identifier: Coirazza, Joleen  (2017) Children’s prosocial behaviours, internal state language, and emotion regulation during play with siblings and friends.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Children’s prosocial behaviors, use of internal state language, and abilities to regulate their emotions were investigated in 46 focal children (M age = 94.58 mos.) during play with their younger sibling (M age = 74.29 mos.) or older sibling (M age = 114.00 mos.) and best friend (M age = 96.88 mos.). The data consisted of two counterbalanced videotaped free play sessions at the focal children’s home with siblings and friends. Using the video recordings, the transcribed play dialogue was coded for children’s engagement in prosocial behaviors and use of internal state language (Recchia & Howe, 2008). Observations indicated that focal children employed a wide range of prosocial behaviors, with social statements (e.g., “we” statements) and shared affect (e.g., laughing, smiling, singing) being more frequently used than helping or sharing. No differences were found in terms of prosocial behaviors engaged in with friends or with siblings, which may be explained by the carryover effect. With regards to the internal state language categories, focal children made references to goals and cognitions more than emotions and preferences, regardless of the play session. Birth order differences determined that both older and
younger focal children were rated higher on the emotion regulation subscale (e.g., empathy, appropriate negative emotions) with friends than siblings, while younger focal children were rated higher on the lability/negativity subscale (e.g., mood swings, negative emotions) with friends than siblings. Finally, significant correlations were found between focal children’s use of prosocial behaviors, internal state language, and the emotion regulation checklist scores, with several significant associations in the two play sessions, suggesting the complexity of interactions between siblings and friends. Findings are discussed in relation to theory, literature, and the play partner’s effect on children’s social and cognitive development.


identifier: Bayat-Makou, Nima  (2017) New Integrated Waveguides Concept and Development of Substrate Integrated Antennas with Controlled Boundary Conditions.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

type: Thesis NonPeerReviewed

abstract:
The unprecedented development of substrate integrated circuits (SICs) has made a widespread necessity for further studies and development of waveguides and antennas based on this technology. As the operating frequency is on the rise, the conventional designs of the substrate integrated components are becoming more problematic and costly. Therefore, some techniques are proposed to improve the performance of the waveguides and antennas based on the concept of substrate integrated technology.
First, the problems of the recently developed ridge gap waveguide (RGW) are resolved by introducing a new configuration of this technology which has considerable advantages over the original version of the RGW regarding its construction technology, propagation mode, characteristic impedance, and insertion loss. Second, the configuration of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW), which has been widely accepted for planar and integrated microwave circuits, is modified to operate with low insertion loss at high frequencies without bearing the anisotropic nature of the dielectric material.
The substrate integrated antennas have a strong potential to be used in the compact wireless devices as they can be easily integrated with the baseband circuits. In the horn family, the H-plane horn antenna that can be implemented in the integrated form has received considerable attention in recent years. However, numerous problems are associated with this antenna such as limited bandwidth, tapered aperture distribution, high back radiation, and E-plane asymmetry. Several new techniques are introduced to improve the performance of this antenna, especially at millimeter wave frequencies.


identifier: Hedayati Nasab, Siavash ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0011-5161 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0011-5161>  (2017) Free Falling of Spheres in a Quiescent Fluid.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Motion of spheres falling through fluids is a classical problem in fluid mechanics. The problem is solved for steady motion and other special cases such as for small and large Reynolds numbers, but not yet for transitional flows due to a complicated nonlinear drag relationship. However, in recent decades a new approach has become available for study- ing this problem via the development of powerful processors and computers. In this thesis we investigate free falling of spherical shape objects through fluid media. We produce ex- perimental data and then model the motion mathematically via Newton’s second law and the Navier-Stokes equations. The resulting second order non-linear differential equation has been solved numerically. Finally, by using the fluid-structure interaction method (im- mersed boundary method) we simulate the free fall of spheres in water and compare these results with our experimental data. The aim of this study will be to answer how density, viscosity, temperature and gravitational acceleration affect the rate of descent of a solid body through a fluid.


identifier: Waks, Stacey  (2017) Perceptions on Paraprofessionals; working with students with special needs in elementary schools.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: There is a lack of research on the role of paraprofessionals in schools and most of the research that has been done was done in the United States. There seem to be many advantages to paraprofessionals working with children with special needs, however, there are many issues as well on the roles of paraprofessionals (Giangreco, Edelman, Luiselli & MacFarland, 1997; Giangreco, 2003). The current qualitative study used a phenomenological action research approach to explore and understand their roles as well the advantages and disadvantages of the role of paraprofessionals in schools in this particular school board. The study interviewed six paraprofessionals, one administrator, two teachers, one special needs teacher, two sets of parents, two children with special needs and two atypical children. Data from this study supported the idea that, similarly to the United States (Patterson, 2006), while there were many advantages to working with paraprofessionals in schools, there are also many barriers and disadvantages with respect to the implementation of the paraprofessionals and the way inclusion is currently being organized and implicated.


identifier: Jamil, Gazi Mohammad  (2017) Three Essays on Inter-Provincial Labour Mobility of Canada.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis consists of three essays on inter-provincial labour mobility in Canada.

In the first essay, we explore the concepts of provincial gross, net and share of net mobility rates across education and age groups using the Survey of Labor and Income Dynamics (SLID, 1993-2011) of Canada. Our results show that provincial mobility of young and more educated are more than their counterparts. The share of net mobility rates reveals that young and less educated individuals mostly have one-way interprovincial mobility. Moreover, inter-provincial migration using gravity model shows that the effects of border and population sizes of destination and original provinces have positive influences and distances have the negative influence on provincial migration. We also identify a positive correlation between provincial in- and out-migration in Canada. This shows that provinces that lose more people also seem to attract more people. Our analysis further illustrates that net provincial mobility has a stronger relationship with in-migration compared to out- migration.

The second essay examines the effect of local market conditions (LMC) on provincial mobility based on Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) from 1993-2011. For measuring local market conditions at the provincial level, we consider two commonly used indices in the literature; one is based on employment growth (Bartik, 1991; Blanchard et al., 1992) and the other one is the unemployment rate. Our findings suggest that local market conditions of the original province rather than a destination province play a significant role in triggering inter-provincial migration. We find that less educated and young individuals are more likely to stay in response to increase in employment growth. However, in response to increase in the unemployment rate, less educated individuals are less likely, and young individuals are more likely to move out of the province of origin. To have a deeper look about the impact of the local market condition on provincial mobility we estimate five different frequencies of mobility. This suggests that shorter frequency of mobility provides more accurate picture how local market conditions affect provincial migration compared to census data. We also find that the effect of employment growth and the unemployment rate of the original province on provincial mobility, build up gradually. However, the effect of unemployment rates of the destination province on provincial migration declines over time.

Finally, the third essay represents the characteristics and the mover-stayer wage gap of provincial movers. Each year a considerable number of people move across provinces of Canada. Some provinces are losing, and some provinces are gaining skilled workers. However, there are not many studies investigate "Who moves and Who Stays behind." By using Canadian longitudinal data set "Survey of Labor and Income Dynamics (SLID)" from 1993-2011, we find that individuals from both education and age groups prefer to stay in Alberta and British Columbia, and Quebec is far behind than Ontario in retaining above average workers. This study also examines pre-move and post-move wage difference of provincial movers and stayers in the same locality. Our results suggest that the mover-stayer wage gap varies across education and age groups and also depend on the employment status. In analyzing the wage pattern of mover-stayer wage gap, our study also reveals that wage differential between movers and stayers disappears after few years of the provincial move. In analyzing occupational mobility among provincial movers our findings demonstrate that provincial movers remain in the same occupation earn the most and provincial mobility pays, but occupational mobility does not.


identifier: Hendry, Clinton K.  (2017) The effects of type of instruction on the initial stages of L2 perception and production of tones in Mandarin Chinese.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This study explored the effects of pronunciation teaching on the L2 acquisition of the four tones that characterize the Mandarin Chinese (MC) tonal system (Qu, 2013):
T1: High and level
T2: High-rising
T3: Low-falling and rising
T4: High-falling
	Research indicates that L1 and L2 acquisition of MC tones obeys a developmental sequence suggesting a markedness hierarchy for tones: T1 > T4 > T2 > T3 (Zhang, 2007; where > indicates “acquired before” and “less marked than”). In a study on the acquisition of foreign /s/ + consonant onset clusters (sC; e.g., /st/ in stop) by Brazilian Portuguese speakers, Cardoso (2011a) and Cardoso and Collins (2015) found that students who were taught exclusively the most marked sC acquired all the other clusters, but those who were instructed from least to most marked or all at the same time did not show similar progress. The goal of this study was to apply similar methods to investigate the effects of type of instruction on the acquisition of these tones by L2 learners.
Sixty-two participants, selected for their inexperience with tonal languages, were divided into two experimental groups to be instructed Mandarin’s tonal system: one was taught exclusively the most marked tone (T3) during instruction, while the other received instruction in a less marked tone (T4). Both groups were assessed on their ability to perceive and produce the tones they were instructed in and transfer their skills to the other tones. Results indicate that instruction of the most marked tone (T3) is more effective in terms of both accurate perception and production of MC tones. Our discussion highlights the pedagogical implications of our findings, particularly regarding the teaching of items that follow a developmental sequence in L2 phonology.


identifier: Derakhshan Horeh, Mahmoud  (2017) Real-time Regularized Tracking of Shear-Wave in Ultrasound Elastography.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Elastography is a convenient and affordable method for imaging mechanical properties of tissue, which are often correlated with pathologies. An emerging novel elastography technique applies an external acoustic radiation force (ARF) to generate shear-wave in the tissue which are then tracked using ultrasound imaging. Accurate tracking of the small tissue motion (referred to as tissue displacement) is a critical step in shear-wave elastography, but is challenging due to various sources of noise in the ultrasound data. I formulate tissue displacement estimation as an optimization problem and propose two computationally efficient approaches to estimate the displacement field. The first algorithm is referred to as dynamic programming analytic minimization (DPAM), which utilizes first order Taylor series expansion of the highly nonlinear cost function to allow for its efficient optimization. DPAM was previously proposed for quasi-static elastography and I extend the approach to shear-wave elastography. The second algorithm is a novel technique that exploits second-order Taylor expansion of the non-linear cost function. I call the new algorithm as second-order analytic minimization elastography (SESAME). I compare DMAP and SESAME to the standard normalized
Cross Correlation (NCC) approach in the context of estimating displacement and elasticity of the medium for shear-wave elastography (SWE). The results of micrometer-order displacement estimation in a uniform simulation phantom illustrate that SESAME outperforms DPAM, which in turn outperforms NCC in terms of signal to noise ratio (SNR) and jitter. In addition, the relative difference between true and reconstructed shear modulus (averaged over several excitations focusing at different focal depths with different scatterers realizations at each depth) is approximately 3.41%, 1.12% and 1.01%, respectively, for NCC, DPAM and SESAME. The performance of the proposed methods is also assessed with real data acquired using a tissue-mimicking phantom, wherein, in comparison to NCC, DPAM and SESAME improve the SNR of displacement by 7.6 dB and 9.5 dB, respectively. Experimental results on a tissue-mimicking phantom also show that shear modulus reconstruction is more accurate with DPAM and SESAME in comparison with NCC.


identifier: Chen, Kimberley  (2017) Exploring the attitudes of neurotypical peers towards children with autism spectrum disorder and their behaviors through play.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This study investigated the effects of four neurotypical preschoolers’ attitudes towards nine of their peers with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and how that impacts their play behaviors. Participants were all male ranging from 3 years to 6 years of age. Children’s attitudes towards their peers with ASD were evaluated using three methods: sociometric peer ratings, child interviews and a social acceptance scale. Children with ASD’s behaviors were observed over a three-week period during free play to collaborate the results. Results from the sociometric peer ratings showed that a child with ASD received the highest rating from his peers. The interviews with the neurotypical peers did not demonstrate a clear awareness of a disability on the part of the children with ASD. The findings indicated that some of the lower functioning children with ASD were not nominated at all as being different and some of the neurotypical children were identified as having difficulty talking or behaving well. Consistent with the literature, this study found more instances of non-play behavior compared to play behavior in children with ASD. Taken altogether, the results showed that the neurotypical children’s awareness of their peers with ASD as being different did not seem to impact their play behaviors.


identifier: Rivard, Anne-Marie  (2017) Humour post-phallique, poétique féministe et traduction activiste : The Female Man de Joanna Russ en français.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: La présente recherche a comme objectif d’examiner les enjeux poétiques, politiques et discursifs entourant la traduction de The Female Man, un ouvrage de science-fiction féministe et subversif publié par l’auteure américaine Joanna Russ en 1975. Dans ce roman phare de la science-fiction féministe, Russ manie un humour « post-phallique », c’est-à-dire un discours humoristique féministe et militant qui, comme la science-fiction féministe, est porteur d’un potentiel activiste et d’une rhétorique percutante. En raison de son sens connoté, le discours humoristique contenu dans The Female Man est forcément complexe à traduire; l’agente traductrice doit donc s’accorder une liberté créatrice qui mette à profit le discours véhiculé dans l’original. Le mémoire vise principalement à déterminer si le traducteur de The Female Man, Henry-Luc Planchat, a su transposer les éléments qui contribuent en français à la poétique féministe de Russ. Il ressort de notre analyse que, paradoxalement, la traduction française du roman de Russ est à la fois féministe et phallocentrique. L’analyse s’appuie sur un ensemble de principes énoncés par des théoriciennes féministes de la traduction. Le projet de traduction féministe, l’horizon du traducteur ainsi que l’agentivité et la traduction activiste sont au cœur de notre étude traductologique.


identifier: Bione Alves, Tiago  (2017) Synthetic voices in the foreign language context.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Second language (L2) researchers and practitioners have explored the pedagogical capabilities of text-to-speech synthesizers (TTS) for their potential to enhance the acquisition of writing (Kirstein, 2006), vocabulary and reading (Proctor, Dalton, & Grisham, 2007), and pronunciation (Cardoso, Collins, & White, 2012; Liakin, Cardoso, & Liakina, 2017; Soler-Urzua, 2011). Despite the positive evidence to support the use of TTS as a learning tool, the applications need to be formally evaluated for their potential to promote the conditions under which languages are acquired, particularly in an English as a foreign language (EFL) environment, as suggested by Cardoso, Smith, and Garcia Fuentes (2015).
The current study evaluated the voice of a modern English TTS system—used in an EFL context in Brazil—in terms of its speech quality, ability to be understood by L2 users, and potential for focus on specific language forms, and was operationalized based on the following criteria: (1) users’ ratings of holistic features (comprehensibility, naturalness, and accuracy, as defined by Derwing & Munro, 2005); (2) intelligibility (the extent to which a message is actually understood), measured with a dictation task; (3) text comprehension (i.e., users’ ability to understand a text and answer comprehension questions); and (4) users’ ability to hear a specific morpho-phonological feature (i.e., the aural identification of English past tense -ed.)
Twenty-nine Brazilian EFL learners listened to stories and sentences, produced alternately by a TTS voice and a human, and rated them on a 6-point Likert scale according to the abovementioned holistic criteria (comprehensibility, naturalness, and accuracy). In addition, they were asked to answer a set of comprehension questions to assess their ability to understand what they had heard. To measure intelligibility, participants completed a dictation task in which they were asked to transcribe utterances, as recommended by Derwing and Munro (2005). Finally, participants performed an aural identification of 16 sentences to judge whether the target feature (past mark -ed) was present or not. After these tasks were completed, semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data regarding participants’ perceptions of the technology.
Results indicate that the performance of both the TTS and human voices were perceived similarly in terms of comprehensibility, while ratings for naturalness were unfavorable for the TTS voice. In addition, participants performed relatively similarly in response to both voices with respect to the tasks involving text comprehension, dictation, and identifying a target linguistic form (past -ed) in aural input. These findings suggest that TTS systems have the potential to be used as pedagogical tools for L2 learning, particularly in an EFL setting where natural occurrence of the target language is limited or non-existent.


identifier: Mohammad Taheri, Yaser  (2017) Improving the Rate-Distortion Performance in Distributed Video Coding.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Distributed video coding is a coding paradigm, which allows encoding of video frames at a complexity that is substantially lower than that in conventional video coding schemes. This feature makes it suitable for some emerging applications such as wireless surveillance video and mobile camera phones. In distributed video coding, a subset of frames in the video sequence, known as the key frames, are encoded using a conventional intra-frame encoder, such as H264/AVC in the intra mode, and then transmitted to the decoder. The remaining frames, known as the Wyner-Ziv frames, are encoded based on the Wyner-Ziv principle by using the channel codes, such as LDPC codes. In the transform-domain distributed video coding, each Wyner-Ziv frame undergoes a 4x4 block DCT transform and the resulting DCT coefficients are grouped into DCT bands. The bitplaines corresponding to each DCT band are encoded by a channel encoder, for example an LDPCA encoder, one after another.  The resulting error-correcting bits are retained in a buffer at the encoder and transmitted incrementally as needed by the decoder. At the decoder, the key frames are first decoded. The decoded key frames are then used to generate a side information frame as an initial estimate of the corresponding Wyner-Ziv frame, usually by employing an interpolation method. The difference between the DCT band in the side information frame and the corresponding one in the Wyner-Ziv frame, referred to as the correlation noise, is often modeled by Laplacian distribution. A soft-input information for each bit in the bitplane is obtained using this correlation noise model and the corresponding DCT band of the side information frame. The channel decoder then uses this soft-input information along with some error-correcting bits sent by the encoder to decode the bitplanes of each DCT band in each of the Wyner-Ziv frames. Hence, an accurate estimation of the correlation noise model parameter(s) and generation of high-quality side information are required for reliable soft-input information for the bitplanes in the decoder, which in turn leads to a more efficient decoding. Consequently, less error-correcting bits need to be transmitted from the encoder to the decoder to decode the bitplanes, leading to a better compression efficiency and rate-distortion performance.
     The correlation noise is not stationary and its statistics vary within each Wyner-Ziv frame and within its corresponding DCT bands. Hence, it is difficult to find an accurate model for the correlation noise and estimate its parameters precisely at the decoder. Moreover, in existing schemes the parameters of the correlation noise for each DCT band are estimated before the decoder starts to decode the bitplanes of that DCT band and they are not modified and kept unchanged during decoding process of the bitplanes. Another problem of concern is that, since side information frame is generated in the decoder using the temporal interpolation between the previously decoded frames, the quality of the side information frames is generally poor when the motions between the frames are non-linear. Hence, generating a high-quality side information is a challenging problem.
This thesis is concerned with the study of accurate estimation of correlation noise model parameters and increasing in the quality of the side information from the standpoint of improving the rate-distortion performance in distributed video coding.
     A new scheme is proposed for the estimation of the correlation noise parameters wherein the decoder decodes simultaneously all the bitplanes of a DCT band in a Wyner-Ziv frame and then refines the parameters of the correlation noise model of the band in an iterative manner. This process is carried out on an augmented factor graph using a new recursive message passing algorithm, with the side information generated and kept unchanged during the decoding of the Wyner-Ziv frame. Extensive simulations are carried out showing that the proposed decoder leads to an improved rate-distortion performance in comparison to the original DISCOVER codec and in another DVC codec employing side information frame refinement, particularly for video sequences with high motion content.
    In the second part of this work, a new algorithm for the generation of the side information is proposed to refine the initial side information frame using the additional information obtained after decoding the previous DCT bands of a Wyner-Ziv frame. The simulations are carried out demonstrating that the proposed algorithm provides a performance superior to that of schemes employing the other side information refinement mechanisms. Finally, it is shown that incorporating the proposed algorithm for refining the side information into the decoder proposed in the first part of the thesis leads to a further improvement in the rate-distortion performance of the DVC codec.


identifier: Davidson, Alexander  (2017) Structure-Seeking in the Sharing Economy.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: As a result of the global economic collapse of 2008, consumers sought other means of gaining access to products and services aside from the burdens of ownership. Widely referred to as the sharing economy, consumers began to coordinate the acquisition and distribution of resources with the help of various online social media platforms. This dissertation explores antecedents of consumer resistance towards participation in the sharing economy. It demonstrates the influence of an unconscious and chronically motivated psychological construct that acts as a barrier towards adoption. Structure-seeking has a significant impact on individuals’ motivation to require predictability, routine, order, structure and disfavor uncertainty within situations and across daily activities. Building on the cognitive structuring literature and Compensatory Control Theory, structure-seeking tendencies are revealed to have a strong relationship with resistance towards adopting certain sharing economy services. In the first essay, two experimental studies demonstrate that structure-seeking consumers generate resistance towards adopting Airbnb but not other sharing economy services that more closely resemble traditional economic models. Through targeted marketing communications, this effect is found to reverse when consumers are exposed to message frames promoting structure and consistency within service experiences. The second essay explores the social cognition literature and demonstrates how structure-seeking influences preferences for service providers who exhibit attributes related to competence but not warmth or morality. It is argued that resistance towards services like Airbnb can be accounted for by the perception of hosts as warm but incompetent. A general discussion highlights the findings of both essays and details the limitations, implications and avenues for future research. This dissertation significantly contributes to research on the sharing economy as well as Compensatory Control Theory and provides valuable insights for both practitioners and scholars.


identifier: Hausfather, Nadia  (2017) Ghosts in our corridors: Emotional experiences of participants in Québec’s general unlimited student strike campaigns (2005 - 2012).  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In this dissertation, I elucidate the emotional experiences and trajectories of participants in  general unlimited student strike campaigns in Quebec from 2005 to 2012. Contrary to my initial hypothesis that anger dominates striking emotions, I argue that, especially near the beginnings of these strikes, participants were able to transcend feelings of anxiety and uncertainty -to be 'vulnerable'- thanks in part to the existential or spiritual ‘high’ of collective-oriented emotions heightened by deliberative decision-making and a sense of making history. As these strikes continued, I illustrate how such 'positive' experiences were intertwined with or overwhelmed by more 'negative' emotions, mediated by power and interpersonal dynamics, creating a confusing array of emotions that were thus difficult to process. The sense of intensity and urgency of these student strikes amplified the more 'negative' emotions, in part because of insufficient time for 'emotional reflexivity' to deal with the resulting ambivalence and disappointed expectations from their existential collective-oriented emotional experiences -what I term the dialectics of vulnerability. I point to how such dialectics were in turn coloured by interviewees' particular life stories as well as by the location that formed the basis of their experience, the educational institution. Finally, I illustrate how despite the inevitable emotional ‘lows’ that these strikes entailed, and despite what I term the 'masculine' emotional habitus of the Quebec student movement more generally, many participants emerged from the strike with a more collective-oriented spirit and set of values, which I suggest could be considered the seeds of new ‘structures of feeling’ -or of a collective sense of existential meaning. The latter played a part in contributing to continued activism for some, especially in the case of the strikes that were general and unlimited (2005, 2012). Continued activism was also mediated by the degree of participants' involvement in the strike and the interpersonal support from individuals and groups with opportunities for emotional reflexivity to cushion and transform vulnerability -thus pointing to the need for diverse collective possibilities to address difficult emotions and mourning within this province's student movement as well as other syndicalist and social movements.


identifier: Harris, Rachel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7356-0127 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7356-0127>  (2017) Picturing Fairyland: Illustrated Fairy Tale Books and the Rise of the Child Reader-Viewer in the Victorian Era.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Disney versions of fairy tales have largely overshadowed the pictorial diversity otherwise found in the long history of illustrated fairy tale books. When earlier variants of fairy stories do get unearthed, it is often only the texts that are scrutinized, while another limitation is the assumption that picture books and fairy stories have always been exclusively for children. This dissertation revisits the neglected legacy of fairy tale illustration, arguing for the importance of pictures in how the stories were received, and asking how the same stories could be transformed through their pictorial re-telling. The question of whether fairy tales were destined for adults or children is a complex one, which involves shifting understandings of childhood itself.  Addressing these questions, the dissertation asks: How can the pictures in traditional fairy tale books (roughly 1690-1960) generate pathways of interpretation between the characters, their worlds, and generations of child and adult reader-viewers?

Part I provides an overview of fairy tale scholarship and the role accorded to illustrations.  Beginning with French aristocratic storytellers such as Charles Perrault and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and proceeding to the Grimms’ proto-national and philological project, I then discuss English authors such as John Ruskin, G.K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who defended fairy tales and fantasy more broadly.  Andrew Lang’s “Coloured Fairy Books,” which assume a child-only readership, are a central focus, largely because issues of gender, sexuality, race, and an imperialist ideology are embedded in his project. This section also analyzes how concepts of childhood, including the “Romantic child,” the “noble-savage child,” and the “innocent child,” are implicated in this history.

Part II proposes three aesthetic modes––the cute, the satirical, and the utopian–– as a way to approach nineteenth-century Victorian fairy tale illustrations. As a diminutive of sorts to the major aesthetic category of the beautiful, the cute is associated with infantile characteristics (i.e. mammalian infants or other creatures with small bodies and large heads), and effeminized or miniature commodities. Cuteness is exemplified by Kate Greenaway’s children inhabiting fantasy gardens, but could also be found in the representation of child-men in the satirical press. Visual satire is commonly associated with caricature, which deploys the art of exaggerating bodily features as political critique, but satire intersects with fairy tale illustration in numerous ways, not least because artists such as Richard Doyle and John Tenniel could be found both in Punch and in fairy tale novellas. Finally, the utopian is concerned with fairyland as a site of beauty, liberty, justice, and fulfilled desire – and is epitomized by the work of Walter Crane, whose socialist values emerge in political posters as well as fairy tale illustration. Throughout these three categories, I develop the concept of interpictoriality – as a way to track motifs and styles across multiple genres and forms of visual culture.

Part III narrows in on Cinderella’s visual transformation, from the early versions by Perrault, d’Aulnoy, and the Grimms to English chapbooks and toy books, to fairy tale anthologies, and eventually to Disney. This discussion is informed by the debate between second-wave feminists Alison Lurie and Marcia Lieberman over the value of fairy tales for a child reader. To move past the yes-or-no question of whether stories of passive and beautiful heroines support the indoctrination of young girls, I examine multiple examples of text and image interaction, and shifts in narrative focus, to show how images of female liberation and suffering have been integral to the story’s appeal.  To counter the impact of the Disney version, I emphasize the pictorial diversity embedded within the fairy tale book, and point to the agency of child and adult reader-viewers.


identifier: Bordjiba, Houssem Eddine  (2017) Data-Driven Approach for Automatic Telephony Threat Analysis and Campaign Detection.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The growth of the telephone network and the availability of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) have both contributed to the availability of a flexible and easy to use artifact for users, but also to a significant increase in cyber-criminal activity. These criminals use emergent technologies to conduct illegal and suspicious activities. For instance, they use VoIP’s flexibility to abuse and scam victims.
A lot of interest has been expressed into the analysis and assessment of telephony cyber-threats. A better understanding of these types of abuse is required in order to detect, mitigate, and attribute these attacks. The purpose of this research work is to generate relevant and timely telephony abuse intelligence that can support the mitigation and/or the investigation of such activities. To achieve this objective, we present, in this thesis, the design and implementation of a Telephony Abuse Intelligence Framework (TAINT) that automatically aggregates, analyzes and reports on telephony abuse activities.
Such a framework monitors and analyzes, in near-real-time, crowd-sourced telephony complaints data from various sources. We deploy our framework on a large dataset of telephony complaints, spanning over seven years, to provide in-depth insights and intelligence about merging telephony threats. The framework presented in this thesis is of paramount importance when it comes to the mitigation, the prevention and the attribution of telephony abuse incidents. We analyze the data and report on the complaint distribution, the used numbers and the spoofed callers’ identifiers. In addition, we identify and geo-locate the sources of the phone calls, and further investigate the underlying telephony threats. Moreover, we quantify the similarity between reported phone numbers to unveil potential groups that are behind specific telephony abuse activities that are actually launched as telephony abuse campaigns.


identifier: Marchand, Anik Hélène  (2017) Acadian Art and Identity: Évangéline, Claude Roussel, and Paul Édouard Bourque.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis examines the birth of modern Acadian art in Southern New Brunswick in the late 1960s. It focuses on two artists, Claude Roussel and Paul Édouard Bourque, who attended and taught at l’Université de Moncton during the 1960s and whose painting had a profound impact on the articulation of Acadian identity in the province as that referring to a predominantly francophone, Catholic minority community in the east coast of Canada, whose descendants were the original French settlers in the region; and who, over the centuries, also include members with mixed Indigenous and European heritage. In 1755, Acadians were expelled—first from Grand Pré, Nova Scotia and then the rest of the Maritime Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island)—by the British Loyalists who arrived in North America in 1604, in what came to be called the Great Deportation, or Le Grand Dérangement. Acadians would not return to the region until the mid to late 1760s. The 1960s was an important period for Acadians in New Brunswick, historically, politically and culturally. It was marked by the questioning of one’s identity, as well as student demonstrations for francophone rights, particularly in Moncton, with the establishment of l’Université de Moncton in 1963 (the first francophone university in New Brunswick and the largest francophone university outside of Québec). An additional catalyst for the province-wide movement for equal rights was the adoption of the New Brunswick Official Languages Act in 1969, under the leadership of Louis Robichaud, the second Acadian appointed Premier of New Brunswick from 1960 to 1970. Roussel, originally from Edmundston and Bourque, from Moncton represent the northeastern and southwestern regions, respectively, where the majority of the Acadian population historically settled and currently reside in New Brunswick. I argue that the work of Roussel and Bourque, surrounded by a circle of like-minded creatives, represent a major shift in the representation of Acadian identity in the visual arts, moving away from typical folkloric depictions of the Deportation towards explorations in the modernist art idiom emerging in the 1960s. Long-treasured Acadian figures and symbols, such as the fictional character of Évangéline, were particularly heralded and revived during the Acadian nationalist movement. Ultimately, the thesis outlines the significant contribution of Roussel and Bourque to not only the articulation and representation of a new, modern Acadian identity in art and culture but also the development of modern art in New Brunswick and Canada in general.


identifier: Zhao, Mengjiao  (2017) Speech Enhancement with Adaptive Thresholding and Kalman Filtering.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Speech enhancement has been extensively studied for many years and various speech enhance- ment methods have been developed during the past decades. One of the objectives of speech en- hancement is to provide high-quality speech communication in the presence of background noise and concurrent interference signals. In the process of speech communication, the clean speech sig- nal is inevitably corrupted by acoustic noise from the surrounding environment, transmission media, communication equipment, electrical noise, other speakers, and other sources of interference. These disturbances can significantly degrade the quality and intelligibility of the received speech signal. Therefore, it is of great interest to develop efficient speech enhancement techniques to recover the original speech from the noisy observation. In recent years, various techniques have been developed to tackle this problem, which can be classified into single channel and multi-channel enhancement approaches. Since single channel enhancement is easy to implement, it has been a significant field of research and various approaches have been developed. For example, spectral subtraction and Wiener filtering, are among the earliest single channel methods, which are based on estimation of the power spectrum of stationary noise. However, when the noise is non-stationary, or there exists music noise and ambient speech noise, the enhancement performance would degrade considerably. To overcome this disadvantage, this thesis focuses on single channel speech enhancement under adverse noise environment, especially the non-stationary noise environment.
Recently, wavelet transform based methods have been widely used to reduce the undesired background noise. On the other hand, the Kalman filter (KF) methods offer competitive denoising results, especially in non-stationary environment. It has been used as a popular and powerful tool for speech enhancement during the past decades. In this regard, a single channel wavelet thresholding based Kalman filter (KF) algorithm is proposed for speech enhancement in this thesis. The wavelet packet (WP) transform is first applied to the noise corrupted speech on a frame-by-frame basis, which decomposes each frame into a number of subbands. A voice activity detector (VAD) is then designed to detect the voiced/unvoiced frames of the subband speech. Based on the VAD result, an adaptive thresholding scheme is applied to each subband speech followed by the WP based reconstruction to obtain the pre-enhanced speech. To achieve a further level of enhancement, an iterative Kalman filter (IKF) is used to process the pre-enhanced speech.
The proposed adaptive thresholding iterative Kalman filtering (AT-IKF) method is evaluated and compared with some existing methods under various noise conditions in terms of segmental SNR and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) as two well-known performance indexes. Firstly, we compare the proposed adaptive thresholding (AT) scheme with three other threshold- ing schemes: the non-linear universal thresholding (U-T), the non-linear wavelet packet transform thresholding (WPT-T) and the non-linear SURE thresholding (SURE-T). The experimental results show that the proposed AT scheme can significantly improve the segmental SNR and PESQ for all input SNRs compared with the other existing thresholding schemes. Secondly, extensive computer simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed AT-IKF as opposed to the AT and the IKF as standalone speech enhancement methods. It is shown that the AT-IKF method still performs the best. Lastly, the proposed ATIKF method is compared with three representative and popular meth- ods: the improved spectral subtraction based speech enhancement algorithm (ISS), the improved Wiener filter based method (IWF) and the representative subband Kalman filter based algorithm (SIKF). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method as compared to some previous works both in terms of segmental SNR and PESQ.


identifier: Salama, Amgad A.  (2017) Compressive Sensing Based Estimation of Direction of Arrival in Antenna Arrays.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis is concerned with the development of new compressive sensing (CS) techniques both in element space and beamspace for estimating the direction of arrival of various types of sources, including moving sources as well as fluctuating sources, using one-dimensional antenna arrays. The problem of estimating the angle of arrival of a plane electromagnetic wave is referred to as the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation problem. Such algorithms for estimating DOA in antenna arrays are often used in wireless communication network to increase their capacity and
throughput. DOA techniques can be used to design and adapt the directivity of the array antennas. For example, an antenna array can be designed to detect a number of incoming signals and accept signals from certain directions only, while rejecting signals that are declared as interference. This spatio-temporal estimation and filtering
capability can be exploited for multiplexing co-channel users and rejecting harmful co-channel interference that may occur because of jamming or multipath effects.
In this study, three CS-based DOA estimation methods are proposed, one in the element space (ES), and the other two in the beamspace (BS). The proposed techniques do not require a priori knowledge of the number of sources to be estimated. Further, all these techniques are capable of handling both non-fluctuating and fluctuating source signals as well as moving signals. The virtual array concept is utilized in order to be able to identify more number of sources than the number of the sensors used.
In element space, an extended version of the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithm, the adaptable LASSO (A-LASSO), is presented. A-LASSO is utilized to solve the DOA problem in compressive sensing framework. It is shown through extensive simulations that the proposed algorithm outperforms the classical DOA estimation techniques as well as LASSO using a small number of snapshots. Furthermore, it is able to estimate coherent as well as spatially-close sources. This technique is then extended to the case of DOA estimation of the sources in unknown noise fields.
In beamspace, two compressive sensing techniques are proposed for DOA estimation, one in full beamspace and the other in multiple beam beamspace. Both these techniques are able to estimate correlated source signals as well as spatially-close sources using a small number of snapshots. Furthermore, it is shown that the computational
complexity of the two beamspace-based techniques is much less than that of the element-space based technique. It is shown through simulations that the performance of the DOA estimation techniques in multiple beam beamspace is superior to that of the other two techniques proposed in this thesis, in addition to having the lowest computational complexity.
Finally, the feasibility for real-time implementation of the proposed CS-based DOA estimation techniques, both in the element-space and the beamspace, is examined. It is shown that the execution time of the proposed algorithms on Raspberry Pi board are compatible for real-time implementation.


identifier: Naoufal, Dana  (2017) "From country...to country: Collecting Life Experiences of Immigrant Children".  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In a country like Canada, where immigration represents the majority of the population growth (Morantz, Rousseau & Heymann, 2011), it can involve several challenges for the immigrants, adults and children. The act of immigrating is a complex process to go through and can result in a large spectrum of consequences for the individuals involved. However, the literature principally analyzed the experiences of adults and adolescents without any specific focus on children’s journeys. Children’s stories are different than the adults and they do perceive their immigration differently. The act of relocating to another society and hence, acculturating can alter children’s development in relevant ways (Encyclopaedia on Early Childhood Development, 2011).
This qualitative study aims at exploring the life experiences of four Lebanese immigrant children and their mothers as they experience the process of immigration. Each participant was interviewed two times for a period of 45-60 minutes based on open-ended questions to allow them to narrate in-depth their personal stories and experiences. Additionally, children had the possibility to choose a play activity (e.g., drawing, figurines or blocks) to express themselves beyond their only words. The results from this study suggest that children’s experiences diverge widely from their mothers and they feel and perceive their immigration process in a different way. While constantly missing their family, immigrant children try to negotiate between their native and host environments to find their way towards adaptation, sole indicator of a finally attained sense of belonging.


identifier: Leonard, Kelly  (2017) Exploring Community Inclusion in Older Adulthood through the use of Computers and Tablets.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The population is aging, and it is predicted by 2050, there will be more individuals over the age of 60 than any other age group. With this in mind, some older adults also experience physical, financial or social constraints, more so than other age groups. In addition, older adults were found to be least likely to engage with computers and tablets, and they are the smallest group using digital social networks. Therefore, in this research project, the issue of social isolation and computer and tablet use was explored amongst older adults experiencing social isolation. Interviews were conducted with six socially isolated older adults, as well as six Therapeutic Recreation practitioners and four volunteer coordinators in order to explore meaningful opportunities for older adults to engage with the community using computers and tablets. The findings suggest that although there are programs and resources currently available to help engage older adults in the community such as online communities and virtual lectures, the biggest barrier that older adults experience is the lack of knowledge with using the device. Participants in this study mentioned that they enjoyed working with younger adults and it is suggested that pairing younger adults to teach older adults how to use computer or tablets devices could compensate for their lack of digital literacy skills. Furthermore, it is recommended that TR practitioners and volunteer coordinators encourage the use of devices in practice and facilitate more digital literacy programs. Programs that can be implemented include online discussion groups, support groups, and educational groups.


identifier: Cheng, Qingqing  (2017) Essays in Information Transmission and Institution Design.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis consists of three essays in information transmission and institution design. Chapter 1 constructs a model of information transmission. The model was set up with an informed sender and two uninformed receivers, where the sender wants to convince the receivers to take a certain action. We analyze strategic information transmission model with two parameters, one is different levels of persuasive function of the channels; another is different degrees of connection between the receivers. We show that if persuasive function is a linear or convex function, the sender should invests all expenditure to one channel with higher level of persuasive function and higher degree of information transmission of the receiver; while if persuasive function is a concave function, three possible optimal behaviours of the sender are investing to one channel, both channels equally, or both channels unequally. Given two concave function examples, we show some decision rules for the sender’s optimal expenditure allocation. Specifically, we show that it is not always to allocate expenditure in both channels equally in symmetric model; it is always to invest all expenditure to only one channel when another channel has very low level of persuasive function, or very low degree of connection between the receivers, and it is always to increase expenditure in one channel when the degree of information transmission of the corresponding receiver increases in asymmetric model.
    Chapter 2 studies two scenarios in a formal analysis of scientists’ effort provision in research and dissemination. One is a simultaneous problem that the sender offers effort to send signal to two types of audiences, such as experts and public; another is a sequential problem that the sender offers effort in academic research, and then sends signal to one type of audiences to representation with effort in science popularization. We investigate how the scientist should divide their time or energy between academic research and science popularization to obtain maximum utility. Consider the same probability and different probability functions at two dimensional for each scenario. We show the optimal allocation of effort depends on the weight of payoff from academic research and science popularization, and the difference in two probability functions between two signals, or between signal and representation. Specifically, in scenario one, if there exist polarization in academic research and science popularization, we could prevent polarization by increasing the ratio of the weights of payoff from dissemination and research using incentives to guarantee the scientist keep the allocation of effort as before. In scenario two, the result shows that we should put equal effort on research and dissemination for scientific achievements transformation no matter how difference in two probability functions between signal and representation.
    Chapter 3 constructs a simple model of direct democracy with supermajority rule and different preference intensities for two sides of a referendum: reform versus status quo. Two parties spend money and effort to mobilize their voters. We characterize the set of pure strategy Nash equilibria. We investigate the optimal majority rule that maximizes voters’ welfare. Using an example, we show that if the preference intensity of the status quo side is relatively high, the higher preference intensity of the status quo side, the higher the optimal majority rule. While, if the preference intensity of status quo side is relatively low, the optimal majority rule decreases if the preference intensity of the status quo side increases. We also show that when the preference intensity of the status quo side is higher, or the easiness to mobilize voters on the status quo side is lower, the optimal majority rule is more likely to be supermajority.


identifier: Ma, Denise  (2017) Anxiety Symptoms and Immuno-endocrine Systems from Childhood to Adolescence: Understanding Reciprocal Change over Time.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Anxiety symptoms may strain underlying biological systems to result in negative long-term health consequences. In addition to generating psychological distress, anxiety symptoms may affect the system’s ability to respond optimally to stress, and impede endocrine and immune functioning over time. To date, the literature shows inconsistent findings regarding the nature and directionality of the relationship between anxiety symptoms and biomarkers of the immuno-endocrine systems. To explore how different dimensions of anxiety symptoms (physiological versus cognitive-emotional) interact with and affect the underlying immuno-endocrine systems over time from childhood to adolescence, the current studies examined the following questions: (1) How and in what direction are anxiety symptoms associated with diurnal cortisol rhythms concurrently and longitudinally?; (2) Is there an association between anxiety and diurnal salivary immunoglobulin A (sIgA)?; (3) How and in what direction are anxiety symptoms related to overall sIgA levels?; and (4) Are there feedback mechanisms, whereby anxiety symptoms and immuno-endocrine biomarkers create a chain of sequential cause and effect, with each affecting the other in a transactional sequence over several years?
Data were collected from participants in the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project between the ages of 9 to 18 using a multi-wave design. Repeated measures of self-report symptom questionnaires, salivary samples of endocrine and immune biomarkers, and demographic information were collected at each data wave approximately three years apart. Hierarchical linear modeling and autoregressive cross-lagged panel designs were used to analyze the data. Results showed that higher physiological anxiety symptoms were concurrently associated with elevated diurnal cortisol, whereas longitudinal results over three years showed that chronic worry and social concerns predicted lower diurnal cortisol, illustrating a more blunted diurnal cortisol profile. Diurnal sIgA results revealed a pattern of activation in children with higher anxiety, specifically, worries and social concerns, than those with lower anxiety. Higher levels of total anxiety, worries and social concerns also led to lower levels of sIgA, which in turn led to increases in anxiety in an incremental “vicious” cycle from age 9 to 18. Taken together, these findings have important implications for understanding the developmental psychobiology of children’s anxiety.


identifier: Zhang, Jing  (2017) Dielectric Filled Printed Gap Waveguide for Millimeter Wave Applications.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
As the communication system goes up to millimeter-wave frequencies for high data rate demands, the conventional microstrip line no longer meets the requirements due to its excessive radiation and harmful surface waves, causing unacceptable insertion loss and interference issues. The radiation and surface waves are absent in the stripline. However, its conductor loss becomes worse due to the narrower strip causing by the implemented two ground planes. In addition, any vertical asymmetry in the stripline can generate unwanted higher order waveguide modes that will be able to propagate wherever the ground planes exist. The standard waveguide technology is not suitable for millimeter-wave bands because of the small dimension of the hole, which causes fabrication challenging and high cost.

The new technology of gap waveguide (GW) offers a solution to the above problems in current guiding structures. Considerable effort is being made to miniaturize it using the printed circuit technology for low-cost and low-profile applications. The microstrip-ridge GW and the inverted microstrip GW are the two candidates reported previously. However, they come with their own drawbacks. The tiny air gap makes it very sensitive to the outside pressure or the environmental factors. The plated vias in the copper strip and the electroless nickel immersion gold (ENIG) coating on the strip cause substantial attenuation and a frequency shift. In addition, it is challenging to connect to other transmission lines or conventional rectangular waveguides for the integration and measurements. Therefore, one major part of this thesis is to develop innovative GW structures without the formerly mentioned issues to be suitable for millimeter-wave frequencies and easier implementation. Another major part is developing passive components, such as antenna arrays, using the proposed new GW structures. The third part is studying the GW-based PMC packaging for the irregular ground/PEC plane. This will help extend this new packaging technology from the microstrip line circuits to the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW)- or grounded coplanar waveguide (GCPW)-based circuits.


identifier: Bahar, Salik  (2017) Sieve Methods and its Application in Probabilistic Galois Theory.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
David Hilbert [Hil92] showed that for an irreducible polynomial F (X, T ) ∈ ℚ(T )[X] there are infinitely many rational numbers t for which F (X, t) is irreducible in ℚ[X]. In 1936 van der Waerden [vdW34] gave a quantitative form of this assertion. Consider the set of degree n monic polynomials with integer coefficients restricted to a box |a_i| ≤ B. Van der Waerden showed that a polynomial drawn at random from this set has Galois group Sn with probability going to 1 as B tends to infinity.

In the first part of the thesis, we introduce the Large Sieve Method and apply it to solve Probabilistic Galois The- ory problems over rational numbers. We estimate, E_n(B),  the number of polynomials of degree n and height at  most B whose Galois group is a proper subgroup of the symmetric group Sn. Van der Waerden conjectured that E_n(B) ≪ B^(n-1). P.X. Gallagher [Gal73] utilized an extension of the Large Sieve Method to obtain an estimate of E_n(B)= O(B^(n-1/2) log^(1-


identifier: Plowright, I  (2017) Repentance could weep unseen: Remembering Maison Sainte-Madeleine, 1850-1975.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
While Irish Magdalen laundries have garnered considerable media attention, the existence of these institutions in Quebec remains relatively unknown.  This project examines Maison Sainte-Madeleine, a refuge in Quebec City opened by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd of Quebec in 1850 with the purpose of reforming so-called “fallen women.” These early inmates, who were often alcoholics, sex workers and unmarried mothers, were only allowed to leave the asylum once the Sisters judged that they were ready to reintegrate into society. In the nineteenth century, inmates sewed and washed clothing as a means of atoning for their sins without payment for their work. In this early period, Maison Sainte-Madeleine relied on charity and revenue from the laundry for its maintenance. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd of Quebec enforced a strict schedule of prayer and work through surveillance and spatial separation. This project outlines the evolution of the built environment, as well as the living conditions and sources of income of the institution from its foundation to its closure.
By the mid-twentieth century, Maison Sainte-Madeleine underwent significant reforms, including the introduction of social workers and the compensation of inmates. The establishment’s modernization during the Quiet Revolution, coupled with the close relationship that the Sisters of the Good Shepherd entertained with the public, led to a divergence in the way these institutions are remembered in Quebec and Ireland. This study will argue that Maison Sainte-Madeleine did not receive the same amount of scrutiny as Irish Magdalen laundries because of its institutional trajectory, and because it was overshadowed in public memory by the Duplessis Orphans scandal.


identifier: Fitterman, Avner  (2017) Learning-induced plasticity in vascular properties in the human brain.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The brain is a plastic organ, able to undergo structural and functional changes following changing physiological contingencies, such as diseases and exercise training. However, the nature of the biological changes that underlie plasticity in the adult human brain is not fully understood.

In light of this lack of knowledge of the biological mechanism behind brain plasticity, non-invasive imaging can be used to track plasticity changes in the living human brain. Quantitative and physiologically-specific magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques are an ideal tool to study these mechanisms. Plasticity is believed to involve a variety of physiological mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms are neuronal in nature, such as synaptogenesis and changes in neuronal morphology, but changes in non-neuronal tissue components are also thought to contribute, including angiogenesis. The latter may result in increased cerebral blood flow (CBF). CBF estimation can be obtained using arterial spin labeling (ASL). In this technique, water protons in blood are magnetically labelled and this labelling is used to measure the amount of blood that perfuses brain regions. The detection of blood perfusion changes during and following learning intervention would be indicative of a contribution of vascular plasticity to learning-induced changes. In this project, we will use ASL to measure plasticity-induced changes in CBF in motor areas during and following five days of motor task learning.


identifier: Martorell, Hugo  (2017) The Evolution of City-Region Food Governance in Montreal Food Politics, Policy and Planning Under Quebec’s Neoliberal Turn.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Municipal Food policy councils (FPC) are emerging across Canada. They are innovative governance models that fill an institutional gap by activating policy and engagement at the municipal level. Territorial, or city-region, food systems are the systems of innovation, which combine the goals of quality, health, ecology, fairness and participative democracy. Multi-level and cross-sectorial partnerships can help re-adjust the institutional context to enable, facilitate and champion the emergence of social innovations carried by civic food networks (CFNs). The process of creating an FPC opens a window on the food politics of a place, its actors, and history. This thesis illustrates some of the challenges city-regions may face by providing an in-depth case study of Montreal, Quebec. This thesis explores the influence of the provincial “neoliberal turn” on food planners and CFNs since early 2000. I highlight how neoliberalism has interacted with the institutional legacy of the "Quebec model". In turn, I follow the social formation of groups and coalitions that shape the regional policy networks from 1986 to 2016 and their interactions with public sector organizations. This work adopts a multi-method approach to analyze the negotiations and arrangements within the 2014-2016 Montreal Food Systems Action Plan. Specifically, this thesis uses an assessment tool built on the premises of Actor-Network Theory to evaluate whether the action plan meets the conditions for an effective partnership. I identify the territorial, technical and political dynamic inside and outside this hybrid public sector-civil society partnership to explain its eventual transition into a municipally mandated Food policy council.


identifier: Hazeri, Somayyeh  (2017) Energy Harvesting in Pneumatic Tires through Piezoelectric Material and its Life Cycle Environmental Impact.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This research aims to seek the current status of piezoelectric energy harvesting technology in running vehicles and its life cycle assessment. The goal is to assess the piezoelectric value to be considered as a future reliable energy source for vehicles which rely on results from prototype demonstrations. Piezoelectric materials can transfer mechanical energy into electrical energy. This kind of energy can be stored and used for other devices. In this case, piezoelectric materials have the potential to provide reliable and cost effective replacement of energy sources. Thus, it can ulti- mately have potential to replace the battery and reduce user costs. This project evaluates the future potential of piezoelectric energy harvesting technology in cars and their environmental impacts. The use of piezoelectric materials in pneumatic tires enables capturing waste energy of cars because of deformations in the tire and weight of the vehicle as well. In the experimental phase a set-up was designed to simulate movement and pressure inside the contact patch of a given car. Outside of the model tire, piezoelectric elements were used to harness energy. Experimental results were compared to a research found in the literature. Comparison showed that this method harvests more energy. Based on the experimental results, this method produced 2.31 w for 56 piezo elements com- parable to 2.3 w for 160 piezo elements found in the literature.
Environmental impacts of these kinds of resources of renewable energy were considered through a life cycle assessment study. The results of the research showed that further evaluation of technol- ogy is required to measure the durability and lifetime of piezoelectric materials. Anyway, to have cleaner and more sustainable forms of energy, it is required to keep costs lower and insure a health- ier environment for the next generation.
Keywords: Piezoelectric, energy harvesting, waste energy, car, tires, Life cycle assessment


identifier: Goyette, Kiley  (2017) Urban governance after urban renewal: The legacies of renewal and the logics of neighbourhood action in post-renewal Little Burgundy (1979 – 1995).  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Urban renewal is perhaps the most widely studied approach to transforming neighbourhoods, but less attention has been given to its lasting effects and its influence on the forms of governance that emerged after it ended. This study of the Montreal neighbourhood of Little Burgundy explores how the physical, social, and ideological conditions left by urban renewal shaped neighbourhood action in the post-renewal period by focusing on three aspects. The first, a logic of governance stressing community participation, emerges as citizen committees contested renewal and problematized the top-down plans of outside experts. In the post-renewal period, this thesis argues, community participation became the major source of legitimacy for neighbourhood action, a logic that came to be reflected in the activities of groups like the Little Burgundy Coalition as well as the municipal state. The second is a concern with concentrated poverty in neighbourhood sociodemographic governance, frequently traced in the literature as emerging in the post-renewal period. In contrast, this thesis shows that this preoccupation emerged much earlier (during the renewal period itself) and was less prominent in the post-renewal period. Third, this study shows how both police actions and responses to police were part of the efforts to transform the neighbourhood, an area neglected in post-renewal governance literature. Tracing the connections between these areas shows how the impact of urban renewal extended beyond the transformations of the renewal period, but instead continued to shape the ways community participation, sociodemographic management, and policing were part of urban governance in post-renewal Little Burgundy.


identifier: Mao, Yawen  (2017) Individualism and Housing Bubbles.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

title: Individualism and Housing Bubbles

abstract: This paper investigates the correlation between individualism and housing bubbles. Individualistic culture could affect human behavior by cultivating overconfidence. People in individualistic environments are more confident about themselves and more likely to attribute their success to their own effort than those in collectivist areas. I measure individualism by extending a collectivism index proposed by Vandello and Cohen (1999). Housing bubble/bust is measured as the absolute value of the proportion of housing price unexplained by housing market fundamentals. Based on a panel data of 6,730 observations in 355 U.S. MSAs during 1990-2015, I find that individualism is positively associated with the housing bubble/bust proxy (HBP), indicating that housing markets are less efficient and investors are more irrational in more individualistic areas. To mitigate the concern of endogeneity and omitted variables, I construct an instrumental variable (IV) using the total number of local congregations. My findings are robust to IV tests, alternative sample periods and model specifications.


identifier: Freire, Manuelle  (2017) What is new in new media art education? A critical discourse analysis of the mythologies of media art education at the university.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This dissertation investigates the training and education of new media artists in higher education. Based on textually described orientations, rationales, and best practices I analyzed discourses that bear on the development of curricular and pedagogical approaches to educate practitioners and professionals in new media arts. Using a critical discourse analysis methodology, I investigated the most predominant concepts, statements, and discursive formations in academic texts published on this topic from the 1980s’ until today. I bring forward the ideologies, the theories, the discursive legacies and discursive patterns that characterize new media art education, and shape the culture of those involved in teaching future media artists. One of the central points of this analysis is the emphatic and cyclic rhetoric of the adjective of ‘new,’ which is embedded in discourses that curiously express ‘old’ inherited disciplinary pedagogies and assumptions. I also examine the perceived and expressed roles of new media artists, and the varied proposals of how these roles can best be cultivated through curricular programs. The analysis of the discourses of the so-called new pedagogies for media art education revealed what is, as well as what is not, new in the education of media artists at the university. The predominant discourses of new media art practices are characterized by calls for changes in the pedagogies in place. Yet this rhetoric is consistently confronted with the inert architecture of the institutions of higher education. I situate the discursive communities and their teaching-learning interactions in the systemic context of the modern western university that promotes a neoliberal orientation—especially in regards to the education of artists.
This study provides an informed critical understanding of the discourses that have, to date, crystallized in this relatively young field, and to a demonstration of the (un-)likelihood of newness in media art education, in spite of fast-evolving technology, and of the expanding scope of practices of the communities within this field.


identifier: Khalilzadeh, Ali  (2017) Numerical Parametric Study of Wind-Driven Rain and Overhang Effectiveness on a Mid-Rise Building.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The question of how wind and wind-accompanied rain are properly predicted, regardless of the method, whether experimental, semi-empirical or numerical is to this day unsettled. Moreover, parametric study of the Wind-Driven Rain (WDR), and consequently its wetting building façades is rather insufficiently dealt with. Due to the destructive repercussions of moisture penetration induced by WDR, façade protection in form of an overhang, which is considered as the most effective means to address the issue with, in regions with high levels of liquid precipitation, is the necessity of this study. Suitable numerical solution, alongside delving into the effect of numerous parameters governing the natural phenomenon, including wind direction and speed, rainfall intensity, and overhang size and shape, is the target of this work. To reach this goal, a MATLAB code controls raindrop injection into pre-solved domain of external flow on stand-alone and surrounded building. Wind flow solution of multiple turbulence schemes is bestowed upon ANSYS Fluent software package. Drag simulation and inlet velocity profiles, are hooked to the solver using User-Defined Functions (UDFs). Validation of wind simulation is done by comparing the predictions to wind-tunnel measurements. Validation of rain simulation on the other hand is performed by comparing the results to real-life conditions on a medium-rise building. Results of validation are rather promising for the upper-half of the windward façade. Proper technique of simulation of wind with conventional two-equation turbulence models, alongside the inlet velocity profiles is found to be boundary-treated Standard k-[omega], wind log-law. Overhang presence and its shape and size are vastly studied and parametrized to find the effect of those parameters on the effectiveness of the overhang. This study shows that although rainfall intensity is faintly influential, the wind speed and direction, alongside overhang size and shape, considerably influence catch ratio and effectiveness of the overhang. The effectiveness decreases by an increase in wind speed and increases for oblique winds. Façade effectiveness of the overhang decreases with an increase in rainfall intensity; although this parameter’s influence on point effectiveness is dependent upon the location of point on the façade. Finally, the wider the overhang, the more effective it is in protecting the façade, as a whole, from rain.


identifier: El Masri, Tarek  (2017) Three Essays on Corporate Governance of Family Firms.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This dissertation is comprised of three essays on issues related to the corporate governance of family firms. The first essay explores how owners-managers of family firms conceptualize and define their firms. Understanding the essence of a family firm helps us better understand their governance and behaviour. This essay contributes to the family business literature by presenting the seven most important criteria in identifying a family business (Handler 1989; Shanker & Astrachan 1996), namely: family ownership, control, involvement, succession, long-term vision, founders’ legacy, and extended family of employees. The essay also contributes a familiness measurement tool that can be used in future research aiming at better understanding the family firm.

The second essay investigates how management control technologies are calibrated in accordance with the sometimes conflicting economic and noneconomic goals resulting from the dual identities of family firms. The results show that family firms calibrate pervasive management control technologies, such as calculative, family-centric or procedural controls to strengthen the business identity and reduce the family identity of their family business. In comparison, the minimal use, or perceived absence, of management control technologies suggest that it accentuates and fosters family identity. Hence, reverting to management control technologies becomes related in a unilateral way to the business identity of the firm, despite the dual control ambition of family firms.

The third essay analyzes CEO and TMT compensation practices to identify patterns that can explain the gap between family firms and the pool of external highly qualified executives. The data analysis highlights a connection between the degree of family ownership, the composition of the BOD, and the identity of the CEO. The results also show that family firms rely more heavily on cash-based awards than on equity-based awards as a form of CEO and TMT compensation. Family firms are reluctant to use option-based rewards and the use of share-based awards is also kept at a minimum. Other evidence point towards a role that institutional ownership plays in restructuring the compensation packages of the TMTs at family firms.

Keywords: Family Firms, Definition of Family Firms, Family Firm Identity, Management Control Technologies, Corporate Governance, Executive Compensation


identifier: Epaillard, Elise ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8777-0478 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8777-0478>  (2017) Non-Gaussian data modeling with hidden Markov models.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In 2015, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were daily generated worldwide of which 90% were unstructured data that do not follow any pre-defined model. These data can be found in a great variety of formats among them are texts, images, audio tracks, or videos. With appropriate techniques, this massive amount of data is a goldmine from which one can extract a variety of meaningful embedded information. Among those techniques, machine learning algorithms allow multiple processing possibilities from compact data representation, to data clustering, classification, analysis, and synthesis, to the detection of outliers. Data modeling is the first step for performing any of these tasks and the accuracy and reliability of this initial step is thus crucial for subsequently building up a complete data processing framework. The principal motivation behind my work is the over-use of the Gaussian assumption for data modeling in the literature. Though this assumption is probably the best to make when no information about the data to be modeled is available, in most cases studying a few data properties would make other distributions a better assumption. In this thesis, I focus on proportional data that are most commonly known in the form of histograms and that naturally arise in a number of situations such as in bag-of-words methods. These data are non-Gaussian and their modeling with distributions belonging the Dirichlet family, that have common properties, is expected to be more accurate. The models I focus on are the hidden Markov models, well-known for their capabilities to easily handle dynamic ordered multivariate data. They have been shown to be very effective in numerous fields for various applications for the last 30 years and especially became a corner stone in speech processing. Despite their extensive use in almost all computer vision areas, they are still mainly suited for Gaussian data modeling. I propose here to theoretically derive different approaches for learning and applying to real-world situations hidden Markov models based on mixtures of Dirichlet, generalized Dirichlet, Beta-Liouville distributions, and mixed data. Expectation-Maximization and variational learning approaches are studied and compared over several data sets, specifically for the task of detecting and localizing unusual events. Hybrid HMMs are proposed to model mixed data with the goal of detecting changes in satellite images corrupted by different noises. Finally, several parametric distances for comparing Dirichlet and generalized Dirichlet-based HMMs are proposed and extensively tested for assessing their robustness. My experimental results show situations in which such models are worthy to be used, but also unravel their strength and limitations.


identifier: Hwangbo, Wonyeel  (2017) A Value-based Approach for Municipal Asset Management.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Asset management serves to schedule interventions to maximize the condition of municipal assets. However, municipalities face the daunting task of dealing with a wide variety of assets (civil infrastructure, facilities, buildings, vehicles, machinery and equipment) with a limited budget. There is a lack of an approach to optimize the scheduling of interventions across all types of municipal assets. There is also a disconnection between the effectiveness of the budget and its ability to upkeep the value of the assets as demanded by accounting and financial regulations. Previous attempts to handle multiple assets face problems in budget balancing given the dissimilar units of measurement of condition indicator for each asset type. This research proposes a value-based approach supported by deterioration and depreciation curves. Treatments are used to sustain or increase the value of all assets. A case study of the municipality of Kindersley is presented to showcases how the value-based approach is more financially-sustainable, yet cost-effective. The approach is flexible enough to accommodate all types of municipal assets, however for limitations of data the case study considers: street names, signs, hydrants, lighting, sidewalks, roads, sanitary pipes and water mains. An Excel platform with a special Add-in is used to host the database and performance curves and to define the optimization problem. An external solver is used to find the optimal solution. Results demonstrate a more stable long term progression for the value-based approach as compared to the condition-based. Meanwhile budget remain at very similar levels.


identifier: Overing, Linda  (2017) Risky Language at Work? Exploring the Effects of English Medium of Instruction on Occupational Health and Safety Learning, Communication, and Compliance in a Southern African Mining Facility.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The effects of monolingual English medium of instruction on formal academic and vocational/technical learning have been heavily researched and documented within the southern African ‘Anglophone,’ yet multilingual context. Less attention has been paid to the impact of English medium of instruction on the lives and livelihoods of individuals who, largely due to national language policies in education, enter the workforce with little or no schooling, and without basic language competencies in English, or literacy competencies in even their mother tongue. When English is the official and dominant language of government, commerce, and industry, the consequences of limited familiarity with it can be far ranging, affecting possibilities for political engagement, contributions to economic growth, employment opportunities, security, and upward mobility; they can also be dire, threatening health and safety.
This qualitative case study fills a gap in knowledge by addressing the under-researched problem of communicative and learning issues faced by individuals who enter the workforce with limited or no English language skills, and for whom linguistic accommodations are not made. The study is situated in the context of a foreign owned mining subsidiary in an ‘Anglophone’ country in southern Africa. The particular focus is on often plurilingual, yet English second/foreign language shop floor workers engaged in the most hazardous jobs within this risk-ridden environment, where occupational health and safety knowledge is an essential, life-saving tool, as well as a learning foundation upon which higher skills attainments and employment security are built.
From the perspective of workers most directly affected, illuminated through the analysis of interviews, observations, and teaching materials, this qualitative case study illustrates how the use of English communication, medium of instruction, and teaching materials in a multilingual but English second/foreign language dominated work environment constrains effective occupational health and safety learning and works to influence policy compliance. The ways in which workers mediate these challenges are also explored. Grounded in this case, based primarily on workers’ input and suggestions, and supported by exemplary practices reported in the occupational health and safety literature, practical and applicable recommendations for change are proposed.


identifier: El Gourari, Younes  (2017) Determining the Performance of Renewable Energy Stocks: A Cross-Country Analysis.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: We examine in this study the relationship between alternative-energy stock excess returns and a wide variety of firm- and country-level risk factors. We collect data for 186 companies, belonging to 5 major renewable energy indexes, from 29 countries over the period 2000-2015. We follow the methodology used by Boyer & Filion (2007) and employ a generalized least squared (GLS) panel model. The results suggest that market excess returns, the changes in company size, and a company’s market-to-book value all have a significant, positive influence on alternative-energy stock value in all our specifications. The findings also imply that, in our sample, the alternative energy sector is riskier than the stock market as a whole. Oil price changes appear to have a weaker, but still a positive impact on clean-energy stock returns in specific time periods, whereas, surprisingly, natural gas prices do not appear to influence those returns. The changes in the percentage of electricity generated using renewable energies, GDP per capita, the input of manufacturing into a country’s GDP, and pollution levels all appear to have a positive impact on renewable-energy stock prices. Finally, we find that the influence of interest rate changes varies (i) between developed and developing countries, and (ii) over the sample period which is largely due to the influence of the financial crisis.


identifier: Shanmugasundaram, Sandhya  (2017) A DNS Based Architecture for Publication and Discovery of Virtual Network Functions in Content Delivery Networks.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In recent years, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has become very popular for many reasons including flexibility and cost efficiency. Virtual Network Function (VNF) is the implementation of network functions using software which is decoupled from the underlying hardware. Content Delivery Network serves content to end-users with high availability and high performance. In addition to content, they also offer value-added services (video overlay, compressed video, video transcoding, etc.) to end-users. Publication and discovery mechanism is very much substantial to provide meaningful services to the end-users. Incorporating publication and discovery mechanisms in NFV can play a crucial role in CDN to provide on-demand value-added services. However, publication and discovery mechanisms for VNF remains a big challenge. As the existing researchers do not consider an exhaustive way of describing Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), VNF descriptors include details concerning VNF deployment but fail to include functional and non-functional specifications of VNF, which increases an inefficient utilization of VNFs. Another challenge is that the current discovery requires VNF consumers to select the VNF manually rather than having an automated mechanism to discover VNF. Furthermore, publication of VNF and its details are proprietary, which brings difficulty for VNF consumers in discovering and utilizing them. This thesis aims to propose a solution for efficient description, publication, and discovery of VNFs.
The main contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, we have proposed a VNF descriptor model including its properties and operations for efficient utilization. Second, we have proposed an architecture for publication of VNF descriptors and for discovering them. The proposed architecture use Domain Name System as a foundation. We have built a proof-of-concept prototype for value added service provisioning of VNF using the BIND open source server. In order to evaluate the viability of the proposed architecture, we have made performance measurement of the implemented prototype.


identifier: Abdul Hadi, Sundus  (2017) Struggle and the Politics of Self Care: A Curatorial Perspective.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
“Take Care of Your Self” is a research-creation project that explores the potential for transcultural dialogue and engagement through the concept of “Care-full curation.”  To explore these ideas through research-creation I organized a week-long exhibition and series of events held during the summer of 2017 in Montreal titled “Take Care of Your Self: A Transcultural Art Event”. The exhibit, in which I was both participating artist and curator, featured work by 27 artists of colour, or “othered” artists from diverse communities. The exhibit sought to explore how notions of self-care, self-determination and healing have conceptually informed artists from a wide range of cultural orientations who are dealing with complex issues of personal, social and political struggle.

Through care-full curation, my intention was to foster counter-narratives to the existing structures perpetrated by mainstream media that keep our diverse struggles separated, and to create a safe space illustrated by artworks and conversations on the subject of self-care and struggle. In this paper, I draw on the concept of self-care as it is articulated and practiced in Black feminist thought and contemporary social movements. I explore how empowerment can be integrated into an approach of critical curation and intersectionality. I also locate the exhibit and series of events in the larger framework of self-care and art as a method of transformative transcultural convening. I position my own practice as an artist-curator through both theory and method by highlighting the process, goals and outcomes of the exhibition “Take Care of Your Self”.

Keywords: trauma / healing / empowerment / counter-narrative / social justice / transcultural / convening / intersectionality / safe space / ruptures / marginality


identifier: Khodadadi, Hossein  (2017) Ultrasound Elastography: Direct Strain Estimation.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Ultrasound elastography involves measuring the mechanical properties of tissue, and has many applications in diagnostics and intervention. Ultrasound elastography techniques mainly target obtaining strain images from raw Radio-Frequency (RF) echo field produced by ultrasound machine without adding any hardware. A common step in different elastography methods is imaging the tissue while it undergoes deformation and estimating the displacement field from the images. A popular next step is to estimate tissue strain, which gives clues into the underlying tissue elasticity modulus. To estimate the strain, one should compute the gradient of the displacement image, which amplifies the noise. The noise is commonly minimized by least square estimation of the gradient from multiple displacement measurements, which reduces the noise by sacrificing image resolution.
The first part of this thesis propose a new method which adaptively adjusts the level and orientation of the smoothing strain images using two different mechanisms. First, the precision of the displacement field decreases significantly in the regions with high signal decorrelation, which requires increasing the smoothness. Second, smoothing the strain field at the boundaries between different tissue types blurs the edges, which can render small targets invisible. To minimize blurring and noise, we perform anisotropic smoothing and perform smoothing parallel to the direction of the edges. The first mechanism ensures that textures/variations in the strain image reflect underlying tissue properties and are not caused by errors in the displacement estimation. The second mechanism keeps the edges between different tissue structures sharp while minimizing the noise.
The second part of this thesis introduces a 2D strain imaging technique called SHORTCUT (meSHing Of gRadienT in DP for direCt Ultrasound elasTography) based on minimizing a cost function. The cost function incorporates similarity of echo amplitudes and tissue continuity. The proposed technique is fast, robust and accurate and it directly produces the strain images from RF data using a novel dynamic programming (DP) configuration. Unlike the standard DP algorithm which discretizes the decision space (displacement field) and search in the space of piecewise constant functions, the proposed DP discretizes the gradient of the decision space (strain field) and search the space of continuous piecewise linear functions. Eliminating the displacement differentiation block and performing a global search instead of local search which exist in all of the available strain estimation techniques result in substantial improvement in SNR, CNR and accuracy of the estimations. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is investigated through simulation data, phantom experiments, and in vivo patient data.


title: Struggle and the Politics of Self Care: A Curatorial Perspective

format: text text archive

abstract:
“Take Care of Your Self” is a research-creation project that explores the potential for transcultural dialogue and engagement through the concept of “Care-full curation.” To explore these ideas through research-creation I organized a week-long exhibition and series of events held during the summer of 2017 in Montreal titled “Take Care of Your Self: A Transcultural Art Event”. The exhibit, in which I was both participating artist and curator, featured work by 27 artists of colour, or “othered” artists from diverse communities. The exhibit sought to explore how notions of self-care, self-determination and healing have conceptually informed artists from a wide range of cultural orientations who are dealing with complex issues of personal, social and political struggle.

Through care-full curation, my intention was to foster counter-narratives to the existing structures perpetrated by mainstream media that keep our diverse struggles separated, and to create a safe space illustrated by artworks and conversations on the subject of self-care and struggle. In this paper, I draw on the concept of self-care as it is articulated and practiced in Black feminist thought and contemporary social movements. I explore how empowerment can be integrated into an approach of critical curation and intersectionality. I also locate the exhibit and series of events in the larger framework of self-care and art as a method of transformative transcultural convening. I position my own practice as an artist-curator through both theory and method by highlighting the process, goals and outcomes of the exhibition “Take Care of Your Self”.


identifier: Smofsky, Sabrina  (2017) Shaping the Skin: Conveying Identities Through Skincare and Cosmetics.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Due to the skin’s external location, it has been endowed various social meanings. Depending on the condition and adornment of one’s skin, social messages are accorded. A smooth, clear complexion communicates good physical and mental health, as internal wellness is perceived as discernible through the skin. When internal wellness is not always possible, or fails to affect the skin, skincare and cosmetics are imagined to offer a user democratic control over not only their skins, but the messages their skins transmit as well. Furthermore, gaining control over one’s skin, and therefore identity, is imagined to empower a user, and foster better internal wellness. As these epidermal aides became legitimized and disassociated with abhorrent behaviours in the 20th century, it assumed a critical role in a woman’s expression of a healthy adherence to her feminine identity. Once cosmetics in particular became synonymous with women’s appearances, it became held as evidence of women’s oppression. While this is true, this is only half the story of cosmetics. The troubling reality is that cosmetics are both oppressive and empowering. However, an added dimension of oppression exists among cosmetic users who have a darker complexion, as supposedly democratic beauty aides are predominantly created for those with light complexions.