This study investigated (1) how and where queer young adults remembered playing and exploring gender and sexuality in their child and youthhoods, and (2) how those memories influenced their identities as queer young adults. Eight young adults from Southern Vancouver Island were recruited to the study using non-probability and purposive sampling. Each participant took part in a narrative interview and was asked to recreate in a sand tray one or more places where they remembered exploring gender and/or sexuality in their childhood or youthhood. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis through a queer phenomenological lens inspired by Sara Ahmed. It was determined that “queer failure,” as described by Jack Halberstam, was a critical, formative process that contributed to the reorienting of queer children and youth towards queer futures. The way that queer failure was responded to by significant adults appeared to have enduring impacts on participants’ self-esteem and self-regard, with having a supportive caregiver being associated with positive self-regard as a queer adult, and a lack of support associated with long-term poor mental health and lower likelihood of experiencing pride in being queer. Additionally, participants demonstrated how access to the outdoors provided a meaningful locus of self-discovery wherein the limitations and structures of gender were less omnipresent and they felt more external and internal acceptance of their queer identities. / Graduate / 2023-08-10

This thesis is an exploration in graphic anthropology alongside a digital community of nonbinary people on the social media app, TikTok. Nonbinary visuality is a complicated and still poorly understood set of experiences largely due to a lack of thoughtful representation in both academic and non-academic circles. This work applies comic-style drawing to gather nonbinary visual narratives as they are shared digitally. In doing so, this work contributes to an understanding of what it might mean to ‘look’ nonbinary. Between September 2021-May 2022 I conducted a digital ethnography on TikTok. I applied comic drawing as my primary mode of notetaking and communicating about my experiences. I also recruited 5 nonbinary social media mutuals who each contributed 1-6 video clips to my project. Informed by these video clips and my own auto-ethnographic experiences on the app, I created a collection of comic style drawings. Selections of these drawings were shared on social media (@enbyanthro) and through an interactive documentary housed on my project website (nbvisualnarratives.ca). Throughout my work here, I consider drawing as a process of gathering - of bringing together and being together. As I gathered individual nonbinary narratives through my drawing method I connected those stories to broader dialogues about being nonbinary. The ethno-graphic gatherings discussed here are made up of both personal narratives and shared experiences, brought together through the process of drawing. / Graduate

IEEE has recently finished its ratification of the IEEE Standard 802.3ba in June 2010 which set the target Ethernet speed as 100 Gbps. The studies on the future trends of the ever-increasing demands for higher speed optical fiber communications show that there is no sign of decline in the demand. Constantly increasing internet traffic and the bandwidth-hungry multimedia services like HDTV, YouTube, voice-over-IP, etc. can be shown as the main driving forces. Indeed, the discussions over the future upgrades on the Ethernet speeds have already been initiated. It is predicted that the next upgrade will enable 400 Gbps Ethernet and the one after will be toward enabling the astounding 1 Tbps Ethernet.Although such high and ultra high transmission speeds are unprecedented over any transmission medium, the bottlenecks for achieving them over the optical fiber remains to be fundamental. At such high operating symbol rates, the signal impairments due to inter- and intra-channel fiber nonlinearities and polarization mode dispersion get exacerbated to the levels that cripple the high-fidelity communication over optical fibers. Therefore, efforts should be exerted to provide solutions that not only answer the need for high-speed transmission but also maintain low operating symbol rates.In this dissertation, we contribute to these efforts by proposing nonbinary-LDPC-coded modulation (NB-LDPC-CM) schemes as enabling technologies that can meet both the aforementioned goals. We show that our proposed NB-LDPC-CM schemes can outperform their prior-art, binary counterparts called bit-interleaved coded modulation (BI-LDPC-CM) schemes while attaining the same aggregate bit rates at a lower complexity and latency. We provide comprehensive analysis on the computational complexity of both schemes to justify our claims with solid evidence. We also compare the performances of both schemes by using amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise dominated optical fiber transmission and short to medium haul optical fiber transmission scenarios. Both applications show outstanding performances of NB-LDPC-CM schemes over the prior-art BI-LDPC-CM schemes with increasing gaps in coding gain as the transmission speeds increase. Furthermore, we present how a rate-adaptive NB-LDPC-CM can be employed to fully utilize the resources of a long haul optical transport network throughout its service time.

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Reviewing literature on the histories of and the attitude studies about transgender people, the use of ‘they’ as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, prescriptive grammar ideology, and aversive prejudice theory provides insight into how these topics are interrelated and relevant to current issues surrounding nonbinary transgender people. This review inspired my research study. My participants (n = 722) completed an online survey in which they reported demographic variables and answered scales that measured ‘they’ attitudes in generic and queer contexts, attitudes toward trans people, and prescriptive grammar ideology. I found that the majority of participants approved of using the singular ‘they’. Regression analyses revealed that in a queer context, negative attitudes toward 'they' were best predicted by trans prejudice, while in a generic context, both valuing prescriptive grammar and anti-trans prejudice similarly predicted 'they' attitudes. This indicates that negative attitudes toward the singular 'they' are not merely an issue of taking a principled stance against "improper grammar". Additionally, both sexual orientation and gender (trans vs. cisgender) moderate the relationship between prescriptive grammar ideology and 'they' attitudes. Age, sexual orientation, and education level also influenced my pattern of results such that older participants, queer people, and more highly educated individuals were more likely to have positive attitudes toward the singular ‘they’. These findings have implications for LGBTQ+ individuals’ relationships with cisgender and heterosexual people as well as for theories of prejudice, particularly with regard to the increasingly important area of attitudes toward people with diverse gender identities.

Syftet med examensarbetet är att identifiera diskursiva representationer av genus i tre olika läromedel som används i kursen psykologi 1 på gymnasienivå i Sverige. Metod och teori kommer primärt från diskursanalytiska traditioner och har även influerats av vissa feministiska teorier. Ur en systematisk läsning och kodning av text och bilder som finns i materialen visade sig tre teman: pronomen, normer och skillnad/avvikelse. Uppsatsen är en del av ett lärarprogram på avancerad nivå och analysens syfte var att hjälpa mig själv och andra lärare i psykologi, min specialisering, att utveckla normkritisk pedagogik och didaktik för att bidra till en bättre förståelse för utsatta människor hos våra elever. Resultatet var att de två psykologi kursböckerna Psykologi 1+2a (Levander och Levander, 2012) och Mänskligt (Bernerson och Cronlund, 2017) har adresserat normer inklusive normer kring genus och sexuell läggning, men har även cementerat normativa diskurser i dessa områden. Mänskligt har lyckats något bättre i att lyfta och applicera normkritik. Det tredje materialet Bryt! är inte en psykologi kursbok utan en handbok i normkritik som mestadels består av gruppövningar med syftet att främja förståelse för normer och deras konsekvenser. Min rekommendation är att använda Bryt! som komplement till en eller både av de analyserade kursböckerna i klassrummet för att erbjuda våra elever en djupare förståelse för hur normer, i synerhet cis/heteronormen, negativt påverkar psykisk hälsa hos utsatta populationer såsom HBTQIA+ personer. / The aim of this thesis is to identify discursive representations of gender in three different learning materials used in an introductory course to psychology on the high school level in Sweden. Methodology and theory come primarily from discourse analytical traditions and have also been informed by certain feminist theories. A systematic reading and coding of the text and images present in the materials led to the emergence of three themes: pronouns, norms, and difference. The thesis is a part of a degree in pedagogy, and the intended result of the analysis was to aid myself and other teachers of psychology, my specialization, in the development of norm critical pedagogy and didactics which foster a better understanding of marginalized people in our students. The findings were that the two psychology textbooks, Psychology 1 + 2a (Levander and Levander, 2012) and Mänskligt (“Human”) (Bernerson and Cronlund, 2017), have each addressed norms, including norms surrounding gender and sexual orientation, but have also acted to reify normative discourses in these areas. Mänskligt has done a somewhat better job of lifting and applying norm critique. The third material, Bryt! (“Break the Norm!”), is not a psychology textbook but a workbook in norm critique mostly consisting of exercises to be carried out in groups with the intention of facilitating understanding of norms and their consequences. My recommendation is to employ Bryt! as a supplement to the use of one or both of the analyzed textbooks in the classroom in order to offer our students a more thorough understanding of the ways in which norms, particularly the cis/heteronorm, act to negatively affect the mental health of marginalized populations such as members of the LGBTQIA+ population.

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The importance of quantum error correction in paving the way to build a practical quantum computer is no longer in doubt. Despite the large body of literature in quantum coding theory, many important questions, especially those centering on the issue of "good codes" are unresolved. In this dissertation the dominant underlying theme is that of constructing good quantum codes. It approaches this problem from three rather different but not exclusive strategies. Broadly, its contribution to the theory of quantum error correction is threefold. Firstly, it extends the framework of an important class of quantum codes - nonbinary stabilizer codes. It clarifies the connections of stabilizer codes to classical codes over quadratic extension fields, provides many new constructions of quantum codes, and develops further the theory of optimal quantum codes and punctured quantum codes. In particular it provides many explicit constructions of stabilizer codes, most notably it simplifies the criteria by which quantum BCH codes can be constructed from classical codes. Secondly, it contributes to the theory of operator quantum error correcting codes also called as subsystem codes. These codes are expected to have efficient error recovery schemes than stabilizer codes. Prior to our work however, systematic methods to construct these codes were few and it was not clear how to fairly compare them with other classes of quantum codes. This dissertation develops a framework for study and analysis of subsystem codes using character theoretic methods. In particular, this work established a close link between subsystem codes and classical codes and it became clear that the subsystem codes can be constructed from arbitrary classical codes. Thirdly, it seeks to exploit the knowledge of noise to design efficient quantum codes and considers more realistic channels than the commonly studied depolarizing channel. It gives systematic constructions of asymmetric quantum stabilizer codes that exploit the asymmetry of errors in certain quantum channels. This approach is based on a Calderbank- Shor-Steane construction that combines BCH and finite geometry LDPC codes.

This work is about representation and existing. I’m fat and transmasculine. I’m looking for a reflection in my surroundings, culture, in media and art. I can’t find it, so I have to create it myself. Through materialising bodies in clay that describe what fat transmasculine people can look like I aim to give myself and people who are similar to me something we’re lacking. I claim my existence.