Much recent scholarship celebrates the early modern period for its development of broader public political engagement through printed media and coffeehouse culture. It is the argument of this study that the formation in England under Charles II of a public sphere may be shown to have followed a reassessment of political discourse that began at Westminster during the troubled reign of that king’s father, Charles I. The narrative of parliament’s growth in this era from an “event to an institution,” as one historian describes it, tells of more than opposition to the King on the battlefields of the English Civil War. Parliament-work in the early years of England’s revolutionary decade also set new expectations for rhetorical deliberation as a means of directing policy in the House of Commons. The ideals of discursive politics that were voiced in the Short Parliament (May 1640), and more fully put into practice in the opening session of the Long Parliament (November 1640), were soon also accepted by politically-minded authors and readers outside Westminster. Prose controversy published in print and political poetry that circulated in manuscript both demonstrate that the burgeoning culture of debate outside parliament could still issue “in a parliamentary way.” Such promotion of productive textual engagements eventually constituted a wider, notional assembly, whose participants – citizen readers – were as much a product of deliberate education and fashioning as they were of the “conjuring,” “interpellation,” or “summoning” that recent scholarly vocabulary suggests. Following the spirit of reform in the English parliament, and subsequently developing through the years of partisan political writing that followed, public opinion, like the Commons, established itself in this era as an institution in its own right. These public and private assemblies disseminated the unprecedented amount of parliamentary writing and record-keeping that distinguishes the period under review, and this rich archive provides the literary and historical context for this study.

Sensitive marine clay in Ottawa is a challenging soil for geotechnical engineers. This type of clay behaves differently than other soils in Canada or other parts of the world. They also have different engineering characteristic values in comparison to other clays. Cone penetration testing in sensitive marine clays is also different from that carried out in other soils. The misestimation of engineering characteristics from cone penetration testing can result. Temperature effects have been suspected as the reason for negative readings and erroneous estimations of engineering characteristics from cone penetration testing. Furthermore, the applicability of correlations between cone penetration test (CPT) results and engineering characteristics is ambiguous. Moreover, it is important that geotechnical engineers who need to work with these clays have background information on their engineering characteristics. This thesis provides comprehensive information on the engineering characteristics and behaviour of sensitive marine clays in Ottawa. This information will give key information to geotechnical engineers who are working with these clays on their behaviour. For the purpose of this research, fifteen sites in the Ottawa area are taken into consideration. These sites included alternative technical data from cone and standard penetration tests, undisturbed samples, field vanes, and shear wave velocity measurements. Laboratory testing carried out for these sites has resulted in acquiring engineering parameters of the marine clay, such as preconsolidation pressure, overconsolidation ratio, compression and recompression indexes, secondary compression index, coefficient of consolidation, hydraulic conductivity, clay fraction, porewater chemistry, specific gravity, plasticity, moisture content, unit weight, void ratio, and porosity. This thesis also discusses other characteristics of sensitive marine clays in Ottawa, such as their activity, sensitivity, structure, interface shear behaviour, and origin and sedimentation. Furthermore, for the purpose of increasing local experience with the use of cone and ball penetrometers in sensitive marine clays in Ottawa, three types of penetrometer tips are used in the Canadian Geotechnical Research Site No. 1 located in south-west Ottawa: 36 mm cone tip, and 40 mm and 113 mm ball tips. The differences in their response in sensitive marine clays will be discussed. The temperature effects on the penetrometer equipment are also studied. The differences in the effect of temperature on these tips are discussed. Correlations between the penetrometer results and engineering characteristics of Ottawa's clays are verified. The applicability of correlations between the testing results and engineering characteristics of sensitive marine clays in Ottawa is also presented in this thesis. Two correlations from the Canadian Foundation Engineering Manual are examined. One of these correlations is between the N60 values from standard penetration testing and undrained shear strength. The other correlation is between the shear wave velocity measurement and site class. Temperature corrections are suggested and discussed for penetrometer equipment according to laboratory calibrations. The significance of the effects due to radical temperature changes in Canada and Ottawa is discussed. Some of the main findings from this research are as follows. • The Canadian Foundation Engineering Manual presents a correlation between standard penetration tests (SPTs) and the undrained shear strength of soils. This relationship may not be applicable to sensitive marine clays in Ottawa. • Another correlation between the site class, shear wave velocity, and undrained shear strength is presented by this same manual which may not be applicable to sensitive marine clays in Ottawa. • The rotation rate for field vane testing as recommended by ASTM D2573 is slow for sensitive marine clays in Ottawa. • Correction factors applied to undrained shear strength from laboratory vane tests may not result in comparable values with the undrained shear strength obtained by using field vane tests. • Loading schemes in consolidation or oedometer testing may affect the quality of the targeted results. • Temperature corrections should be applied to penetrometer recordings to compensate for the drift in the results of these recordings due to temperature changes. • The secondary compression index to compression index ratio presented in the literature may not be the value obtained from this research.

The popularity of mother blogs is increasingly attracting sponsors looking to market their products to mother blog audiences. This combination of commercial and informational content calls on readers and writers to distinguish between informational content and commercial activity. This thesis examines how mother bloggers integrate sponsored content into their blogs and how both writers and readers interpret the credibility of these posts. The study takes place within a conceptual framework of source and message credibility. Using a qualitative and interpretive approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with readers and writers. Although the results are not generalizable, they suggest determining the credibility of these posts is a social process, informed by participants’ existing knowledge and framed within the community of mother bloggers. The results add to our understanding of credibility perceptions when commercial and informational content comingle and have implications for other online communities that require ongoing information evaluation.

In Wireless Sensor and Robot Networks (WSRNs), static sensors report event information to one of the robots. In the k nearest neighbour query processing problem in WSRNs, the robot receives event report needs to find exact k nearest robots (KNN) to react to the event, among those connected to it. We are interested in localized solutions, which avoid message flooding to the whole network. Several existing methods restrict the search within a predetermined boundary. Some network density-based estimation algorithms were proposed but they either result in large message transmission or require the density information of the whole network in advance which is complex to implement and lacks robustness. Algorithms with tree structures lead to the excessive energy consumption and large latency caused by structural construction. Itinerary based approaches generate large latency or unsatisfactory accuracy. In this thesis, we propose a new method to estimate a search boundary, which is a circle centred at the query point. Two algorithms are presented to disseminate the message to robots of interest and aggregate their data (e.g. the distance to query point). Multiple Auction Aggregation (MAA) is an algorithm based on auction protocol, with multiple copies of query message being disseminated into the network to get the best bidding from each robot. Partial Depth First Search (PDFS) attempts to traverse all the robots of interest with a query message to gather the data by depth first search. This thesis also optimizes a traditional itinerary-based KNN query processing method called IKNN and compares this algorithm with our proposed MAA and PDFS algorithms. The experimental results followed indicate that the overall performance of MAA and PDFS outweighs IKNN in WSRNs.

With the introduction of antibiotics in animal feed becoming less popular, the agricultural industry has begun a shift towards the use of probiotics in animal feed. Since there is no current method to evaluate the risks of using genetically modified probiotics in animal feed. The goal of this project was to create a genetically modified model organism for risk assessment. The genetic marker for that was chosen was GFP that was to be expressed on the surface of the cell. The fluorescent properties allow for visualisation of the genetically modified bacteria and the surface expression would allow for the easy capture and recovery of the bacteria for culturing and cell counts. Genome wide screens were performed using the CW PRED algorithm to locate proteins with LPXTG motif for cell wall anchoring. 16 hypothetical proteins were detected and 6 were selected as candidates for possible surface display of GFP. Of these candidates, the novel L. casei protein LSEI_2320 was found to be expressed at the mRNA during early growth by RT PCR and at then protein level during stationary phase with western blot. This LPXTG protein was found at the surface of L. casei ATCC334 during stationary phase and late stationary phase with immunofluorescence microscopy. A genetically modified L. casei ATCC334 was constructed using the surface protein LSEI_2320 locus as a region for recombination with the pRV300 suicide plasmid. Genetic modification of the locus by the insertion of a GFP reporter region just before the predicted signal peptide site resulted in the abrogation of the expression of LSEI_2320 from the cell surface at the late stationary phase. It appears that this particular gene is not necessary to cell survival even though it is abundantly expressed on the cell surface and can be used as a location for genetic modification in L. casei ATCC334.

In this study, membranes were made from three polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymers individually and the blend systems of high (H) and low (L) molecular weight PVDF by phase inversion process. After investigating membrane casting solutions’ viscous and thermodynamic properties, the membranes so fabricated were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, gas permeation tests, porosity measurement, contact angle (CA) and liquid entry pressure of water (LEPw) measurement, and further subjected to vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) in a scenario that was applicable for cooling processes, where the feed water temperature was maintained at 27℃. It was found that PVDF solutions’ viscosities and thermodynamic instabilities were determined by the types of PVDF employed in single polymer systems and the mixing ratios of two PVDF polymers in blend systems. Thus the membrane properties and performances were influenced by the aforesaid factors as well. In single polymer systems, it was found that the membrane surface roughness and porosity increased with an increase in molecular weight. Among all the membranes casted in this study, the water vapor flux of VMD was found to be the highest at the intermediate range of H:L ratio, i.e., 4:6, at which the thickness of the sponge-like layer showed a minimum, the finger-like macro-voids formed a more orderly single-layer structure, and the LEPw showed a minimum. A conclusion can be made that blend systems of high molecular weight PVDF polymers and low molecular weight PVDF polymers could be used to optimize membrane performance in vacuum membrane distillation.

This thesis applies a novel method of change detection, the Landsat Image Stack Trend Analysis method to the monitoring of retrogressive thaw slumps in the Richardson Mountains, NWT. This method represents a significant improvement upon previous methods of thaw slump monitoring, which utilized air photos and high-resolution satellite imagery. This method applies Tasseled Cap brightness, wetness and greenness indices to Landsat TM/ETM images acquired between 1985 and 2011 and analyzes the temporal change of each pixel for the different indices values. This method is useful in retrogressive thaw slump monitoring in two ways. First, by creating a map showing the linear change over time from 1985 to 2011, retrogressive thaw slumps can be easily identified, as they are more dynamic than the surrounding tundra. In total, 251 thaw slumps were identified within an area of roughly 18 000km2. Second, thaw slump activity, from initiation, growth and stabilization can be studied by plotting the annual vegetation index pixel values of adjacent pixels in a thaw slump. This method allows for the efficient extraction of annual thaw slump headwall retreat rates, provided the availability of cloud-free imagery. The retreat rates of 16 slumps were extracted, which were found to have an average annual retreat rate of 11.8 m yr-1.

Handheld devices are becoming increasingly common, and they have varied range of resources. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) allows resource constrained devices to offload computation and use storage capacities of more resourceful surrogate machines. This enables creation of new and interesting applications for all devices. We propose a scheme that constructs a high-performance de-centralized system by a group of volunteer mobile devices which come together to form a resourceful unit (cloudlet). The idea is to design a model to operate as a public-resource between mobile devices in close geographical proximity. This cloudlet can provide larger storage capability and can be used as a computational resource by other devices in the network. The system needs to watch the movement of the participating nodes and restructure the topology if some nodes that are providing support to the cloudlet fail or move out of the network. In this work, we discuss the need of the system, our goals and design issues in building a scalable and reconfigurable system. We achieve this by leveraging the concept of virtual dominating set to create an overlay in the broads of the network and distribute the responsibilities in hosting a cloudlet server. We propose an architecture for such a system and develop algorithms that are requited for its operation. We map the resources available in the network by first scoring each device individually, and then gathering these scores to determine suitable candidate cloudlet nodes. We have simulated cloudlet functionalities for several scenarios and show that our approach is viable alternative for many applications such as sharing GPS, crowd sourcing, natural language processing, etc.

Multicore CPUs (Central Processing Units) and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are omnipresent in today’s market-leading smartphones and tablets. With CPUs and GPUs getting more complex, maximizing hardware utilization is becoming problematic. The challenges faced in GPGPU (General Purpose computing using GPU) computing on embedded platforms are different from their desktop counterparts due to their memory and computational limitations. This thesis evaluates the performance and energy efficiency achieved by offloading Java applications to an embedded GPU. The existing solutions in literature address various techniques and benefits of offloading Java on desktop or server grade GPUs and not on embedded GPUs. Our research is focussed on providing a framework for accelerating Java programs on embedded GPUs. Our experiments were conducted on a Freescale i.MX6Q SabreLite board which encompasses a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU and a Vivante GC 2000 GPU that supports the OpenCL 1.1 Embedded Profile. We successfully accelerated Java code and reduced energy consumption by employing two approaches, namely JNI-OpenCL, and JOCL, which is a popular Java-binding for OpenCL. These approaches can be easily implemented on other platforms by embedded Java programmers to exploit the computational power of GPUs. Our results show up to an 8 times increase in performance efficiency and 3 times decrease in energy consumption compared to the embedded CPU-only execution of Java program. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work done on accelerating Java on an embedded GPU.

Adopting the Ecological Contextual Model of Acculturation and Adjustment (Birman, 1994; Trickett, 1996) and the Stress and Coping paradigm (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, 1986, 1991), the present thesis explored the psycho-social, work, and marital adjustment of 200 established older middle-aged refugees from the Former Yugoslavia living in the Ottawa area. More specifically, three studies were conducted to examine specific stressors and resources of relevance to the adjustment of Former Yugoslavian men and women, across the following three distinct life domains: psycho-social, work, and marital. Study I explored the potential buffering effects of interpersonal trust on the relational growth of Former Yugoslavian refugees. Results demonstrated that interpersonal trust moderated the negative effects of war-related trauma on the relational growth of Former Yugoslavian women. No such buffering effect was found for the men. Study II investigated Former Yugoslavians' work adjustment by exploring the influence of pre-migratory work-related expectations-outcome congruence, occupational mobility, work stress (general and discrimination), as well as personal (education, English language proficiency) and social resources (support at work) on their work satisfaction and distress. Results indicated that different factors emerged as significant predictors of work satisfaction and work distress for Former Yugoslavian men and women. Study III explored the potential moderating role of marital resilience on the relationship between marital stress (general and acculturative) and marital adjustment. Results showed that marital resilience moderated the negative effects of marital stress on the marital adjustment of Former Yugoslavian women. No protective effect of marital resilience was found for the men. Taken together, the results of the three studies provide support for the relevance and importance of studying the stress, resources, and adjustment of refugees across contexts and gender. Given that important gender differences were found in different adaptational domains, the need to study further the impact of gender in refugees is reinforced. The findings are discussed within the current gender and migration literatures as well as the multidimensional theories of cross-cultural adjustment. Theoretical, research, and clinical implications were presented, along with recommendations for future research.