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Recent Submissions

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    Let Her Story Be Told: Violence Against Women Within the Archaic Aegean and Ionian Oikos
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-10-01) McGrath, Olivia
    Violence against women can be found in poetry, legal codes, and osteoarchaeological records across the Aegean Islands and Ionian territory. These sources are cross-examined through an intersectional lens to identify a pattern of domestic violence between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. The evidence suggests that wives, daughters, and female slaves each experienced domestic violence. It will be argued that despite the differences in status, violence against women was condoned given that men were obligated to maintain control over their home; the behaviour of the women within it reflected on men's sense of self and public image. To ensure control, gendered stereotypes regarding women's nature and minds appear across all forms of poetry, including epic, lyric, and iambic, and these imbed the belief that women were execrable into social attitudes, daily life, and the historical record. This thesis shows that these beliefs were then used to justify domestic violence to such an extent that they were passed down through generations and appear online today to validate the same violence used three thousand years ago to control women.
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    Spatially Confined Superposed Unruh-DeWitt Detector Trajectories
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-10-01) Cey, Taylor
    In the absence of a comprehensive theory of quantum gravity, operational approaches to relativistic quantum phenomena have become increasingly important to probe our understanding. Unruh-DeWitt detectors are a versatile and powerful tool in that arsenal, and have been used to analyze problems such as the Unruh effect and quantum information theory. This work aims to examine the effects of superpositions of trajectories on Unruh-DeWitt detectors, which has been of particular interest to studying relativistic quantum information, with a special focus on experimental applicability. This thesis investigates the response of a detector interacting with a massless scalar field in (3+1) Minkowski spacetime when placed in a superposition of trajectories. The trajectories are examined in four distinct geometric configurations, including both circularly revolving and static trajectories, for which the detector can be confined to a singular location or orbit. The response of a detector in superpositions of circular and static trajectories is compared to analogous incoherent mixed state systems, and interference effects from non-local interactions between the trajectories through the Wightman are revealed and discussed. An effective temperature measure for Unruh-DeWitt detectors is established and used to investigate the thermal properties of superposed detectors. An experiment is proposed to test the response of a detector superposed at two distinct positions interacting with an analogue (2+1) massless scalar field. Using a beamsplitter allows for a single modulated laser source to pass through a Bose-Einstein condensate at two locations. We show that through a process of recombination of the beams and heterodyning, the response function of the detector can be obtained from the difference-photocurrent power spectral density. This is shown to explicitly include interference terms resulting from non-local interactions between the two superposed positions of the detector in the analogue field. We show that this can be done while operating beyond the standard quantum limit using squeezed light to obtain a greater signal-to-noise ratio.
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    Exploring How Shifting between Physical and Virtual Reality Influences Player Experience and Game Design in VR Games
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-10-01) Vinoj, Lakshmi
    Cross-reality refers to the ability of users to transition between multiple realities. These transitions range from the real environment to a virtual environment, as well as environments in between that contain a mix of real and virtual elements. Users access these virtual and mixed environments using head-mounted displays. These devices provide users with high resolution, wide field of view, real-time tracking, and embodied interaction capabilities, resulting in immersive and unique experiences during virtual reality gameplay. Due to this, there is an abundance of research on virtual and mixed reality gaming using head-mounted displays. Current research applies the concept of transitioning between realities in educational games and workplace applications; however, relatively little research has examined games that enable interactions across multiple realities within these devices purely for entertainment purposes. This thesis addresses this gap through two studies. Study 1 (N = 15) investigated players’ preferred interaction techniques for viewing and interacting across physical and virtual realities. Four techniques were evaluated: Transparency, Window, Eraser, and Flashlight. These techniques were implemented across three conditions, depending on whether the player starts in a virtual or a real reality and transitions to the other: virtuality-to-virtuality, virtuality-to-reality, and reality-to-virtuality. The study identified participants' preferences for each technique, the factors that influenced their favourability, and potential gaming applications for each technique. Based on participants' suggestions and the findings of Study 1, Study 2 (N=25) used the Flashlight technique in an escape room across four conditions: pure-virtuality, virtuality-to-virtuality, virtuality-to-reality, and reality-to-virtuality. Pure-virtuality was used as the baseline condition. Study 2 results showed that players’ enjoyment of the game did not differ significantly across the four conditions. Players experienced greater presence and lower workloads when more of the gameplay occurred in the virtual world. The qualitative results showed that: (1) the physical environment should be considered as part of the overall player experience, (2) hints should guide players coherently across both realities, (3) the relationship between the realities should feel cohesive, (4) difficulty should be carefully balanced because participants reported greater difficulty in some cross-reality conditions, and (5) the virtual environment should meaningfully contribute possibilities that complement the physical environment. Together, these studies contribute an understanding of how players experience different cross-reality interaction techniques and gaming conditions, as well as design considerations for developing more cohesive, intuitive, and engaging cross-reality games.
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    Multi‑source analyses of average treatment effects with failure time outcomes
    (Springer Nature, 2025-07-04) Wen, Lan; Steingrimsson, Jon; Robertson, Sarah; Dahabreh, Issa
    Analyses of multi-source data, such as data from multi-center randomized trials, individual participant data meta-analyses, or pooled analyses of observational studies, combine information to estimate an overall average treatment effect. However, if average treatment effects vary across data sources, commonly used approaches for multi-source analyses may not have a clear causal interpretation with respect to a target population of interest. In this paper, we provide identification and estimation of average treatment effects in a target population underlying one of the data sources {in a point treatment setting} for failure time outcomes potentially subject to right-censoring. We do not assume the absence of effect heterogeneity and hence our results are valid, under certain assumptions, when average treatment effects vary across data sources. We derive the efficient influence functions for source-specific average treatment effects using multi-source data under two different sets of assumptions, and propose a novel doubly robust estimator for our estimand. We evaluate the finite-sample performance of our estimator in simulation studies, and apply our methods to data from the HALT-C multi-center trials.
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    Doubly Robust Estimation of Monotonic Survival Curves for Time-Varying Treatments in Observational Studies
    (De Gruyter Brill, 2026-09-18) Wen, Lan
    Doubly robust estimators of the longitudinal g-computation formula enhance robustness against model misspecification, offering an improvement over the standard inverse probability weighted estimators. However, existing doubly robust estimators for discrete-time survival outcomes do not necessarily guarantee that the estimated survival curves remain monotonic. In this manuscript, we propose a novel estimator of the g-computation formula specifically designed for discrete-time survival outcomes, ensuring that the resulting estimated survival curves are monotonic in the presence of treatment-confounder feedback and simultaneously guaranteeing double robustness at all time points. We establish theoretical properties of this estimator and compare its performance with existing estimators that do not impose monotonicity constraints. Through simulation studies, we compare our proposed approach with existing methodologies in terms of bias, efficiency, and robustness under various model misspecifications, and demonstrate its application using an illustrative real-world dataset.