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Shape files from Proposing targets and limits to urban sprawl: How likely are current greenbelt scenarios for Montreal to achieve proposed reference values by 2070?
No full textThis dataset includes the shapefiles of the built-up areas used in the studies by by Nazarnia et al. (2016) and Mosharafian and Jaeger (2025/2026):
Nazarnia, N., Schwick, C., Jaeger, J.A.G. (2016): Accelerated urban sprawl in Montreal, Quebec City, and Zurich: Investigating the differences using time series 1951-2011. Ecological Indicators 60: 1229-1251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2015.09.020
Mosharafian, S., Jaeger, J.A.G. (2025 or 2026, in press): Proposing targets and limits to urban sprawl: How likely are current greenbelt scenarios for Montreal to achieve proposed reference values by 2070? Environmental Management
Animals crossing roads in the Laurentians: Does use of crossing structures help reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions on unfenced roads? News Bulletin No 1
No full text- Identifying and evaluating wildlife roadkill quantities and culvert use along Route 117 (R117) and Chemin du Lac-Supérieur in the Laurentians (Ch. L.-S.)
- Summer 2025 surveys found: 249 dead animals on R117; 1,864 dead animals on Ch. L.-S.
- Mammal mortality numbers were highest for red squirrels, raccoons, and white-tailed deer.
- Amphibian mortality was extremely high with 1,571 individuals, including 1,000+ green frogs.
- Monitoring includes 16 culverts with 74 cameras to assess wildlife movement under Route 117 and Ch. L.-S
Optimizing and Validating the Performance of a Low-cost Potentiostat for In-Situ Flow Battery Testing
Get PDFAbstract
Optimizing and Validating the Performance of a Low-cost Potentiostat for In-Situ Flow Battery Testing
Dharik Purohit
This thesis relates to the design, optimization, and validation of a low-cost potentiostat tailored specifically for the requirements of flow battery testing. The primary objective is to deliver a reliable solution that maintains high-performance standards necessary for precise electrochemical measurements, achieved through simplified circuit design, affordable components, and open-source software.
The potentiostat design incorporates an expanded compliance voltage of ±2.5V, dynamic current range selection using a multiplexer, and enhanced noise filtering for accurate operation in aqueous systems and microelectrode setups. The system’s functionality was further extended with the addition of features like two-way pulse testing and battery charge-discharge testing over multiple cycles. Comprehensive performance validation was conducted to ensure the potentiostat meets the requirements for electrochemical applications, with tests focused on accuracy, stability, and flexibility across a range of experimental conditions.
The CellStat’s design specifications were derived through simulations and theoretical calculations, including the assessment of compliance voltage, DAC/ADC resolution, and projected measurement errors. These theoretical benchmarks were validated through cyclic voltammetry experiments under varying scan rates, showcasing the potentiostat’s ability to reliably measure and control redox reactions in flow batteries. The work highlights the potential for low-cost, open source potentiostats to meet the growing demand for accessible electrochemical testing tools, supporting advancements in renewable energy technologies
Identifying Socio-Technical Risks in Open-Source Software for Scholarly Communications: Tools, Metrics, and Opportunities for Libraries to Support Sustainable Development
Get PDFObjective –In the interest of helping libraries make evidence based decisions about open-source software (OSS), the objective of this research is to establish whether tools that automate the evaluation of OSS project communities could be used specifically on scholarly communications OSS (SC-OSS) projects to provide actionable insights for libraries to guide strategic decision making and corrective interventions.
Methods –Seven OSS project communities were selected for evaluation, chosen from widely used scholarly communicationssoftware applications used in Canada for repositories, journal hosting, and archives. While all aspects of OSS projects may be evaluated at the project or network/ecosystem level, addressing the actors, software, or orchestration (Linåker et al., 2022), community evaluation that looks at the interaction patterns between project contributors is the practical focus of this research paper since there are multiple human factors that librarians who may not be software developers can impact. We identified a community analysis tool called csDetector (Almarimi et al., 2021) from the software engineering literature. This tool was chosen based on two main criteria: 1) ability to analyze data from GitHub repositories (the code sharing platform used by all selected SC-OSS projects) and 2) capacity to automatically produce results without manual intervention. Since some of the seven OSS projects were spread across multiple GitHub repositories, a total of 11 datasets from GitHub, each containing three months’ worth of data, were analyzed using csDetector.
Results –The results produced by csDetector are interesting though not without limitations. The tool is complex and requires the user to have software development skills to use it effectively. It lacked sufficient documentation, which made interpreting the results challenging. The analysis from csDetector, which identifies community smells (i.e., types of organizational and social dysfunction within software projects [Tamburri et al, 2015, 2021a]), suggests that these SC-OSS project communities are experiencing knowledge sharing difficulties, weak collaboration practices, or other member interaction dysfunctions that can eventually permanently affect community health. Having a software tool that can take metrics from GitHub and detect community smells is a valuable way to illustrate problems in the project’s community and point the way to remedying dysfunction.
Conclusion–While the OSS community analysis tool csDetector currently presents several hurdles before it can be used, and results generated come with caveats, it can be part of an approach to support evidence based decision-making pertaining to SC-OSS in libraries. The information provided can be worth monitoring (especially social network metrics such as centrality) and their results, particularly for community smells, identify problems that may be addressed by non-developers. Awareness of community smells in OSS can provide a deeper understanding of OSS sustainability as it provides a language to identify suboptimal social dynamics
I Love (Monster) Girls
No full text“I Love (Monster) Girls” is a hybrid-poetic exploration of monstrosity as an escape from queer trauma, disability, and grief. The project has two primary components; (1) autofiction as ‘Syd’ seeks therapy for their slew of tumultuous relations and suicidal ideation; and (2) prose, lyric, and film script that explore Syd’s explosive and occasionally violent relationship with the shapeshifting Monster Girl that they find in their apartment wall. These two components shift between real world experiences and a highly fantastical look at self-loathing, anxiety, anger, hypersexuality and isolation. The project is inspired by
other contemporary texts such as Ariana Reines’ Coeur de Lion and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, that also seek to comprehend heartbreak and violence through an author-forward perspective, and by monstrously queer media such as Psycho Nymph Exile by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, the film Ex Machina directed by Alex Garland or the graphic novel Layers of White by solopipb, all of which explore sexual and often violent relationships with monsters
A theoretical analysis of Nigerian politicians and their godfathers
Get PDFPolitical decision-making in Nigeria is often influenced by a system of patron-client relationships, commonly referred to as Godfatherism. This study examines how political Godfathers shape the policy choices of politicians and, in turn, affect democratic accountability. By extending the Maskin and Tirole (2004) model, this paper introduces the role of campaign contributions from Godfathers as a critical
factor in affecting political choices.
The theoretical framework considers a two-period model where elected politicians choose between policies that align with public welfare or the preferences of their Godfathers. The model accounts for re-election incentives, voter awareness, and institutional strength, revealing that politicians are likelier to prioritize the Godfather’s interests over public needs when electoral accountability is weak. The study also compares three governance structures which are Direct Democracy, Judicial Power, and Representative Democracy, to evaluate which system minimizes the distortive effects of this elite influence
Deep Learning Approximation of Matrix Functions: From Feedforward Neural Networks to Transformers
Get PDFDeep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the last decade. Transformers, a type of DNN, have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) through models like ChatGPT, Llama and more recently, Deepseek. While transformers are used mostly in NLP tasks, their potential for advanced numerical computations remains largely unexplored. This presents opportunities in areas like surrogate modeling and raises fundamental questions about AI's mathematical capabilities.
We investigate the use of transformers for approximating matrix functions, which are mappings that extend scalar functions to matrices. These functions are ubiquitous in scientific applications, from continuous-time Markov chains (matrix exponential) to stability analysis of dynamical systems (matrix sign function). Our work makes two main contributions. First, we prove theoretical bounds on the depth and width requirements for ReLU DNNs to approximate the matrix exponential. Second, we use transformers with encoded matrix data to approximate general matrix functions and compare their performance to feedforward DNNs. Through extensive numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the choice of matrix encoding scheme significantly impacts transformer performance. Our results show strong accuracy in approximating the matrix sign function, suggesting transformers' potential for advanced mathematical computations
An Empirical Study on Learning Models and Data Augmentation for IoT Anomaly Detection
Get PDFThis thesis studies the application and impact of deep learning methods in anomaly detection, a critical area within security applications. While deep learning's popularity is driven by its perceived ability to manage complex patterns in large datasets and perform feature engineering inherently, this thesis questions these assumptions. By revisiting feature selection and data augmentation techniques, this research evaluates their effectiveness in improving the performance of deep-learning-based anomaly detection methods. Furthermore, it examines the impact of other essential factors such as model choice (both traditional machine learning and deep learning), data balancing, and hyperparameter tuning on anomaly detection performance.
From these investigations, the thesis reports that the common beliefs surrounding deep learning are not universally valid, highlighting the need for a framework to evaluate the usefulness of features and data for specific cases. To address this gap, a new framework is proposed, guiding data users and anomaly detection tools toward optimal configurations, including feature selection, model selection, hyperparameters, and data augmentation techniques. The effectiveness of this framework is demonstrated using two major IoT datasets, offering insights into improving anomaly detection systems through strategic and evidence-based approaches
Investigating municipal Access to Information via news coverage of Montreal’s housing crisis
Get PDFThis study seeks to reveal the role of Access to Information (ATI) and public records in local journalism by conducting a thematic analysis of 107 news media articles about Montreal’s housing crisis, and by examining original and previously released Access to Information request packages. This work highlights how local news media have covered the housing crisis thus far, with a deliberate focus on the sources and angles used, and how they might address the issue differently going forward, with increased focus on using official documents and ATI requests in the coverage. Importantly, this study focuses on Montreal’s municipal ATI system, as previous work in academia has mostly focused on either Canada’s federal ATI system or provincial/territorial systems.
This study reveals that, in stories about the housing crisis, local news media have tended to favour the voices of politicians and official statements, while only a few rare outlets sporadically use ATI to deepen their reporting.
This study recognizes that tight deadlines in news work and long delays in the municipal ATI system are in part responsible for local journalists’ heavy reliance on political sources and official statements. However, the result of not using ATI as a journalistic source leads to a journalism that remains at the surface level and fails to provide citizens the information they are entitled to, that would allow them to make more informed decisions about municipal policies related to housing and municipal elections. With this important function of local journalism in mind, this study suggests increased use of ATI requests in gaining a deeper understanding of complex issues that directly target citizens
Paradoxical Value Co-Creation Through Destructive Behaviors: Trash Talking in Dota 2
Get PDFCo-creation is always considered an outcome of positive behaviors. Conversely, co-destruction is mostly treated as a negative outcome of negative or destructive behaviors. However, there are instances that negative or destructive behaviors paradoxically create value. Conducting nine interviews and analysing ten extensive threads, my findings suggest that under circumstances, there are more angles to destructive behaviors rather than being merely destructive! Exploring Dota 2 players’ motifs for trash talking that is a negative behavior, I identified four types of value in trash talking. First trash talking for the pleasure of winning, second trash talking for entertainment and fun, third trash talking for gameplay self-perception enhancement and feeling better about oneself and fourth trash talking for social bonding and friendship ties. These findings contribute to the co-creation and trash talking literatures challenging the predominant ideologies that co-creation is always stemmed in positive behaviors and that trash talking is always a negative behavior