McGill University Thèses et mémoires publiés en 1988

This thesis explores the visual functions of the right anterior temporal cortex of the human brain. In Part 1, 92 patients with unilateral temporal- or frontal-lobe excisions and 35 normal control subjects were tested under two experimental conditions (global, local) of a reaction-time task, employing hierarchically structured letters or designs as stimuli. In both versions, the right temporal-lobe group was less affected than other groups by interference from the global aspect of the stimulus. These findings support the hypothesis that the right temporal lobe contributes to global visual processing. In Part 2, the ability to learn a cue-system for discriminating …  Read more

This study examines the influence of polls and pollsters on politicians. The analysis reviews the American literature, which suggests that electoral technology is used by private political consultants to assist the politician in manipulating the voter. Six hypotheses are identified from the electoral manipulation literature, focusing specifically on the influence of political consultants on politicians. These hypotheses are tested with an historical analysis of the use of polls in the political organization of the Liberal Party of Canada from 1943 to 1984. Secondly, in-depth interviews were conducted with prominent Liberals, and are reviewed to further test the hypotheses as they …  Read more

Short-term memory (STM) consists of two major components. The first is an active articulatory loop, responsible for the internal articulation of verbal items that permits the recycling and continuous refreshing of information. The second involves a passive phonological store into which auditory speech information enters directly. The first part of this thesis consists of a general evaluation of the cognitive impairments in three brain-damaged patients, who show a similar reduction in their auditory span, related to the components of STM. The word length effect, the phonological similarity effect and the primacy and recency effects are examined under normal conditions and …  Read more

Research on electrochemical detection methods for electroactive species in flowing streams is focussing on improving selectivity without compromising sensitivity or detection limits. With this in mind an effective electrode would be one that can examine electroactivity at many potentials in the shortest possible time frame. This work has investigated this possibility by using a single low temperature isotropic carbon working electrode with a choice of three scanning techniques. The most familiar one is cyclic voltammetry which is known to generate a wealth of qualitative information. The other modes are pulse and square-wave cyclic voltammetry. These modified versions of cyclic voltammetry …  Read more

The cap structure, m$ sp7$GpppX (where X = any nucleotide), is present at the 5$ sp prime$ end of all eukaryotic cellular messenger RNAs (except organellar). Previous studies have demonstrated that during protein synthesis the cap structure is recognized by a $ sim$24 kDa cap binding protein (CBP), termed eukaryotic initiation factor 4E (eIF-4E). With the use of a newly developed cap-analogy affinity matrix a high molecular weight complex that contains eIF-4E was purified, termed eIF-4F. In addition to eIF-4E this CBP complex consists of eIF-4A and a 220 kDa polypeptide (p220). Using an RNA unwinding assay direct evidence was …  Read more

Braun, Peter E. (Supervisor)  Read more

This Thesis investigates theoretically and experimentally the dynamical behaviour and the stability of a cylindrical shell coaxially located in a rigid cylindrical pipe and subjected to internal or annular flow. In the theoretical study, the shell could be clamped or pinned at both ends and the fluid flow in the inner shell and the annulus is assumed to be viscous and incompressible. The fluid forces consist of two parts: (i) steady viscous forces which determined using turbulent fully-developed theory; (ii) unsteady viscous forces which are derived by means of linearized Navier-Stokes equations. Shell motions are described by Flugge's modified shell …  Read more

Soviet literature of the twenties and thirties is examined in the present study in its relationship to other verbal genres, primarily, the speeches of Party leaders, newspaper rhetoric and political posters. The first four chapters of the dissertation focus on such topics as the reception of Marxist-Leninist discourse by peasants and workers as well as its representation in fiction; the refraction of official discursive formulas in characters' speech and the dialogization of Party rhetoric; the integration of political documents into fiction and their structural function. Particular attention is paid to the way the contamination of Party rhetoric by substandard language …  Read more

This thesis addresses The Development and The Future of English and Islamic Law within the given historical, political, social and legal context of the Sudan. In so doing it uses a comparative methodology. Part I highlights the genesis and the development of Islamic Law in the Sudan over three centuries. Emphasis is on the legal aspect of this long history, though other relevant factors are highlighted as well. The characteristics of this era are significant in understanding later developments of both English and Islamic Law as well as their future in the Sudan. Part II focuses on the factors that …  Read more

Chopped alfalfa and chopped whole-plant corn were ensiled and the proteolytic changes which occurred during ensiling were investigated. Proteolysis was measured in terms of end-products of protein degradation and by protein isolation followed by electrophoresis. The effects of formic acid and ammonia, applied at the time of ensiling, on proteolytic changes were investigated. Alfalfa treated with formic acid contained significantly reduced levels of NH$ sb3$-N and NPN compared to control silage; ammonia (NH$ sb3$)-treated alfalfa silage had significantly less NPN (P $<$ 0.05). After 90d of storage, formic acid-treated and NH$ sb3$-treated alfalfa silage contained lower levels of both branched …  Read more

This thesis locates Ibsen within the intellectual context pertaining to gender that is provided by such influential nineteenth-century texts as Mill's The Subjection of Women and Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht, both of which seemingly feminist works in actuality foreground women only for their importance in the production of better-quality sons who will ensure the endurance of the patriarchy. The attraction of feminists to the dramas of a playwright who avowedly wrote from this patriarchal standpoint is elucidated by a consideration of the appropriation of the woman-centered texts of patriarchal "feminism" by recent feminists seeking material to reinforce their own movement. The …  Read more

Cette étude examine le potentiel d'un système intégré de traitement du purin de pore, incluant une unite de tamisage et un réacteur séquentiel biologique (RSB). Un nouveau procédé mécanique de separation des fractions liquides et solides du purin a été développé. Ce procédé utilise un convoyeur a courroie fait de materiel filtrant continuellement nettoyé par un jet d'air. Les meilleurs résultats ont été obtenus avec un filtre dont les ouvertures avaient 0.1 mm de largeur et avec une charge hydraulique de 35 litres par minute. Pour des boues dont le contenu en matière sèche variait de 2 a 8%, l'efficacité …  Read more

Four Western press agencies, together with the Soviet press agency TASS, have a virtual monopoly on the gathering and dissemination of international news. These agencies to a large extent determine the nature of information originating in foreign countries that reaches the peoples of the world through newspapers, radio and television. This information monopoly by itself indesirable, is particularly harmful to the developing nations that often have non independent means of obtaining information about events occurring in other countries. The "New World Order of Information and Communication" (N.W.O.I.C.) that has emerged from deliberations among the non-aligned nations and in UNESCO represents …  Read more

MacKenzie, Robert E. (Supervisor)  Read more

Pihl, Robert (Supervisor)  Read more

The principles of Tribology are introduced to the general problem of tyre-soil interaction with a view to development of a better knowledge of the manner in which the tyre-soil interface behaves under rolling motion subjected to tractive force. In essence, an analytical model based on the finite element method is developed to evaluate the tyre-soil longitudinal slippage in connection with the tractive applied torque. The following major considerations are included in the proposed model: (1) A quasi-static finite element approach to cope with the actual dynamic behaviour of the tyre-soil interface. (2) Implementing the tyre tread effect in terms of …  Read more

The Ca$ sp{2+}$ binding protein, calmodulin, has been implicated in several Ca$ sp{2+}$ dependent processes during secretion in many different secretory systems. One area where calmodulin is suggested to play a role is the fusion of the secretory granule with the plasma membrane during exocytosis. Calmodulin may mediate the interaction or fusion through specific calmodulin-binding proteins (CMBPs) present in these two membranes. CMBPs present in bovine chromaffin cell granule membranes were characterized using the techniques of calmodulin affinity chromatography and $ sp{125}$I calmodulin overlay. Several CMBPs were detected in these membranes. One of these proteins, of molecular mass 65 kilodaltons …  Read more

Mammalian DNA sequences (ors), enriched for origins of DNA replication, have been isolated by extruding nascent DNA from replication bubbles activated at the beginning of S phase in CV-1 monkey cells. To determine whether these sequences had origin function, their ability to enable pBR322 plasmids to replicate autonomously in mammalian cells was examined. Using the DpnI-resistance assay and density labeling with bromodeoxyuridine, plasmids containing four different ors (ors 3, 8, 9 and 12) were found to replicate after transfection in CV-1, COS-7 and HeLa cell lines. These results were verified using electron microscopy for ors 8 and ors 12 plasmids, …  Read more

Programming a robotic workcell involves much more than simply writing a program for each element, because the operations to be performed are tightly coupled by precedence constraints on their time ordering, and by constraints associated with the shared resources. The situation is further complicated because robotic workcells are typically configured to repetitively perform a desired application; we would therefore like to optimize the order in which operations take place, so as to minimize the total time required. But even when the operations have deterministic outcomes, there may exist alternative sequences with different durations, due to non-determinism in the workcell sequencing …  Read more

This thesis investigated the nature of the deficit in story recall associated with temporal-lobe damage in the left hemisphere dominant for speech. The first three experiments examined whether excision of this region (1) slows the rate at which verbal material is processed, (2) reduces working-memory capacity, or (3) interferes with the integration of information across sentences. Left temporal lobectomy does not impair these aspects of the initial processing of stories, since on none of the above variables was the performance of left temporal-lobe groups deficient relative to that of normal control subjects, or patients with unilateral frontal- or right temporal-lobe …  Read more

The transfer of radiant energy in highly inhomogeneous media is a difficult problem that is encountered in many geophysical applications. It is the purpose of this thesis to study some problems connected with the scattering of solar radiation in natural clouds. Extreme variability in the optical density of these clouds is often believed to occur regularly. In order to facilitate study of very inhomogeneous optical media such as clouds, the difficult angular part of radiative transfer calculations is simplified by considering a series of models in which conservative scattering only occurs in discrete directions. Analytic and numerical results for the …  Read more

Ce travail est un pas en avant sur la route de la classification des singularités dans le contexte de la Geometric Différentielle Synthétique. On utilise une version interne de la topologic des Compacts-Ouverts de C"(V, R) qui se révéle practique a l'heure de prouver des resultats de densité (l'aspect genérique). Avec cette topologie on montre comment diverses notions de stabilité peuvent etre intemalissées et comparées. Les singularités sont étudiees ici pour les gennes syntbétiques (representés par des objects infinitésimals) car cette propieté appartienne au "tout pres" du point. On obtient le resultat de characterisation suivant: les germes stables de fontions …  Read more