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L'imaginaire de Pierre Perrault : habiter la Québécoisie
Get PDFLe mémoire de maîtrise qui suit tente de cartographier l’imaginaire du cinéaste-poète Pierre Perrault. Faire de l’imaginaire un objet d’étude n’est pas sans contrainte puisque cela implique un voyage épistémologique loin des normes théoriques propre à nombre entreprises académiques. Il est nécessaire de ce fait de reconfigurer ces conceptions et d’opter pour un parti pris méthodologique qui prend fait et cause pour la mémoire et le travail de l’imagination. En prenant mes assises chez plusieurs penseurs de l’imaginaire tels que Gaston Bachelard et Gilbert Durand, et plus récemment Gilles Thérien et Martin Lefebvre dont l’approche sémiotique particulière arrive à point avec la démarche du cinéaste-poète qui a dédié sa vie à parcourir le territoire de l’âme de la Québécoisie.
En parcourant à mon tour cet imaginaire du pays perraldien, je montrerai qu’à travers un ensemble de structures et de constellations sémantiques et symboliques, la carte de la Québécoisie se dessine à travers une figure centrale et holistique : la figure de l’habiter
The Influence of Subjective Socioeconomic Status on Consumption Decision Making
Get PDFThis dissertation investigates the influence of subjective socioeconomic status (SSES) on consumers’ decision making in conspicuous, impulsive, and compulsive consumption. It comprises three essays. The first essay examines whether and how SSES impacts conspicuous consumption decisions. Two studies reveal that SSES drives consumers’ conspicuous purchases via a sense of entitlement, and that this effect of SSES is stronger for consumers who are higher in trait achievement vanity. The second and third essays probe the impact of SSES on consumers’ impulsive and compulsive buying decisions. The second essay posits that SSES drives both impulsive and compulsive buying through a sense of entitlement and price sensitivity. Such wellbeing-detrimental effect of SSES is expected to get worse in more materialistic consumers. In contrast, the third essay proposes a consumer wellbeing-beneficial process, that is, SSES buffers both impulsive and compulsive buying through a sense of control. This effect of SSES is predicted to get stronger in consumers who have a greater perceived power. These hypothesized relationships between SSES and impulsive and compulsive buying are tested and supported by results from both one cross-sectional study and one experimental study in each essay. In line with previous literature, this dissertation shows that SSES predicts consumer decisions consistently and independently from objective socioeconomic status (OSES)
Final Report of the Cataloguing Code of Ethics Review Working Group (CCERWG) to the Cataloguing and Metadata Standards Committee (CMSC) of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA-FCAB)
Get PDFA Knowledge Graph to Represent Software Vulnerabilities
Get PDFOver the past decade, there has been a major shift towards the globalization of the software industry, by allowing code to be shared and reused across project boundaries. This global code reuse can take on various forms, include components or libraries which are publicly available on the Internet. However, this code reuse also comes with new challenges, since not only code but also vulnerabilities these components might be exposed to are shared. The software engineering community has attempted to address this challenge by introducing bug bounty platforms and software vulnerability repositories, to help organizations manage known vulnerabilities in their systems. However, with the ever-increasing number of vulnerabilities and information related to these vulnerabilities, it has become inherently more difficult to synthesize this knowledge. Knowledge Graphs and their supporting technology stack have been promoted as one possible solution to model, integrate, and support interoperability among heterogeneous data sources.
In this thesis, we introduce a methodology that takes advantage of knowledge graphs to integrate resources related to known software vulnerabilities. More specifically, this thesis takes advantage of knowledge graphs to introduce a unified representation that transforms traditional information silos (e.g., VDBs, bug bounty programs) and transforms them in information hubs. Several use cases are presented to illustrate the applicability and flexibility of our modeling approach, demonstrating that the presented knowledge modeling approach can indeed unify heterogeneous vulnerability data sources and enable new types of vulnerability analysis
Artificial Neural Network Modeling Approach for Elastic Plastic Stress and Strain Computation for Notched Components
Get PDFFatigue assessment of notched components requires knowledge of elastic-plastic stress-strain responses at notch areas. Traditional elastic-plastic finite element analysis (FEA) is not computationally efficient, and approximation methods are not highly accurate. Therefore, the present study uses the integration of an artificial neural network (ANN) and finite element (FE) to predict elastic-plastic stress and strains at notch locations on the basis of an elastic FEA solution. To this end, two different Finite Element (FE) models were developed to generate hypothetical elastic and elastic-plastic stress and strain datasets for different hardening materials and load levels. The first FE model was based on an elastic deformation state, while the second one was under an elastic-plastic deformation state. The elastic stress data obtained from the elastic FE model was used as the input data, and the elastic-plastic stress-strain data from the nonlinear elastic-plastic FE model was utilized as the output data. Subsequently, the ANN was trained for the dataset to establish a relationship between the input and output data. The dataset fed to the ANN model was then divided into three groups: training, verification, and testing. The training data was used for the ANN learning algorithm to attain the desired accuracy by obtaining the hyperparameters of the model. Subsequently, the verification data was employed to evaluate chosen hyperparameters and make adjustments of the hyperparameters to determine optimum results, and in the last stage, the generalizability of the model was examined by the testing data. The predicted stress-strain results showed that the developed ANN model is able to accurately and efficiently predict elastic-plastic stress and strain for the notched body using only the elastic FEA solution. The developed ANN-FE methodology could efficiently estimate elastic-plastic stresses and strains for notch bodies with varying material hardening properties and load levels
Keepin’ it Weal in “The 514”: Hip-Hop as a Tool to Promote Well-Being in Montreal’s Marginalized Communities
Get PDFMany people today associate hip-hop with only rap music and the other commercialized aspects of the culture. However, hip-hop is, and always has been, more than simply a way to turn a profit or pass the time. Since its inception, hip-hop has aided the survival and flourishing of its progenitors and pioneers, primarily Black and Latino youth occupying the margins of society. To date, numerous scholars have examined how marginalized and oppressed people have used hip-hop to promote various aspects of well-being. While there are several ways in which well-being is perceived and defined, an important approach examines existential well-being, a philosophical approach that considers how people function along the full spectrum of human existence—physical, social, personal/psychological, and spiritual. This thesis uses existential well-being as a framework to explore how practitioners in Montreal use hip-hop to promote well-being in marginalized communities. As a form of research-creation, the core of the thesis is a series of three podcast episodes, where I explore the use of hip-hop with specific Montreal practitioners. Overall, the thesis illuminates various ways hip-hop has been used to promote well-being in Montreal and beyond. A key contribution of the thesis is to show that, while it may be useful to conceive of well-being in terms of four distinct domains, practitioners in Montreal tend to promote well-being as an integrated existential whole
The Changing Landscape: How the Indian Companies Act 2013 is impacting small-cap firms in India
No full textThe Indian Companies Act, 2013 brought along a set of well-defined norms relating to corporate governance to enhance accountability and transparency in corporate affairs. This paper examines the immediate and long-term implications of the implementation of the Indian Companies Act, 2013 on the performance of small firms in India. A new corporate governance score is created, based on the regulations of the Act, for each firm. The sample is divided into compliant and non-compliant firms based on their scores using this new metric prior to the Act. The study finds that firms that complied with the new regulations prior to the enforcement of the Act experienced higher abnormal returns when the new regulations were enacted. Furthermore, firms with higher governance scores also experienced higher long-run returns, post-Act. Governance scores were not significant for non-compliant firms, however. Higher audit fees are associated with better performance. For policymakers, businesses, and investors in India and other economies that have adopted similar reforms, these results have significant practical implementations. This study adds to the ongoing discussion about the value of adopting and complying with good governance practices
Exploring the Strategizing of a Human Resource Management Practice by Business Line Managers from a Middle Management Perspective
Get PDFABSTRACT
Exploring the Strategizing of a Human Resource Management Practice by Business Line Managers from a Middle Management Perspective
Lihui Zhang, Ph.D.
Concordia University, 2023
This Ph.D. research explores the strategizing of a HRM practice from a middle management perspective. Adopting the Strategy-as-Practice perspective (Whittington, 2006) as a backdrop, this research studies both an organization’s practice and its practitioners’ praxis to enact HRM practices. In other words, it examines what middle managers (practitioners) do (praxis) to enact one new performance management practice, and how these activities and processes unfold within internal and external environments to result in specific outcomes.
Adopting a grounded theory approach, this research conducts a single case study with a professional service firm (ABC Company) in mainland China. Data are collected mainly by conducting semi-structured interviews with business line middle managers, top management team members, and lower-level employees. Document analysis, observations and subject matter expert meetings are also utilized to complement interviews for data analysis.
Applying Floyd and Wooldridge’s (1992) four types of middle managers’ strategic influence that are based on two dimensions (upward vs. downward influence and integrative vs. divergent relative to the strategic intent), middle managers in ABC Company are found to exhibit more divergent influence downward to employees, no obvious divergent influence upward to the TMT, and some degree of integrative influences both downward and upward.
The strategizing processes are found to unfold over four phases. In each phase, middle managers’ sensemaking, the following actions and the consequent results reinforce each other to drive the process to evolve to the next phase. After a few years of implementation, ABC company had come to a strategic stalemate with two conflicting performance cultures coexisting, where the intended pay-for-performance culture was not fully established, and it was difficult to go back to its initial pay egalitarianism.
The working mechanisms that explain middle managers’ activities and the strategizing processes in ABC Company are represented as four mismatches between: (1) its goals and strategy design, (2) its strategy and human capital, (3) its organization and strategy, and (4) sensemaking and sensegiving.
This research has implications for strategic HRM in professional service firms. Firms need to build HRM infrastructure and human capital so as to better involve business line managers in HRM activities
Cerning
No full textCERNING is a collection of poems that address the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) facility, a beloved other, and a beloved landscape. It investigates the process of personal meaning making — the narration of origin stories as they repeatedly return to and reframe the question: how did we get here? In contrasting the highly personal and lyric, with language from the facility, an encounter is created between the personal and the scientific. These poems identify cyclical habits of meaning making in the context of our intricate contemporary moment as it verges on newness, the unknown, or collapse. The speaker moves between addressing a beloved, a natural landscape, and the contours of her inner world as a form of research into situatedness and meditative observation. Structurally, CERNING is composed of five main parts: an introduction, and then four sections, each corresponding to one area on the diagram of the CERN facility at the Franco-Swiss border. The poem titles borrow the organizing principle of the physical site. Various poetic forms, from prose poems to the lyric, are used to ask questions about the impulse to render scientifically 'legible'. The sequencing of the poems is a response to the scientific architecture of meaning production that the facility represents: from understanding antimatter, to isolating the God Particle, to recreating the conditions prior to the Big Bang. Ultimately, the collection creates space for reflection and prompts the reader to consider their own connections to the cosmic, the routine, and the narration of life
A Novel Approach for Anaerobic Treatment of Food Waste under Psychrophilic Temperature
Get PDFFood waste (FW) has become a significant concern because it can cause serious environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and hence investigating advanced methods to recycle
food waste into energy and materials is of immense importance. Food waste has a high energy potential and excellent biodegradability, and high-water content. As a result, food waste can be treated by anaerobic technology that allows efficient energy recovery and reduces the environment's carbon footprint. However, in cold regions like Canada, mesophilic anaerobic treatment (30–35°C) can be energy intensive. Therefore, in this study, a novel approach has been established to treat food waste at a lower operating temperature. The objective of the study is to develop a sustainable system to treat food waste at a lower ambient
temperature since climatic conditions in Canada are more suited for psychrophilic (1-20°C) temperatures rather than mesophilic (30–35°C) anaerobic treatment. Low temperature has a negative impact on cellular processes during anaerobic treatment, making
substrates unavailable to microbes. Hence, this study introduced a novel biogas recirculation strategy to overcome the thermodynamic constraints at lower temperatures. Food waste was collected exclusively from the residential area of downtown Montreal near the
Concordia campus for three months. The collected food waste sample was tested under anaerobic treatment conditions over a time period of 30 days to determine the biomethane generation
potential of food waste at mesophilic (30–35ºC) and psychrophilic (<20ºC) temperatures. In order to investigate the feasibility of the anaerobic treatment potential of food waste under psychrophilic
temperature and evaluate the efficiency of the biogas recirculation technique for enhanced biomethane production and system stability, batch tests were carried out on food waste in different trials. The anaerobic treatment potential of food waste under mesophilic conditions was examined for comparison. The impact of different substrate-to-inoculum ratios (0.5, 0.75, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 4.0) and six different total solid percentages (5%, 10%, 12%, 15%, 18%, 20%) under mesophilic (30–35ºC) and psychrophilic (1-20ºC) temperatures were investigated for evaluating the optimum conditions for anaerobic treatment of food waste. Additionally, to evaluate the effect of particle size distribution on methane yield, food waste samples were generated using two different particle size
distributions: (1) majority of particle sizes less than 2mm and (2) majority of particle sizes larger than 2mm.
Methane concentrations in the produced biogas were found to be 69%-94% under mesophilic anaerobic treatment, and methane concentration was observed between 68%-93% under
psychrophilic anaerobic treatment with methane recirculation which was close to mesophilic treatment. The COD removal efficiency was found to be between 40% and 79% at mesophilic anaerobic treatment, while the removal of COD ranged from 34% to 82% for psychrophilic anaerobic treatment with biogas recirculation. A maximum reduction of 91% in volatile solids(VS) was observed under mesophilic anaerobic treatment, whereas the highest VS reduction was found to be 92% after psychrophilic anaerobic treatment with biogas recirculation. Furthermore, a larger particle diameter has no major impact on methane production. Thus, the biogas recirculation approach eliminates the need for energy-intensive mechanical particle size reduction. In conclusion, the biogas recirculation technique at psychrophilic conditions has demonstrated improved methane generation and resulted in higher VS reduction and COD removal efficiency comparable to the results obtained from the mesophilic anaerobic treatment. It is evident that applying anaerobic digestion systems with biogas recirculation under psychrophilic conditions could have significant potential in providing economically feasible and energy-efficient options for treating food waste in cold regions. However, further study will be required to develop a comprehensive guideline in this field