VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Top-predators as structuring agents in dynamic marine environments

Global declines in top-predators are occurring due established and ongoing fisheries throughout the world’s oceans. In particular, dramatic declines have been observed for Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in the boreal sub-arctic and for reef sharks (mostly Carcharhinidae spp.) in coral reefs. The impact of these declines on marine communities still remains largely unclear due to food web complexity, interacting factors, confounding variables, and fluctuating ecosystem states. Furthermore, as the impact of disturbances on communities can be press (e.g. fisheries), pulse (e.g. environmental variability) or combine, fisheries contribute to disturbance regimes that can generate heterogeneity in communities, meaning that their effects are likely not uniform across space and time. Determining the ecological role of top-predators, as top-down structuring agents, alongside ecosystem disturbances is fundamental to understanding baseline conditions and ultimately may help to inform conservation efforts. This thesis investigates the relative roles of top-predators and disturbances to build an understanding of how marine communities and food webs may be structured. This thesis aims to address: (i) how environmental variability may impact the role of top-predators, (ii) determine the ecological role of top-predators in coral reef environments, (iii) how top-down and bottom-up structuring agents impact variability in food webs, and (iv) how humans are modifying the role of top-down and bottom-up structuring agents. In this thesis I present three main findings: (i) top-predators have a strong top-down influence on marine communities and food webs alongside other disturbances, (ii) combined effects (between top-down and bottom-up structuring agents) can impact communities at broad and fine spatial scales, and (iii) spatial heterogeneity in structuring agents caused by human activities, impacts food web dynamics across multiple spatial scales. The findings in this thesis provide a foundation from which management decisions can be made to ultimately address restoration and conservation goals.

Keywords: Marine
Top-down
Coral reef
Sharks
Atlantic cod
Disturbance
Advisor: Fortin, Marie-Josée
Framing Social Criticism in the Jesus Movement: The Ideological Project in the Sayings Gospel Q

This dissertation concerns the ideological project of the Sayings Gospel Q, a written source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Although it has become increasingly popular to understand the earliest rural Jesus movement as emerging from a peasant milieu, proponents of this model have not yet taken the time to explore the ramifications for a highly stylized written document being the earliest evidence for this movement, as this project does. The analysis takes as its starting point the problematic category of “peasant” and tries to offer some theoretical clarity into the way the term is deployed. Although the term may still be useful for thinking about the social structure of ancient Palestine, Q does not seem to be a product of that group of people. On the contrary, Q is a sophisticated literary text, which has a number of affinities with other ancient literature, as well as interesting parallels with documentary papyri. Even so, Q does not appear to the product of elites, for the text is rife with tropes of social and economic marginality. In order to access the elusive “middling stratum” from which Q’s authors may stem, this project looks cross-culturally at middling figures, using the same sorts of data that have hitherto been used to characterize the Jesus movement as a peasant movement (anthropological and sociological studies of peasants). Middling figures in similar contexts have a number of things in common, especially if such antecedent conditions as education and literacy skills are present: structural marginality, creativity and innovation, and the capacity to articulate social interests and facilitate reform. These features can be productively mapped onto Q in order to provide insight into the genesis of this text and its ideas. In fact, this comparison better explains Q’s project than the frequent appeal to its “peasant milieu.” Q’s ideological project is admittedly self-interested, but it nevertheless synthesizes a range of social experiences in ways that are fundamentally related to the middling social experience of its authors. It is thus a determined intellectual project, not the vestiges of oral traditions stemming directly from peasant villagers.

Keywords: early Christianity
Galilee
scribes
Sayings Gospel Q
Jesus movement
social location of thought
social structure of the Roman Empire
Advisor: Kloppenborg, John
Rehabilitation of Executive Dysfunction in Multiple Sclerosis: Cognitive, Behavioural and Neurophysiological Effects of Goal Management Training

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, progressive central nervous system disease characterized by distributed white matter injury. Particularly prevalent in Canada, MS is a leading cause of disability with extended personal and societal costs given its early onset (on average between 20-40 years of age). Deficits in executive functioning are common and detrimental to employment, daily functioning and quality of life, however their precise nature remains underspecified. Two studies were undertaken to: (1) describe the executive processes affected in MS, including neurophysiological correlates, and (2) explore, in a double-blind randomized controlled trial, patients' response to an intervention for improving behavioural self-regulation. Study 1 described significant functional limitations and impairments in processing speed and executive control of attention, memory and working memory in MS patients, both relative to neurologically healthy controls and as a monotonic function of disease severity. Mean amplitudes for event-related potentials (ERPs) including the P3 and the error-related negativity and positivity (ERN, Pe) were linked to behavioural markers of attention control and performance monitoring. ERP amplitudes and ERP-behavioural associations appeared sensitive to the presence and severity of executive dysfunction related to disease progression. In Study 2, these impaired MS patients were randomly assigned to a modified version of Goal Management Training (GMT) or a psycho-educational control group (Brain Health Workshop, BHW). In GMT, patients learned stepwise strategies (Stop-State-Split) to keep on track in their daily activities, including mindfulness training to enhance attentional awareness and control. Rehabilitation outcomes were assessed post-training and at a 6-month follow-up using a multi-level battery. Compared to BHW, GMT was associated with greater improvement on tests of executive-attentional processes as well as functional task performance and observable functioning in daily life activities. ERP-behavioural changes provided corollary evidence of improved self-regulatory processing. This study is among the first to demonstrate improvement in executive functioning compared to an active control condition in MS patients with a range of disease severity and with effects remaining visible at six months. While replication in a larger sample size is needed, results suggest GMT as a potentially effective approach for executive and self-regulatory impairment in people with MS.

Keywords: neuropsychology
rehabilitation
multiple sclerosis
executive functioning
attention
mindfulness
event-related potentials
partial least squares
cognitive impairment
information processing
randomized controlled trial
functional assessment
Advisor: Levine, Brian
Women, Work, and Family: Estimating Married Women's Status Achievement Over Their Careers

My dissertation project examines women’s family lives, career trajectories, and status attainment. I draw on the concept of the work-family interface to highlight how work and families operate as contextual layers that cross-over in shaping definitions and appraisals of mothers as workers and workers as mothers. Utilizing data on married mothers’ complete working histories, I demonstrate that job exits due to motherhood negatively impact women’s occupational status attainment (SES), but I also show that women face penalties when changing jobs involuntarily and also due to personal reasons not tied to the maternal role. Importantly, in each instance, I demonstrate that these effects operate independently of the non-employment durations they engender, offering broad support for the status characteristics framework which points to the role of employer appraisals of women’s work commitment in shaping their SES outcomes. I also bring families back into the discussion of the work-family interface via the construction of a family-level framework that draws on mothers’, fathers’ and children’s attitudes about maternal employment as a platform for the development of discrete family configurations. I reveal a wide array of family attitude configurations that underscore that maternal employment continues to be contested moral terrain in some families while it is ii supported in others. In particular, I show that in egalitarian families—where maternal employment is not seen as a risk to ‘good’ mothering—mothers report more positive experiences of family and marital relations, less housework and more paid work, and higher earnings. I argue that family contexts represent an important yet understudied contextual reality that is more than the sum of individual views and which have unique consequences for women’s family lives and status trajectories.

Keywords: women, work, family
Advisor: Wheaton, Blair
Dreams in Early Modern England: Frameworks of Interpretation

While dreams as visions have received much attention from historians, less work has been undertaken on understanding more commonly experienced dreams that occurred in sleep. In this dissertation I seek to begin redressing this neglect. Two overarching questions focus the dissertation: How did early modern English people understand their dreams? And did these understandings change in response to significant developments in English culture? To answer these questions I explore early modern English theories, beliefs and experiences of dreams through a close study of key medical, demonological, philosophical, spiritual, oneirocritic and private writings. I suggest that in the period 1550-1750 there were three principal frameworks used to understand dreams: (1) health of the body and mind, (2) prediction and (3) spirituality. These three frameworks coexisted, either reinforcing or contesting one another throughout the period. The framework of health saw dreams as natural products of the body and mind that revealed the overall health of the dreamer. In the model of prediction, dreams were deemed significant, yet encoded, clues to the future that required careful interpretation. Finally, in spiritual frameworks, dreams were conceived as sent by God, angels or the Devil. Since early modern English writings reveal a diversity of natural and supernatural theories about dreams that never really declined, a study of them also helps to complicate ideas about the disenchantment of the world. Finally, I also suggest that early modern English writings on dreams reveal the perceived vulnerability of the dreamer to internal and external forces. Dreams were a locus where the boundaries between the human and divine, supernatural and natural, met and merged, making the individual vulnerable to a host of external and internal forces.

Keywords: Dreams
Sleep
Nightmare
History of Ideas
Visions
Culture
England
Early Modern
Advisor: Abray, Lorna Jane
Todd, Barbara
A Normative Model of Professionalization: Implications for Business Ethics

To say that there is a lack of consensus on the essence of professionalization is an understatement. For almost a hundred years, scholars have disagreed about the traits, attributes, processes, temporal sequences, and socio-historical structures that fundamentally define professions. My dissertation draws on an information theoretic framework to provide a novel analysis of the role of professions in society. According to my normative model, professions are trust-creating and trust-preserving institutional structures, which respond to market failures that arise due to information asymmetries in the market for professional services. Given the limitations on market-based and governmental solutions to information asymmetries, I argue that norms should be viewed as a fundamental transaction-cost minimizing professional governance mechanism. What are the moral obligations of the professional? The implicit morality of the market for professional services involves achieving the end of economic efficiency. Accordingly, professional moral obligations involve a set of deontic constraints that promote Pareto-efficiency in response to information asymmetries. After providing a conceptual framework that outlines the relation between professional and ordinary morality, I argue that social institutional roles sometimes permit, to a limited extent, what would otherwise be forbidden. Given certain institutional structures and safeguards, professional roles can, thus, be sui-generis sources of moral obligation. The culmination of my arguments about professions and professional morality is a contribution to the business ethics literature. Since the early twentieth century, scholars have argued over whether the managerial role may be theorized using the normative and theoretical trappings of the professions. A survey of the management literature reveals that an adequately nuanced analysis of the professions and the normative nature of professionalization has yet to be put forward. To fill this gap, I provide a normative model of management professionalization that is sensitive to the socially beneficial nature of professional work while avoiding glorified altruistic characterizations. I argue that managers in private economic entities are professionals, properly understood, since in addition to external market-oriented incentives, they typically appeal to internal, trust-creating norms to promote Pareto-efficiency within the firm. Professionalism thus involves following efficiency imperatives despite the prevalent moral hazard problems surrounding the managerial role.

Keywords: Essence of professionalization
Management professionalism
Advisor: Heath, Joseph
Romantic Medicine and the Poetics of Palliation

This study uses the interdisciplinary lens of Romantic medical ethics to reconsider received ideas about the therapeutic power of Romantic poetry. Studies of literature and medicine in the long nineteenth century have generally considered disease the era’s main medical symbol; they have likewise considered holistic “healing” its major model for poetry’s therapeutic effect, following Geoffrey Hartman’s description of Wordsworth’s ability to “heal the wound of self.” Without denying the importance of these paradigms, my work explores alternate foci: pain instead of disease, and palliation instead of healing. In Britain, professional medical ethics were first codified during the Romantic period in response to a variety of medical and social advances. But because of Romantic medicine’s curative uncertainty and utilitarian intolerance for pain, its ethicists turned from cure to palliation to describe a doctor’s primary duty toward his patients. My study argues that this palliative ethic was taken up by Romantic literary writers to describe their own work. By engaging with contemporary medical ethics treatises such as John Gregory’s 1770 Lectures on the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician and Thomas Percival’s 1803 Medical Ethics, I explore four Romantic authors’ struggle to find an appropriate medical model for their work’s therapeutic benefits. Ultimately, all turned their attention from “healing the wound of self” to palliating the agonies of a world where, as Wordsworth writes, “suffering is permanent, obscure and dark.” Reading William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes through a palliative lens reveals a diversity of perspectives on the therapeutic potential of literary writing and challenges our received picture of their engagement with medical ideas: e.g. Wordsworth, hailed by Matthew Arnold for his “healing power,” found an alternate model for his poetry’s medical benefits, while Keats finally abandoned his early belief that the poet should be “physician to all men.” My study follows these four writers as they variously embrace, qualify, or outright reject the idea that literature could, as Keats had once hoped, “sooth the cares and lift the thoughts of man.”

Keywords: Romantic
medicine
poetry
palliation
Advisor: Bewell, Alan
The Antiphonary of Bangor and its Musical Implications

Abstract This dissertation examines the hymns of the Antiphonary of Bangor (AB) (Antiphonarium Benchorense, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana C. 5 inf.) and considers its musical implications in medieval Ireland. Neither an antiphonary in the true sense, with chants and verses for the Office, nor a book with the complete texts for the liturgy, the AB is a unique Irish manuscript. Dated from the late seventh-century, the AB is a collection of Latin hymns, prayers and texts attributed to the monastic community of Bangor in Northern Ireland. Given the scarcity of information pertaining to music in early Ireland, the AB is invaluable for its literary insights. Studied by liturgical, medieval, and Celtic scholars, and acknowledged as one of the few surviving sources of the Irish church, the manuscript reflects the influence of the wider Christian world. The hymns in particular show that this form of poetical expression was significant in early Christian Ireland and have made a contribution to the corpus of Latin literature. Prompted by an earlier hypothesis that the AB was a type of choirbook, the chapters move from these texts to consider the monastery of Bangor and the cultural context from which the manuscript emerges. As the Irish peregrini are known to have had an impact on the continent, and the AB was recovered in Bobbio, Italy, it is important to recognize the hymns not only in terms of monastic development, but what they reveal about music. In light of musical fragments recovered from the Schottenstift in Vienna, and its links with the Irish recruiting ground in Rosscarbery, County Cork another portion of Ireland’s past has become known. Only by looking back to the AB and piecing the evidence together can the significance of the recovery be fully appreciated. While there are more questions raised in this dissertation than can be answered, the AB is part of a larger history that intersects with the study of medieval music.

Keywords: Ireland
Liturgical Manuscript
Advisor: Haines, John
Accommodating the Animal: Domestication in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Eighteenth-century English writers imagined domestication as the education of animals, as a mutually beneficial contract between species, as a form of cruelty and exploitation, and as an extension of hospitality. This study analyses how these diverse literary portrayals of domestication intersect and what they can tell us about eighteenth-century Britons’ conflicted and conflicting feelings about humans’ close relationships with creatures different from, and yet similar to, themselves. I argue that representations of domestication—as an improving or destructive, collaborative or coercive process—provide valuable insights into how eighteenth-century English writers and their readers positioned themselves in relation to animals and dealt with the challenges of “accommodating” or “making room” for animals within their houses and their communities. Each chapter focuses on a different depiction of domestication and the questions it raises about the extent of animals’ capabilities and proximity to humans. I begin with texts that present domestication in terms of education and, in so doing, suggest a link between animals and children. Chapter one examines natural histories and pedagogical treatises that separate animals’ ability to learn from their possession of reason; literary responses to the learned pig and its rumored talent at spelling; and fables and stories for children that entertain the possibility of interspecies collaboration in the classroom. In chapter two, using Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa as a case study, I trace how seemingly progressive representations of domestication as a contract which has the informed and voluntary consent of both parties can be used to legitimise oppressive treatment. In chapter three, I explore the connections drawn between domestication and hospitality—and between pets, menagerie animals, guests, and captives—in texts by Francis Coventry, Sarah Trimmer, William Cowper, Gilbert White, and others. The thesis concludes with a brief look at the continued relevance of eighteenth-century representations of domestication today.

Keywords: eighteenth-century literature
animal studies
domestication
Advisor: Lynch, Deidre
Behavioural and Neural Correlates of Individual Differences in Episodic Memory

Episodic autobiographical memory (AM) refers to the real-life recollection of personal events that are contextually-bound to a particular time and place. Anecdotally, individuals differ widely in their ability to remember these types of experiences, yet little cognitive neuroscience research exists to support this idea. By contrast, there is a growing body of literature demonstrating that individual differences in episodic memory for laboratory experiences, intended to serve as a proxy for real life, are associated with brain-biomarkers. The present studies provide a starting point for exploring individual differences in the real-life expression of memory; which is more complex, multifaceted and has longer retention intervals, than laboratory memory (LM), thus allowing for the assessment of remote memory. While there are many factors that contribute to individual differences in episodic AM, the focus of this dissertation is on genetic influences. In particular, the KIBRA gene has been associated with episodic LM in a replicated genome-wide association study; T-carriers showing enhanced performance relative to individuals who lack this allele. The present series of studies explored the association of KIBRA with episodic AM. An ancillary goal was to clarify the association between KIBRA and episodic LM. Accordingly, in Chapter 2, episodic LM and AM were probed in a large sample of healthy adults in relation to KIBRA genotype. Next, in a subset of participants, functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were used to explore KIBRA-dependent differences in hippocampal and medial temporal lobe (MTL) blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) response (Chapter 3) and structure (Chapter 4). Akin to prior research, Chapter 2 showed that KIBRA is associated with episodic LM, albeit not on all measures. Moreover, a KIBRA association was observed for remote aspects of episodic AM on some measures. Chapter 3 showed mainly greater hippocampal and MTL cortex BOLD response in T-carriers relative to non-carriers during the recollection of both LM and AM. Moreover, during episodic AM, T-carriers showed a distinct pattern of hippocampal-neocortical connectivity. Finally, Chapter 4 showed that T-carriers have a larger cornu ammonis and dentate gyrus relative to non-carriers, suggesting a potential neural locus for the effects of KIBRA on episodic memory.

Keywords: memory
genetics
Advisor: Levine, Brian