identifier: Roohian, Hamidreza  (2022) The Effect of Media Coverage and Institutional Ownership on Performance.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis consists of three essays that investigate the effects of media coverage and institutional ownership on flows and performances of mutual funds and firms.
The first essay (chapter 2) investigates the importance of the existence and tone of media coverage on open-ended mutual funds (OEMFs). Media coverage can be an important channel for determining which mutual funds are being considered for purchase or retention by less sophisticated individual investors. We find that media coverage is more likely for bigger, older and fee-waiving open ended mutual funds. Consistent with the investor attention hypothesis, we find that the existence, frequency and tone of media articles, and also excluding those that do not mention holdings, significantly affect future OEMF flows and performance more strongly during the following-day. Over longer periods of time, we find that the fund-performance effect of learning based on the tone of news articles is more pronounced. We find significant but small spill-over effects from news mentions of other same-management funds. We also find that funds with negative coverage are not punished as much as funds with positive coverage are rewarded.
The second essay (chapter 3) discusses the significance of changes in holdings of institutional investors on the stocks they hold. These changes may have market impacts, particularly if their size provides informational advantages due to better firm manager access, especially for stocks with lower analyst reviews and weaker internal corporate governance. We find that a stock’s performance is related to prior changes in the stock holdings of institutional investors with more than 1% of a firm’s outstanding shares after the publication of the Dow Jones end-of-quarter top institutional investor reports (“events”), and that the relation is more pronounced for smaller stocks. We find that the stock holdings of these Top Institutional Investors are a better predictor of a stock’s subsequent returns compared to the total stock holdings of other institutional investors. We observe abnormal performances associated with the reported shifts in stock holdings after event dates, and an increase in trading volumes on the event dates, which is consistent with the investor recognition hypothesis.
The third and final essay (chapter 4) investigates whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects firm value which has gained extra interest since the COVID-19 market crash. In this essay, we investigate whether a firm’s Environmental/Social/Governance (ESG) orientations affect the changes in the composition of the holdings of institutional investors. We find that CSR firms outperform others throughout the market downfall, especially when they have more long-horizon institutional ownership (IO). Our results indicate that the environmental and social scores of firms significantly increase cross-sectional stock returns. We observe that CSR has a stronger effect on firm value and performance during the COVID-19 market crash for firms with higher monitoring from influential institutional owners.  We also find that institutional investors do not trade based on ESG scores during normal times but that their trading reflects and affects these metrics during times of financial turmoil.


identifier: Belhomme, Claudine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5616-3306 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5616-3306>  (2022) Technical Translation in a Commercial Context: A Focus on Festo Didactic.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

type: Thesis NonPeerReviewed

abstract:
This thesis reports the results of an empirical case study exploring two technical translation processes of Festo Didactic, a multinational producer of digital and non-digital technical and technological learning material. Data was collected through surveys, interviews, observation, and documents. Skopos theory and business and project management principles were used to bring into special focus the constraining conditions in which technical translations are produced in a commercial context, which help determine translation quality. Because technical translation deals with the application by some user of a technology or scientific theory, the importance of users and related questions of usability, terminology and safety were emphasized.

Ce mémoire de thèse rapporte les résultats d’une étude de cas empirique explorant deux processus de traduction technique de Festo Didactic, un producteur multinational de matériel d’apprentissage technique et technologique numérique et non-numérique. Les données ont été recueillies par le biais de questionnaires, d’entretiens, d’observations et de documents. La théorie du skopos et les principes de gestion des affaires et des projets ont servi à mettre en évidence les conditions contraignantes dans lesquelles les traductions techniques sont produites dans un contexte commercial et qui contribuent à déterminer la qualité des traductions. Vu que la traduction technique porte sur l’application par un utilisateur d’une technologie ou d’une théorie scientifique, l’accent a été mis sur l’importance des utilisateurs et sur les questions connexes de convivialité, de terminologie et de sécurité.


identifier: Zhao, Zeyu  (2022) An attempt to model the natural bloom-crash cycle using Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Phytoplankton are important components of aquatic ecosystems. A dramatic way that certain phytoplankton affect these ecosystems, and human health, is by undergoing an annual cycle of bloom and crash. This involves a rapid growth of a large population and its subsequent rapid death. Algal bloom can be harmful to the environment so it is important to know the ending process. However, it is uncertain if the crash is caused by nutrient deprivation or programmed cell death. Previous experiments showed a similar crash in synchronized culture of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in the lab. In this study, we used synchronized culture to simulate the crash of a natural blooming algal population and to determine the cause of the crash. Moreover, programmed cell death in mammalian cells was found to be regulated by cytoplasmic stress granules. Previous studies in our lab reported similar RNA-containing stress granules in the chloroplast of C. reinhardtiiand the localization of oxidized RNA to the pyrenoid. Thus, another objective of this study was to detect RNA in the pyrenoid and determine if that was associated with the rapid death. My results suggest that synchronized culture is an effective model to simulate natural bloom and crash in algal population and the crash was mainly caused by nutrient deprivation, although some possible toxins produced by algal cells might be another factor. Accumulation of RNA during light phase of the diel cycle was observed but the attempt to extract RNA from pyrenoid was unsuccessful. My results are preliminary and further investigation is necessary, however, they could still serve as a start for future studies.


identifier: Gagnon, Jenny-Ann  (2022) Culturing Caco-2 cells on a microfluidic device.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Organs on a chip is a technology that is often used to mimic the in vivo microenvironment within an organ. In vivo, different forces impact the cell (e.g., peristalsis motion or fluid flow in the intestine), which altogether cause a shear stress that further influences the phenotypical outcome of the cells. With microfluidics, it is possible to mimic these forces to grow the cells in an environment that resembles the in vivo environment. Organs on a chip have the potential to become a valuable tool when it comes to the preclinical evaluation of potential chemotherapeutic agents, thus decreasing the need for animal models. However, the specific conditions for each type of organ on a chip (e.g., brain, liver, intestine) are not uniformly established. Therefore, I tested the effect of different shear stresses on an intestinal epithelium cultured in a microchannel, by varying the rate of perfusion. I found that the ideal shear stress for the integrity of the intestinal epithelium is 0.25 dyn/cm2. I also analyzed the adverse effects of a chemotherapeutic agent, methotrexate, on the intestinal epithelium, by simulating an oral administration of the drug. I determined that methotrexate reduced the levels of the tight junction protein Zonula occludens-1 (ZO-1) within the tight junction between the epithelial cells. Moreover, I found that holes were forming in the tight junctions and that giant multinucleated cells were appearing following a methotrexate treatment. I hypothesized that the formation of these giant multinucleated cells was due to the fusion of neighbour cells, which could lead to holes in the tight junction, leading to an increase in intestinal permeability.


identifier: alqawasmeh, najla  (2022) Novel Feature Extraction Methods to Automatically Detect Gender and Age From Handwritten Documents.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Handwriting acts as a mirror, reflecting the writer’s personality characteristics and demographic
properties. As a result, handwriting analysis has become significant in a variety of disciplines, in�cluding medical, socialisation, and security. Identifying a person’s biometric information from
handwriting has recently become a crucial research topic. Therefore, we decided to focus our re�search on extracting gender and age from handwriting, as the former is important in psychology,
document analysis, paleography, graphology, and forensic investigation. The latter on the other
hand, is essential in medical diagnosis and forensic analysis.
Handwriting analysis is commonly done by extracting relevant features such as slant, pen pres�sure, word spacing, and others. The traditional method of studying handwritten texts involved a
graphologist visually inspecting a set of related features. However, analysing many handwritings
takes a long time, making it a tiring and time-consuming process. In addition, the analyst’s level
of expertise influences the analysis too. As a result, we have studied and developed an automatic
technique for analysing handwriting documents to extract the writer’s gender and age without addi�tional human intervention.
The proposed analysis systems include the five essential aspects of handwriting analysis sys�tems. An Arabic dataset was first gathered to test and evaluate the proposed systems. We named
it Free Style Handwritten Samples (FSHS). Our dataset stands out from others because it has 2200
writers, more than any other Arabic dataset currently available. This made the dataset vary with the
iii
handwriting styles, as the total number of handwritten documents in the dataset is 2700. The dataset
is mostly text-independent, except 500 samples are text-dependent. The second phase is image ac�quisition and preprocessing. Moreover, to extract the related features, image processing techniques
and the transfer learning method were utilised. While in the classification phase, Support Vector
Machine (SVM) and Neural Network (NN) algorithms were employed. Finally, multiple assess�ment metrics were used to evaluate the proposed systems.
Automatically identifying a writer’s gender and age is a challenging task due to the overlapping
features of handwritings from different writers. Auto-gender and age detection can be implemented
using a set of extracted features or by applying transfer learning. This research presents two dif�ferent methodologies to detect the gender and age of a writer from handwritten documents. First,
a set of related features were extracted for the gender detection system, such as pen pressure, word
spacing, text line irregularity, and left and right margins. At the same time, the percentage of black
and white pixels and irregularities in pen pressure, slant, and text lines were retrieved to determine
the age of writer. Then, the extracted features were analysed separately, followed by the generation
and testing of combinations of two and three features. Finally, the sum of all features was evalu�ated. Subsequently, an automatic feature extraction methodology leveraging the knowledge from
two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), GoogleNet and ResNet, was applied.
The two proposed systems performed well when applied to the FSHS dataset. The accuracy
rates for the gender detection system employing SVM and NN methods, respectively, were 94.7%
and 97.1%. In addition, when we used the SVM and NN approaches to apply the age detection
system to the same dataset, we obtained accuracy values of 71% and 63.5%, respectively.
To compare our results to other available works, the proposed systems were applied to the public
datasets ICDAR2013 and the Khatt dataset. Finally, a number of assessment and tests were carried
out to assess the effectiveness of the proposed systems, and the results reveal that the proposed
gender and age detection systems outperform the current state-of-the-art with an accuracy rates of
67% and 96.2%, respectively.


identifier: Maita, Nour  (2022) Toward a more relevant and responsive science education in schools: Science education for socially responsible and critical future citizens.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The time of uncertainty and risk we live in today demands future citizens capable and willing to make transformative changes that strengthen human values, equality, and justice on Earth. For education in general and science education in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has created new realities that require shifting science teaching and learning away from traditional approaches that focus on content memorization and teach science as depoliticized and decontextualized. In this thesis, I analyze the theory of learning and experience of John Dewey, the theory of problem-posing pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and the theory and practice of socioscientific issues to examine their contributions to transforming science education in the middle school towards a more relevant and responsive framework. I argue that activating a science teaching and learning context through the lens of these theories improves students' understanding of the nature of science and empowers them to recognize the interrelation of science with social, political, economic, cultural, ethical, and environmental factors. Additionally, it promotes the development of students’ critical thinking and social responsibility to engage with awareness in decision-making processes concerned with science-related social and environmental dilemmas. The significance of my thesis lies on the importance of the theoretical contributions to strengthen a critical scientific literacy, a politicized science education that involves a socioscientific issues framework to foster a science educational culture that nurtures critical and responsible future citizens. Implications, recommendations for teachers, and challenges in practice are also discussed.


identifier: Li, Xiaoming  (2022) Data-Driven Optimization Models for Shared Mobility-on-Demand Systems.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Shared Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) has tremendously reshaped the transportation patterns in urban areas. The prosperity of Big Data and 5G network technology brings new challenges to shared MoD systems. Specifically, the major challenges in shared MoD systems under the data-driven environment include dynamic environment, stochasticity, large-scale optimization, and Big Data characteristics. In this research, we identify shared MoD management as a resource allocation problem in the two-sided market environment. Further, we adopt optimization under uncertainty modeling techniques to address the resource allocation issues for shared MoD systems. To improve the performance of the shared MoD systems under the data-driven environment considering uncertain parameters, we propose a generic learning-based data-driven optimization framework and apply it to three shared MoD optimization issues.

Specifically, we develop a generic learning-based data-driven optimization framework that integrates data processing, feature engineering, machine & deep learning approaches, reformulation, and decomposition algorithms to optimize the resource allocation problems in shared MoD systems. The research involves three synergistic shared MoD areas. (1) Kernel density enabled stochastic programming modeling for proactive vehicle allocation and reactive relocation in the car-sharing system. We design a data-driven optimization framework that seamlessly integrates kernel density estimation and a two-stage stochastic programming model to address the issue. (2) Mixture density networks enabled stochastic programming modeling for dynamic proactive idle vehicle guidance in the ride-hailing system. We design a novel deep neural network and integrate it with a one-stage stochastic programming model to guide the idle vehicle to alleviate the supply-demand gap in the ride-hailing region. (3) Dynamic data-driven robust optimization modeling for ride-sharing matching problems under travel time uncertainty. We develop a data-driven robust optimization framework that organically integrates gated recurrent networks, a one-stage robust optimization model, model reformulation, and a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm to address the ride-sharing participants matching issue. Based on these research points, this Ph.D. thesis is a compilation of three published or submitted journal papers.

To sum up, this Ph.D. thesis presents a general data-driven optimization framework that organically integrates the artificial intelligence (AI) paradigm, including machine and deep learning approaches with optimization under uncertainty modeling techniques. Driven by AI techniques, the learning-based data-driven optimization framework can address the resource allocation problems in shared MoD systems by hedging against the uncertainty in a decent way. Further, the proposed approach is not limited to the shared MoD systems. Still, it can be applied to other relevant fields by replacing the learning and optimization components in the framework.


identifier: Feola, Sarah  (2022) The Effect of Exercise on Intramyocellular and Extramyocellular Lipids in Childhood Versus Adulthood Onset of Obesity: A Pilot Study.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The Effect of Exercise on Intramyocellular and Extramyocellular Lipids in Childhood Versus Adulthood onset of Obesity: A Pilot Study
Background: Compared to those who develop obesity in adulthood, those with childhood onset obesity have greater risk of metabolic disease. However, the mechanisms associated with this increased risk are unknown. Muscle lipids have been associated with insulin resistance. Thus, differences in the metabolism of intramyocellular lipids (IMCL) and extramyocellular lipids (EMCL) may contribute to greater risk of metabolic disease in childhood vs. adulthood onset obesity.
Objective: To investigate whether the timing of obesity onset affected the metabolism of IMCL and EMCL in response to exercise in individuals with obesity.
Methods: Ten males with obesity ≥23yrs were recruited with either childhood- (n=5) or adulthood- onset (n=5) obesity. At visit 1, participants underwent dual x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) and resting indirect calorimetry. Participants were provided with a standardized diet for 3 days prior to visit 2. At visit 2, baseline IMCL and EMCL via magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) was measured. Participants then completed a 90 minute cycle with indirect calorimetry. A second MRS measurement was done immediately post exercise.
Results: Substrate oxidation was not significant between groups. Post exercise, the adulthood onset group had a significant (P=0.039) decrease in IMCL, with no change in EMCL. The childhood onset group displayed no change in IMCL or EMCL with exercise.
Conclusion: This was the first study to compare the rates of IMCL and EMCL depletion in childhood and adulthood onset of obesity after a bout of exercise, providing novel insight for future research.  We made a novel observation that males with adulthood onset obesity had greater decreases in IMCL post-exercise.


identifier: Neumann, Cassandra, Sares, Anastasia, Chelini, Erica and Deroche, Mickael  (2022) Roles of bilingualism and musicianship in resisting semantic or prosodic interference while recognizing emotion in sentences.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

creator:
Neumann, Cassandra
Sares, Anastasia
Chelini, Erica
Deroche, Mickael

abstract: To infer emotions in speech, listeners can use the way people speak (prosody) or what people say (semantics). We hypothesized that bilinguals and musicians would rely more on prosody than on semantics. In two online experiments, we collected data on 1041 young adults, who listened to sentences with either matching or mismatching semantic and prosodic cues to emotions. Participants then identified the emotion enacted by the speaker’s prosody (ignoring semantics; Experiment 1) or in the semantics (ignoring prosody; Experiment 2). In both experiments, performance suffered when prosody and semantics conflicted. Musicians were better at resisting the interference among bilinguals, but not among monolinguals. Thus, the musician advantage may not be due to a difference in weighting prosody over semantics, rather an overall better ability to inhibit irrelevant information. As for the hypothesized bilingual advantage, the findings warn that musicianship is critical to control for.


identifier: Charles, Jordan  (2022) The effect of acute stressors on heroin seeking after punishment-imposed abstinence and the role of individual trait variation in male and female rats.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Substance use disorders involve a cyclical pattern of escalating drug use, abstinence from the drug of choice, and subsequent relapse. Relapse can be driven by stressful life events causing drug cravings and preoccupation, leading to the return of escalating drug use. Different models have been proposed to study this phenomenon in animals. Often users abstain due to the negative consequences of drug-seeking and taking. As such, voluntary abstinence models were created whereby animals often choose to abstain of their own volition. One of the ways to induce this is through a punishment-imposed abstinence model, where abstinence is achieved through punishing animals’ drug-seeking or drug-taking behaviours. Past research in our laboratory using this model has shown that acute food deprivation stress increases heroin-seeking following abstinence. However, there is little research on the generalization of the effects of acute food deprivation stress on heroin-seeking to other acute stressors using a punishment model. Individual differences in many traits correlate with drug use behaviours. Specifically, traits like reward-seeking, anxiety-like behaviour, and novelty-seeking have been associated with different aspects of drug use. Greater levels of reward-seeking, anxiety-like, and novelty-seeking behaviours are thought to increase the risk of substance use. Finally, sex differences are well documented in addiction research due to biological and sociological reasons. Animal models further support sex differences: females often escalate to drug use faster, have higher intake levels, and relapse more. Furthermore, females are more resistant to punishment than their male counterparts, which may mean that females are more resistant to punishment-imposed abstinence. The current study had three aims: (1) to investigate the generalization of the effect of acute food deprivation to other acute stressors in a punishment-imposed abstinence model: restraint stress, forced swim stress, and foot-shock stress; (2) to measure the degree to which individual differences predict stress-induced relapse using the following tests: sucrose preference (SP) test, elevated plus maze (EPM), open field test (OF), and tail-flick (TF) test; and (3) assess differences between male and female rats in punishment-imposed abstinence and stress-induced drug-relapse behaviour. Adolescent male and female Long-Evans rats underwent SP, EPM, OF, and TF testing. Subsequently, rats were trained to self-administer heroin (0.1 mg/kg/infusion) under a seek-take chain for at least 14 days. Rats then underwent punishment-imposed abstinence for 8 days. Afterwards, rats were exposed to a stress condition (males: food deprivation, restraint, forced swim, or footshock; females: restraint, forced swim, or food deprivation) before undergoing a heroin-seeking test. It was found that the effect of acute food deprivation stress on relapse generalized only to forced swim-induced relapse in both male and female rats. Individual differences in traits of anxiety, novelty-seeking and reward-seeking did not reliably predict drug relapse. Male and female rats did not differ in punishment-imposed abstinence or stress-induced relapse behaviour.


identifier: Tang, Jianyu  (2022) Accuracy Improvement of Industrial Robot Using PID Controller Based on Back-propagation Neural Networks.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Nowadays, industrial robots are widely used in many fields. With the wide range of applications, the accuracy of robots has become an issue of concern. In some path following tasks, the accuracy of existing robots does not yet meet the industry standard. In this research, the accuracy of the robot is enhanced by using position-based visual servoing. The purpose of this research is to propose a novel dynamic path tracking (DPT) method to solve the aforementioned accuracy problem. This method uses the C-Track from Creaform to measure the end-effector of the robot M-20iA from Fanuc and to use the visual information to guide the robot to follow the desired path. First, a stereo binocular camera C-Track provides the real-time pose information of the end-effector. To remove the noise transmitted from the camera, the research uses a robust Kalman filter (RKF) to improve the performance of the standard Kalman filter under disturbance by correcting the state variable error covariance (P). Then, the Fanuc robot M-20iA uses position-based visual servoing (PBVS) strategy to correct the position and orientation of the end-effector, which is implemented through dynamic path modification (DPM) function, in conjunction with real-time data acquired by C-Track. Next, adaptive neuro-PID (ANPID) control is developed as the PBVS scheme for DPM correction. Such control strategy has a strong adaptive and self-learning capability, which enables online tuning of the PID controller parameters, resulting in better performance in robot control. Finally, extensive experiment tests have been carried out and the results show that the the accuracy of path following reaches ±0.08mm and ±0.04deg, compared with the accuracy ±0.2mm and ±0.1deg achieved by conventional PID controller.


identifier: Jurkonytė, Ilona  (2022) From Temperature of War to Descending Clouds: US Bomb Archive and the Marshall Islands.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This doctoral thesis presents an analysis of how audiovisual media participates in US extraterritorial nuclear weapons production. It focuses on the nuclear visual archive of the Marshall Islands and its subsequent inclusion in the experimental cinema canon. By tracing an aestheticizing shift from audiovisual data produced by the military-scientific complex to the nuclear sublime as a representational regime, this thesis demonstrates how audiovisual technology participates in the creation of nuclear imaginaries, and (re)produces the conditions of settler colonialism. The goal of this thesis is to develop methodological and theoretical entry points for investigating the genealogy of the nuclear visual archive to highlight its incompatibility with the experiences of communities impacted by nuclear “testing,” and with larger planetary environmental urgencies.
The archival research and close reading of audiovisual sources demonstrate how Indigenous experiences were invisibilized through the production of a nuclear archive. First, this was accomplished through the specific set-up of the US military-scientific complex and its approach to harvesting images. Second, the process was furthered through the production of nuclear knowledge, as rendered through the aesthetic category of nuclear sublime in the film and arts milieu.
	The first chapter, Ocean and Cold War, is dedicated to exposing the connections between Mackinderian notion of geopolitics as a “special form of visualization” and the Cold War as an oceanic process. The second chapter, Audiovisual Deterritorialization and Extraction Through Image, proposes a decolonial analysis of the inaugural moment of the US Cold War – the nuclear weapon “tests” in oceanic environments. As an alternative to the usual framing of Pikinni Atoll as a steppingstone for the Cold War arms race, which tends to invisibilize Marshallese experiences, the second chapter offers an analysis of Pikinni Atoll as a film set. Such shift proposes new frameworks that would allow us to embrace questions of justice in the critique of hyper-militarization, and that would create space for recognition of the worlds lost due to the production of ‘US nuclear modernity’. The third chapter, The Bomb Archive or Nuclear Bomb as an Archiving Device, offers an analysis of how the notion of the nuclear sublime is complicit in misrepresentations of nuclear weapons’ effects. Chapter four, Canonization of the Nuclear Sublime and Standardization of Catastrophe, narrows my analysis of the bomb archive by focusing on the US experimental artist Bruce Conner’s film CROSSROADS (1976). The thesis concludes with a spacio-temporal reframing of the Cold War and its legacies as a liquid frontier regime, the implications of which are inseparable from environmental concerns.


identifier: DHAR, Avik  (2022) Design, Modeling, and Nonlinear Response of Linked Column Frame with Multiple Links under Crustal and Subduction Zone Earthquakes.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Abstract

Design, Modeling, and Nonlinear Response of Linked Column Frame with Multiple Links under Crustal and Subduction Zone Earthquakes

Avik Dhar

To mitigate the economic loss in the aftermath of seismic events, researchers required the development of low-damage seismic force resisting systems. As such is the Linked Column Frame (LCF) with backup moment resisting frame (MRF). The fundamental advantage of the LCF system is its tri-phase response: elastic, rapid return to occupancy (low residual drift), and collapse prevention.
Dusicka and Iwai (2007) developed the LCF system with single link (LCF-S) and multiple links per floor (LCF-M). Then, Malakoutian (2012) refined the design methodology for the LCF-M system using design provisions for Eccentrically Braced Frame (EBF) according to ASCE 7 and Lopes (2016) conducted experimental tests. Vayas et al. (2013) analysed different types of links acting as flexural beams and pins. However, the effect of subduction zone ground motions on the nonlinear seismic response of LCF buildings was not investigated and a design methodology complying with NBC and CSA S16 standard requirements was not proposed.
The main objectives are:

• Propose a forced-based design method for the LCF system with single and multiple links per floor using the current NBC 2015 and CSA S16-14 standard requirements.

• Develop a numerical model of LCF system in OpenSees environment that is able to show accurate nonlinear behavior of links from yielding to failure, and consider a low-cycle fatigue model to trigger the failure of MRF's beams.

• Assess the seismic performance of the LCF-M system versus the traditional EBF system

employed to brace a low-rise building subjected to crustal and subduction zone ground motions using nonlinear time history analysis and incremental dynamic analysis.
To fulfill the research objectives, the design methodology for LCF-M system was proposed and numerical models of a 4-storey building located on Site class C in Vancouver B.C. was developed in OpenSees. It was found that at design level (2% in 50 years probability of exceedance), the LCF-M prototype building showed lower residual interstorey drift than 0.5%, which is the reparability threshold, and lower link rotation than 0.08 rad., while the MRF beams were on the verge of hinging. The analysis also found that compared to EBF prototype building, the LCF-M with perimeter backup MRF provided larger margin of safety under both sets of crustal and subduction ground motions. In addition, LCF-M buildings enable rapid repair following earthquakes.


identifier: Zhou, Tao  (2022) Enhancing the Path Accuracy of an Industrial Robot with Visual Servoing and Reinforcement Learning.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Industrial robots generally exhibit poor path accuracy and thus cannot satisfy many manufacturing requirements. Improving robot path accuracy necessitates motion control with feedback from high-precision external sensors. Typically, feedback control strategies for an industrial robot are realized by adjusting the robot’s intrinsic motion via an external controller.

In this research, the control scheme consists of position-based visual servoing (PBVS). An external pose correction controller is introduced to enhance a robot’s path accuracy by reducing the path error.

A proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller is utilized as the primary control method. Due to the repetitiveness of robotic tasks, the control performance can undergo iterative improvement by supplementing the baseline PID controller with a reinforcement learning (RL) based controller, trained via an actor-critic algorithm. The experimental platform comprises two commercial systems: the C-Track 780 dual camera sensor (Creaform) and the M-20iA robot (FANUC). The control performance is assessed using mean absolute error (MAE) and maximum error.

The effect of supplementing the baseline PID controller with the proposed RL-based controller is assessed with two experiments. Experiment 1 consists of position-only line following, while experiment 2 consists of full pose line following. Qualitatively, transient performance is improved by overshoot attenuation. In experiment 1, the RL-based controller reduces MAE and maximum errors by 10% and 20%, respectively in the transient phase. The resulting position path accuracy is ±0.09 mm. In the (full pose) experiment, the MAE is not significantly affected, where the maximum errors deteriorate by 4% in position but improve by 9% in orientation. The resulting path accuracy is ±0.30 mm / ±0.07 ◦.


identifier: Tallon, Emma  (2022) Reflecting on the Role of Non-Profits in the Refugee Claimant Process: An Inquiry into the Welcome Collective.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: During the ‘neoliberal turn’ and the disinvesting the in social sector (1980s-2000s), over 830,000 refugees entered Canada either through the Federal Government’s Resettlement Programs or private sponsorship (Picot, 2019).  Simultaneously, the government began off-loading social responsibilities to non-profit organizations to reduce government responsibility, including the support of refugee communities. Since then, non-profits have become key actors within the refugee claimant process. Drawing from ethnographic data, including in-depth interviews conducted with service providers at the Welcome Collective, a refugee aid organization in Montreal, Quebec, as well as participant observation, this thesis explores the role of non-profits in assisting individuals within the refugee claimant process. Service providers discussed their roles as not only mediators, but actors in providing both material and immaterial support to meet the needs of refugee claimants. This thesis makes use of Institutional Ethnography (IE) to investigate the importance of differentiating between vulnerability and precarity within refugee aid. Within Canada, the State follows a vulnerability narrative when managing refugee populations—focusing on the individual and their ability to integrate into the economic system, as well as society more-broadly. Conversely, precarity underscores the external circumstances acting independently of the individual that serve to hinder mobility and erase past identities. It is in engaging with both the local, the refugee community, and the trans-local, the State processes, that one can uncover non-profit’s complex role within the refugee claimant process—one that must maintain a relationship between the local communities and trans-local processes. It is through IE that the Welcome Collective’s infrastructure of care for refugee claimants becomes evident, including their use physical space, relation to the government, as well as their work with documents, that all work in tandem to destabilize the State’s vulnerability narrative and suggest a relational narrative that acknowledges the level of precarity.


identifier: Chevrier, Erik  (2022) Building Food Sovereign Campuses: A Case Study of the Campus-Community Food Groups at Concordia University.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis focused on the Concordia Campus-Community Food Groups Research Project as a case study to explore how to build food sovereign campuses. While most universities in Canada are developing sustainability policies, none have yet to be considered transformative, holistic, and in-depth. Food sovereignty approaches can help university foodservices meet these higher order sustainability conditions. The research for this dissertation was performed between 2014 and 2018 using a critical-participatory-action research approach. First, we gathered information about the campus-community food system by interviewing fifty-nine food activists and searched Concordia’s archives for relevant artifacts and articles. Second, we built an online archive and created multimedia products for the archive. We uploaded over seven hundred video interview segments and designed maps of the campus-community food system. Third, we organized a public consultation with all the campus-community food groups to get feedback about our findings and discuss how to build a food sovereign campus. This thesis provides a description of the campus-community food system map, and a historical analysis of how the groups on the map came to fruition. We found a dozen food groups that produce, process, and distribute food, fight for food justice and reduce food insecurity. We also found seven historical trends that explain how the campus-community food system was created and several factors that impeded activists from successfully preventing Concordia from hiring transnational foodservice corporations. Lastly, this thesis proposes a framework that distinguishes key differences between corporate, weak sustainability, and food sovereignty approaches to university food services. Our findings suggest that a food sovereign campus is transformative, controlled by an array of campus-community partners, not run by large multinational foodservice corporations, and provides value to the campus and surrounding communities instead of externalizing social and environmental costs. While there are some issues with using food sovereignty to refer to university campuses, we hope to inspire researchers and food activists to continue to develop the framework proposed in this thesis.


identifier: Nguyen, Alex ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9773-3515 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9773-3515>  (2022) Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Functional Connectivity and Integration During Cognitive Tasks.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Introduction: We previously demonstrated that sleep deprivation (SD) alters the balance of integration and segregation of brain activity in cortical networks, which was correlated to cognitive impairment following SD. The objectives of this study is to examine the effects of total sleep deprivation and recovery nap on (i) cognitive performances, (ii) functional connectivity, (iii) integration and (iv) compare changes in integration with cognitive changes during different cognitive tasks individually. We hypothesized that sleep deprivation will lead to increase integration within-networks relative to between-networks and associated with cognitive impairment for all three tasks.

Methods: 20 healthy adults (MAGE=21.32, 12 females) were scanned using simultaneous EEG-fMRI during three cognitive tasks (attention, working memory, vigilance) in three conditions: following a normal night of sleep, 24-hour of total SD, and 1-hour recovery nap. A general linear model was performed to compare functional connectivity between the three conditions. Functional clustering ratio (FCR) was used to calculate integration and Pearson’s correlations was used to compare the changes in integration and cognitive changes between each conditions.

Results: SD was associated with increased FCR, driven by a rise of integration within cortical networks which was associated with deficits in performance of working memory and attention tasks, but not vigilance task. Restoration of balance between integration and segregation of cortical activity was related with performance following recovery nap demonstrating bidirectional effect.

Conclusions: These results demonstrate intra- and interindividual differences in cortical network integration and segregation during task performance may play a critical role in vulnerability to cognitive impairment in the SD state.


identifier: Zhu, Yinying  (2022) Development of Inverse Modeling Method for Emission Source Identification in River Pollution Incidents.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Accidental spills and illegal chemical discharges have occurred worldwide, causing adverse effects on human health and the ecosystem. Inverse models play an essential role in source identification based on limited concentration data observed at monitoring sites. However, most studies have been conducted on the inverse inference of pollution sources in atmospheric and groundwater environments. Few studies have focused on identifying pollution sources in rivers. In addition, multiple source identification, uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis of inverse models are rarely considered. An integrated inverse modeling system is developed in this thesis for source identification in river pollution incidents, including three independent inverse modeling approaches for an instantaneous point source (IPS), a continuous point source (CPS), and multi-point sources (MPS), respectively. The inverse modeling approach estimates source parameters with uncertainty concerns by combining a water quality model and a probabilistic inverse method based on observed pollutant concentrations.
First, the IPS inverse modeling approach is developed based on the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) method. Then the developed MH-based IPS approach is tested and compared with a genetic algorithm (GA)-based IPS approach for a hypothetical case and a real case study. Results confirm that the MH-based IPS approach performs better than the GA-based IPS approach in terms of accuracy and stability for IPS source identification. According to the sensitivity analysis, the emission mass of the pollution source positively correlates with the dispersion coefficient and the river cross-sectional area, whereas the flow velocity significantly affects the identified values of release location and release time. Second, the CPS inverse modeling approach employed the up-to-date DiffeRential Evolution Adaptive Metropolis (DREAM) algorithm to estimate source parameters. The DREAM-based CPS inverse modeling approach accurately performs in a hypothetical case and a field tracer case. Moreover, compared to the MH-based and GA-based CPS approaches for CPS identification, the DREAM-based CPS approach has an advantage in accuracy, computation time, and reconstructing the time series of pollutant concentrations. The accuracy of the approach can be improved by decreasing observation errors, increasing the monitoring number, and deciding monitoring locations closer to the spill site.  Third, the MPS inverse modeling approach is developed based on the DREAM algorithm. The one-point, two-point, and three-point source problems are considered in case studies to validate the feasibility and accuracy of the DREAM-based MPS approach. Among the three identified source parameters, the identification error of the release time tends to rise obviously in response to the increase in pollution sources. Subsequently, an integrated inverse modeling system with a graphical user interface is established based on the three developed inverse modeling approaches, and its efficiency is tested through case studies. In conclusion, the integrated system can serve as a helpful tool for source identification, model validation, and pollution prediction in the assessment and management of emergency pollution incidents.


identifier: Ahrabi, Tahereh  (2022) Ukraine’s crisis in 2022 through the lens of game theory.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In this paper, I study Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine using game theory. I analyze different scenarios of the war based on three different realistic strategies that can be chosen by Russia, and three different realistic strategies that can be chosen by the West, leading to a simultaneous-move 3x3 non-cooperative game between these two players. In addition, I model both players with two different potential types: the West can be either approachable or aggressive, and Russia can be militant or insecure. While the available strategies of the players do not change, the type of a player determines the preferences over the available fixed strategies. Therefore, I model this situation as four different non-cooperative games depending on the players' types, and solve all four games by finding their Nash equilibria. In the second part of the paper, I include Ukraine as a third player who can affect the result of the war. The goal is to predict the possible future outcome of the ongoing war and to gain a better insight into the world’s future economic and political status.


identifier: Horen Greenford, Daniel Stephen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8390-9388 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8390-9388>  (2022) Safe ends with just means: Charting a course to a fossil fuel free economy for Canada and beyond.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In this dissertation, I bring together a broad area of research in climate science and policy, ethics, ecological economics, political economy, and environmental sciences. I aim to cut through complexity and present clear conclusions that follow from decades of scholarship that has not yet made the impression on policymakers or the public that it deserves. This dissertation comprises three papers: 1) a critical overview of fair shares and decarbonization scenarios, and a way to reconcile what should be done with what experts think can be done (with a Canadian case study); 2) a framework for climate testing proposed fossil fuel infrastructure that can be used to evaluate an individual project's compatibility with global or domestic emissions reduction targets (with a case study of Canadian gas); and 3) an analysis of the potential for a shift towards services to mitigate GHG emissions and other environmental impacts. The results of paper 1 show that under a relatively ambitious but still insufficient decarbonization program, Canada is projected to accrue an emissions debt of 6 to 52 GtCO2e by 2050, which could be valued at $0.8 trillion to $6.5 trillion using the best estimate for the social cost of carbon dioxide. Paper 2 concludes current plans to extract Canadian gas are unequivocally at odds with national and global climate efforts, and that even climate action in line with an inequitable share of ~2–3°C of warming necessitates an immediate and rapid phase out of gas extraction within years. Papers 1 and 2 contribute policy tools needed for Canada and similar wealthy fossil fuel producing nations to do their fair share of a global energy transition, even when a domestic energy transition is limited by political or technological constraints. Paper 3 shows that when counting household consumption of people as part of the sectors that employ them, supposedly ‘clean’ sectors like services are just as harmful as ‘dirty’ ones. This exposes the limited potential to reduce environmental impacts by growing the service sector, refuting claims made by advocates of green growth via an explosion of the knowledge economy. These findings may be used to inform policymaking, so that appropriate emphasis is placed on behavioural, technological, and structural changes to the economy. Together, realizations from this dissertation can be used to craft fair and practical policy for a just transition for Canada, through integrated domestic and foreign policy, which also could serve as a model for other affluent nations.


identifier: Gillman, Samuel O'Brien  (2022) Phase-Amplitude Coupling of Theta and Gamma Rhythms During Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Impacting Memory Across the Lifespan.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) between brain oscillations is thought to be an underlying neural mechanism of memory consolidation. Oscillation coupling may become weaker with greater age, possibly explaining natural memory decline across the lifespan, as suggested by studies of PAC during non-rapid-eye-movement sleep. Theta-gamma PAC (TGC) during wake is correlated with stronger encoding and better recall. However, it is unclear how TGC during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep correlates with memory or changes with age. I aimed to find TGC during REM sleep (REM TGC) affecting sleep-dependent memory consolidation that changes with age-related memory decline. We recorded scalp electroencephalography of good sleeping younger and older adults. Oscillatory data was extracted from filtered electroencephalography signals. Before sleep, participants learned a declarative memory or non-memory control task, then retested the respective task after sleep to measure memory consolidation. Memory consolidation was better in younger, compared to older, adults. REM TGC strength, measured by a modulation index, was not different between age groups nor task nights. Faster gamma coupling in a frontal channel was positively correlated with and predicts improvements in memory consolidation in younger adults. Slower gamma coupling in a central channel was positively correlated with memory consolidation in older adults. Our results suggest REM TGC strength is stable across the lifespan. However, the strength of faster TGC in younger and of slower TGC in older adults may improve memory consolidation. These results uncover more about how REM sleep and REM TGC changes across the lifespan, in relation to memory.

Keywords: rapid eye movement sleep, theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling, sleep-dependent memory consolidation, aging


identifier: Ibrahim, Mohamed Elhadi Mohamed  (2022) Threshold Velocity and Incubation Period in Water Droplet Erosion.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Erosion wear due to high-speed water droplets impact is a major reliability concern in several power generation and aerospace industries. The problem is synonymously referred to as water droplet erosion (WDE), liquid impingement erosion (LIE), rain erosion (RE), or leading-edge erosion (LEE). The present work addresses two important erosion responses; material endurance against erosion (known as the threshold condition) and the number of droplet impacts needed to initiate erosion damage (known as the incubation period). The objectives of the work are to develop a prediction model for the threshold condition, and to contribute to the understanding of the damage mechanisms in the incubation period.

The present work combines the theory of threshold crack propagation with dynamic wear and fracture properties of materials to arrive at a mathematical equation (model) for the threshold conditions. The developed model predicts the threshold impact velocity of metallic materials directly from their mechanical properties and impact conditions. The model is experimentally validated for five metallic alloys namely; Ti-6Al-4V alloy, 17-4 PH stainless steel, stainless steel (X22CrMoV12-1), 7075-T6 aluminum alloy, and 2024-T4 aluminum alloy. The developed model is also compared to the analytical model developed in the literature and found to predict threshold velocities with higher accuracy. The threshold velocity - simply calculated from the developed model - can directly evaluate the risk of developing erosion damage for specific material, and hence can be used as an effective material design and selection tool.

As for the incubation period, the influence of change in surface roughness (i.e., roughening) and the rate of change in hardness (i.e., hardening) on the damage accumulation process have experimentally and numerically been investigated in this work. Water droplet erosion tests were carried out on Ti-6Al-4V alloy and 17-4 PH stainless steel. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope (CLSM), Vickers Hardness measurement, Tensile Tests, and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of Impact stresses were carried out. The results show that the dynamic surface roughening process results in higher and continuously-increasing impact stresses for the same impact pressure due to geometrical stress concentration. It is also found that the strain hardening exponent (n) influences the incubation period by controlling the rate at which the fracture of surface fragments is achieved as well as the rate with which mechanical properties change with the increase in number of droplet impingements. It is concluded that strain hardening exponent (n) and surface roughening are crucial parameters in the damage accumulation process during the incubation period.


identifier: Ayouby, Reem  (2022) Social Media: Perceptions, Use, and Impact; A Motives Perspective.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This dissertation addresses the mixed findings regarding the impacts of social media use on individuals. The literature extensively discusses the negative effects on users, such as social media addiction; however, there are some counter arguments for positive impacts. This dissertation asks:
1. 	What are the social impacts of social media use?
2.	How does the interaction between implicit motives and perceived social media functionality influence use and consequently the social impacts?
3.	How does emotion-regulation moderate the relationship between social media use and social impacts?
To answer these questions, a theoretical framework is proposed to explain social media use impacts. It examines the factors contributing to the social impacts by considering: (i) user’s implicit motives while controlling for explicit motives; (ii) their perceived social media functionality; (iii) their resulting use behaviour; (iv) their self-regulation ability; and (v) the impacts of the social media use on well-being as proxy to social impacts.
Next, the construct of perceived social media functionality is operationalized by focusing on one platform—Facebook—and developing a measure of perceived Facebook functionality. The validated construct reveals seven dimensions of perceived Facebook functionality (relationships, sharing, persona, presence, entertaining, learning, and transactional).
Finally, this measure is used to operationalize the theoretical framework, resulting in a testable research model. The findings show that four perceived Facebook functionalities (PFF) are dominant in influencing Facebook use. Specifically, PFF learning, PFF entertaining, PFF persona, and PFF presence. Facebook use explains a significant amount of variation in the brief inventory of thriving, especially once the prediction-oriented segmentation algorithm segregates the data into two groups. In the first, Facebook use has a negative impact on thriving. Difficulties in emotion regulation, which impact thriving directly, compound this effect by also interacting with Facebook use’s effect on thriving. This reveals that the Facebook users with negative outcomes are using Facebook because of difficulties in self-regulation (an interaction effect). In the second group, Facebook use has a strong positive impact on thriving and no interaction effect with difficulties in emotion regulation.
This work concludes with a discussion of contributions to theory and practice, limitations, and future research directions.


identifier: McKell, Tabitha  (2022) Understanding Teachers’ Experience with a Revised History Curriculum.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Quebec’s mandated high school history course has received much public attention since the reimagining of the curriculum in 2006. In this thesis, I examine the historical contexts and debates surrounding Québec’s mandated history courses published in 1982, 2006 and 2016. I investigate the problems with the 2006 curriculum and conduct a policy analysis of the circumstances for replacing the 2006 curriculum only 10 years after its publication. The 2016 curriculum is based on the recommendations of a public consultation by Beauchemin and Fahmy-Eid (2014). A policy analysis of these recommendations reveal that Beauchemin and Fahmy-Eid tightly controlled text and discourse in favour of a national historical narrative. Consequently, the Beauchemin and Fahmy-Eid report (2014) limits Quebec’s minority and marginalized communities from connecting to or being validated by history. The 2016 version of the curriculum has come under scrutiny for overemphasising the historical contributions of one nation through a unique Québec lens (Bradley & Allison, 2021). The phenomenological portion of my thesis shows that teachers of English-speaking students in Québec are aware that the 2016 curriculum does not validate minority and marginalized communities and accommodate the curriculum by delivering the material in ways that undermine the nationalistic and civic aspects of the curriculum and encourage students to reflect on their place and that of others in Québec’s social culture.


identifier: Orlando, Mark Anthony  (2022) A Meta-Analytic Review and Experimental Study Exploring Links between Aggression and the Oxytocinergic System in Mice and Human Populations.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Interpersonal aggression is a significant source of individual and societal distress. For this reason, countless research projects have attempted to identify the biological and psychological determinants of aggressive behaviour. An emerging body of literature suggests that the nonapeptide oxytocin (OT), generally regarded as a facilitator of prosocial behaviours, can instead amplify aggression and hostility under certain contexts. The current dissertation was designed to clarify the association between OT and aggression, by investigating this relation in both animal and human samples. In the first study, we conducted a systematic meta-analysis of genetic OT-knockout animal-model studies. Relative to genetically unmodified controls, OT receptor knockout mice were found to exhibit significantly elevated aggression, across all behavioural paradigms and outcome measures. Other forms of genetic modification were found to be less reliably associated with subsequent aggression, suggesting that prenatal OT exposure plays a critical role in the development of aggressive behaviour in adulthood. Evidence of contextual and individual variability was also observed. In the second study, we investigated the association between exogenous OT administration and a form of cognitive bias that may be predictive of future aggressive behaviours: autobiographical memory retrieval biases. We found that, under placebo, high-aggression participants exhibited greater difficulty retrieving specific memories of positive events. Following OT administration, the retrieval of specific memories for positive cue words was selectively improved in high-aggression individuals. Additionally, such individuals rated the emotional valence of their autobiographical memories less negatively under OT, when compared to placebo. Importantly, these findings were exclusive to memories retrieved within a social context. Recollections produced in a non-social environment were rated less positively following OT administration, exclusively for high-aggression participants. These findings again suggest important individual and contextual variability and highlight the potentially deleterious effects of OT administration in the absence of social contact. Together, these studies indicate that OT does modulate the frequency of aggressive behaviours, as well as the cognitive biases that may precede them. Critically, these data also highlight important developmental, individual, and contextual considerations, which in turn allows us to identify viable targets for future research.


identifier: Zvionow, Tehila  (2022) The Effects of Acute High-Intensity Interval Training and Sleep Restriction on Memory: A Pilot Study.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Background: Sleep restriction impairs memory, while high intensity interval training (HIIT) improves cognition. Our objectives were to assess the feasibility of the study and to obtain preliminary results on the effects of an evening HIIT plus sleep restriction on declarative memory.
Methods:  88 healthy adults (24.6 ± 4.2yrs), completed a sleep diary 4 days prior to and during the experimental night. Participants were randomized into either restricted (~5-6 h/night) or average (~8-9 h/night) sleep opportunity, without (S5, S8 respectively) or with HIIT (HIITS5, HIITS8).
During the experimental night (at 7 p.m.), the HIIT groups completed a 15-min HIIT session while the non-exercise groups had an equivalent period of seated rest. This was followed by face-name recall tasks: encoding and immediate recall sessions the same evening, and a delayed recall session the following morning after an average or restricted sleep opportunity.
Results: Our remote-pilot study showed that all participants in the exercise groups completed the HIIT protocol safely. We found a significant interaction between HIIT and sleep conditions on delayed recall accuracy (p = 0.042, ηp2 = 0.049). Post hoc analysis showed significant differences for delayed recall accuracy between HIITS8 and S8 (81.64±14.64 vs. 93.95±10.71, p = 0.013, respectively) and between S5 and S8 (82.87 ± 16.66 vs. 93.95 ± 10.71, p = 0.023, respectively).
Conclusion: Acute evening HIIT hindered the positive effects of sleep on memory. Additionally, HIIT did not compensate for the memory impairment of sleep restriction.


identifier: Stainton, Jessie Eleanor Myfanwy  (2022) Craft-based Interviews: Intervening in Intellectual Ableism Through Research-Creation.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Lived experiences of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have been relegated to the margins of the humanities and social sciences research, even in the field of critical disability studies. The limits of existing research methods, which privilege written and spoken forms of communication, and the ableism entrenched in academic infrastructures, I argue, have been instrumental to this marginalization. In an attempt to disrupt these hierarchies, this thesis proposes a new research method called “craft-based interviews” as a way to do research, not on or about, but with intellectually disabled people through the process of creating together and communicating by other means than only words. “Craft-based interviews”, in the way I theorize it, is a process-based method that can open up new channels of communicating in ways that counter and resist intellectual ableism in research practices and its privileging of the linguistic. Mobilizing the experimental ethos of research-creation, “craft-based interviews” affords a critical intervention, not only in enabling the participation of people with IDD in research, but in reckoning with ontological questions of knowledge, research and power. Through a detailed thematic analysis of the craft-based interviews I conducted with two people with IDD, and a discourse analysis of the correspondences I had with my own institution’s ethics board, I explore the new possibilities that “craft-based interviews” can open up, and also interrogate the institutional barriers to conducting research with people with IDD in the humanities and social sciences.


identifier: Kluban, Maryna  (2022) On Measuring JavaScript Vulnerabilities in the NPM Packages, Websites and Chrome Extensions.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
JavaScript is often rated as the most popular programming language for the development of both client-side and server-side applications. Because of its popularity, JavaScript has become a frequent target for attackers, who exploit vulnerabilities in the source code to take control over the application. To address these JavaScript security issues, such vulnerabilities must be identified first.
Existing studies in vulnerable code detection in JavaScript mostly consider package-level vulnerability tracking and measurements. However, such package-level analysis is largely imprecise as real-world services that include a vulnerable package may not use the vulnerable functions in the package. Moreover, even the inclusion of a vulnerable function may not lead to a security problem, if the function cannot be triggered with exploitable inputs.
In this thesis, we develop a vulnerability detection framework that uses vulnerable pattern recognition and textual similarity methods to detect vulnerable functions in real-world JavaScript projects, combined with a static multi-file taint analysis mechanism to further assess the impact of the vulnerabilities on the whole project (i.e., whether the vulnerability can be exploited in a given project).
We compose a comprehensive dataset of 1,360 verified vulnerable JavaScript functions using the Snyk vulnerability database and the VulnCode-DB project. From this ground-truth dataset, we build our vulnerable patterns for two common vulnerability types: prototype pollution and Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS).
With our framework, we analyze 9,205,654 functions (from 3,000 NPM packages, 1892 websites and 557 Chrome Web extensions), and detect 117,601 prototype pollution and 7,333 ReDoS vulnerabilities.
By further processing all 5,839 findings from NPM packages with our taint analyzer, we verify the exploitability of 290 zero-day cases across 134 NPM packages. In addition, we conduct an in-depth contextual analysis of the findings in 17 popular/critical projects and study the practical security exposure of 20 functions. With our semi-automated vulnerability reporting functionality, we disclose all verified findings to project owners. We also obtained four CVEs for our findings, two of them rated as 9.8/10 (critical) severity, one as 9.1/10 (critical), and one as 7.5/10 (high) severity; several other CVE requests are still in the process now.  As evident from the results, our approach can shift JavaScript vulnerability detection from the coarse package/library level to the function level, and thus improve the accuracy of detection and aid timely patching.


identifier: Yu, Siyao  (2022) Institutional perspective on subsidiaries of multinational companies operating in China.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This exploratory study investigates the subsidiaries of transnational companies operating in China with institutional change as a background. Through the institutional perspective, I explored the actors’ work during the gradual institutional change in China. I investigated the research questions of how the institutional change in China influences the operation of transnational companies' subsidiaries, as well as how the transnational companies strategically respond to institutional change. adopted a qualitative method, the data collected from case studies of three subsidiaries operating in China supported the investigation of the research questions. In the research, I explored the basic elements of institutional change, such as formal and informal institutions and the government’s role in influencing the subsidiaries operating in China; I also found that the subsidiaries of transnational companies can respond actively and strategically to the institutional environment in China through their institutional work.
It assists managers who engage in international business in better understanding the specific business environment in an emerging country and better implementing business strategies; it also enriches the study of institutional work in developing and transitional economies context.


identifier: Faal, Farshid  (2022) Reinforcement Learning for Mitigating Toxicity in Neural Dialogue Systems.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Developing a machine that can hold an engaging conversation with a human is one of the main challenges in designing an open-domain dialogue system in the field of natural language processing.
With the advancement of deep learning techniques and the availability of large amounts of data on human-to-human conversational interaction, a fully data-driven and holistic approach is considered to design open-domain dialogue systems.
Dialogue generation models trained on large corpora of human-to-human interactions learn undesirable features and mimic behaviors from data, including toxic language, gender, and racial biases.
Hence, as dialogue systems become more widespread and trusted, developing such systems that account for possible safety concerns is vital.
In the first part of the thesis, we address the limitations of training the open-domain dialogue generation model with the log-likelihood method, and we propose the Reinforce Transformer-decoder model, our novel approach for training the Transformer-decoder based conversational model, which incorporates proximal policy optimization techniques from reinforcement learning with the Transformer-decoder architecture.
We specifically examine the use of our proposed model for multi-turn open-domain dialogue response generation on the Reddit dialogues data, a real-word human-to-human dataset. Experiments demonstrate that responses generated by our proposed neural dialogue response generation model are diverse and contain information specific to the source prompt based on diversity and relevance evaluation metrics.

In the second part of the thesis, we propose a new approach based on the domain adaptation language model and multitask deep neural network to detect and identify the toxic language in the textual content.
We argue that the first step in managing toxic language risk is identification, but algorithmic approaches have demonstrated bias. Texts containing some demographic identity terms such as Muslim, Jewish, Asian, or Black are more likely to be labeled as toxic in existing toxic language detection datasets. In many machine learning models introduced for toxic language detection, non-toxic comments containing minority and marginalized community-specific identity terms were given unreasonably high toxicity scores. To address the challenge of bias in toxic language detection, we employ six toxic language detection and identification tasks to train the model to detect toxic contents and mitigate unintended bias in model prediction.
We evaluate and compare our model with other state-of-the-art deep learning models using specific performance metrics to measure the model bias. In detailed experiments, we show our approach can identify toxic language in textual content with considerably more robust to model bias towards commonly-attacked identity groups presented in the textual content. Moreover, the experimental results illustrate that jointly training the pretrained language model with a multitask objective can effectively mitigate the impacts of unintended biases and is more robust to model bias towards commonly-attacked identity groups presented in datasets without significantly hurting the model's generalizability.
In the third part of the thesis, we propose our approach to mitigate toxic language generation by neural generative language models and conversational AI systems.
Transformer-based language models can generate fluent text and efficiently adapt various natural language generation tasks.
However, language models that are pretrained on large unlabeled web text corpora have suffered from degenerating toxic content and social bias, hindering their safe deployment for fine-tuning dialogue response generation systems.
Various detoxification methods have been proposed to mitigate language model toxicity; however, these methods struggle to detoxify language models when conditioned on prompts that contain specific social identities related to gender, race, or religion.
In this study, we propose Reinforce-Detoxify, a reinforcement learning-based method for mitigating toxicity in language models.
Reinforce-Detoxify is formulated as an autoregressive LM and uses a multilayer transformer-decoder as the model architecture.
We address the effect of detoxification methods on language generation from LMs towards social identities. We propose a reward model based on multitask learning that can mitigate unintended bias related to various social identities in toxicity prediction.
We employ our multitask deep neural network model to mitigate unintended bias in toxicity prediction related to various social identities as a reward function for fine-tuning the generative model.
Furthermore, to prevent the unfavorable effect of detoxification on language model fluency, we penalize the Kullback Leibler divergence between the learned policy and the original LM that we used to initialize the policy.
Empirical results demonstrate that utilizing reinforcement learning for fine-tuning the language models to maximize the reward can mitigate toxic language generation and outperform the current detoxification methods in the literature. Furthermore, we have shown that utilizing a reward model trained to reduce unintended bias towards various social identities successfully enables the language models to mitigate toxicity when conditioned on prompts related to these social identities.


identifier: Calderone, Alexandra  (2022) Power in numbers: How attaining a critical mass of women on corporate boards impacts firm financial performance.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This paper investigates the association between gender composition of board members and firm financial performance in Canadian companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Through the conceptual lenses of tokenism and critical mass theories, our study provides new insights into the relationship of board gender diversity and performance by adding an important but overlooked moderating variable, notably the effect of firm size. We use data from 235 Canadian firms across 11 industry sectors for the period of 2019. The results demonstrate that large sized firms with at least 30% of women on the board of directors are likely to outperform their competition, as measured by Tobin’s Q. Through this study, we make a theoretical contribution to the literature by expanding upon the tokenism and critical mass theories. Practitioners will also gain deeper insights on how the role of women on corporate boards can impact performance for their respective firms.


identifier: Antonio Kleber, Amaral Gomes Junior  (2022) “They are not our secretaries”: Wonder, Women and Superhero Cinema An ethnography of moviegoers in Brazil.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Superhero cinema requires the engagement of the audience to be successful and to ensure its continuation. It contributes the establishment of the public pedagogy of our societies, informing what ideologies are intrinsic to the understanding of our common realities and normalizing patterns of conduct. Movie posters from superhero films depicting women have, however, been changed from representations based on the accommodation of male fantasies – thus generally sexualizing the female body – to depictions more attuned to female audiences’ expectations. This research aims to investigate the way these movie posters have been received by a group of nine women from Fortaleza, Brazil, trying to answer the question: how much representation have these women felt from these movie posters over the past few years? It brings about several points of tension since Brazil is a society where patterns of beauty are exported throughout the world. Being consumers of popular culture, and having their everyday lives impacted by these cultural products, the research participants discuss how superhero cinema in the last decade or so has been transformed by the advent of the release of Wonder Woman (2017), with results that defend the movie as a turning point in superhero cinema, but also open unexpected discussions about other products as somewhat responsible for such change. In order to do so, they have been invited to take part in a private conversation while discussing movie posters curated in a virtual exhibit with over sixty images positioned chronologically, with the goal of assessing their relationality with those posters, their take on each of them and how they understood the studios’ decision in promoting each movie the way it came to be. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the research was the result of a conversation that includes visual anthropology, public pedagogy, sociology, women studies, feminist cinema and media studies.


identifier: Cagnoli, Donna  (2022) The Impact of Native Advertising, Culture and Trust on Advertising Credibility.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Despite extensive research on credibility and trust in advertising, there is little information on how native advertising and culture might impact these important constructs among social media users. In my thesis, I address this gap by testing the relationship between different types of native advertising (i.e., influencers versus newsfeeds) and culture on perceived advertising credibility. To measure culture, I focused on the individualism versus collectivism scale proposed by Hofstede. I also tested whether trust mediates this relationship. To anticipate, this thesis first thoroughly defines the meaning of native advertising and its presence in social media, then it goes over the concept of credibility, provides an overview of Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions and finally, I discuss the concept of trust. This led to the development of three hypotheses. The first hypothesis investigates how different forms of native advertising (that is, influencers versus news feed accounts) affect advertising credibility, and the second hypothesis examines culture as a potential moderator. Both hypotheses were supported. The third hypothesis examined whether trust mediated the effect, but no significance was found (though I did find evidence that trust predicted credibility). For the completeness of the research, Hofstede’s remaining dimensions of culture were analyzed as potential moderators. Moreover, some exploratory behavioural analyses were conducted (e.g., product recommendations and purchase intentions). After the results section, a discussion of future research and limitations is presented.


identifier: Alshalalfah, Abdel-Latif  (2023) System-Level Analysis and Design of Safety-Critical Cyber Physical Systems.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The reduction in size and cost of hardware together with the accelerating innovation and advancement in sensor and computational technologies have opened the door for cyber physical systems into all types of applications. While most early systems involved varying degrees of human involvement, the various success stories are encouraging designers to develop cyber physical systems for autonomous control.
	The trustworthiness of a cyber-physical system is essential for it to be qualified for utilization in most real-life deployments. This is especially critical for systems that deal with precious human lives. which can be engaged directly as in biomedical systems or indirectly as in automotive systems. Although use-cases for biomedical and automotive systems are considered, the proposed generalized framework can be used to analyze the safety of various cyber-physical systems.
    These safety-critical systems can be investigated using both experimental testing and model-based verification. Accurate models have the potential to permit investigating the system behavior under abnormal scenarios. Also, appropriate modeling can speed-up the development process by evaluating candidate designs at an early stage of the design cycle.
    Model-based verification can be conducted using the less-exhaustive simulation testing or the resources-greedy model checking. As a trade-off, statistical model checking bears a feasible approach where statistical guarantees can be examined with a specific level of confidence. This research addresses the problem of utilizing accurate system-level models to analyze and design safety-critical cyber-physical systems.
    The behavioral descriptions of cyber physical systems are modelled by constructing equivalent formal models. These system-level models are used to conduct statistical model checking to verify properties written using metric interval temporal logic and to provide statistical guarantees on the system safety. This approach is applied on biomedical and automotive systems to verify their safety with consideration for some distortions resulting from unintentional or intentional sources. The proposed verification approach enlightens the development process by providing feedback that can help elect the designs. Moreover, new robust and safe control techniques are proposed to enhance the safety of a closed-loop glucose controller system. Also, a systematic approach is proposed for safety analysis of cyber physical systems. This approach processes systems described using SysML diagrams and applies a new proposed automatic algorithm to construct equivalent formal models. This research work is a step towards bridging the gap between system-level models and formal models so that analysis can be conducted efficiently to enhance the safety and robustness of cyber-physical systems.


title: Multi-Axis Fiber Bragg Grating Accelerometer

contributor: Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

subject: FBG, Accelerometer, FEM

abstract: This thesis mainly focuses on sensor nodes design. A small two-axis and three-axis accelerometer using optic fiber with FBG written in the core as sensing element were originally designed due to the advantages of FBG mentioned above. The proposed design has a concentrated mass sitting in the middle of a rigid frame, and a glass fiber with a FBG written in the fiber core as a stiff spring is connected between each side of the frame and the mass. The two accelerometers can decouple the ground motion along different axes, resulting in virtually zero cross-sensitivity, which exceeds currently available seismometers.  The accelerometer or seismometer has a working bandwidth below the structure’s natural frequency and linearly responds to ground movement. COMSOL Multiphysics by using Finite Element Method (FEM) was used to analyze and simulate the two devices.


title: An Investigation of a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm applied to Encrypted Traffic Identification

contributor:
Faculty of Computer Science
Master of Computer Science
Dr. Robert Beiko
Dr. Malcolm Heywood
Professor Denis Riordan
Professor Malcolm I. Heywood
Professor Nur A. Zincir-Heywood
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
No

subject:
Network Traffic Identification
Encrypted Traffic

abstract: This work explores the use of a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) for both, feature selection and cluster count optimization, for an unsupervised machine learning technique, K-Means, applied to encrypted traffic identification (SSH). The performance of the proposed model is benchmarked against other unsupervised learning techniques existing in the literature: Basic K-Means, semi-supervised K-Means, DBSCAN, and EM. Results show that the proposed MOGA, not only outperforms the other models, but also provides a good trade off in terms of detection rate, false positive rate, and time to build and run the model. A hierarchical version of the proposed model is also implemented, to observe the gains, if any, obtained by increasing cluster purity by means of a second layer of clusters. Results show that with the hierarchical MOGA, significant gains are observed in terms of the classification performances of the system.


title: Evaluating Naphthalene Sorption to Cement-Based Solidification/Stabilization Additives

contributor:
Department of Civil Engineering
Master of Applied Science
Pak Yuet
Margaret Walsh
Margaret Walsh
Craig Lake
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable

subject:
Civil Engineering
Environmental Engineering
Cement
Stabilization
Solidification
sorption
naphthalene

abstract:
Solidification/Stabilization (S/S) is a low cost remedial technology that is being used with success to remediate sites that contain higher molecular weight organic compounds, leading to a need to research the interaction of organic contaminants with cement-based S/S materials.  The objective of this study was to examine the sorption levels of naphthalene to cement-based S/S materials.
Batch testing was performed with S/S materials containing different amounts of organic carbon to investigate the sorption of naphthalene.  It was found that sorption values varied, but appear to be dependent on the organic carbon present.  Dynamic leach test (ANS16.1 methodology) and SPLP analysis results are presented for intact cement-based S/S materials.  Contaminant migration modeling was performed to use the information obtained in the study to compare the sorption capacity of cement-based S/S systems.  It was shown that cement-based S/S remediation systems can provide long-term protection against naphthalene contaminant migration.


title: Prophecy and Vitality: Reclaiming E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood's Theories of Literary Affect as Critical Tools for the Analysis of Fiction

contributor:
Department of English
Master of Arts
Dr. Diepeveen
Dr. Bruce Greenfield
Dr. Anthony Enns
Leonard Diepeveen
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable

abstract: This thesis explores the value of literary affect and reader experiences thereof for critical analysis. Two authors, E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood, sit at the core of this thesis due to their respective ideas of ?prophecy? and ?vitality? that propose the importance of individual reader experience in interpreting fiction. Their theories propose, in different ways, that fiction has the ability to extend beyond its mimetic and contextual limits. Derek Attridge and Emmanuel Levinas have contributed to these theories more recently and from a different perspective to re-establish the examination of literature based in reader experience and its ineffable effect. These theories are examined and combined to achieve a holistic and functional theory of literary affect that can be applied critically. The novels used as examples are E. M. Forster‘s A Passage to India, Christopher Isherwood‘s Prater Violet, A Meeting by the River, and A Single Man.


title: Examining temporal variations of phytoplankton photoacclimation using a novel fluorescence based approach

contributor:
Department of Oceanography
Master of Science
Dr. Mary Jane Perry
Dr. Dan Kelley
Dr. Katja Fennel
Dr. Keith Thompson
Dr. John Cullen
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable

subject:
phytoplankton
chlorophyll a fluorescence

abstract: Models of primary production require parameters to describe photosynthesis as a function of irradiance, such as the saturation irradiance (Ek, ?mol photons m-2 s-1). However, this parameter varies in both time and space, is expensive to measure, and its variability in the oceans is not well described. A novel fluorescence-based approach is presented to determine an empirical parameter (EFT, ?mol photons m-2 s-1), which is strongly correlated with Ek. This correlation provides evidence to use EFT as a proxy for Ek. Using an autonomous profiling instrument package (SeaHorseTM, located on the Scotian Shelf) and an autonomous oceanographic observational buoy (Land/Ocean Biogeochemical Observatory, located in the Northwest Arm, N.S., Canada), the variability of EFT was examined on three time scales: hours, days, and seasons. Studying variations of EFT with these autonomous instruments provided insights to its variability on time scales relevant to models of primary production.


title: Seductive Convention: Reading, Romance and Realism in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out

contributor:
Department of English
Master of Arts
Not applicable
Dr. Leonard Diepeveen
Dr. Marjorie Stone
Dr. Ronald Huebert
Dr. Rohan Maitzen
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable

subject: Victorian Modernist Feminist Reading Realism Romance

abstract: This study analyses the oscillations between realism and romance in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. In these novels, the shift from realism to romance is often mediated by scenes of female reading. This thesis explores the relationship between female reading and genre and argues that the conventional story patterns of past texts exert a strong influence on a woman’s ability to conceptualize her own identity and shape her life story.


title: Scaling up to food webs: Effects of temperature on structure and function along a latitudinal gradient

contributor:
Department of Biology
Master of Science
Madhur Anand
Paul Bentzen
Hal Whitehead
Sina Adl
Jeffrey Hutchings
Tamara Romanuk
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable

subject: Food webs, climate change, latitudinal gradient

abstract: Global warming will affect every level of biological organization from the metabolism of individuals to the functioning of ecosystems.  I explored the effects of warming on three rock-pool meioinvertebrate communities along a latitudinal gradient (temperate, tropical, and sub-Arctic regions) to determine effects on community and food-web structure and functioning.  Warming affected regions differently, having a positive effect on sub-Arctic communities, a negative effect on temperate communities, and intermediate responses in tropical communities in terms of abundance, stability and extinction frequency.  Differences in structural properties of the food webs supported the insurance hypothesis: that greater redundancy in webs results in greater stability, and helped to explain why the tropical community was more stable than the temperate community in warmed treatments.  My study highlights the importance of considering differential response of species and communities from different latitudes and the importance of food web structure in predicting species response to global climate change.


title: Climate Change Impacts and Adaptations in the Forests of Central Nova Scotia

contributor: School of Resource & Environmental Studies

subject: Forest, forest management, climate change, modelling, LANDIS-II

abstract: Global climate change is at the forefront of issues in forest management.   Forest managers are now faced with the challenge of incorporating climate change into their forest management values and objectives, as existing paradigms may be invalidated by the changing climate.  The exploration of climate change impacts and formulation of potential management strategies will be necessary to reduce the vulnerability of forests.  Halifax Water manages forest watersheds for the purpose of supplying clean water to much of the Halifax Regional Municipality.  The purpose of this study is to characterize the future forest structure of the two principal watersheds supplying the Halifax Regional Municipality and to evaluate different adaptations incorporated into forest management using a modelling approach.  The landscape disturbance model LANDIS-II and ecosystem process model PnET-II were used to simulate the forest response to climate change and adaptive measures in timber harvesting.  Several impacts of climate change were examined in the study area.  The most drastic effect of climate change in the watersheds was considerable change in forest composition, with a sharp decline in the abundance of boreal species, such as balsam fir and black spruce, and an aggressive increase in some temperate and pioneer species, such as red maple and aspens.  Incorporating climate change adaptation into timber harvesting scenarios was found to be effective in minimizing trade-offs between timber supply and forest ecosystem integrity in the face of climate change.  The watersheds managed by Halifax Water represent a situation where the principal objective is the maintenance of water quality as opposed to timber production, and therefore offer a unique opportunity to implement cutting-edge practices and adaptive forest management focused on climate change resilience and resistance while also facilitating transition to the changing climate.


title: An After-school Physical Activity Intervention for Children: Examining the YMCA CATCH Kids Club Program

contributor:
School of Health & Human Performance
Master of Science
Dr. Angelo Belcastro
Dr. Anita Unruh
Dr. Phil Campagna
Dr. Angie Thompson
Dr. Laurene Rehman
Received
Not Applicable
Not Applicable

subject:
Physical Activity
After-school programs
children
Accelerometers

abstract: Children who are overweight and physically inactive are a great concern due to the potential negative health consequences. Afterschool physical activity interventions have become increasingly popular in hopes of addressing these health risks. An afterschool program that has drawn attention in recent years is one with a physical activity component known as Coordinated Approach to Child Health (CATCH). The present study examined the effect the CATCH program had on MVPA and physical fitness in children in grades 3 to 6 attending the YMCA afterschool program. Results indicated a significant increase in overall daily MVPA (p=0.047) as well as physical fitness (p=0.000) from baseline to post-test. It was also found that children attending the afterschool program were already accumulating substantial daily MVPA during their regular afterschool program. These findings indicate that while CATCH was successful in increasing MVPA, students attending afterschool programs may already be obtaining sufficient MVPA during afterschool time.


title: The Cosmic Christian Vision of Prudentius' Liber Cathemerinon, and the Inculturation of Augustan Vatic Poetry

contributor: Dr. Wayne Hankey, Dr. Peter O'Brien, Dr. Michael Fournier

subject: Prudentius, Aurelius Clemens,  Inculturation, Christian Latin Poetry, Late Antique

subject: Late Antique Poetry, Prudentius

abstract: A thesis examining the cross-cultural context of Prudentius' Liber Cathemerinon.

abstract: The object of this study is two-fold: 1) to show that the Liber Cathemerinon of Prudentius Aurelius Clemens is not just a series of unrelated hymns, but a poetic breviarium, or handbook, of fundamental Nicene Christian belief. Behind the literal narrative lies a salvation history, running through the chief elements of the Old and New Testaments. 2) To examine how Prudentius not only presents the salvation-history narrative, but also translates it into the Augustan poetic idiom through intertextual dialogue with Augustan pagan authors, primarily Vergil, Horace, and Ovid. By reinterpreting and refuting pagan religious sentiment through developed intertextual dialogue, Prudentius produces a hybrid world-view that is both Roman and Christian.


title: Winckelmanns Idee der Schönheit und ihr Einfluss auf Walter Pater

contributor:
Department of German
Master of Arts
Prof. Jane Curran
Prof. Hans-Günther Schwarz
Prof. Jane Curran
Prof. Judith Sidler
Prof. Hans-Günther Schwarz
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable

subject:
Winckelmann
Schönheit
Walter Pater

abstract:
The following work deals with the idea of Beauty as seen in the work of
Winckelmann and its influence on Walter Pater, the English critic. The
concept of Beauty is to be analyzed chronologically. First of all, the concept
of Beauty in Winckelmann’s work will be analysed and its particularities will
be described. Further, the concept of Beauty will be analyzed in so far as it
changes throughout time and influences the further development of aesthetic
theory. Hegel takes up Winckelmann’s idea of Beauty and uses this idea in
his own aesthetic theory. Walter Pater takes up and develops the idea of
Beauty not only from Winckelmann, but also from Hegel. The influence of
both art critics, Winckelmann and Hegel, on Walter Pater will be shown in
this thesis. The latter, as this thesis shows, was to develop his own aesthetic
theory, which is supported by the concept of Beauty in Winckelmann and
Hegel.


title: Commuting in Halifax, Nova Scotia: Exploring Midlife Women's Perceptions and Experiences of Active Transportation

contributor:
School of Health & Human Performance
Master of Arts
Dr. Wendy Young
Dr. Anita Unruh
Dr. Lois Jackson
Dr. Renee Lyons
Dr. Patricia Manuel
Dr. Wendy Young
Dr. Lois Jackson
Received
Not Applicable
Not Applicable

subject:
midlife women
physical activity
health promotion
active transportation
walking
cycling
Halifax
women
transportation
built environment
responsibilities
natural environment
social environment
workplace
commuting

abstract: Nova Scotia is one of the least active provinces in Canada and is experiencing rising levels of obesity and related diseases. Women in Canada have low rates of participation in physical activity, despite the many benefits. The purpose of this research was to develop an understanding of how the built, natural and social environments act as enablers and barriers to the use of active transportation for midlife women. A qualitative, grounded theory approach was used in conjunction with a feminist perspective to explore the research topic. Findings suggest that the characteristics of the route and region, the presence or lack of support, and the perceived value and benefits of active transportation affect the type of transportation mode that is selected for commuting. Findings also reveal the ways that women respond to and overcome barriers. Implications for health promotion and future research are discussed.