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Detecting Silicon Monoxide in the Atmosphere of Ultra-Hot Jupiter WASP-178b
No full textUltra-hot Jupiters (UHJs) host unique atmospheric chemistry where refractory species remain gaseous. WASP-178b (Teq ∼ 2470 ± 60 K) is a UHJ that exhibits strong near-ultraviolet absorption (0.2–0.28 μm) previously attributed to silicon monoxide (SiO), though direct detection remained elusive. We present the first spectroscopic detection of gaseous SiO in an exoplanet atmosphere through re-analysis of archival HST/STIS E230M observations. Using an in-band/out-of-band technique with theoretical SiO templates from the ExoMol SiOUVenIR line list, we detect excess absorption of 0.647 ± 0.148% at > 4.3σ significance (p = 7.6 × 10−6). This confirms SiO remains in the gas phase at these extreme temperatures, constraining the silicate cloud condensation threshold. Our detection methodology provides a framework for systematic SiO searches across the UHJ population, enabling comparative studies of silicon chemistry and thermal structure in these extreme atmospheres
An IRT Model-Based Reliable Change Index With Empirical Priors: An Extension Using A Multiple Group Approach With Finite Sample Sizes
No full textThe reliable change index (RCI; Jacobson & Truax, 1991) is a popular tool for assessing whether individuals have changed between treatments. Recently, an Item Response Theory (IRT)-based RCI that incorporates group mean information through the use of expected a posteriori (EAP) estimation has been adopted, showing promising results (Chalmers & Campbell, 2025). This paper extends the previous RCI-IRT work by (1) using finite sample sizes for model calibration and parameter estimation and (2) adopting a multiple group (MG) approach to modelling sample data. Results showed that even with slight methodological changes, the results are similar to the previous studies, in that incorporating empirical priors improves rates of detecting individual change when true change is present. Larger calibration sample size has an impact on model parameter recovery, but not person parameter recovery. Finally, results favour the use of the MG approach with EAP group-informed priors when underlying group heterogeneity is expected
Achieving Beauty and Health: Exploring Public and Private Aesthetic Medicine in Xiamen, China
No full textBased on 14 months of fieldwork, this dissertation explores women’s changing understanding and practices of beauty and health enhancement in Xiamen City, China. It argues that women’s beauty and health enhancement is not completed by limited treatments and plastic surgery procedures but reflects women’s living and becoming in the world. Beauty perceptions involve women’s imaginations of themselves and their relations to the socialist state, the capitalist market, biomedicine, Minnan patriarchal family, and ethnic minority identities. My research data is colleted by conducting participant observations and semi-structured interviews in and outside local public and private hospitals. My dissertation begins with exploring the complexities of Whiteness with a focus on Chinese competing beauty ideals such as Bai You Shou 白幼瘦 (whiteness, youth, and slimness) in a context of long-standing globalization. Whiteness in Xiamen is related to skin condition (smoothness and flawlessness), diets, age, working or living environment, and not necessarily connected with the spread of European values or racial categories. The dissertation then shows how the Chinese medical system (public medicine and private medicine) makes women’s pursuit of these beauty ideals an individual option rather than a citizen’s compulsory responsibility. My dissertation also explains how beauty was intervened upon by biomedical standards of health differently in Xiamen’s public and private hospitals. The Chinese biomedical system offers a special case to study the construction of biomedical authority without eliminating other medical systems, such as Chinese medicine, facilitated with Renqing 人情 (debts, duties, favours, etc.) and Guanxi 关系 (social relations, connections, networking). Finally, my dissertation demonstrates how some Chinese women realize their beauty and health ideals outside clinical settings. I show that though beauty and health are configured as individual pursuits, women incorporated beauty and health enhancement into their lifelong projects in relation to their gender and family roles, aesthetic citizenship, and aspirations for the future
Beyond Resistance: Futurities and Carceral Logics of Black Worldlessness
No full textIn scholarly and policy discourses on socio-spatial patterns and Black well-being in Canada, little attention has been paid to how the spatialization of blackness, at the intersection of race, class, and carceral logics, shapes the lived experiences, expressive capacities, and futurities of Black residents in racialized neighbourhoods. This dissertation interrogates how Black life is both constrained and creatively negotiated within geographies marked by surveillance, neglect, and containment. Grounded in Black Radical Thought, Critical Race Theory, Critical Urban Studies, Black Geographies, postcolonial critique, and carceral studies, I examine the tactics of self-making, strategies of reclaiming Black life, and the envisioning and materialization of Black futurities among Black residents navigating what I theorize as Black worldlessness in racialized neighbourhoods within Toronto and the Region of Peel, Ontario.
Based on 17 semi-structured interviews with self-identified Black residents (aged 18–57) across Toronto, Brampton, Caledon, and Mississauga, this study investigates how internalized and externalized racial-spatial constraints shape practices of belonging, subjectivity, and futurity. I demonstrate that dominant urban narratives, shaped by media, planning discourse, and state policy, deploy anti-Black frameworks that index Black life to social death, thereby legitimizing punitive interventions while erasing Black subjectivity and interior life from spatial imaginaries.
In response, I introduce the Quiet, as mobilized by Kevin Quashie (2012), as an analytic of interiority: a contemplative, affective reservoir that Black residents draw upon to navigate the psychic and material dimensions of Black life. This inner world serves as a site of both refusal and possibility. Through this framework, I identify three experiential categories: (1) residents Quietly Holding Ground, who are constrained, but not fully, by the internalization of anti-black stigma and systemic abandonment; (2) residents Moving Ground, who mobilize interior capacities and external supports to envision lives beyond the terms of Black worldlessness; and (3) residents Making Ground, who remain in racialized neighbourhoods by choice, forging transfigurative futures through acts of interior sovereignty and collective care.
Ultimately, I argue that Black life in racialized geographies cannot be apprehended solely through paradigms of resistance or structural domination. Instead, this work demands an analytic that centers Black aliveness, an orientation to being expressed through relations, dreaming, refusal, contemplation, and heterogeneity, as a legitimate mode of existence, as is. While anti-black spatial orders structure the external world, they do not exhaust Black lifeworlds. Attending to the practices through which Black communities envision and enact futurities, even within zones of abandonment, reveals a richer cartography of Black being, one that unsettles the epistemological limits of urban and carceral thought.
This study contributes to our understanding of how Black life unfolds within carceral urban geographies by drawing on and further developing theory at the intersections of Black Geographies, Critical Race Theory, carceral studies, and Black Radical Thought. By introducing the internal-external continuum of Black worldlessness and mobilizing the analytic of the Quiet, this research expands the conceptual vocabulary for understanding how Black residents navigate racialized spatial containment, not solely through resistance, but through interiority, contemplation, and quotidian acts of self-making. It offers a methodological and theoretical intervention that reorients urban and sociological scholarship toward the interior dimensions of Black livability, revealing the nuanced and heterogeneous ways Black communities imagine and enact futurities within and against the structures that seek to delimit their lives. The envisioning of Black futures serves as a reminder that we have ambitions, we desire, we pray, we hunger, we dream, we cry, and we fear; the Quiet and interiority holds all of this within
Cattle, Capital, and Cannon: War-Making and the Construction of a Liberal Accumulation Regime in the Platine Basin
No full textAbstract: This thesis historicizes the emergence of nation-states in the Plata region of South America during the half-century of civil and international chaos which followed independence. Drawing on several approaches within the broad ambit of historical materialism, it argues that Latin America became part of global capital accumulation with the conquest but that the (geo)political framework of its incorporation has been substantially remade over the following centuries. Case studies of the Argentine Civil Wars (~1810-70) and the related War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70) demonstrate how nineteenth-century conflicts had economic dependency as a central outcome. This was so because export-oriented agrarian and commercial elites succeeded in defeating internal and external obstacles to their class rule. As a result, the Plata became incorporated into the “informal empire” of British capital, with harsh lasting consequences for its economic development. This argument contributes to bypassing a general opposition or lack of constructive engagement between “world-systemic” and “geopolitical” Marxisms. It is contended that both approaches have crucial lacunae in explaining the patterns of postcolonial nation-building in Latin America and especially the Plata. Also addressed are broader methodological and theoretical questions about the task of historicizing the nation-state, modern geopolitics, and capitalism
LAAT
No full textLAAT is a short hybrid documentary that offers a glimpse into the world of Tehran’s elderly lutis and the emotions they confront in the twilight of their lives as they reflect on their past. The film explores their role in the Iranian 1953 coup, a perspective that is often overlooked, seen through the eyes of a former child labourer who witnessed the events firsthand. Through interviews with participants and eyewitnesses, as well as archival footage, it explores how a gang of luti figures helped ignite the chaos that led to the fall of Mohammad Mossadegh’s government, a pivotal moment in the country’s political history that not only disrupted the elite but also shattered the hopes and dreams of the working class, leaving a deep wound on the soul of modern Iran, one that has yet to heal. This film, grounded in research on different aspects of luti culture and history, as well as its portrayal in post-coup Iranian cinema, seeks to offer an authentic representation of the luti character, a rebel figure whose presence in both politics and cinema has been marked with controversy and debate
Effect of Semaglutide on Skeletal Muscle During Weight Loss in Diabetic Rats
No full textObesity and diabetes mellitus are among the most widespread chronic conditions in modern society. The growing prevalence of obesity has prompted the exploration of various therapeutic interventions, including semaglutide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1RA). GLP-1RAs have shown promise in weight management, but GLP-1 receptors have been found in many tissues beyond the original therapeutic targets (pancreatic beta-/alpha- cells), including skeletal and smooth muscle, heart, and brain. Therefore, it is critical to study the potential effects of GLP-1 on these tissues, as potential off target effects (beneficial or detrimental) are expected. Many aspects or side effects of the medication remain underexplored, including the impact of semaglutide on skeletal muscle mass preservation during weight loss. This thesis investigates the differential effects of semaglutide administration compared to traditional caloric restriction on skeletal muscle mass, insulin signalling and markers of protein turnover in a male rat model of type 2 diabetes (T2D)
Hope From Within: Exploring Indigenous Resilience in Patti LaBoucane-Beson’s The Outside Circle and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves
No full textThis essay won the Department of English’s 1000-level Essay Prize in 2025. The Department of English awards prizes for the best essay written in courses at each of the four year levels. Faculty members may nominate students for this award."The aim of this essay is to compare Patti LaBoucane-Benson's The Outside Circle (2015) and Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) in the context of Indigenous resilience to showcase how the rediscovery of an interconnected Indigenous identity and the revival of spiritual traditions can become active modes of resistance and transformation. By observing the recurring symbolism of a web and the repetition of smudging that occur within both novels, I examine how the practice of traditional Indigenous ways of knowing and being can become a powerful means of hope for Indigenous peoples to heal integrational wounds and resist colonial erasure.
Transcultural Identity: Cantonese Opera in Chinese American Literature
No full textYork Research Support Gran
Investigating Local and Configural Shape Processing with Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials
No full textObject recognition relies on shape, comprised of both local and configural shape information. Local shape information involves elements such as line curvature and edge angles confined to specific regions and perceived independently, while configural shape information arises from the spatial arrangement of local shape features. Previous research suggests that humans primarily use edges and contours for object recognition and are sensitive to disruptions in configural shape. However, it remains unclear how the human visual system separately encodes local and configural shape information, and whether distinct neural mechanisms underlie these processes. We presented stimuli manipulating local and configural shape information independently to participants while recording EEG responses using a Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials paradigm. Our results reveal that object recognition depends on two mechanisms: one more transient that is sensitive to local shape localized in occipital regions, and one sustained and sensitive to configural shape manipulations localized in right temporal cortex