McGill University Theses and dissertations by author name (F)

This thesis presents the first inclusive untagged analysis of $B \to X_u \ell \nu$ decays using data from the Belle II experiment. Within the Standard Model theory of particle physics, these are weak decays of the $B$ meson to a hadron containing an up quark, $X_u$, a charged lepton (either an electron or a muon), $\ell$, and the corresponding lepton neutrino, $\nu$. The decay rate is governed by the Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix element $V_{ub}$. The value of the $V_{ub}$ matrix element is one of the fundamental parameters of nature, a quantity that cannot be theoretically predicted and therefore must …  Read more

The upgrade of the KEKB to the SuperKEKB accelerator is being followed by the update of the Belle detector to the Belle II detector. The design instantaneous luminosity of SuperKEKB is 8*10^35 cm^-2s^-1, forty times higher than that at KEKB. The new high-luminosity environment will bring an increase in the beam background. Due to the 40-fold increase in luminosity, the beam backgrounds are expected to increase also by forty times compared to those encountered by the Belle experiment. The Belle II collaboration has implemented various countermeasures to combat the increase in beam background and enable a safe operation of the …  Read more

When the European Commission ultimately blocked the merger between American giant General Electrics and Honeywell in July 2001, this decision triggered a firestorm of criticism. Not only had the Commission just stopped a purely American transaction for the first time since the enactment of European Merger Regulation, but it also contradicted its American Counterpart, the US Department of Justice: The Americans had cleared the deal several months earlier. In spite of constant cooperative efforts during the investigation, the two antitrust agencies could not reach a common position. When scholars and officials tried to find reasons for the divergence between the …  Read more

The transformation of 45 tropical cyclones into extratropical cyclones over the western Noah Atlantic Ocean between 1963 and 1996 is studied. Cases are selected from the National Hurricane Center's "best track" archive. National Centers, for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalyses of geopotential height data are used to construct a synoptic-dynamic climatology of extratropical transition, or "ET". The Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) upper-air archive of six near-track stations is used to produce sounding composites. Primary results of the study follow. (1) A statistically-significant 1000--500-hPa warm anomaly (with respect to the 1963--96 climatology) persists for the one-week period prior to the passage of …  Read more

Greer-Wooten, B. (Supervisor)  Read more

The letter of credit continues to play an indispensable role in the financing and securing of international commercial transactions. Its usefulness and efficacy derives primarily from the fact that it is independent from the underlying relationship between buyer and seller. In a considerable number of cases, however, the independence of the letter of credit has been challenged as a result of fraud in the underlying transaction. After analyzing recent reforms of the regulatory framework governing letters of credit, this fraud exception to the independence principle will be reappraised in the light of current developments in Canada and the United States. …  Read more

The problem of locating collisions between computer modeled moving rigid bodies is considered. Each rigid body is modeled by the union of polytopes. Safe and reliable collision detection algorithms are constructed. Since the computer representation of real numbers is finite, an interval projective point is used to encompass all localization errors of a modeled point. An interval point is the elementary geometrical form from which all others are constructed. The Euclidean convex set spanned by an interval point is also a polytope. The construction of a polytope relies on a robust convex hull algorithm. The computed hull is guaranteed to …  Read more

This is a study of the foreign and domestic policies of the USSR as they pertain to its war-readiness, as well as the degree to which these policies presumably opened the door to the European conflagration and, in 1941, to the Nazi-Soviet war. Topics to be discussed include: (1) the crash industrialization of the Soviet Union and industrial war preparations from 1928--41; (2) the development of Soviet military doctrine before and after 12 June 1937; (3) a critical re-examination of the popularly accepted reasons for the devolution of the Soviet armed forces; and (4) Soviet foreign policy from 1937--41. The …  Read more

Event response data that record the timings of randomly occurred events and the strengths of these events are becoming increasingly important in psychology. Although previous researchers such as Kass et al. and Rathbun et al. have developed techniques to model event timings, and that there are social science literature for modeling event times, few researchers have developed techniques to model the event times as well as the strengths of the events. Thus, the present thesis describes a new model that incorporates the use of functional data analysis to estimate a joint occurrence of event intensity, or the instantaneous rate of …  Read more

Time-series data that reflect a periodic pattern are often used in psychology. In personality psychology, Brown and Moskowitz (1998) used spectral analysis to study whether fluctuations in the expression of four interpersonal behaviors show a cyclical pattern. Spline smoothing had also been used in the past to track the non-periodic trend, but no research has yet been done that combines spectral analysis and spline smoothing. The present thesis describes a new model which combines these two techniques to capture both periodic and non-periodic trends in the data. The new model is then applied to Brown and Moskowitz's time-series data to …  Read more

Electric power systems are characterized by their immense complexity. The assessment of their security on-line has always been a challenging task. Many possibilities were investigated in the past in an attempt to characterize the secure operating region of a power system. Pattern recognition is thus far the only tool that can take various degrees of network complexity into consideration. In the present study, an efficient algorithm which learns adaptively the secure operating region is proposed. At each iteration, training operating points are generated sequentially on a piecewise linearly approximated separation surface computed by the one-nearest-neighbor (1-NN) rule. The separation surface …  Read more

Cancer cells commonly lose expression of cell adhesion molecules, such as E-cadherin and CEACAM1, with disease progression. Re-introduction of these molecules into high-grade tumor cells results in suppression of tumor growth and invasion. To elicit this change in malignant behavior, these adhesion molecules require an intact cytoplasmic domain. Invasion suppression necessitates interaction of the cytoplasmic tail with specific intracellular proteins; simple cell adhesion is not sufficient to abrogate invasion. The Coxsackievirus and Adenovirus Receptor (CAR) is a recently identified cell adhesion molecule whose expression is downregulated in cancer progression. It is a 46-kDa transmembrane protein of the immunoglobulin superfamily of …  Read more

Exhalation / Expiration (Expiration / Trépas), œuvre composée pour un ensemble à vent de trente-quatre instrumentistes, poursuit une série d'hommages musicaux par la compositrice à la mémoire de son père, Alexander Fol. La composition réunit différentes techniques musicales afin d'accomplir métaphoriquement un « mappage » où l'infection d'un corps en bonne santé subit une grave maladie, suivie progressivement par la mort de l'organisme. La durée de l'œuvre est 21 minutes et demie.La conception du matériau, notamment la forme, l'harmonie, le rythme et l'orchestration, inclut l'application d'une approche à la sémiotique musicale informée par l'Orphisme, doctrine philosophique et orale de la …  Read more

Il est prévu que le Dernier Refuge de Glace (DRG) – une région englobant et s'étendant au nord de l'Archipel Arctique Canadien et au nord du Groenland – soit sans glace d'ici quelques décennies. Jusqu'à présent, les projections du DRG provenaient de modèles climatiques globaux à résolution relativement basse, qui ne résolvent pas le transport de glace de mer à travers les passages étroits de l'Archipel Arctique Canadien et du détroit de Nares vers les eaux du sud où elles fondent. Ici, nous revisitons les projections du DRG à partir de simulations récentes à haute résolution (0,1 degré) du Community …  Read more

Goodridge, Lawrence (Internal/Cosupervisor2)  Read more

Hox genes encode homeodomain-containing transcription factors involved in the specification of structures along the anterior-posterior and secondary axes of the vertebrate embryo. Many pieces of evidence suggest that retinoic acid (RA) regulates Hox gene function. The present work involved the characterization of the transcription unit of a murine Hox gene, Hoxd4, its response to RA and its genetic interactions with Retinoic Acid Receptors (RARs) beta and gamma. We have identified two Hoxd4 transcription start sites, P1 and P2. Multiple transcripts were identified by Northern blot, originating from both promoters and multiple polyadenylations signals. Expression of P1 transcripts in the neural …  Read more

Trois études de cas unique ont permis d'explorer l'effet de différents traitements visant à remédier aux troubles de la parole associés au syndrome de Down. Ces troubles sont typiquement décrits comme de la dysarthrie, cependant un nombre croissant de recherches suggère que l'apraxie verbale développementale concomitante avec des désordres phonologiques pourraient expliquer la pauvreté de la précision articulatoire et de l'intelligibilité chez ces individus. Le traitement approprié pour remédier aux troubles de la parole du syndrome de Down dépend du profil psychologique de l'individu. Trois expériences aléatoires ont été conduites sur chacun des participants âgés de 10 à 20 ans. …  Read more

This thesis synthesizes different elements of Bourdieu’s writings on practice, politics, and charisma to provide a new interpretation of Egypt and Syria’s three-year merger into a unified state, the United Arab Republic (UAR). It begins with a theoretical chapter that explores ideas of the state as a symbolic actor, charisma as a process of representation, and the subjectivites of constituencies. The existing literature on the topic is then reviewed and critiqued to show the benefit of adopting a practice-theoretical frame as an alternative to those emphasizing logics of consequence or appropriateness. A “sobjectivist” case study then presents a fine-grained study …  Read more

Mathematical modeling can help providing better understanding of the nature and characteristics of regulatory processes in hematology. We first review different mathematical approaches used for modeling so-called dynamical hematological diseases, which are characterized by oscillations in one or more blood cell lines. Then, we present two delay differential equation (DDE) models of the hematopoietic system designed for the study of the effects of Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor (G-CSF) administration. G-CSF is used clinically for treating subjects presenting low numbers of white blood cells, a condition referred to as neutropenia that can result from different causes. However, even though G-CSF is widely …  Read more

Cyclical neutropenia (CN) is a rare hematological disorder characterized by oscillations in the circulating neutrophil count. The treatment for this disease uses granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) on a daily basis. Cyclical neutropenia has been extensively modelled due to its interesting dynamics. However, there has been no attempt to use these dynamical features in order to improve existing treatments. A computer simulated study proposing three non-standard treatment protocols to achieve good results with smaller G-CSF dosing and/or fewer days of administration is presented. If the results of this modelling are borne out clinically, it will entail considerable financial savings. The …  Read more

Few studies of interpersonal complementarity have examined individual differences that might moderate the relation between one person's behaviour and the other's response. The present research investigated the degree to which global perceptions of others (perceived interpersonal climates) moderated the relation between event-level perceptions of the other and behavioural response in social interactions. The influence of interpersonal perceptions on social behaviour was examined in two field studies; the first study was conducted with university undergraduates, and the second study was conducted with a community sample of working adults. Event-contingent recording procedures were used to collect information about participants' communal (agreeable---quarrelsome) and …  Read more

Cette étude, orientée sur l'idée des deux solitudes sociales que séparent les Franco-américains et les Anglo-américains, vise à une présentation bien plus qu'à une interprétation de la présence anglaise dans le roman canadien-français. [...]  Read more

This study was an attempt to combine both the psychological and lifestyles approaches and use qualitative research techniques in order to explore how young anglophones living in Montreal adapted to prolonged periods of unemployment. I examined how these young people felt their well-being was influenced by the experience of unemployment, what factors distinguished those who coped well with unemployment from those whose well-being declined, and how the mental health of respondents influenced their ability to adapt their lifestyle to accommodate prolonged periods of unemployment. This study provides detailed data about young people's subjective experience of unemployment and indicates the means …  Read more

A large number of scientists, engineers, and researchers in fields as varied as physics, musicology, biology, and statistics use MATLAB daily as part of their work. These users appreciate the conciseness and expressiveness of the MATLAB language, the impressive number of powerful matrix operations and visualization functions, the easy-to-use IDE, and its interactive environment. At the same time, the web platform keeps growing and innovating. At the center of this evolution is the JavaScript language. Though it was initially used only for simple tasks in web pages such as form validation, JavaScript is today the driving technology behind extremely powerful …  Read more

Le masculin est employé dans ce résumé pour désigner les personnes dans le seul but d'alléger le texte. Les chercheurs académiques affirment que la promotion du dialogue entre les acteurs concernés et la gestion des connaissances au niveau local pourraient aider à adresser le défi global de la distribution inadéquate d'eau potable. Par contre, la conception et la mise en oeuvre de la recherche courante sur la distribution de l'eau laissent un décalage entre les connaissances des chercheurs et les pratiques de distribution d'eau sur le terrain. Cette thèse s'est servie du problème de distribution d'eau à Buea comme cas …  Read more

Cette thèse vise a initier le lecteur avec le sujet des nombres L2-Betti. Ces nombres sont des invariants de G-revêtements réguliers. Ils seront introduits en un premier temps en utilisant l'analyse fonctionnelle et, ensuite, une approche plus algébrique sera prise pour leur étude. L'emphase sera alors mise sur trois questions importantes. Ces questions sont: la conjecture zero-in-the-spectrum, la conjecture d'Atiyah et l'approximation des nombres L2-Betti.  Read more

Recent critiques of both the subject and method of anthropology have caused the discipline to reexamine its process of representation. This thesis provides an exploration of approaches to representation in visual anthropology, with specific emphasis on collaborative visual ethnography. Both theoretical and practical issues are considered. The first chapter traces the history of ethnographic film and discusses various approaches to subject participation in literature and films. The second chapter presents a theoretical basis for collaborative visual ethnography, primarily from "postmodern" critiques of anthropology and recent visual anthropology literature. The third chapter consists of an analysis of a video resulting from …  Read more

Shakespeare’s plays articulate their author’s understanding of sound at various registers of theatrical and linguistic representation. I have tried to make listening my own critical practice by attending to the ways Shakespeare is attuned to, and rebroadcasts throughout his work, the many interrelated valences sound has in the early modern period. “Shakespearience” is the term I use for a re-invigorated phenomenological approach to the study of Shakespeare’s works, one which considers them the products of an embodied consciousness that is itself informed by cultural beliefs and attitudes. Shakespearience allows us to inquire not only into what Shakespeare thought about sound, …  Read more

The literary and socio-political environments of early nineteenth-century America demanded from Hawthorne a new formulation of the allegorical mode, which in turn afforded him means to critique that same historical situation. His metonymic and realistic uses of allegorical techniques invert the emphasis of traditional allegory, permitting him subversively to critique the idealist principles of contemporary historiography and the Transcendentalist movement. Hawthorne's discontent with antebellum historiography's conflation of the Puritan colonists and the Revolutionary fathers, and with Transcendentalism's disregard for the darker side of human nature, led him to critique these idealisms in his fictions. His appropriation of allegorical conventions allowed …  Read more

The study of organic chemical reactions has been intensified greatly in recent years. Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics have contributed generous results as to the possibility of chemical reaction and to the position of equilibrium attainable. Since, however, considerations of this type are concerned with probability states, and are static in their treatment, no knowledge is obtained of the interaction processes by which chemical change takes place. Chemical kinetics, on the other hand, involves characteristics of the reactive process and, allied with knowledge available from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, forms an efficient method of attack. Progress in this field has made …  Read more

The main points of interest obtained from the experimental results are: 1. The reaction is retarded by the oxygen formed in it according to theequation above, due to the preferential adsorption of the oxygen. 2. Oxygen added in large quantities tends to swamp out the effect of oxygenformed in the reaction, so that the reaction becomes virtually first order. This holds unti1 the concentration of added oxygen is equal to or lessthan that of the nitrous oxide. 3. With small amounts of added oxygen the reaction rate :follows the retarded reaction equation except that theslope is different when plotted, varying …  Read more

A general synthesis for bridged bicyclic disulfide compounds was refined and expanded from (3.2.1) to (4.2.1) and (2.2.1) systems. Various derivatives were synthesized through modification of the hydroxyl functionality in these molecules. The oxidation of all bridged bicyclic disulfide compounds to their corresponding bridged bicyclic thiosulfinate esters (a previously unknown class of compounds) was performed. Three crystal structures were obtained and selected bond lengths, bond angles and torsion angles were compared with the calculated values obtained using MMX molecular mechanics via the PCMODEL program. The m-CPBA oxidation of the above bridged bicyclic thiosulfinate esters was followed at low temperature using …  Read more

A new Linear RFQ Ion Trap/Axial Time-of-Flight mass spectrometer was developed and tested. A segmented quadrupole rod system was used to create a static axially confining field that could trap and cool an ion cloud from a DC ion source. In addition, an adjustable extraction field was applied, after sufficient ion collection, by pulsing the trapping rod segments to send the cooled ion cloud into a collinear Time-of-Flight spectrometer. Two chevron stacked multichannel plates, with a measured charge amplification of 3.75 x 107, were used as a detector at the end of the flight tube. The purpose of this work …  Read more

3',5"-aminoglycoside O-phosphotransferase type IIIa (APH(3')-IIIa) is an enzyme produced by pathogenic Gram-positive bacteria such as Enterococci and Staphylococci. It is capable of conferring resistance to a broad range of clinically important aminoglycoside antibiotics via the ATP-dependent addition of a phosphate to specific hydroxyl groups on the drug. The phosphorylated amino-glycoside loses its toxic effects due to reduced affinity for its target, the A-site of 30S ribosome. Crystal structures of several ternary complexes have been elucidated in an effort to understand the promiscuity of substrate recognition by APH(3')-IIIa. They are APH(3')-IIIa bound with ADP and kanamycin or neomycin to resolutions of …  Read more

Renal cortex consists of a variety of cell types, of which glomeruli constitute about 5% by weight. To study metabolism of glomeruli (as distinct from cortex) a method which gives a glomerular isolate suitable for this purpose has been developed. Production of Cl4O2 from labelled substrates indicates rate of oxidation. Nephrotoxic nephritic (NTN) rats were studied 24 hours and 10 days after nephrotoxic serum injection. Glucose oxidation (mμM glucose carbon/10^5 glomeruli/3 hours) was 666, 1080, and 726 for normal, 24-hour and 10-day NTN rats respectively; palmitate oxidation was 4.8, 14.5 and 9.6. Comparison of the glucose: palmitate contribution to energy …  Read more

Breast carcinoma is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women worldwide, with approximately 1 in 7 expected to be affected during her lifetime. The spread of breast cancer to secondary sites is generally incurable. Bone is the preferred site of metastasis, where the development of a secondary tumour causes severe osteolysis, hypercalcemia and a considerable pain burden. However, how breast cancer cells establish supportive interactions with bone cells is not well understood. We have examined the effects of factors released from MDA-MB-231 and 4T1 breast cancer cells on the differentiation of C57BL6 mouse bone marrow cells. Treatment with cancer-derived factors …  Read more

Thermal energy storage systems have been extensively used throughout the world for heating applications going back centuries. Heat from burning wood or coal could be stored as sensible heat and used gradually thus saving on fuel needs and increasing comfort. Although declining in use with the advent of inexpensive on demand heating systems, there has been a steady and gradual renewal in interest fueled by their potential applications in conjunction with renewable energy sources.One of the major disadvantages of nearly all renewables is their inherent variability. This is made worse by societal expectations and need for on demand energy, whether …  Read more

The present work examines the literary criticism expressed by Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi in several of her unpublished letters. The first part outlines the cultural and historical tradition of Venice during the Eighteenth Century. Particular attention is subsequently given to the intellectual role of women, their contribution to the literary salons of the time, and the neoclassical tradition. This first part is essential in that it supplies a valuable context to Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi's writings. In the second part, I examine Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi's literary criticism of major European authors and works. Through these criticisms she exposes her misvision of the …  Read more

Jouve-Martin, José (Supervisor2)  Read more

Performance evaluation is a critical stage in the design of every communications system. This task often presents difficulties related especially to computational requirements. This thesis presents a general method that can be used to provide closed form expressions of low complexity for the average Bit Error Rate (BER) of different communication technologies. The method is based on numerical optimization of the parameters of finite series whose mean values can be calculated easily. To that end, a new error measure that addresses specific needs of the approximations needed for communications problems is proposed as the cost function of the optimization procedure. …  Read more

This thesis is an exploratory study of the responses of families to the contingencies presented by the mental illness and mental hospitalization of one of their members. More specifically, the thesis seeks to analyze the interaction which takes place between the families and the medical functionaries and institutions which have evolved as societal devices for helping those afflicted with a crisis of illness. Primarily the thesis seeks to illuminate the conditions under which medical help is or is not acceptable to these families who voluntarily seek it in their attempts to cope with the crises created by illness.  Read more