfarin has a low probability of improving survival in SSc-PAH and IPAH. Conclusion. I have demonstrated that making more valid estimates of treatment effect using observational data of an uncommon disease can be successfully achieved. Given the low probability that warfarin improves survival in SSc-PAH and IPAH, and availability of other PAH therapies with demonstrable benefits, there is little role for warfarin in these patients.

Keywords: Bayesian
Confounding
Advisor: Feldman, Brian