This is an inquiry that explores both then and now. Father and Daughter. Temporality and Geography. Within these pages stories are used to explore my family’s present and past; migration, settlement, memory, experience and connection to place – Glace Bay, a village on Cape Breton Island. Through narrative, poetry and photography, the contrasting experiences of having lived in Glace Bay in the past, and the struggle to connect with Glace Bay in the present, and future, are explored. Finally, within this manuscript I examine the impact of my father’s stories and I identify storytelling as an important factor in developing a critical consciousness. My father inspired my sense of social justice at a young age and the impetus for this project was not just to document his stories for the sake of posterity, but also to exemplify the way consciousness is cultivated and passed down; across generations, despite changing landscapes, through story.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

(En)Compassing Heart explores and documents the organizational journey of POR AMOR Community Enhancement Initiatives. POR AMOR is a current, Toronto based, youth-led, non-profit organization I co-founded with three other young women in 2003. POR AMOR initiatives focus on youth empowerment and specifically helping young people to make responsible transitions into adulthood and become active leaders in their communities. Through the use of arts-informed methodological practices, this project is constructed as a modern narrative, infused with spoken-word poetry, to track the journey of a young girl from her passion for the arts to becoming an empowered individual within her community. The young protagonist is representative of the journey of POR AMOR, our journey as young people navigating our way to meaningful work in communities. The mission of POR AMOR is to promote and facilitate art-based youth empowerment initiatives in local and international community contexts.

Advance directives in Canada are instructions made by capable adults that pertain to future healthcare treatment choices at a time of incapacity. My experience as an ethicist working in an Ontario long-term care facility that provides medical treatment to patients with Alzheimer’s Dementia portrays a range of important ethical concerns that arise out of the use of advance directives, at least in terms of their current use. In this thesis I analyze composite case studies to identify the more prominent challenges that exist and I turn to the literature to seek ways to more clearly understand these problems and to determine if they can be overcome. What I conclude is that the use of advance directives with the Alzheimer’s Dementia population in long-term care, as it is currently used, is fraught with problems that are mainly irresolvable. I offer clinical and policy recommendations that are aligned with this view.

Advance directives in Canada are instructions made by capable adults that pertain to future healthcare treatment choices at a time of incapacity. My experience as an ethicist working in an Ontario long-term care facility that provides medical treatment to patients with Alzheimer’s Dementia portrays a range of important ethical concerns that arise out of the use of advance directives, at least in terms of their current use. In this thesis I analyze composite case studies to identify the more prominent challenges that exist and I turn to the literature to seek ways to more clearly understand these problems and to determine if they can be overcome. What I conclude is that the use of advance directives with the Alzheimer’s Dementia population in long-term care, as it is currently used, is fraught with problems that are mainly irresolvable. I offer clinical and policy recommendations that are aligned with this view.

In this thesis, we study how and to what extent a self-organized mobile robot flock can be guided by informing some of the robots within the flock about a preferred direction of motion. Specifically, we extend a flocking behavior that was shown to maneuver a swarm of mobile robots as a cohesive group in free space, avoiding obstacles. In its original form, this behavior does not have a preferred direction and the flock would wander aimlessly. In this study, we incorporate a preference for a goal direction in some of the robots. These informed robots do not signal that they are informed (a.k.a. unacknowledged leadership) and instead guide the swarm by their tendency to move in the desired direction. Through experimental results with physical and simulated robots we show that the self-organized flocking of a robot swarm can be effectively guided by an informed minority of the flock. We evaluate the system using a number of quantitative metrics: First, we propose to use the mutual information metric from Information Theory as a dynamical measure of the information exchange. Then, we discuss the accuracy metric from directional statistics and size of the largest cluster as the measures of system performance. Using these metrics, we perform analyses from two points of views: In the transient analyses, we demonstrate the information exchange between the robots as the time advances, and the increase in the accuracy of the flock when the conditions are suitable for an adequate amount of information exchange. In the steady state analyses, we investigate the interdependent effects of the size of the flock in terms of the robots in it, the ratio of informed robots in the flock over the total flock size, the weight of the direction preference behavior, and the noise in the system.

<p>Some scholars argue that the principle of voluntary informed consent is rooted in the Western ethos of liberal individualism; that it would be difficult to implement this requirement in societies where the norms of decision-making emphasize collective rather than individual decision-making (for example, Sub-Saharan Africa); that it would amount to “cultural imperialism” to seek to implement the principle of voluntary informed consent in non-Western societies. This thesis rejects this skepticism about the possibility of implementing the informed consent requirement in non-Western environments and argues that applying the principle of voluntary informed consent in human subjects’ research in Sub-Saharan African communal culture could serve as an effective measure to protect vulnerable subjects from possible abuses or exploitations. The thesis proposes the “multi-step” approach to informed consent as the best approach to the implementation of the principle in the African communal setting. The thesis argues that the importance of the “multi-step” approach lies in the fact that it is one that is sensitive to local culture and customs. On the question of whether the principle of voluntary informed consent should be made compulsory in research, the thesis answers that we have no choice in the matter.</p>

The keyboard toccatas of J. S. Bach, BWV 910-916, present a formidable challenge of interpretation to the modern-day performer. These works contain some of the most unusual compositional techniques to be found in Bach’s output due to their use of an improvisatory, virtuosic style inherited from the seventeenth century. While pianists of today are trained to perform with perfect fidelity to the score, the treatises from the time of Bach point to a rhythmically free approach to the improvisatory features of these toccatas. The goal of this treatise is to explore how the historical tradition from which Bach’s toccatas emerged influenced their stylistic characteristics with the purpose of applying this information to create an informed performance by today’s interpreters. In this effort, this treatise focuses on several broad categories in the process of understanding the inspiration and, therefore, the interpretation of these works. These categories include the genesis of the toccata as a genre, the compositional techniques associated with the toccata, Bach's personal contribution to the genre, and the interpretation of Bach's toccatas specifically. / text

FDA decisions and late-stage clinical trial results regarding new pharmaceutical approvals can cause extreme moves in the share price of small biopharmaceutical companies. Throughout the clinical trial process, many potential investors are exposed to market-moving information before such information is made available to the investing public. An investor who wished to profit from advance knowledge about clinical trial results may use the publicly traded options markets in order to increase leverage and maximize profits. This research examined options data surrounding the public release of information pertaining to the efficacy of clinical trials and approval decisions made by the FDA. Events were identified for small pharmaceutical companies with fewer than three currently approved drugs in an attempt to isolate the effect of individual clinical trial and FDA-related events on the share price of the underlying company. Option data were analyzed using logistic regression models in an attempt to predict phase II and III clinical trial outcome results and FDA new drug approval decisions. Implied volatility, open interest, and option contract delta values were the primary independent variables used to predict positive or negative event outcomes. The dichotomized version of a predictor variable designed to estimate total investment exposure incorporating open interest, option contract delta values, and the underlying stock price was a significant predictor of negative pharmaceutical related events. However, none of ii the variables examined in this research were significant predictors of positive drug research related events. The estimated total investment exposure variable used in this research can be applied to the prediction of future clinical trial and FDA decision related events when this predictor variable shows a negative signal. Additional research would help confirm this finding by increasing the sample size of events that potentially follow the same pattern as those examined in this research. / text

This thesis seeks to demonstrate, by way of a multidisciplinary study, that consent is, despite its legal definition which refers to the free and enlighted expression of individual will, in fact, at times limited if not eliminated, by social considerations, arising from the medical, economic and legal context. These considerations reflect what one might call the social norm. An appropriate understanding of consent serves, therefore, to express the social norm as a constraint, which, in turn, acts as a measure of what it means to belong in society. Thus, while consent is often presented as the fundamental principle to be respected in biomedical research, it is in reality, merely one principle to respect among others. These limitations connected to consent are exacerbated in emergency situations where consent is sometimes reduced to mere signature, and in some cases it has been recognized that research can be undertaken without the subject's prior consent.