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Three Arabic Fishing Songs from the Musandam Peninsula
No full textThe coasts of the Arabian Peninsula are home to fishing communities with rich and diverse oral traditions. While various other types of texts have been recorded, fishing songs in this region have received little attention. The present study seeks to fill this gap through documentation of three Arabic fishing songs from the Musandam Peninsula of eastern Arabia, at the meeting point between the main body of the Gulf and the Batinah coast of northern Oman. The chapter opens with a description of the Musandam Peninsula and the languages spoken there. It reviews oral traditions of the Gulf and reflects on their enduring importance, with a focus on fishing songs. After introducing the research context and the consultant, the body of the study presents and analyses three songs: Ayāllā ‘O God’, Xəbbāṭ ‘little kingfish’, and Lā ramētə ‘I will not give it up’. The study concludes with reflections on the purpose, musical and literary structure, and dialectal patterning of the Arabic in these songs within the wider regional context
(Im)perfect Precision: Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) Workflows for Exterior Retrofit Wall Panels using Industrial Robotics
No full textIn Canada, a large stock of buildings built before the introduction of national energy codes are deteriorating, leading to poor energy performance. Current research on retrofit solutions explores various ways to manually prefabricate exterior insulation panels to improve building envelopes. In parallel, but not related to retrofits, significant research in integrating robotics into construction workflows exists, but primarily focuses on new construction. This thesis proposes an alternative panelized retrofit solution by investigating Design for Manufacturing and Assembly workflows using robotics for highly deformed existing buildings. Issues with traditional panelized retrofits are addressed including the difficulty of existing building deformation, bespoke surface openings, and long on-site timelines. This research assesses appropriate software tools; explores the relationship between scale, fabrication processes, and materiality; examines the role of robotics in architectural conservation projects; tests methods of building complex panel geometries; and proposes a design and robotically assisted construction technique for retrofit wall panels
3D Assemblies of Plasmonic Nanocrystals: Fabrication and Optical Properties
Get PDFThe goal of this thesis was to fabricate plasmonic supercrystals and investigate their unique optical properties, which have been demonstrated to outperform their 1D and 2D counterparts. This research explores three bottom-up fabrication techniques, with the most promising approach being the layer-by-layer deposition method to directly add successive nanocrystal monolayers onto pre-existing plasmonic substrates. The optical properties of these 3D assemblies reveal that the coupling between adjacent nanocubes from different layers generate a distinctive peak within the NIR region. Additionally, subsequent depositions using gold nanoparticles have been shown to significantly enhance the dipolar mode and the dipole-dipole coupling mode. The thesis also demonstrates the importance of angle dependencies, especially with p-polarized light, where the plasmon modes undergo a blue-shift as the angle of incidence gets larger. These finding have the potential to enhance applications in optical sensors, energy harvesting, and in surface enhanced Raman scattering
Navigating the Unknown: Radar–Inertial Localization for All-Terrain Autonomous Vehicles in GNSS-denied Environments
Get PDFIn GNSS-denied environments such as dense forests, tunnels, and hostile theaters, LiDAR can fail under poor visibility and is easily detected by adversaries. Radar, by contrast, is less conspicuous and more robust to adverse conditions. This thesis introduces a radar–inertial navigation framework tailored to two operational modes. First, an Adaptive Error-State Extended Kalman Filter fuses Doppler velocities from automotive 4D radar with IMU data and refines noise parameters in real time for unstructured environments. Second, a radar scan-matching module aggregates returns into augmented point-clouds, and a point-to-plane ICP algorithm estimates relative poses to reduce drift in structured settings. Two fusion strategies—loose coupling in a factor graph and a Stochastic Cloning EKF—integrate these ICP solutions with high-rate radar–inertial odometry. Field tests in off-road and subterranean scenarios confirm accurate, stealthy localization, establishing 4D radar-inertial fusion as a promising solution for GPS-denied autonomous ground navigation
Development and Application of Simplified and Advanced Modeling Procedures for Timber-Concrete Composite Structures
Get PDFTimber-concrete composite (TCC) structures combine the natural aesthetic and sustainability of timber with the strength and fire resistance of concrete, offering several structural, environmental, and economic advantages. A crucial element in the performance of TCC structures is the connection between concrete and timber which determines the effectiveness of the composite action. Among various types of connections available in the literature, notched connections provide a cost-effective and structurally robust solution for constructing TCC systems. However, existing analytical models for design and assessment of notched connections are limited and mostly based on oversimplifying assumptions. The first two phases of this research program aim to develop both simplified and advanced modeling methods to better understand the behavior of notched connections. The first phase focuses on modeling notched connections in pushout tests, while the second phase investigates their behavior in TCC beams. In each phase, detailed 2D finite element (FE) models are developed and validated against various test specimens, followed by conducting a series of parametric studies to assess the influence of key design parameters. Based on FE analysis results, closed-form equations are derived to approximate stress distributions in notched connections, accounting for nonlinear and multi-axial stress conditions in concrete. These equations form the basis of a simplified analytical model proposed for predicting the load-carrying capacity and failure mode of notched connections. The difference between the behavior of notched connections in pushout and beam configurations is investigated to ensure the proposed analytical model is applicable to both configurations. The proposed model is verified against experimental and FE analysis results and further evaluated against the Eurocode standard. The final phase of the research involves extending the modeling capabilities of a three-dimensional FE analysis software, VecTor3, for performance assessment of TCC structures, with a specific focus on the two-way behavior of cross-laminated (CLT)-concrete composite slabs. Appropriate constitutive material models, failure criteria, and link elements are implemented into the software to accommodate modeling of timber and its connection with concrete. The analysis procedure is validated against timber, concrete, and TCC test specimens
Supercritical Semi-Linear Elliptic Problems Using Variational Principles
Get PDFThe thesis investigates the use of variational methods to study elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) with supercritical nonlinearities. By focusing on convex subsets of a Banach space, the research overcomes compactness issues typically encountered with nonlinearities that exceed the Sobolev embedding exponent. This enables the effective use of standard variational techniques, leading to existence results for solutions. The work covers two supercritical elliptic problems with different boundary conditions. First, it establishes the existence of a nontrivial solution for a Neumann problem in the unit ball, where the nonlinearity f(u) has a continuous primitive. Then, the dissertation explores a Dirichlet boundary problem in a bounded annular domain, with a supercritical nonlinearity satisfying specific regularity conditions. In both cases, the study demonstrates the existence of solutions under symmetry and monotonicity assumptions, showing how the variational approach applied to convex subsets of the Sobolev space resolves these complex problems despite supercriticality-related compactness issues
The Protester as Producer: Militant Action and the U.S. Radical Media
Get PDFThe Protester as Producer: Militant Action and the U.S. Radical Media analyses militant protest as an apparatus of cultural production. I examine the relationship between militant protest tactics and the radical media to show how actions like vandalism, sabotage, armed self-defence, armed propaganda, and self-immolation circulated as new forms of cultural expression and public discourse in the context of the U.S. war in Vietnam and its concurrent racial crises. The histories I have unearthed through archival research transform our understanding of protest in the Vietnam era and beyond, revising conventional histories of militancy in this period and instead bringing militant tactics more closely into line with everyday cultural expressions of rebellion and revolt. My approach shifts scholarly focus from institutional histories of conflict to the everyday tactics of rebellion which are often depoliticized or ignored in favour of more formalized political action. To analyze everyday tactics and their networked circulation, I adopt Michel de Certeau’s understanding of “popular tactics” as the everyday practices by which people “make use” of institutional spaces, networks, and procedures for their own ends. Protesters deployed militant tactics not only as a means of withdrawing their efficiency from “the war machine,” but also as a form of anti-war propaganda that fostered cultural and ideological connections between disparate radical groups. By analysing tactics as cultural forms over the course of four chapters, I expand the scope of radical media to include not only traditional materials such as the Vietnam-era alternative press, the underground GI press network, and radical films, but also instructional texts, military manuals, bombed buildings, live action performances, suicide notes, vandalized surfaces, and other hastily scribbled messages of dissent
