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Effects of land reclamation on organic matter decomposition at smelter impacted hill slopes
No full textMining, smelting and forest harvest led to severe environmental disturbances across Sudbury
region, resulting in extensive forest cover loss, soil erosion and contamination with acids and
metals. Regreening efforts began in 1978, by liming, fertilizing and tree planting. However little
work has been done to assess the influence of reclamation practices on soil processes and
functioning in these industrially damaged landscapes. In particular there is a lack of such
information for hillslopes and other challenging sites. In view of this, the present study
examined the effects of land reclamation on key ecosystem processes such as litter
decomposition and soil respiration (CO2) and CH4 and N2O fluxes and the ecological controls
that regulate these processes. The study was conducted along two parallel transects, one within a
barren area and the other within a regreened area at a steep hillslope within the Kelly lake
watershed, a study site a few kms of the Copper Cliff smelter in Sudbury. Traditional litter bag decomposition studies are time consuming, expensive, and lack
standardization of litter quality. I therefore used a new Tea Bag Index methodology to measure
early stage decomposition with two contrasting standardized substrates (Green and Rooibos tea).
Tea bag Index parameters were used to quantify the rate at which standardized litter is broken
down (decomposition rate index (k)) and to measure the undecomposed residual substrate in the
soil (stabilization factor (S)) which has a potential for sequestration. The results revealed that
decomposition of Green tea (labile substrate) was twice as fast as Rooibos tea (recalcitrant
substrate) in both the reclaimed and barren areas. I found that at reclaimed areas the average
Green tea mass loss rates (1.37 ± 0.01 (SE) gm), CO2 production rates (98.84 ± 5.46 (SE) mg m-2
h-1), CH4 consumption rates (- 0.0104 ± 0.00 (SE) µg m-2 h-1 ) were statistically higher than at
barren areas, where the average Green tea mass loss were (1.25 ± 0.01 (SE) gm), CO2 production
rates were (33.79 ± 2.26 (SE) mg m-2 h-1 ) and CH4 flux rates were (0.0014 ± 0.001 (SE) µg m-2
h-1) respectively. Average Rooibos tea mass loss on the other hand showed no significant
differences occurred between reclaimed areas (0.69 ± 0.02 (SE) gm) and at barren areas (0.64 ±
0.02 (SE) gm). N2O flux rates also did not differ significantly between reclaimed (-0.01048 ±
0.0006 (SE) µg m-2 h-1) and barren areas and (-0.00073 ± 0.000452 (SE) µg m-2 h-1). However,
when the combined substrate measure of decomposition rate index (k) was compared, there was
no significant differences between the reclaimed area soils (0.012 ± 0.001 (SE) g·g-1·day-1) and the still barren untreated soils (0.013 ± 0.001 (SE) g·g-1·day-1). Only the Stabilization factor (S)
proved to significantly different with a higher value for the barren soil (0.16 ± 0.009 (SE) g g-1 )
than the reclaimed soil (0.09 ± 0.006 (SE) g g-1) suggesting that the barren areas had slower
decomposition resulting in a greater potential for accumulation of undecomposed organic matter
in the soil. All soils tested proved to be sources of carbon dioxide. The reclaimed areas appeared
to be small sinks for methane and nitrous oxide, whereas at barren areas results were less
consistent and the soils appeared as likely to emit or consume methane and nitrous oxide fluxes My main finding was that land reclamation enhanced decomposition of labile substrates
CO2 production rates and CH4 consumption rates but decomposition rate index (k) and soil
respiration rates (CO2) and CH4, and N2O fluxes were still very low compared to other less
disturbed ecosystems. Stepwise multiple regression analysis revealed that decomposition of
Green tea (labile substrate) was most likely influenced by microclimatic factors (i.e. moisture)
and that decomposition and soil respiration (CO2 production rates) decreased with increasing
temperature at barren areas. Topography (i.e. elevation(m)) had little or no effect on carbon
turnover rates across the study sites. In conclusion, land reclamation influenced key ecosystem
processes such as decomposition of labile organic matter and soil respiration, but even after 37
years post-treatment, Sudbury soils in these hillslope sites were shown to be still under severe
environmental stress
Western narratives, themes and memories of the Arab Spring: an analysis of western newspaper coverage of the Arab Spring and meaning-making through social and historical memory
No full textThe mass uprisings that occurred during the Arab Spring of 2011 changed the political
landscape of the Arab-speaking world in a matter of months. Western newspapers of
record, such as Le Monde and Le Figaro in France, The New York Times in the United
States, and The Times in Britain, all provided extensive coverage of the events in the
Middle East and North Africa. Through an analysis of the main themes found in the
narratives established by the newspapers a general sense of Western impressions towards
the Arab Spring can be discerned. Additionally, memories that were frequently
remembered by the commentators of the Arab Spring shall be examined to determine what
memories of the past were consulted in the service of meaning-making for writers featured
in the four newspapers of record
The architectural segregation of Chicago Black identity in the South Side
No full textA well-known Latin proverb states, “knowledge is power”1 and in light of this, theoretically those who possess
the most knowledge inherently have the most power. Across the United States, historically, education has been denied to Black Americans as a means to keep them subservient to their White counterparts.
Despite slavery being abolished in 1865, while the Black community was newly empowered, they were simultaneously further oppressed as their lack of access to education emphasized the stigma of them
as second class citizens. 2 Of particular interest, Chicago, Illinois emerged as a city with a deep-rooted connection to America’s extensive Black community. Built upon the imbalanced scales of Black
oppression and empowerment, Chicago is a clear precedent for the ramifications of slavery and subsequent human rights movements. Today in Chicago, the majority of all under- and low-performing high schools are on the city’s South Side. 3 Through decades of redlining 4 and presently maintained preference 5, Chicago is one of the cities with the highest neighborhood segregation indexes in the United States. 6
Despite the change in housing legislation 7, and while the majority of visible minorities
have disseminated into White society, the Black community has remained, united in separation within the
South Side of the city. Architecturally, Chicago is likewise considered home to modern American design. This city has an impressive historic architectural narrative, but what remains hidden beneath this
proud history is the use of architecture as a means for implicit segregation by way of illegal (and at one time legal) housing discrimination 8 and spatial access. Although one design implementation
cannot solve years of historic oppression or the disenfranchisement that subsequently followed, this proposal is
designed to expand on the conversation and make visible the historic segregation and the current state of events befalling Chicago’s South Side through a socio-architectural lens. The following thesis will question; how the South Side may retain the autonomy and empowerment that segregation has produced, while minimizing the inherent challenges caused by this lack of integration. Furthermore,
it will consider the possibilities of how a platform may be programmed which allows for the amelioration of education, promotion of continued Black excellence, and advocacy of Black history
Falconbridge Nikkelverk 1910-1929-2004: an international company in Norway
No full textOriginally published in Norwegian in 2004, this English translation of "Falconbridge nikkelverk 1910-1929-2004 : et internasjonalt selskap i Norge" describes the history of the Kristiansands Nikkelraffineringsverk, a nickel refinery established in Kristiansand Norway in 2010. The refinery was purchased by Falconbridge in 1929
Integrated interpretation of the Blake River Group using geophysical data from metal earth's Rouyn-Noranda transect, Quebec
No full textThe study of crustal structure in Precambrian greenstone belts is crucial for understanding of mineral deposits and their genesis. This thesis takes on an integrated interpretation of geophysical data for Metal Earth’s Rouyn-Noranda transect as part of a large collaborative research. Regional scale seismic reflection, magnetotelluric and gravity data as well as magnetic and surface geology maps are used to conduct the study. The seismic reflection data was enhanced by the application of the curvelet enhancement method and seismic attributes for to improve interpretation ability. Two sets of density models were used, namely, constrained and unconstrained models. A 2-D conjugate gradient inversion of Magnetotelluric data was done after the phase tensor and skew angle were analyzed to determine dimensionality and directionality. The data was interpreted together in the form of integrated
interpretation in order to understand the structure and architecture of the crust along the transect. The seismic data is characterized by poorly reflective upper crust, strongly reflective mid crust, exhibiting complex reflection structure sub-horizontal reflections truncated by gently dipping reflections. The lower crust is characterized by sub-parallel reflections
with weak continuity. The magnetotelluric model is characterized by a resistive upper crust with conductive pathways penetrating through the resistive bodies; and a conductive mid-to-lower crust. Integration of the data reveals a good correlation between the data sets and the upper crustal conductive conduits correlate directly with surface geology map structures
a well as lineations from the magnetic map. The highly reflective mid crust correlates with the conductive feature in the mid crust in which the correlation is attributed to partial melts in the mid-crust. The density models also show a good correlation with the seismic data and were used to constrain the depths and dimensions of plutonic rocks along the transect
Opinion mining of online users’ comments using Natural Language Processing and machine learning
Get PDFWith the widespread popularity of World Wide Web, increasing number of people are active on
social media and websites to post their opinions towards products or special events or to make
decisions based on the opinions and experiences of people on social media. These Online
opinions are unstructured or structured textual data containing insignificant as well as significant
information which has attracted attention of researchers to extract knowledge from such textual
data. Opinion mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques help to find
information through the huge number of reviews in the form of unstructured comments. In this
research a model is proposed for classification of online user’s feedback and opinions to improve
the accuracy and precision of the classification in comparison to the existing research on the
same dataset. More-precisely, in this research, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques as
well as various supervised machine learning techniques are used to classify users’ opinions. The
performances of all the classifiers are evaluated to find the best performance. The data set
contains 689 comments extracted from the users' comments from Amazon.com, collected and
annotated by Minqing Hu and Bing Liu. The selected comments are about the product
“Speakers” on Amazon.com. Each comment is written by one user and it has a certain label that
shows the author's desire to comment. This label can be classified as "positive", "negative" or
"neutral". The data is provided in the form of XML file, a semi-structured format. The opinions
are processed using natural language processing techniques, for instance by removing
punctuations, removing URLs, removing numbers, removing spaces, removing stop-words, and
their features are extracted using natural language processing techniques, for example, Word
Tokenization, Stemming and Bag of words and Bag of N-grams and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF_IDF). The proposed method was implemented using Python
programming language and Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and other libraries in python. The
proposed model gave a peak of 88% precision by Random Forest with 140 trees and bigram
feature space. Also, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Artificial Neutral Network, and SVM
gave 87% precision for trigram feature space
Architecture towards a good death | The landscape of the dead in the world of the living
No full textAn integral fact of life is death, it
connects an individual to all times, peoples
and places, but it is not a stagnant constant,
it is a process firmly entrenched in each and
every individual as well as the overall zeitgeist.
Unfortunately, the majority of North Americans
have an image of death often discordant to
its reality, it is habitually viewed at best as an
uncomfortable topic and at worst as a taboo.
People are often not even aware of their
own negative relationship to death and are
therefore accepting of the uncomfortable
association to it. This disconnect has left
society with insufficient, lackluster and
unsupportive death infrastructure. Yet death
is intricately woven into the fabric of life,
it is a constant companion that should be
acknowledged, addressed and designed for
and as an architect there is a moral obligation
to consider not only the needs of the living
inhabitants but those who will occupy the
landscape indefinitely in death. Due to this link
the definition of one encompasses the other,
therefore life and death are not a line from
one to the other but instead a circle with no
perceptible break. Society has lost sight of the
multi-generational aspect of death, causing
this gap and calling for a solution to bridge
the divide between life and death, closing the
cycle between individuals. The thesis works
to frame one of these moments in the cycle,
allowing for both life and death to co-exist
comfortably within one programmed space.
The proposal, at its heart is a greenspace
cum deathscape, integrated into the existing
planned and natural landscape and then drawing people in with programs supportive
of the acts encircling interment, celebrations,
memorializations and rituals. It has been split
into two main programs; one a symbol of
welcoming for both casual visitors and those
with a ritual purpose and the other a centre
for those in all stages in life to come and leave
a less tangible piece of themselves for others.
Both are intended for use in everyday life in
a way deemed respectful to its inhabitants
while having an intrinsic connection to death.
The path connecting these acts then as the
threshold both guiding an individual through
a journey of self discovery and tempering the
transition from one stage to another.
The proposed thesis looks at death
history in Sudbury and its contemporary
practices, the historic to modern tradition of
Dia de los Muertos in Mexico, Memento Mori
as both a concept and an art movement,
as well as incorporating information learned
from case studies before moving onto the
site and the actual proposed design. The
ideas surrounding it are laid out through both
factual explorations as well as more abstract
interpretations and personal art creations. In
summary, places of death were not always
shunned by the living but in an increasingly
secular world people have lost sight of the
rituals that give both life and death meaning.
Dying a good death means many things to
many people and it is up to architecture, and
therefore architects, to support the process
that is the most meaningful for the person and
their bearers going through it
Indigenous identity and the urban environment : architecture for uncovering and restoring indigenous cultures in the City of Toronto
No full textColonization has traumatized Indigenous peoples across Canada and the world for
centuries. Due to failure to recognize rights and traditional ways of life, many Indigenous
people are forced to relocate to urban areas in search of social and economic opportunities
in hopes of a better future. However, the urban built environment currently does not
support these urban Indigenous peoples where their identity is both physically and
conceptually concealed behind colonial facades. Thus, even in an attempt to provide
culturally specific space, the city is still guilty of inflicting trauma. This is especially true in
the city of Toronto where, despite having the largest Indigenous population in Ontario,
cultural identity is virtually non-existent.
As such, the question being investigated is, how can Indigenous presence in the city of
Toronto be strengthened through restorative architecture that enhances cultural identity,
not hinder it? This thesis will explore the ways in which agency can be returned to
Canadian Indigenous peoples through the creation of a Living Learning Centre; a hybrid
program that supports the practice of Indigenous culture in the city while fostering the
education of non-Indigenous people in order to strengthen inter-cultural relationships. In
doing so, the objective is to generate greater discussion about issues faced by Indigenous
people, serving as a catalyst for change on a larger scale