McGill University Thèses et mémoires publiés en 2005

Pluralism, the variety of philosophical, moral, cultural and religious worldviews of contemporary society, is a characteristic of Western democracies. This places upon such societies a great challenge for the teaching of moral principles in schools and for the establishment of such principles in the public sphere. John Rawls's political idea of an overlapping consensus is a principle of decision-making that can be used as a model for arriving at principles for moral education and also as a model for moral deliberation in the public domain. Multicultural narratives can play an important role in enhancing the creation of an overlapping consensus …  Read more

The mechanism of nucleation and growth of tin electrodeposits was investigated. Also the influences of the operating parameters on the morphology, texture, and microstructure as well as the corrosion resistance of tin coatings were studied in order to propose optimum deposition conditions. Tin electrodeposition on glassy carbon and steel from acid sulfate electrolytes proceeds via the 3D (Volmer-Weber) mechanism. On low carbon steel substrates, 3D tin crystallites are initially formed preferentially on step edges, followed by fast deposition of other sites with much smaller and densely packed crystallites of about 150-180 nm in diameter. It was discovered that hydrogen co-evolution …  Read more

Malignant brain tumors such as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and medulloblastoma are among the most devastating of cancers and their extensive infiltration into normal brain tissue leads to recurrence and poor patient prognosis. This thesis focuses on negative regulators of malignant brain tumor invasion in three-dimensional collagen gel matrices. We observed a chemorepellent effect in co-cultures of glioma spheroids where C6 and U251 glioblastoma cells are repelled by a secreted chemotropic molecule produced by the adjacent spheroid. In addition, the inhibitory effect of glioma conditioned medium on implanted C6 and U251 spheroids suggests that a chemorepellent effect may be accompanied by …  Read more

This two-year qualitative clinical study investigates the intea-psychic (within a person) and inter-relational (between people) effect of maternal ambivalence in female psychotherapy relationships. The participants are five, low-income single mothers, and I am the therapist researcher. Ambivalence describes the co-existence of loving and hating feelings. In traditional psychoanalytic theory, ambivalence originates in the developing infant's relationship to the mother and forms the basis of all adult relationships. A mother's experience of ambivalence is viewed as a regressive return to an earlier emotional experience with her mother. Maternal ambivalence is a feminist psychoanalytic concept developed by Parker (1995, 1997). Parker expands …  Read more

While studies in the social sciences have looked at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth, few have focused on how they experience school. Sexual orientation is still a taboo subject or only treated cursorily in educational institutions and teacher-training programmes. Research that does look at schools is mitigated by subjects who are at different degrees of being out in their schools, or are treated as a monolith with other LGBT youth, or have been recruited through psychosocial agencies, and by data gathered retrospectively and/or at arms-length through surveys. This dissertation describes the experience of being gay and out at …  Read more

The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the bilateral air services agreements of Sri Lanka under the existing legal, regulatory and the infrastructural framework of civil aviation in Sri Lanka. In order to achieve this objective, this thesis is divided into following chapters, Chapter One - Deals with the history and evolution of bilateral air services agreements in the history of world civil aviation. Chapter Two - This Chapter has two sections. Section one addresses briefly the history and evolution of the air transport industry of Sri Lanka. Section two looks into the legal and regulatory framework within …  Read more

Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) is an enzyme involved in homocysteine metabolism. A common polymorphism in the MTHFR gene (677C→T) can result in the condition hyperhomocysteinemia when concurrent with low dietary folate intake. In several clinical studies, this polymorphism has been associated with low bone mineral density and increased fracture risk. The MTHFR knockout mouse, a model for human hyperhomocysteinemia, was used to further investigate the bone phenotype associated with this condition by comparing heterozygous mutants to wild-type animals. Effects of a low folate diet were also assessed. Bone strength was not decreased, and osteoclast numbers were not increased in heterozygotes or …  Read more

This work presents a new method for obtaining planar traveling wave solutions to Lattice Differential Equations (LDEs). Our approach is based on introducing a traveling coordinate transformation, which yields a more general class of equations than that obtained through the standard traveling wave ansatz method. A correspondence is then obtained between solutions of this new problem and traveling waves of the LDE. Drawing on existing theory regarding existence, uniqueness, and stability, two approaches are presented in Chapter 2 for solving the new formulation to obtain traveling wave solutions of the one-dimensional discrete Nagumo equation. Chapter 3 presents the results of …  Read more

The objective of the study was to determine whether diet diversity can predict the prevalence of infectious disease in children under 6-years in a rural African village. The study took place in Southern Madagascar. Dietary diversity, health and socio-economic interviews were administered to 77 mothers of children under 6 years old and who no longer breastfed. The diet diversity score was analysed along with socio-economic variables as predictors of the number of days a child had spent ill from an infectious disease in the past month. Meat and wild food variety, as well as education of the mother, childhood vaccinations …  Read more

Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to measure relative GABA concentration in the brains of patients with MS. It was hypothesized that microglial activation in MS cortex and presumed associated stripping of GABAergic synapses would be associated with a lowering of GABA concentration. Twelve patients with MS (six relapsing remitting, six secondary progressive) and five healthy control subjects were examined using a GABA-optimized STEAM sequence on a scanner operating at 3.0 tesla. A volume of 2 cm x 3 cm x 3 cm including posterior cingulate and occipital cortex was chosen. GABA/Cr was reduced by approximately 50% in patients with …  Read more

Health is defined as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease. Quality of life refers to a person's perception of well-being and life satisfaction. Chronic liver failure can have significant negative impact on a patient's cognitive abilities and can cause physical debilitation. Thus, it is not surprising that cirrhotic patients often have severe impairment in their quality of life (QOL). From the perspective of the health care system, patient's health-related quality of life (HRQL) is the more relevant construct. Success of liver transplantation (OLT) is often measured by length of survival, …  Read more

Whiteway, Malcolm  Read more

The self-assembly behavior of poly(ethylene oxide)-b-polystyrene- b-poly(acrylic acid) (PEO-b-PS-b-PAA) triblock copolymers in solution is the focus of this thesis. The triblock copolymers were synthesized by atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). The compositions of the block copolymers were determined by 1H NMR. The synthesized block copolymers have relatively low polydispersity indexes (PDI < 1.3) as proved by GPC. The influence of several factors on the ATRP of styrene or t-BA, such as temperature, catalyst and polymerization time, was also explored. The effects of several parameters on the self-assembly behavior of this triblock copolymer were investigated, including the nature and composition of …  Read more

Stroke is a leading cause of disability for adults. Several studies confirm cognitive impairment in persons following stroke. Every stroke patient should have rapid access to cognitive screening and evaluation. In this study, Rasch analysis was used to determine the suitability of the telephone version of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) in screening for cognitive impairment in persons with stroke. The specific objectives were to determine the range of difficulty represented by the items of the telephone version of the MMSE, to identify the hierarchy of item difficulty and to compare the French and English versions of the test. Rasch …  Read more

Background. Clustering of observations occurs frequently in epidemiological and clinical studies of time-to-event outcomes. However, only a few papers addressed the challenge of accounting for clustering while analyzing right-censored survival data. I propose two bootstrap-based approaches to correct standard errors of Cox's proportional hazards (PH) model estimates for clustering, and validate the approaches in simulations. Methods. Both bootstrap-based approaches involve 2 stages of resampling the original data. The two methods share the same procedure at the first stage but employ different procedures at the second stage. At the first stage of both methods, the clusters (e.g. physicians) are resampled with …  Read more

JRelix is an implementation of a relational database system which provides a significantly powerful database programming language and which is especially adept with complex data. This thesis documents an enhancement of JRelix which provides intuitive descriptions and efficient manipulations for textual information in the database. Coupled with the relational and domain algebra in JRelix, the new database system supports rapid textual information retrieval, flexible text mining, structured text schema discovery, relational operations on text, transformation between text and relation, and powerful pattern matching in structured or unstructured data. These endow JRelix with the capacity of handling complicated textual information from …  Read more

Two nearly monodisperse polybutadienes (PBd) having different molecular weights were used to study nonlinear viscoelastic behavior using a sliding plate rheometer incorporating shear and normal stress transducers. Comparison of data for the shear stress growth function at the start-up of steady simple shear with predictions of the Wagner model was used to estimate the time-dependency of wall slip. Both the time-dependent slip velocity and the steady-state values were found to depend on molecular weight, thus supporting the hypothesis that "slip" actually involves a shear-induced disentanglement between molecules strongly adsorbed at the wall and those in the bulk. The critical shear …  Read more

This thesis describes a method to analyze proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy imaging (MRSI) of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease of the central nervous system (CNS). MRSI can non-invasively measure the metabolites in the brains and is helpful in research of progression of MS. Conventional approaches to analyze MRSI data are either using region-of-interest (ROI) methods or averaging the resonance intensities over the whole study area. This thesis documents an approach to use all reliable resonance intensities in MRSI based on multivariate mixed effect statistical models for repeated measurement. We applied the method in a series …  Read more

Modelica is a recently developed object-oriented language for physical systems modeling. It is a modern language built on non-causal modeling with mathematical equations and object-oriented constructs. An open source research prototype compiler for muModelica, a subset of Modelica, is presented. The compiler takes textual Modelica source as input, translates it into flat Modelica, then performs a series of symbolic transformations on the differential-algebraic equations, most notably, assigning causality, and generates input suitable for processing by a numerical simulator such as Octave. Design and implementation issues of the muModelica compiler are discussed in some detail in this thesis. These issues include …  Read more

Life signal detection is an old concept with contemporary applications, including predicting cardiac arrhythmia from heart signals, and helping in the search for lost survivors. The underlying principle of the microwave heart monitoring is based on detecting the changes in the reflected microwaves caused by the movement of the chest wall in response to respiration and ventricular activities. This thesis seeks to analyze the induced current distribution and specific-absorption rate (SAR) using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method on an accurate two-dimensional thoracic model provided by the Visual Human Project (VHP). Additional test cases are analyzed which model the two-dimensional heart …  Read more

We develop a coarse grained methodology to study solvent mediated interactions between two or more hydrophobic spheres. The free energy of a configuration of two hydrophobic hard spheres is calculated as a function of their separation to understand the thermodynamic force between them mediated by water. The range of the hydrophobic interaction is found to be of the order of the equilibrium correlation length of water; beyond this range the hydrophobicity induced force is negligible. We also examine the free energy landscape corresponding to the two interacting hydrophobic spheres, and find a new intermediate state between the two states of …  Read more

Functional RNA sequences typically have structural elements that are highly conserved during evolution. Here we present an algorithmic method for multiple alignment of RNAs, taking into consideration both structural similarity and sequence identity. Furthermore, we performed a comparative analysis on pairing probability matrices of a set of aligned orthologous sequences and predicted the conserved secondary structure. Our alignment method outperforms the most widely used multiple alignment tool - Clustal W, and the structure prediction approach we proposed can generate a more accurate secondary structure for 5S rRNA compared to the existing approaches such as Alifold. In addition, our algorithms are …  Read more

This thesis deals with the issue of augmenting public resources with fixed size dedicated (private) resource pools to increase the probability of meeting the service level agreements (SLAs). Since service hosting systems based on virtual machines (VMs) are becoming increasingly practical, this thesis proposes an VM-based infrastructure for outsourcing computer services in public computing utility. Several service-oriented heuristics are proposed to perform resource management in migrating the VMs in order to obtain higher levels of quality of service. Through extensive simulations, this thesis evaluates the performance of the heuristics under different conditions.  Read more

Botulinum A toxin (BTX) has become increasingly recognized as a treatment option in the management of spasticity in children with cerebral palsy (CP). Preliminary evidence suggests that certain baseline characteristics of the child may affect responsiveness to BTX. However, the contribution of these factors has not been fully elucidated. The primary objective of the study was to examine whether specific intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the child were associated with responsiveness to BTX. The results indicate that age, number of treatments, parenting stress and child's motivation were associated with the degree of change in gait pattern, level of ambulation, gross …  Read more

Text categorization (TC) is the task of automatically categorizing textual digital documents into pre-set categories by analyzing their contents. The purpose of this study is to develop an effective TC model to resolve the difficulty of automatic classification. In this study, two primary goals are intended. First, a Hidden Markov Model (HAM is proposed as a relatively new method for text categorization. HMM has been applied to a wide range of applications in text processing such as text segmentation and event tracking, information retrieval, and information extraction. Few, however, have applied HMM to TC. Second, the Library of Congress Classification …  Read more

A beta-galactosidase gene from Bifidobacterium breve B24 which showed the higher hydrolytic and synthetic activity was cloned in E. coli. The complete beta-galactosidase gene contained 2076 bp nucleotides and encoded 691 amino acids which had a high homology to the other Bifidobacterium species. This beta-galactosidase was homologous to that of the LacA family. The galA gene was successfully over-expressed in E. coli ER2566. To observe any change in the recombinant enzyme, beta-galactosidases from Bifidobacterium breve B24 and recombinant E. coli ER2566 were purified to homogeneity by ion exchange chromatography (Mono-Q) and gel-filtration chromatography (Superose-12 and Superdex 200) columns. The molecular …  Read more

The phosphoenolpyruvate-dependant carbohydrate transport system (PTS) couples uptake of a variety of carbohydrates with phosphorylation in prokaryotes. In this system, a phosphoryl group is sequentially transferred through two general phosphoryl carrier proteins, enzyme I (EI) and HPr, and a carbohydrate-specific permease enzyme II (EII). EII is constituted of two cytoplasmic domains IIA and IIB, and a transmembrane channel IIC domain. The galactitol-specific transporter (IIgat) belongs to the glucitol family and is structurally the least well-known. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was used to solve the three-dimensional structure of IIBGat. IIB Gat is composed of a central four-stranded parallel beta sheet …  Read more

Determining whether stoning for adultery and hand-amputation for theft were practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia represents the first phase in exploring the origins and evolution of these penalties in Islamic law. Should both punishments prove to predate Islam, then it would appear the Qur'an broke with stoning and confirmed amputation of the hand. An extensive survey of pre-Islamic, Near Eastern legal materials in search of parallel penalties has thus been attempted in this thesis. Remarkably, not only stoning and hand-amputation, but nearly the entire range of Islamic adultery and theft legislation have pre-Islamic parallels. The nature of these parallels, however, does …  Read more

The Very Large Optical Telescope (VLOT) is a concept, proposed by the National Research Council - Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, to address future demands of the international astrophysics community. To develop and evaluate the VLOT designs, an Integrated Modeling approach is employed. The Integrated Model (IM) is a single simulation tool which accounts for the interactions between different telescope modules to produce the final image quality generated by the telescope. The work in this thesis relates directly to two of the modules of the IM: (1) the structural dynamics and (2) the primary mirror control module. In order to obtain …  Read more

Geosynthetics that are usually made of Poly(vinyl) Chloride (PVC) are used as components of engineered barriers in landfill applications. As a component of an engineered barrier scheme, it is used to mitigate the migration of hazardous and toxic mixtures of chemicals that can diffuse through the clay layer in the engineered barrier. The integrity of the geosynthetic layers that are in frequent contact with these chemicals is therefore of interest to the overall waste containment strategy. This thesis conducts a coordinated investigation that will allow the characterization of the deformability properties of geosynthetic materials, subjected to various levels of exposure …  Read more

Levine, Martin D.  Read more

This thesis presents the framework used in our research group---the Shared Reality Environment Lab---for use in our spatially immersive setups. Our main interest is the application of virtual reality techniques in the context of computer-mediated human to human communication and collaboration. The purpose of this architecture is to allow users to quickly develop remote collaborative applications without the need to manage low level operations. The framework is comprised of multiple independent components: the Qave graphics engine, user trackers, sound spatializer, coherence server, communication library and overlapping projectors interface. Some components were already implemented when this work started and the contributions …  Read more

The study objectives were to measure the concentrations of albumin, prealbumin and transferrin in amniotic fluid (AF), and to establish if these concentrations were associated with infant birth weight (BW). At St Mary's Hospital (Montreal, Quebec), 294 AF samples were collected from mothers undergoing routine amniocentesis (12-19 weeks gestation). Exclusion criteria included subjects having gestational diabetes, multiple births or fetal genetic abnormalities. AF samples were analyzed by capillary electrophoresis (CE) at 190 nm. Analysis of variance and multiple linear regressions were performed. AF prealbumin could not be detected by CE. However, ANCOVA showed that transferrin was different among BW categories. …  Read more

Deschepper, Chirstian F. (Supervisor)  Read more

Hamdy, R. (Supervisor)  Read more

Current prediction equations for glomerular filtration rate (GFR), the most important measure of renal function, are neither accurate nor precise in children. Clinical data were abstracted from 207 charts of pediatric patients with renal disease attending the Montreal Children's Hospital from 1999-2004, to derive serum creatinine (SCR)-based equations and test their ability to predict iothalamate clearance, a gold standard measure of GFR, using linear regression and the Bayesian Information Criterion. In a separate study, CysC-based equations were derived from data on cystatin C (CysC) previously measured in 103 children between 1999 and 2003. Two SCR equations were derived for patients …  Read more

In glomerular epithelial cells (GEC), the actin cytoskeleton is a key determinant of cell morphology and functions, including permselectivity. Complement C5b-9 induces sublytic GEC injury associated with GEC morphological changes and proteinuria. This study addressed the role of Rho GTPases in complement-mediated GEC injury. We demonstrated that the amount of active RhoA increased; while the amount of active Rac1 and Cdc42 were decreased in C5b-9 mediated sublytic GEC injury both in vitro and in glomeruli from rats with PHN in vivo. Complement mediated inactivation of p190RhoGAP may contribute to complement-induced RhoA activation. Overexpression of constitutively active or dominant negative mutants …  Read more

We consider the use of medial surfaces to represent symmetries of 3-D objects. This allows for a qualitative abstraction based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of components and also a degree of invariance to a variety of transformations including the articulation and deformation of parts. We demonstrate the use of this representation for both indexing and matching 3-D object models. Our formulation uses the geometric information associated with each node along with an eigenvalue labeling of the adjacency matrix of the subgraph rooted at that node. We compare our algorithm with the techniques of harmonic spheres (Kazhdan et al., …  Read more

CD45, also known as Leukocyte-common antigen (LCA), is a type-1 receptor-like protein tyrosine phosphatase (PTPase), which contains two PTPase domains, the membrane proximal domain (DI) and the membrane distal domain (D2). It is uniquely expressed on the surface of all leukocytes and their hematopoietic precursors and plays an important role in immunoreceptor signaling. In this study, I identified a novel CD45-interacting protein, Fyb, through screening human leukocyte cDNA library with a modified yeast two-hybrid system. Fyb is an adaptor protein mainly involved in the regulation of T cell receptor-induced integrin clustering and adhesion. It contains several regions with potential to …  Read more

Drawing upon court files in the Liaoning Provincial Archives, this dissertation addresses the question of the transformation of the civil justice system in Fengtian Province in the early twentieth century. Fengtian Province was among the few provinces where judicial-legal reforms were first launched during the late Qing's New Policies period. In the early Republic, judicial-legal reforms were continuously pursued under the governance of the warlord Zhang Zuolin. The accommodation of judicial-legal modernity within warlord politics was a result of the simultaneous presence of local elite activism, nationalism and the dominance of republican ideology. To demonstrate judicial-legal modernity in this frontier …  Read more

Reliable operation of networks consisting of many embedded wireless nodes operating under strict cost and energy constraint is a major requirement for their widespread acceptance. Towards this goal, we consider self-testing of complete wireless nodes in the field through a low-energy software-based self-test (SBST) method. The energy consumption of SBST is optimized both for individual components such as a CPU, embedded memories, and an RF module, as well as at the system level, considering the interplay between module tests. We derive an SBST scheme that utilizes existing CPU instructions efficiently by taking the least amount of cycles and selecting operands …  Read more

Four studies were conducted to investigate some factors affecting milk fatty acid composition of dairy ewes. The first study was performed to determine the influence of freezing temperatures and storage time on ovine milk composition and cheese making. The other three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of dietary added fats with different profiles of fatty acids from canola, sunflower and flaxseeds on animal performance, nutrient utilization, milk yield and cheese making. The main emphasis was on fatty acid composition, particularly CLA and Omega-3 fatty acids, in milk and cheese. Results showed that: (1) feeding up to 8% of …  Read more

It is widely accepted that the cortex can be divided into a series of spatially discrete areas based on their specific laminar patterns. It is of great interest to divide the cortex into different areas in terms of both neuronal functions and cellular composition. The division of cortical areas can be reflected by the cell arrangements or cellular composition. Therefore, the cortical structure can be represented by some functional neuronal density data. Techniques on functional data analysis help to develop some measures which indicate structural changes. In order to separate roughness from structural variations and influences of the convolutions and …  Read more

Action potential firing rate from magnocellular neurosecretory cells (MNCs), and the resulting vasopressin (VP, antidiuretic hormone) secretion from the neurohypophysis, correlate linearly with extracellular fluid (ECF) osmolality. Previous studies suggest that angiotensin II (Ang II) released centrally may enhance the sensitivity (gain) of this osmoregulatory reflex by increasing the slope of the relation between the firing rate of MNCs and ECF osmolality. The intrinsic osmosensitivity of MNCs is mediated by a cell volume-dependent regulation of stretch inactivated cation (SIC) channels. Therefore Ang II might increase gain by modulating the effects of ECF osmolality on cell volume, or the coupling between …  Read more

In this thesis, we present the identification of methods and tools for the design and analysis of an Agile All-Photonic Network (AAPN). This thesis discusses the layered topology which comprises of a set of overlaid star/tree networks, with an optical core space switch at each of the star centers and hybrid photonic/electronic switches at the edges, and optionally, with Multiplexer/Selectors in between to concentrate traffic. Consequently, network cost is minimized while taking into consideration performance criteria such as delay and reliable traffic restoration upon network failure. A new mixed integer linear programming formulation is presented for core node placement and …  Read more

This study examines the role of the Internet in the life of diasporic women. Twenty-nine qualitative interviews were conducted with Mainland Chinese immigrant women in Montreal, Canada to answer three research questions: (1) what is the use and value of the Internet as perceived by these women; (2) how have they experienced the Internet given their particular social situation as immigrants in Montreal; and (3) what diasporic identities are related to these women's Internet practices. The research found that the Internet was perceived by these women mainly as a tool to obtain information, facilitate communication, and access recreation. Its appropriation …  Read more

Flutter analysis plays an important role in the design and development of aircraft wings because of the information it provides regarding the flight envelope of the aircraft. With the coupling of the flow and structural solver, the flutter boundary of wings can be evaluated in the time domain. This study: First, computes the aeroelastic response for a typical sweptback wing section model by coupling a flow solver and a two degree of freedom structural equation of motion solver to predict the flutter boundary of an airfoil at different Mach numbers. The results agree well with previous numerical results, and the …  Read more

Through a comparative study of the law in the U.K. and Canada, the thesis will examine the law of ship mortgages in China. In the beginning, the thesis will discuss the concept of ownership in ships, ships' registration and the concept of ship mortgages. After laying the theoretical basis, the author will go on to talk about the rights and obligations of the mortgagor and mortgagee. Furthermore, the priority of maritime claims under Chinese maritime law will be presented. The last part of the thesis will be dedicated on the subject of conflict of laws in the domain of the …  Read more

At the HERA particle accelerator, 27.5 GeV electrons collide with 920 GeV protons. In the photoproduction mode, the quasi-real exchange photon emitted by the electron interacts with the proton at small momentum transfer. Such events are selected and investigated with the ZEUS detector in the photon proton center-of-mass range 130 GeV < Wgamma p < 270 GeV using the 55.1 pb-1 gated luminosity of the year 2000 data. The two typical photoproduction processes are studied separately: in the direct case photons can interact directly with the proton, while in the resolved case the photon is resolved into its hadronic components. …  Read more

The wind energy industry has undergone a dramatic transformation during the last decade. The total operating wind power capacity in the world has increased greatly. As more and more attention is paid to the increase in both the size and number of wind farms, a number of problems should be investigated in more detail. The voltage stability problem primarily focuses on the reactive power management that affects voltage stability and transmission losses. Wind power farm installations that have the potential to displace a large percentage of fossil-fuel generation must be designed to avoid unacceptable frequency and voltage disturbances due to …  Read more