McGill University Thèses et mémoires par auteur commençant par R

An earthquake of magnitude 5.7 occurred in the Saguenay region of the province of Quebec, Canada, on November 25, 1988. Although no loss of life or severe structural damages were caused by this earthquake the poor performance of unreinforced masonry and structures with 'tension-only' cross-bracing were reported by a site visit team. This thesis presents some of the important engineering characteristics of the 1988 Saguenay earthquake. Comparisons are made in terms of elastic and inelastic response spectra for the lateral forces to be considered for the seismic response analysis of short-period structural systems. In particular, the seismic response of a …  Lire la suite

This study explores the political impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the Supreme Court of Canada. This influence is contrasted with the judiciary's historic reluctance to recognize civil liberties, commencing with the position taken by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the cautious reaction of the Supreme Court to the Diefenbaker Bill of Rights. The treatment of civil liberties under the Charter is considered through a survey of some of the Charter cases addressed by the Supreme Court of Canada. The political consequences of the Court's decisions are examined. Alternative possibilities for the Court's …  Lire la suite

The effect of cool flame partial oxidation on the detonation sensitivity of a hydrocarbon fuel was investigated experimentally. The detonation sensitivity was quantified by measuring the run-up distance required for a deflagration to transit to a detonation wave (DDT) in a rough tube. Fuel rich pentane-oxygen mixtures at subatmospheric initial pressures were studied. Subsequent to the injection of the mixture into the heated detonation tube, the mixture underwent cool flame oxidation after a well controlled delay time, as it was determined by the temperature of the tube. Typical delays ranged from 0.7 to 2 seconds (depending on temperature) and were …  Lire la suite

Bowlby's notion that client secure attachment to the therapist leads to deeper client exploration, is considered an important corner stone of the therapeutic process. Psychotherapy researchers have neglected the study of therapist contributions and observer perspectives when studying this important therapeutic phenomenon. Studies of therapeutic secure base have shown that there is a relationship between client general attachment patterns and those with therapist, as well as that this secure attachment to therapist relates to deeper sessions. The main objectives of the present research was to extend the study of secure base in therapy to include consideration of therapist attachment processes …  Lire la suite

Presented in this work is a thorough examination of the use of segmentation in ΔΣ Digital-to-Analog converters (DAC). ΔΣ DACs use the principle of negative feedback to recreate an incoming signal and convert it into a pulse modulated density (PDM) signal. This effectively recreates the input signal, with some added quantization noise. Segmentation is a process in which a digital code is split into disparate codes that can then act as separate signals. In this work, segmentation has been used to relax the requirements on the digital hardware while sacrificing little in the way of performance in terms of Signal-to-Noise …  Lire la suite

Les Hydrates de clathrates sont des solides cristallins constitués d'eau et une moléculehôte, qui est souvent un liquide volatil ou un gaz. Il existe de nombreuses applicationspotentielles pour les hydrates de gaz, telles que leur utilisation pour le transport et le stockagede différents gaz, ainsi que pour la séquestration de CO2 dans les eaux profondes. Toutefois,les hydrates de gaz peuvent également être problématiques pour l'industrie du pétrole et dugaz, où la formation d'hydrates solides provoque des bouchons qui empêchent les flux dansles pipelines et peut endommager le matériel. Pour tous ces processus, la formationd'hydrates se compose de deux étapes: nucléation …  Lire la suite

This thesis presents new approach to the supervisory control of complex systems modelled as Multi-Agent (MA) products of finite deterministic automata. First, the centralized supervisory control problem for the MA product is considered. This differs from the standard approach to supervisory control since (i) vector languages are under consideration and (ii) each supervisor can disable only one particular component of a vector event. The notion of MA controllability is introduced and is shown to essentially constitute a necessary and sufficient condition for the synthesis of an MA supervisor. In the case when a given vector language K fails to be …  Lire la suite

In this thesis we give a positive answer to the question "Is it true that the set of all definable elements of $ rm { bf R sp{f}} subset$ R, where R is the set of real numbers, is elementary substructure of R in HF-logics?" This result is proved under the set-theoretic hypothesis of Projective Determinacy (PD). We also study the structure of hereditary finite closure of a set; the notions of pattern and matching of patterns are discussed in sufficient detail.  Lire la suite

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava, the originator of the style of Russian bards, was the first to express his nation's disillusionment over the country's political system and government in a new and alternative way. For this purpose, he used the direct impact of his poetry, a part of which he would sing for audiences, accompanied only by his guitar. This sort of communication between the writer and his interlocutors remained in sharp contrast with the means traditionally used by the official Soviet mass culture. The spreading of guitar poetry was impossible to control by authorities, since for popularization it used not only …  Lire la suite

Lexical semantic relations (LSRs) play an important role in systematically generalizing ontasks such as lexical entailment. Notably, several tasks that require knowledge of hypernymystill pose a challenge for recent pretrained language models (LMs), underscoring the needto better align their linguistic behavior with our knowledge of LSRs. In this thesis, wepropose Balaur, a model that addresses this challenge by modeling LSRs directly in theLM’s hidden states throughout pretraining. Motivating our approach is the hypothesis thatthe internal representations of LMs can provide an effective interface to their linguisticbehavior, and that by controlling one we can influence the other. We verify our hypothesisand …  Lire la suite

Guastavino, Catherine (Supervisor1)  Lire la suite

This thesis arose from a general interest in Turkish history and the Kemalist transformation heightened by a brief residence in Istanbul under the auspices of the World University Service of Canada. In this period, the writer became aware of the formidable challenge facing the Turks between 1939 and 1945, and of the considerable diplomatic skill with which they responded. Their foreign policy during the Second World War is a subject worthy of far greater attention than it has yet received, as the appended bibliography will show. [...]  Lire la suite

As war approached, Kemalist Turkey sought safety through collective security arrangements. Despite her proclamation of non-belligerency in 1939, she remained during the first phase of the world conflict a willing ally of Britain and France. In the second period she became increasingly cautious, and in the third (that of the Axis zenith) she embraced neutrality. From early in 1943 until the declaration of war, she returned to a pro-Allied partiality, although this was much complicated by Russian presence among the Allies. Indeed, throughout the war her main fear was of Soviet imperialism.  Lire la suite

Patanjali Kambhampati (Supervisor2)  Lire la suite

Shrier, Alvin (Internal/Cosupervisor2)  Lire la suite

Polysemy refers to word forms that have semantically related or overlapping meanings. Studies of polysemy are few in number and contradictory. Some find differences between polysemy and homonymy (Frazier & Rayner, 1990); others find similarities (Klein & Murphy, 2001). Here, polysemous words independently rated to have low, moderate, or high semantic overlap of their distinct meanings, were studied using the methods of Klein & Murphy. Participants judged the sensicality of phrases consisting of a modifier and a polysemous word as a function of a cooperating, conflicting, or neutral context. Low and moderate-overlap words elicited slower judgments than high-overlap words, and …  Lire la suite

A study was undertaken to evaluate the suitability of the SLURP hydrological model for simulating the hydrology of the Saint Esprit watershed (26 km 2) in Quebec. Climatic data and other input were made available through a monitoring program set up in the watershed from 1994 to 1998. GIS was used to store, analyze and export the watershed information into the model. The continuous semi-distributed model SLURP was calibrated using three years of data (1994--1996). Parameter calibration, except that of snowpack melt-rate, was done through an automatic optimization technique. The model was validated using graphical outputs, the Nash/Sutcliffe (R2) coefficient …  Lire la suite

In this study of Vlady Kociancich's Ultimos dias de William Shakespeare, it will be shown how a totalitarian regime comes to consolidate its power through the imposition of a priviledged discourse that is postulated as the absolute truth. It will likewise be demonstrated that the characters trapped in this system are subjected to one single possible interpretation of individual and social realities. We will then examine the role played by the two protagonists, Santiago Bonday and Renata, in the closed world of Ultimos dias, as well as study the possibilities that these two main characters have of escaping the big …  Lire la suite

Street youth can be viewed as an oppressed population based on the fact that most street youth experience one, if not all of the five faces of oppression. Using an anti-oppressive framework, this thesis examines whether the oppression of street youth is ever inadvertently contributed to, reproduced, or perpetuated by services that youth access voluntarily. In addition, this research also explores what possible reasons or conditions might be promoting or perpetuating the oppression of street youth through helping agencies or by helping professionals. Lastly, youth were asked what anti-oppressive practices they could identify in current services, as well as how …  Lire la suite

Henry, James Lorne (Supervisor)  Lire la suite

The objective of this thesis was to elucidate the neurophysiological and neurochemical bases for modulation of sensory transmission in the spinal cord evoked by the activation of primary afferents in the lightly anaesthetized rat. Effects of prolonged, intense (20 $ times$ threshold), low frequency (4 Hz) stimulation of meridian and non-meridian sites on the thermally evoked nociceptive withdrawal reflexes of the tail and limbs were studied. Threshold was the minimum current required to elicite muscle contraction. Intense stimulation applied to meridian sites inhibited tail withdrawal. This inhibition persisted beyond one hour after the end of stimulation. Stimulation of non-meridian sites …  Lire la suite

When we experience the world, we do so primarily through place, a concept which contains the experiential component of space. The advancements in geographical information science, however, have thus far concerned themselves mostly with space, and developments in computational methods of working with place have been limited. Mobilities, which operate on both place and temporality, are a valuable aspect from which to understand and model places. Free-floating micromobility access systems, a type of system which arranges small vehicles, such as bicycles, for public rental and temporary use, generate useful data on how people move through cities, which offers enormous potential …  Lire la suite

La recherche sur l'intelligence artificielle (IA) est centrée sur la conception de systèmes d'apprentissage capables de résoudre des tâches complexes de manière efficace. Le principal outil que nous analysons dans cette thèse est l'apprentissage par renforcement profond (deep RL), qui fournit un cadre d'apprentissage général aux systèmes d'IA pour résoudre des problèmes de prise de décision séquentielle. Cependant, Deep RL peut souvent nécessiter des millions d'éxamples pour atteindre des performances quasi humaines et est souvent très sensible au bruit dans l'environnement et aux choix d'hyperparamètres. Dans cette thèse, nous soutenons que ces faults peuvent être surmontées en décomposant le problème …  Lire la suite

The pressure-volume characteristics and the regional distribution of liquid ventilation in left lower lobes of excised dogs' lungs were determined by infusion of saline containing I131 labelled albumin into preparations suspended in a second liquid, whose density was lower than that of the ventilating liquid. Surface tension in the lung was thereby abolished, and a vertical transpulmonary pressure gradient was created. The elastic properties of the lung were therefore altered and the pressure-volume curve was no longer exponential as it is during ventilation with air. Above functional residual capacity ventilation was distributed preferentially to the alveoli of the upper zones. …  Lire la suite

In eastern Canada, the marine fishing industry is based upon the capture, processing, and distribution of groundfish stocks. The areas fished are ideal for the reproduction of the economically important species such as the gadids and the pleuronectids. The presence of a partially enclosed body of water, such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence is also ideal for the capture of the mature fish. The ice factor encountered in a climate of such extremes forms an interesting, enforced, natural means of conserving the younger stock by limiting the duration of the fishing season. [...]  Lire la suite

Cameron, T. (Supervisor)  Lire la suite

Menzies, Richard Ian (Supervisor1)  Lire la suite

Le mécanisme principal de cyclogenèse aux latitudes moyennes est l'instabilité barocline. Le taux de croissance barocline, aussi appelé taux de croissance maximum de Eady, est un indicateur quantifiant cette instabilité. Un taux de croissance barocline calculé en prenant en compte les processus atmosphériques humides est utilisé dans le développement d'un indice de l'activité des tempêtes dans l'Atlantique Nord. Cet indice est défini comme l'étendue surfacique normalisée des maxima de taux de croissance dans le bassin de l'Atlantique Nord. Une étendue zonale continue significative d'une durée déterminée définit un évènement. Ces évènements sont des régimes météorologiques synoptiques à basse fréquence.Ces régimes …  Lire la suite

About 30 years ago, adipose tissue was considered to be metabolically inert. It was thought that its main functions were insulation of the body against heat loss and provision of mechanical support for certain organs. During the past 20 years, a surge of experimental work has changed these concepts radically. At the present time, adipose tissue is known to be the site of an intricate interplay of metabolic processes. [...]  Lire la suite

Su, Yi (Supervisor2)  Lire la suite

This doctoral thesis is dedicated to the study of the forms of community and filiations in the works of Michel Beaulieu (1941-1985) and Gilbert Langevin (1938-1995). Immediately after the "poétique du pays" and at the same time as the "new writing" and "counter culture" movements, these two Quebec poets were wary of traditional forms of community (People, Nation, any grouping based on a unitarian conception). Important figures of the literary environment since the sixties, with ties to many different poetic movements, Beaulieu and Langevin remain determinedly faithful in their pursuit of a personal writing. This thesis aims at bringing to …  Lire la suite

Les instruments de musique numériques (IMN) sont souvent dépourvus de la riche rétroaction haptique qui caractérise l’expérience de jeu des instruments acoustiques, créant ainsi un écart expérientiel pour les interprètes. Cette thèse examine comment la rétroaction vibrotactile peut être conçue de manière stratégique pour combler cet écart, en explorant l’influence des caractéris- tiques fondamentales d’un IMN sur la conceptualisation et la mise en œuvre de la rétroaction haptique. Pour répondre à cette question, la trousse d’outils Sonic Touch a été développée comme une plateforme flexible pour le prototypage rapide vibrotactile dans l’environnement Max/MSP. Une série d’ateliers exploratoires ont été menés, …  Lire la suite

The current trend towards higher resolution positron tomography requires the development of small but efficient detectors. The design and evaluation of a detector comprising four equally spaced, 4.5mm-wide bismuth germanate crystals coupled to a dual photomultiplier tube is presented. The intrinsic optical cross talk between the two sectors of the dual photomultiplier exhibits a spatial dependence that has been exploited for crystal identification. The intrinsic peak efficiency of the detector is higher than that of the low resolution detectors currently in use in the Montreal Neurological Institute's Positome III camera and the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) timing resolution is 10ns. …  Lire la suite

This work is aimed at understanding the mechanisms that underlie the functions of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) nucleocapsid protein (NCp7) during reverse transcription initiation as well as during specific viral genomic RNA encapsidation. To pursue the first goal, we developed an in vitro reverse transcription reaction system, in which synthetic NCp7 was employed to place natural tRNALys3 onto an HIV-1 RNA template containing the primer binding site (PBS) and its flanking sequences. After placement, NCp7 was removed by Proteinase K digestion and phenol: chloroform extraction, so that the function of NCp7 in annealing could be separated from that …  Lire la suite

The educational policy for adults in China has fluctuated over the 40-year period since the founding of the People's Republic of China. The purpose of this study will include the effects on adult education of ideological shifts in the underlying educational philosophy related to social and political development in China during the three identifiable key periods of change associated with the re-building and development of the nation from 1949 to 1986; namely, (1) 1949-1966, the beginning of the Communist Era; (2) 1966-1976, the Cultural revolution period; (3) 1976-1986, the period after the Cultural Revolution. In many cases, the development of …  Lire la suite

Human designers use previous designs extensively in solving new design problems and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) provides a knowledge representation paradigm which attempts to model such process. In this thesis we present a case-based approach to solving design problems by retrieving similar previous designs and adapting them to meet the new problem. A system called CBEDS (Case-Based Electromagnetic Design System) has been developed. The thesis describes the knowledge organization for a case database which represents the semantic content of electromagnetic device designs and how to use feature extraction methods to reduce the indexing dimension of designs. A method based on interval …  Lire la suite

White, John H. (Supervisor1)  Lire la suite

DNA-binding proteins such as IHF play a crucial role in bacterial survival. IHF is involved in many biological processes in E. coli and possibly in other bacteria. It was hypothesized that another protein, Nlp, belongs to a family of conserved DNA-binding proteins, and this protein was shown to be non-essential for cell viability, but highly conserved among the Enterobacteriaceae. As Nlp appears to play a role in gene regulation, we wished to identify all Nlp-regulated genes. nlp was cloned into pBAD18-Kan generating pMM5, where Nlp expression was under the control of arabinose. Strain LF20300 was transformed with pMM5 and then …  Lire la suite

This thesis attempts to answer the following question: Should it ever be legally permissible to buy a kidney from a living donor in Israel? Existing legislation and government policy prohibit payment out of fear that the poor, minorities, and other vulnerable people will be coerced to exchange organs for money, i.e. it focuses on the potential harm to the donor. This thesis will address the issue of whether this prohibition is justified and how much risk a paid donor should be allowed to assume. This essay will present a detailed investigation of an existing kidney trade in Israel, as well …  Lire la suite

This was an investigation of the ways in which firms, in the developing nations during the 1980's, have adapted production technologies in their efforts to expand the production capacities and to contribute towards the nation's capability for self-sustaining industrial operations. The study was undertaken in the bakery industry in Kenya, between 1984 and 1991, in two phases that involved a survey of 82 firms and an in-depth case study of six firms. One of the principal aims of the study was to identify a more promising strategy between the small-scale operations and the Big-Push model. The argument in this study, …  Lire la suite

Dale, D. G.  Lire la suite

Lemay, Serge (Internal/Supervisor)  Lire la suite