A new approach to oceans and coastal governance – influenced by ecosystem-based management and resilience thinking, by spatial approaches to management and by decentralized or participatory governance – a policy of integrated management was defined in the years following the Oceans Act (1986). The motivation for this study arose from the resistance of project partners in the Coastal CURA (a five-year, SSHRC-funded, multi-partner research project designed to support coastal community engagement in resource governance) to the thinking and practice of government-supported “integrated management”. In response, I developed a conceptual framework for examining integrated management from a critical, community-based perspective, drawing on political ecology, geography and policy studies. I apply this framework to a study of policy discourses in the Canadian Maritime Provinces to examine: i) their role in framing what options, participants, and knowledges are included in fisheries and coastal policy, regulation and institutions; ii) how power relationships are enacted and how access to resources are altered through integrated management approaches to coastal resource governance; iii) community resistance through alternative discourses and models. Within this study, I use governmentality and critical policy analysis as tools for analyzing the retreat of the state on the one hand (through decentralized and participatory governance), and the application of new technologies of governance on the other, and for examining the effects these movements have on coastal citizens. By naturalising the state as the appropriate scale and competent party for managing coastal problems, coastal communities are framed out of governing the commons. However, this study demonstrates how counter-discourses can re-imagine communities, and their practices and knowledges, in a discursive policy struggle. This thesis situates these puzzles in three case studies, one of regional policy discourses and two community case studies in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Basin and Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick.

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This thesis is concerned with various aspects of stationary and nonstationary time series analysis. In the nonstationary case, we study estimation of the Wold-Cram'er evolutionary spectrum, which is a time-dependent analogue of the spectrum of a stationary process. Existing estimators of the Wold-Cram'er evolutionary spectrum suffer from several problems, including bias in boundary regions of the time-frequency plane, poor frequency resolution, and an inability to handle the presence of purely harmonic frequencies. We propose techniques to handle all three of these problems. We propose a new estimator of the Wold-Cram'er evolutionary spectrum (the BCMTFSE) which mitigates the first problem. Our estimator is based on an extrapolation of the Wold-Cram'er evolutionary spectrum in time, using an estimate of its time derivative. We apply our estimator to a set of simulated nonstationary processes with known Wold-Cram'er evolutionary spectra to demonstrate its performance. We also propose an estimator of the Wold-Cram'er evolutionary spectrum, valid for uniformly modulated processes (UMPs). This estimator mitigates the second problem, by exploiting the structure of UMPs to improve the frequency resolution of the BCMTFSE. We apply this estimator to a simulated UMP with known Wold-Cram'er evolutionary spectrum. To deal with the third problem, one can detect and remove purely harmonic frequencies before applying the BCMTFSE. Doing so requires a consideration of the aliasing problem. We propose a frequency-domain technique to detect and unalias aliased frequencies in bivariate time series, based on the observation that aliasing manifests as nonlinearity in the phase of the complex coherency between a stationary process and a time-delayed version of itself. To illustrate this ``unaliasing'' technique, we apply it to simulated data and a real-world example of solar noon flux data. / Thesis (Ph.D, Mathematics & Statistics) -- Queen's University, 2009-02-05 10:18:13.476

Problem determination is the identification of problems and performance issues that occur in an observed system and the discovery of solutions to resolve them. Top-k analysis is common task in problem determination in database management systems. It involves the identification of the set of most frequently occurring objects according to some criteria, such as the top-k most frequently used tables or most frequent queries, or the top-k queries with respect to CPU usage or amount of I/O. Effective problem determination requires sufficient monitoring and rapid analysis of the collected monitoring statistics. System monitoring often incurs a great deal of overhead and can interfere with the performance of the observed system. Processing vast amounts of data may require several passes through the analysis system and thus be very time consuming. In this thesis, we present our lightweight top-k analysis framework in which lightweight monitoring tools are used to continuously poll system statistics producing several continuous data streams which are then processed by stream mining techniques. The results produced by our tool are the “top-k” values for the observed statistics. This information can be valuable to an administrator in determining the source of a problem. We implement the framework as a prototype system called Tempo. Tempo uses IBM DB2’s snapshot API and a lightweight monitoring tool called DB2PD to generate the data streams. The system reports the top-k executed SQL statements and the top-k most frequently accessed tables in an on-line fashion. Several experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. The experimental results show that our approach achieves low system overhead. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-31 12:42:48.944

It is widely accepted that the cortex can be divided into a series of spatially discrete areas based on their specific laminar patterns. It is of great interest to divide the cortex into different areas in terms of both neuronal functions and cellular composition. The division of cortical areas can be reflected by the cell arrangements or cellular composition. Therefore, the cortical structure can be represented by some functional neuronal density data. Techniques on functional data analysis help to develop some measures which indicate structural changes. / In order to separate roughness from structural variations and influences of the convolutions and foldings, a method called bivariate smoothing is proposed for the noisy density data. This smoothing method is applied to four sets of cortical density data provided by Prof Petrides [1] and Scott Mackey [2]. / The first or second order derivatives of the density function reflect the change and the rate of the change of the density, respectively. Therefore, derivatives of the density function are applied to analyze the structural features as an attempt to detect indicators for boundaries of subareas of the four cortex sections. / Finally, the accuracy and limitation of this smoothing method is tested using some simulated examples.

<p>The multivariate two-sample tests provide a means to test the match between two multivariate distributions. Although many tests exist in the literature, relatively little is known about the relative power of these procedures. The studies reported in the thesis contrasts the effectiveness, in terms of power, of seven such tests with a Monte Carlo study. The relative power of the tests was investigated against location, scale, and correlation alternatives.</p>

The purpose of this research was to understand how the risks associated with West Nile virus (WNV) were presented by the Winnipeg Free Press. A detailed content analysis was completed on all Winnipeg Free Press articles and Manitoba Health news releases, between 1999 and 2008, containing information related to West Nile. Additional data included interviews with government and media representatives. Several recurring frames, including blame, controversy, rights and fairness, risk, and uncertainty were found in the newspaper data. Over time there was a decrease in both the coverage and prominence of WNV-related issues by the Winnipeg Free Press. In terms of the use of sources by media, the provincial government was found to be the most commonly used source in this context. Reporting of WNV-related issues by the Winnipeg Free Press has been relatively clear and balanced despite some initial alarmist coverage surrounding the uncertainty of the arrival of WNV.