McGill University Thèses et mémoires par auteur commençant par R

Progressive development projects are aimed at enforcing the process of dwelling evolution which has been observed in informal settlements by providing conditions that are favourable for housing development. This study suggests that, under these created environments, dwelling evolution presented particular characteristics that differentiated it from similar processes in other contexts. A long-term assessment of the phenomenon of dwelling evolution was conducted at "El Gallo", a progressive development project in Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela. Dwelling evolution was examined by observing aspects of the process that were relevant to the case study. These included changes in the dwelling area, spatial configuration and functional …  Read more

A number of concentrated high molecular weight narrow distribution polystyrene solutions were investigated using a sliding plate rheometer. An in-depth study of the wall slip of these solutions had to be conducted to determine the range of conditions where this phenomenon occurred. It was found that the critical stress for the onset of slip depends on the surface of the substrate. Step strain experiments allowed the determination of the ratio of the second to the first normal stress difference, which was found to have values of up to $-$2. Gradients in the normal stress differences are believed to be the …  Read more

A self-gravitating, elastic, spherical thick shell model is used to derive the present state of the lateral variations of density and stress within the lunar interior. Density perturbations are generally +/-200 kg/m 3 within the crustal layers, with peaks of up to +/-400 kg/m 3. These perturbations diminish quickly with depth, becoming less than +/-80 kg/m3 by 150 km depth, and generally less than +/-5 kg/m3 by 300 km depth. The major stress differences associated with the mascon basins are found in the upper mantle reaching maximums of 6--8 MPa at about 150 km depth. The introduction of a partially …  Read more

Freedman, S. O.  Read more

In light of the recent claims that semiotics has failed because of the inapplicability of scientific methods to the “human sciences”, the semiotic theory of Umberto Eco is examined from the perspective of the “sophisticated methodological falsificationist” philosophy of science or Lakatos Eco’s A theory of Semiotics and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language are found to suffer from a faulty criterion for scientificality, misuse of symbolisms and calculi. […]  Read more

The displacement and deformation of brain tissue is a major source of error in image-guided neurosurgery systems. This thesis presents the design, implementation and validation of an image registration algortithm to detect and correct brain-shift using pre-operative MR images and intraoperative Doppler ultrasound data. The registration algorithm uses segmented vessels from both modalities, and estimates the displacement using a modified version of the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. The least trimmed squares (LTS) was used to reduce the number of outliers in the point matching procedure. The selected points were first used to estimate a linear transformation between the two …  Read more

Collins, D. Louis (Supervisor)  Read more

In force sensing, optomechanics, and quantum motion experiments, it is typically advantageous to create lightweight, compliant mechanical elements with the lowest possible force noise. Here we report wafer-scale batch fabrication and characterization of nanogram-scale mechanical Si3N4 trampoline resonators having room temperature quality factors above 4*10^7 and ringdown times exceeding five minutes (1 mHz linewidth). We measure a thermally limited force noise sensitivity of 16.2(0.8) aN/Hz^(1/2) at room temperature, with a spring constant (~1 N/m) 2-5 orders of magnitude larger than those of competing technologies. We also characterize the compatibility of these devices with a high-finesse cavity and their suitability for …  Read more

There is no international agreement on the vertical limit of State sovereignty, the boundary between territorial airspace and outer space. The need for defining this boundary has been debated for over 50 years. Today, the need to settle this gap in the law is growing in importance. This thesis concludes that setting a low vertical limit on State sovereignty is the best approach because it will allow all States free access to space and enable uniform international rules to be set at a relatively low altitude. Chapter I discusses territorial sovereignty and examines the evolution of vertical sovereignty. It then …  Read more

Yates, Robin (Supervisor)  Read more

Ponty, Yann (Supervisor2)  Read more

Un objectif principal de l'analyse fonctionnelle et prédictive de l'ARN est d'obtenir sa structure tridimensionnel à partir de sa séquence. Pour résoudre ce problème, plusieurs méthodes ont été développées durant les dernières années, telles la décomposition cyclique, l'assemblage de fragments et la simulation de dynamiques moléculaire. Cependant, leurs capacacités prédictives restent limitées. Nous avons mis au point un nouvel outil, RNA-MoIP, permettant d'incorporer l'information des motifs locaux nouvellement accessibles dans des bases de données pour la prédiction de structures d'ARN. Nous montrons que notre approche (i) améliore la prédiction des paire de bases canoniques (ii) identifie la meilleure structure secondaire …  Read more

Purpose. To evaluate the role of endovaginal sonography (EVS) and Doppler ultrasound in detecting endometrial carcinoma in women presenting with postmenopausal bleeding. Materials & methods. We prospectively evaluated 421 women with EVS over a 5-year period. Of these 31 (7.4%) were diagnosed with endometrial carcinoma at histopathology. For each patient, biometric and morphologic parameters, as well as Doppler indices of the endometrium were obtained. Results. Applying a combination of biometric and morphologic criteria, EVS diagnosed malignancy with a sensitivity of 77% (95% CI: 59%--90%) and a specificity of 84% (80%--87%). Using only biometric criteria (endometrial thickness >2mm indicating malignancy), EVS …  Read more

L'étude suivante est une étude qualitative des expériences académiques de quatre jeunes adultes ayant des troubles d'apprentissage et des déficiences associées. L'étude examine les modèles et les variations trouvés parmi les participants afin de mieux comprendre leurs expériences de l'école primaire jusqu'aux études postsecondaires. Au moment du recrutement, les quatre participants impliqués dans cette étude étaient inscrits ou récemment diplômés de programmes postsecondaires à Montréal. Ils ont partagé leurs expériences avec des chercheurs en entrevues semi-structurées individuelles. Les données ont été extraites par analyse thématique. Les conséquences des expériences éducatives des participants ont été classées en trois catégories: environnement social, …  Read more

Bedos, Christophe (Supervisor2)  Read more

Background: The diagnostic and clinical differentiation between children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and children with pragmatic language impairments (PLI), two populations that share a similar linguistic profile, was examined in school-aged children. Charting the behavioral and cognitive profiles of these populations can serve to aide diagnostic differentiation and educational intervention. Objectives: The objectives of this study were two-fold. One, to compare scores on diagnostic measures of autism between school-age children with ASD and those with PLI Two, to investigate differences between children in these groups and typically developing children in the areas of social cognition and executive function (EF). …  Read more

Most demented individuals are now cared for at home by family members. The present study examined the coping strategies employed by family caregivers, their perception of burden, and the internal dialogues employed by caregivers to stressful events. Sixteen (13 females, 3 males) participants with an average age of 67.4 years were interviewed. Results indicate that caregivers who spend less hours per week caring for their care receiver perceived less overall burden and caregivers who subjectively felt that they were coping with their role tended to use more coping strategies. Caregivers' internal dialogues and comments concerning problems coping with Alzheimer's patients …  Read more

The growth of world capitalism has brought with it a spectacular development of state intervention in the functioning of the economic system. The creature of the classical economists, Laissez-Faire, never applied fully, for even in its hey-day, there was a measure of government participation in determining the conditions under which the economy functioned. And as the process of industrialization worked its way and spread, Laissez-Faire increasingly gave way to an ever-expanding measure of restriction from within its own institutions and from the state. [...]  Read more

The primary objective of this M. A. thesis is to correct some false assumptions found in both older and more recent secondary literature on North American Indian narratives. Many folklorists base their folktale criteria on terms of cultural differences instead of similarities which results in an ethnocentric point of view that holds the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmarchen as a standard against which all other folktale collections falls short. If we want to strive for a world view that will embrace all types of literature, while respecting the individuality of each culture, then we must focus on the essential similarities among …  Read more

Vaginismus is a sexual dysfunction that has received insufficient empirical attention. The first chapter of this thesis consists of a critical review of the literature and demonstrates the overall paucity of research studies and their poor methodological quality. The second and third chapter are based on the results of an experimental study comparing 87 women, matched on age, relationship status, and parity and assigned to 3 groups, vaginismus, dyspareunia/vulvar vestibulitis syndrome (VVS), and no pain. A structured interview evaluating pain with intercourse and history of gynecological problems as well as psychometric measures; evaluating sexual and physical abuse, sexual knowledge and …  Read more

This thesis re-evaluates Inhumanism, the philosophy of twentieth-century American poet Robinson Jeffers, in light of the Christian eremitic tradition. Inhumanism continues to create controversy around Jeffers' life and work; charges of misanthropy and anti-Americanism have pushed him to the margins of American literature. My first chapter looks at how critics have tried to understand Inhumanism's influences and motives by contextualizing Jeffers' philosophy in many cultural, psychological, literary, and spiritual traditions. Chapter Two explores the main tenets of the eremitic ideal, as expressed in the lives and writings of hermits from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Chapters Three, Four, and …  Read more

The person has in theory been at the center of the law since Gaius divided the private law into persons, things, and actions. In constructing the person, however, the law takes apart and sets aside the human being, replacing it with a legal abstraction that diverges markedly from it. This gap is partly due to the way the law has been structured conceptually, as a set of bounded categories clearly distinguished from each other. Viewing the person as the result of a series of either/or classificatory decisions privileges the liberal model of the person: a partimonialized, transactionalized bearer of rights. …  Read more

Looper, Karl Julian (Internal/Supervisor)  Read more

Globular proteins are important ingredients in many food formulations because of their nutritional value and their various functional properties such as gel formation. Proteins form gels by polymerization into a three-dimensional matrix. The rheological properties of the resulting viscoelastic solids can be obtained by Instron measurements. In the present work, gels were obtained by heating solutions of bovine serum albumin (BSA) in D$ sb2$O and egg albumin in H$ sb2$O under different conditions (i.e., pH, salt concentration, protein concentration, time of heating and temperature), and their gel strengths were measured by a compression test (Universal Testing Machine LRX). The Fourier …  Read more

In this dissertation, I undertake an empirical analysis of Iranian punitive practices over the last century. In thiscontext, I set out to investigate three issues. First, I critically examine the claim that modernity is characterizedby a diminution of corporal punishments, considering both the older humanist-progressivist verions of this claim and therevisionist-Nietzschean versions that have been advanced by several scholars including Michel Foucault, David Rothman,Michael Ignatieff, John Langbein, Gerhard Oestreich and Marc Raeff. In particular, I examine the relationship betweenmodern torture and might be called the "disciplinary process" that is said to characterize modernization. Second, I evaluate Chomsky and Herman's hypothesis …  Read more

Developing a technique that combines nanometer spatial resolution with sub-femtosecond temporal resolution is a crucial step towards exposing the inner mechanisms of chemical reactions, single molecule motion, electron dynamics in solids, and the effects of defects or trap states on electron motion and behavior, amongst a slew of other questions related to the ultrafast electron dynamics of surfaces. In this work, we integrate a traditional pump-probe spectroscopy scheme into an ultra-high vacuum atomic force microscope to develop the first ultrafast atomic force microscope capable of measuring nanoscale forces with attosecond precision. We use this technique to measure and spatially resolve …  Read more

A large volume of literature has accumulated dealing with the problem of the limestone conglomerates of the Quebec Group. Most of the field work has been restricted to the vicinity of Quebec City, where the occurrence is not representative of the whole. The present investigation evaluates existing ideas on the origin of the conglomerate on the basis of field evidence collected mainly near Grosses Roches and also at Trois Pistoles. A new approach, the gravitational gliding hypothesis, is proposed. It is postulated that the limestone conglomerate formed as a beach talus below Lower Cambrian to Lower Ordovician limestone cliffs.  Read more

Bernard, Daniel (Supervisor2)  Read more

Fluid visualization techniques and fluid solvers are widely used in computer graphics and scientific visualization. There is a wide variety of fluid visualization methods. We discuss in detail an important visualization technique known as the Line Integral Convolution (LIC). We perform an experiment to show how the LIC results are affected by the input parameter. We also discuss the nature of the fluid velocity field and provide a brief classification of various fluid visualization techniques. This is followed by fluid solvers, which model the dynamics of the underlying fluid and are used to generate the discrete vector field that represents …  Read more

In this thesis, a novel 6 degree-of-freedom parallel mechanism is evaluated as a flight simulator motion base. The mechanism consists of three fixed-length legs, each supported by a three-wheeled mobile robot. The three legs support a platform, which acts as the end-effector of the mechanism. Thus, the mechanism has the advantage of portability and simple design, because of the specific actuating system. Two different designs are evaluated: one with ball joints at the upper ends of the legs and revolute joints at the lower ends and one with the opposite configuration. The inverse kinematics and inverse dynamics analysis of the …  Read more

This thesis has two main contributions. The first contribution is the use of cooperative localization for decoupling the positional error of a moving robot from its environment. The second contribution is the development of efficient multi-robot exploration strategies for an unknown environment. The proposed method is designed to be robust in the face of arbitrarily large odometry errors or objects with poor reflectance characteristics. Central to the exploration strategy is a sensor (robot tracker) mounted on a robot that could track a second mobile robot and accurately report its relative position. Our exploration strategies use the robot tracker sensor to …  Read more

When the relative velocity between the different objects in a scene and the camera is relative large---compared with the camera's exposure time---in the resulting image we have a distortion called motion blur. In the past, a lot of algorithms have been proposed for estimating the relative velocity from one or, most of the time, more images. The motion blur is generally considered an extra source of noise and is eliminated, or is assumed nonexistent. Unlike most of these approaches, it is feasible to estimate the Optical Flow map using only the information encoded in the motion blur. This thesis presents …  Read more

For a compact surface S with a finite set of marked points P , we define a 1-system tobe a collection of arcs which are pairwise non-homotopic and intersect pairwise at mostonce. We prove that, up to equivalence, there are exactly 23 maximal 1-systems on (S, P)when S is a torus and |P | = 2.Along the way, we generalize some of the results of a paper of Przytycki to the context of surfaces withboundary. In particular, we prove that the maximal cardinality of a 1-system on (S, P)is 2|χ|(|χ| + 1) − v/2 , where χ is the Euler …  Read more

Soil texture, a key factor in soil health and agricultural productivity, has traditionally been measured using time-consuming laboratory methods. This study takes a novel approach by exploring the prediction of soil texture and soil organic matter (SOM) using an innovative image-based data fusion technique. This method, which combines images captured at two different spatial scales: 8.85 um per pixel and 0.70 um per pixel, was implemented in a low-cost prototype that incorporates a camera and a microscope, both controlled through a Raspberry Pi 4 board. The detailed images of soil samples captured by this system were used as inputs for …  Read more

Many orebodies have been formed in low temperature environments, distant from any known source and beyond the influence of ground water. These facts imply that ore metals travel in some way from a source to the places where they are found. Various theories have been put forward which purport to explain how this may happen. Because metals and their common silicates and sulphides are, with a few exceptions, volatile only at temperatures considerably above the temperatures at which epithermal deposits are thought to form, most theories postulate the presence of water to act as a moving flux in which the …  Read more

The town of Buchans is four miles north of Red Indian Lake, in about the centre or Newfoundland, lat. 48° 50'W; long. 56° 46'W (see fig.1). The Buchans Mining Company Limited is a subsidiary of the American Smelting and Refining Company. The mineral rights are leased from Terra Nova Properties Limited, which is a subsidiary of the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company Ltd. The town of Buchans is linked to the Canadian National Railway line at Millertown Junction by a private single-track line. This was the only means of ground transport to Buchans until a road to the Trans-Canada highway was completed …  Read more

Corn (Zea mays L.) production under monoculture and conventional-tillage management may cause soil degradation and nitrate (NO$ sb3 sp-)$ pollution. This study was conducted from 1991 to 1993 to evaluate the impact of conventional-tillage (CT) and no-tillage (NT) practices under corn-soybean (Glycine max L. Merill) rotations (C-S-C and S-C-S), continuous corn (C-C-C) and continuous soybean (S-S-S) systems on optimum N fertilization rates, yield and soil residual N levels. Field experiments were carried out on a Ste. Rosalie clay (Humic Gleysol) and an Ormstown silty clay loam (Humic Gleysol). Overall, tillage had little effect on soil and crop N levels or …  Read more

This study examines one facet of the nineteenth-century territorial expansion of French Canada. It analyzes the principal features of the settlement history of the northern coast of the Gaspe Peninsula where colonization did not begin in earnest until the 1830s when the expansion of the Jersey cod fishery encouraged many Baie des Chaleurs residents to move permanently to the easternmost outports of the study area. Between 1840 and 1880, a much larger contingent of landless French-Canadians from parishes located between Levis and Matane, on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River, settled the remainder of the Gaspe north coast. …  Read more

McKinney, Melissa (Supervisor1)  Read more

Malgré leur importance dans le budget radiatif terrestre et les modèles atmosphériques, les nuages arctiques restent mal documentés et incompris. Le déploiement d'un radar millimétrique et d'un lidar à haute résolution spectrale à Eureka (80°N) en août 2005 offre un ensemble unique de données pour l'étude des nuages arctiques. Dans ce projet, des algorithmes synergétiques furent développés et appliqués à deux ans de données pour fournir une première climatologie des nuages et de leur microphysique à cet emplacement éloigné. Les résultats montrent un cycle annuel dans l'étendue des nuages. Ils sont surtout détectés dans les bas niveaux ou en une …  Read more

Les nuages stratiformes de basse altitude restent un des facteurs imprévisibles dans les simulations du climat futur. Malgré leur rôle important dans le budget radiatif terrestre et le grand nombre de campagnes de terrain dédiées, plusieurs procédés à l'échelle nuageuse dans les stratocumulus marins demeurent mal représentés. Le déploiement dans les Açores d'un laboratoire mobile du programme « Atmospheric Radiation Measurement » pendant 19 mois a fourni l'ensemble de données d'observation au sol sur les nuages de couche limite marine le plus long et le plus complet à ce jour. Le premier objectif de ce projet fut la documentation de …  Read more