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A feminist analysis of women’s chronic pain experiences in Northwestern Ontario
Get PDFThis feminist research project explores women’s experiences with chronic pain in Thunder Bay, Northwestern Ontario. Through an intersectional feminist narrative approach, I examine how chronic pain impacts women’s sense of identity and explore their experiences in the health care system. In-depth interviews with eight women between the ages of 18-50, who self-identify as having chronic pain, were conducted to understand their chronic pain narratives. Findings suggest that women’s experiences with chronic pain are deeply connected to their identity. Participants’ gender, age, body size, ability, and the context of place, significantly influences their chronic pain experiences. Discourses surrounding normative ideals about femininity and bodies shape how participants experience their chronic pain, especially through their relationships, motherhood, employment, education, mobility, autonomy, and mental health. Their identities shift as they grapple with the physical limitations of chronic pain, and their taken-for-granted embodied ways of being in everyday life. Participants also struggle to navigate the health care system in Thunder Bay. They point to a lack of doctors to treat the population of Northwestern Ontario, leading to long wait times and a lack of access to specialized services. Significantly, participants’ identities as women created gendered experiences in the medical system, which intersected with age, place, and body size, to cause challenges with being diagnosed and believed by medical professionals. Although they are challenged by structural barriers and biases, participants developed a resistance toward the biomedical system and took their health into their own hands by advocating for themselves and doing their own research to find alternatives for treating their chronic pain
Transition metal ligands for Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling reactions and the coordination of radionuclides - studies towards aurora kinase inhibition for PET imaging
Get PDFThis thesis is wide-ranging covering disparate areas of synthetic organic and metalorganic
chemistry, unified by the general use of these projects in medicinal chemistry.
Two organometallic palladium complexes 2.3 and 2.4, the 2-methyl-4-phenyl-1,3-
thiazole and the 4-phenyl-1,3-thiazol-4-ylamine ligand respectively were synthesized
and characterized using NMR, mass spectrometry, IR, and X-ray crystallography. These
catalysts were tested with various substrates to understand the influence of these catalysts
on substrates with electron-withdrawing groups or electron-donating groups in the Suzuki-
Miyaura cross-coupling reaction. Several aryl halides and different boronic acid pairs were
studied yielding a conversion rate between 27-97 % when 5 mol % of each palladium
catalyst was used at 60 oC for 8 hours. The relative rate of electron poor aryl halides was
faster than electron rich aryl halides with catalyst 2.4 (amine substituted catalyst) showing
preference for electron-withdrawing group (EWG > EDG). The relative rates of the
electron rich aryl halides were faster than the electron poor aryl halides when the catalyst
with the methyl substituted ligand (catalyst 2.3) was used and we get the opposite
preference for electron-donating group (EDG > EWG). The latter behavior is unique in
Suzuki-Miyaura coupling reactions, which makes catalyst 2.3 a useful addition to the
family of Suzuki-Miyaura catalytic systems. [...
Acoustic properties of four central boreal tree species for potential use in instruments
Get PDFIn resonance wood, acoustic velocity, density profiles, and ring characteristics
play an important role. Multiple factors cause variation of these properties, like the
difference between juvenile wood and mature wood, reaction wood, and disease. In this
study, the acoustic velocity, density profile, and ring characteristics of four boreal
species (black spruce, balsam fir, white birch, and trembling aspen) were tested and
compared to the published values for resonance wood. There were significant
differences (α < 0.01) of acoustic velocity and density between species, and radial
positions. Black spruce had the highest acoustic velocity at 6275 m/s and white birch
had the highest density at 632 kg/m3. When compared to the literature, the softwood
species were within the range of values used in resonance wood, while the hardwood
species were not. In conclusion, it is possible to use acoustic velocity, density profiles
and ring characteristics to identify species to be used as resonance wood
Environmental emotions, environmental social justice, and hope
Get PDFEducators are faced with teaching their students about subjects such as climate change, the mass
extinction of species, and environmental degradation while trying to encourage a love of nature
and pro-environmental behaviour. Challenging emotions related to the environment may arise for
both students and educators, and the literature highlights an opportunity for more
acknowledgement and consideration for the emotional toll that can occur when learning about
environmental crises. This portfolio seeks to illuminate environmental emotions and related
social justice issues for the purpose of creating a tool for educators to present the topic and
provide an opportunity for further questions to be raised and knowledge to be generated with and
by students. This portfolio utilizes Parallaxic praxis as the methodology and consists of: 1) a
literature review; 2) an illustrated short story inspired by the data and concepts considered in the
literature review; 3) and a critical reflection on the creation of the illustrated short story and
potential uses for it as a tool of illumination
Advanced deep regression models for smart operation of the oil and gas industry
Get PDFThe first industrial revolution in the early 18th century largely exploited steam power to replace animal labor. Since then, there has been rapid development in industrial operations. Now, the world
has come to the brink of the fifth industrial revolution, a.k.a. industry 5.0, where industries invest in
building intelligent systems to perform complex actions more efficiently by leveraging technological advancements, including big data, and high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. Thus,
modern artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep neural networks (DNNs) has emerged as a
powerful tool in industries for informed operational control, real-time fault and anomaly detection,
and maintenance.
In this direction, this research aims to develop advanced regression models using artificial
neural network (ANN), 1-D convolutional neural network (CNN), and long short-term memory
(LSTM) units for key operations in the oil and gas industries. More specifically, this study focuses
on three stages, namely drilling, transportation, and production, and proposes robust regressors for
accurate prediction of void fraction, the temperature of internal components of electric motors, and
the production level of hydrocarbon extracts. A precise prediction of these factors will increase
resource efficiency, energy saving, and product quality, and decrease environmental pollution. An
exhaustive experimental study conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrates the practicability
of the proposed solutions and their robustness. It is worth mentioning that Canada is the world’s
fifth-largest oil producer and has one of the world’s largest oil reserves and the world’s third-largest
proven oil reserves
Biosynthesis of ω–hydroxy fatty acid polyesters in Nicotiana tabacum stigmas
Get PDFThe aerial surfaces of all land plants are covered by hydrophobic lipid barriers
that contain a core structure of polyesters derived from hydroxy fatty acids and glycerol.
One type of surface lipid polyester is found in the exudates of wet stigmas of
Solanaceae species, such as Nicotiana tabacum. These polyesters consist of ω-hydroxy
fatty acids and glycerol, are extracellular, and have the experimental advantage of being
soluble in organic solvents. However, very little is known about the biosynthesis
mechanisms of stigma lipid polyesters. To gain insight into the biosynthesis of stigma
lipid polyesters, I have characterized their structure and composition through stigma
development and monitored polyester assembly through [14C]-acetate and [14C]-glycerol
radiolabeling. Tobacco stigma lipids accumulate estolides consisting of ester-bonded ω-hydroxy fatty acids end-capped by normal fatty acids in the form of triacylglycerol,
TAG(n), diacylglycerol, DAG(n), and free estolides, FFA(n), where n denotes the estolide
bond count. These are composed primarily of oleic acid, linoleic acid, 18-hydroxyoleic
acid, and 18-hydroxylinoleic acid and the estolides were identified to form on any
position of the glycerol backbone. Chemical characterization of stigma lipid estolides
suggest that polyester assembly occurs within the glandular zone of stigmatic tissue and
then exported to the stigma surface; however, no distinctions have been made whether
this process is intracellular or extracellular. Phosphatidylcholine (PC) is involved in
stigma glycerolipid synthesis but not in acyl hydroxylation or estolide formation.
Radiolabeled substrate accumulation suggests non-estolide glycerolipids to be
synthesized through a combined de novo and PC-derived DAG(0)/TAG(0) pathways. A
precursor-product relationship was observed in TAG(n) species and suggests that
TAG(n) remodeling occurs, such that estolide polymerization occurs in a stepwise
manner. These oxygenated fatty acids and estolides have physiochemical properties
suitable for potential industrial uses, such as biolubricants. Identifying the mechanisms
involved in the production of stigma lipid polyesters will help develop alternative sources
of bio-based polymers by bioengineering plant surfaces or microorganisms. The
sustainable and environmentally friendly production of these polyesters by engineered
organisms is expected to result in substantial economic and environmental benefits
Electrokinetic-assisted membrane photobioreactor (EK-MPBR) for municipal wastewater treatment
Get PDFMembrane technology and phycoremediation, which utilizes algae for nutrient removal, are two
major emerging technologies for wastewater treatment. Membrane photobioreactors (MPBRs)
integrate these technologies and provide promising technology to render wastewater for reuse in
the industrial or agricultural domains. One of the main current limitations of this technology is
membrane fouling, and developing a proper technique to address this issue in MPBRs has
remained a gap in this sector.
With the major aim of alleviating membrane fouling in MPBRs, this study modified the design of
the current MPBRs to utilize an electric field. Using graphite sheet as anode and stainless steel
mesh as simultaneous membrane support and a cathode on each side of the membrane module was
developed to ameliorate membrane performance. This novel design helps to repel biomass from
the membrane surface with the charge introduced by a low voltage direct current (DC) electric
field. The membrane performance of the electrokinetic-assisted MPBR (EK-MPBR) as well as the
biological performance of this recently developed technology, have been investigated. Synthetic
municipal wastewater was treated by an EK-MPBR and ran in parallel with a control MPBR for
49 days, where EK-MPBR demonstrated significant improvement in terms of membrane fouling
inhibition with 50% less fouling frequency. Considerable enhancement in phosphorus (P) removal
was another advantage of the EK-MPBR compared to the control MPBR with the EK-MPBR
having 56% better P removal. Involved electrokinetic phenomena such as electrophoresis,
electroosmosis, and electrochemical reactions contributed to the performance of EK-MPBRs in
terms of cell size reduction, dewaterability, and bacterial growth and agglomeration inhibition,
respectively, leading to change in algal morphology. [...
Exploration of contrastive learning strategies toward more robust stance detection systems
Get PDFStance Detection, in general, is the task of identifying the author’s position on controversial topics. In Natural Language Processing, Stance Detection extracts the
author’s attitude from the text written toward an issue to determine whether the author supports the issue or is against the issue. The studies analyzing public opinion
on social media, especially in relation to political and social concerns, heavily rely on
Stance Detection. The linguistics of social media texts and articles are often unstructured. Hence, the Stance Detection systems needed to be robust when identifying
the position or stance of an author on a topic. This thesis seeks to contribute to the
ongoing research on Stance Detection. This research proposes a Contrastive Learning approach to achieve the goal of learning sentence representations leading to more
robust Stance Detection systems. Further, this thesis explores the possibility of extending the proposed methodology to detect stances from unlabeled or unannotated
data. The stance of an author towards a topic can be implicit (through reasoning)
or explicit; The proposed method learns the sentence representations in a contrastive
fashion to learn the sentence-level meaning. The Contrastive Learning of sentence
representations results in bringing similar examples in the Sentence Representation
space belonging to the same stance close to each other, whereas the dissimilar examples are far apart. The proposed method also accommodates the token-level meaning
by combining the Masked Language Modeling objective (similar to BERT pretraining)
with the Contrastive Learning objective. [...
Natural regeneration in Norway spruce and red pine plantations in Dufferin County Ontario - a case study
Get PDFNorway spruce has been demonstrated to be a highly productive species in
eastern temperate regions of Canada and is commonly utilized for the afforestation of
poor soils. However, literature on the understory regeneration and management of
mature Norway spruce plantations in Canada is lacking. Characteristics of natural
regeneration were compared under two neighbouring Norway spruce and red pine
plantations in southern Ontario. Regeneration counted at plots found large quantities of
Norway spruce regeneration which was the dominant species of regeneration at both
Norway spruce stands and neighbouring red pine stands. Most of this regeneration was
also comprised of saplings greater than 1.3 meters in height. All stands had natural
regeneration from outside stands, however regeneration at red pine stands was more
diversified, especially in smaller height categories. Average diameters of different
species were more normally dispersed than height, and somewhat related to the
understory light intensity. Measurements of light intensity using a spherical
densiometer were found to be consistently lower for both stands, and likely related to
the abundance of tall regeneration instead of the overstory density. One-way analysis of
variance (ANOVA) found no significant differences for all parameters between stand
types (red pine and Norway spruce), although this was potentially in part due to small
sample sizes (n= 8 for most measures). These findings suggest some potential of
Norway spruce as an invasive species, however further study is required to make this
claim. A review of the European literature on the topics of Norway spruce regeneration
and Norway spruce stand conversion suggests Norway spruce exhibits intermediate
levels of shade tolerance regenerating best in large gaps and is capable of being
outcompeted by shade-tolerant species at low-light environments. Practitioners
managing similar stands should target small canopy gaps and should anticipate the
potential of the species to regenerate very intensively in large gaps compared to native
spruce species
Saasaakwe - to shout with joy An investigation into traditional Indigenous learning systems through the lens of Anishinaabekwe (Indigenous women) sharing their stories within the Powwow circle and the settler-colonial world of academic education
Get PDFThis research uses interviews and a storytelling approach to explore Indigenous ways of
knowing, being and doing through exploring Anishinaabekwe experiences within the settlerstream world of academic education and the powwow circle. The researcher interviewed 9
Indigenous women investigating if and how traditional Indigenous ways of life,
Minobimaadiziwin (walking a good path) and Kinoo’amaadawaad (Indigenous ways of
knowing, being and doing) can be interwoven into teacher and learner experiences to enhance
opportunities for truth, reconciliation, personal growth and peace.
First, this thesis outlines the perspective of the researcher, an Anishinaabekwe
(Indigenous woman) jingle dress dancer from the Red Rock Indian Band, Lake Helen and the
significance of the researcher’s identity in this project. Next, it reviews literature and information
pertaining to the history through to modern day utilization of Indigenous knowledges in the
settler-stream academia. The methodology section explains how the research was completed,
utilizing the Powwow circle as a framework for research. Through sharing interviewees’ stories,
common themes and ideas are highlighted and discussed. Finally, this thesis outlines suggestions
and recommendations for others wishing to incorporate Kinoo’amaadawaad, specifically the
Powwow, into educator and learner experiences to benefit all