Public apprehension about religious diversity has pervaded Canadian headlines at an increasing pace, particularly during the past fifteen years. Urban centres and suburban and rural communities alike have seen clashes over the manifestation of diverse belief systems in daily life. From immigrant ‘codes of conduct,’ a ‘charter of values,’ controversy over the wearing of the Sikh kirpan in school, to bans on religious vestments and symbols worn by public servants including teachers, conflict and socially divisive misunderstandings are often the unfortunate fruits of ignorance about the ‘other.’ Many religious actors at the center of these stories have seen their cases ultimately adjudicated in Canada’s highest court, reinforcing the perception that religious difference is a source of conflict and division in Canadian society. In this era of global conversations about how liberal democracies approach diversity, this dissertation expands the conversation on education about religion, beliefs and worldviews in Canadian classrooms. With public education situated as a primary site for constructing democratic citizenship, the question of how this evolving dynamic of diversity is taught in schools is symbolically and practically linked to broader debates about government and societal responses to pluralism. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by interweaving thinking from the literature on pluralism, xenosophia and deep equality as a conceptual framework, with empirical work investigating what parents and educators thought Canadian public-school (primary and secondary) students should learn in order to best prepare them for living and thriving in a diverse society. Triangulated data gathered from semi-structured interviews with parents and educators (n=22), responses from a national online survey (n=190), and a textual analysis of secondary student manuals from Quebec’s Ethics and Religious Culture Program (n=5), provided a holistic vantage point from which to consider the central research questions. Analysis and interpretation of findings revealed that learning about diversity and difference were of central importance, however, there were fundamental concerns regarding indoctrination, rejection of majority religious privilege and even-handedness in the presentation of religious and nonreligious belief systems. Existing discourse on religious and worldview literacy education in Canada tends to focus on teaching and learning in the context of a discrete curriculum such as the Ethics and Religious Culture program. However, findings from this research suggest that increased public awareness about the religious entanglements of colonization, combined with the significant rise in the number of Canadians who hold non-religious worldviews, contribute to a rethinking of how such literacy endeavours may be better integrated into other subject areas such as civics, citizenship, history or social studies.

Over the years, many defense techniques have been proposed by the security community. Even so, few have been adopted by the general public and deployed in production. This limited defense deployment and weak security has serious consequences, as large scale cyber-attacks are now a common occurrence in society. One major obstacle that stands in the way is practicality, the quality of being designed for actual use or having usefulness or convenience. For example, an exploit mitigation design may be considered not practical to deploy if it imposes high performance overhead, despite offering excellent and robust security guarantees. This is because achieving hallmarks of practical design, such as minimizing adverse side-effects like performance degradation or memory monopolization, is difficult in practice, especially when trying to provide a high level of security for users. Secure and practical exploit mitigation design must successfully navigate several challenges. To illustrate, modern-day attacks, especially code re-use attacks, understand that rudimentary defenses such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) will be deployed moving forward. These attacks have therefore evolved and diversified their angles of attack to become capable of leveraging a multitude of different code components. Accordingly, the security community has uncovered these threats and maintained progress in providing possible resolutions with new exploit mitigation designs. More specifically though, defenses have had to correspondingly extend their capabilities to protect more aspects of code, leading to defense techniques becoming increasingly complex. Trouble then arises as supporting such fine-grained defenses brings inherent disadvantages such as significant hardware resource utilization that could be otherwise used for useful work. This complexity has made performance, security, and scalability all competing ideals in practical system design. At the same time, other recent efforts have implemented mechanisms with negligible performance impact, but do so at the risk of weaker security guarantees. This dissertation first formalizes the challenges in modern exploit mitigation design. To illustrate these challenges, this dissertation presents a survey from the perspective of both attacker and defender to provide an overview of this current security landscape. This includes defining an informal taxonomy of exploit mitigation strategies, explaining prominent attack vectors that are faced by security experts today, and identifying and defining code components that are generally abused by code re-use. This dissertation then presents two practical design solutions. Both defense system designs uphold goals of achieving realistic performance, providing strong security guarantees, being robust for modern application code-bases, and being able to scale across the system at large. The first practical exploit mitigation design this dissertation presents is MARDU. MARDU is a novel re-randomization approach that utilizes on-demand randomization and the concept of code trampolines to support sharing of code transparently system-wide. To the best of my knowledge, MARDU is the first presented re-randomization technique capable of runtime code sharing for re-randomized code system-wide. Moreover, MARDU is one of the very few re-randomization mechanisms capable of performing seamless live thread migration to newly randomized code without pausing application execution. This dissertation describes the full design, implementation, and evaluation of MARDU to demonstrate its merits and show that careful design can uphold all practical design goals. For instance, scalability is a major challenge for randomization strategies, especially because traditional OS design expects code to be placed in known locations so that it can be reached by multiple processes, while randomization is purposefully trying to achieve the opposite, being completely unpredictable. This clash in expectations between system and defense design breaks a few very important assumptions for an application's runtime environment. This forces most randomization mechanisms to abandon the hope of upholding memory deduplication. MARDU resolves this challenge by applying trampolines to securely reach functions protected under secure memory. Even with this new calling convention in place, MARDU shows re-randomization degradation can be significantly reduced without sacrificing randomization entropy. Moreover, MARDU shows it is capable of defeating prominent code re-use variants with this practical design. This dissertation then presents its second practical exploit mitigation solution, BASTION. BASTION is a fine-grained system call filtering mechanism aimed at significantly strengthening the security surrounding system calls. Like MARDU, BASTION upholds the principles of this dissertation and was implemented with practicality in mind. BASTION's design is based on empirical observation of what a legitimate system call invocation consists of. BASTION introduces System Call Integrity to enforce the correct and intended use of system calls within a program. In order to enforce this novel security policy, BASTION proposes three new specialized contexts for the effective enforcement of legitimate system call usage. Namely, these contexts enforce that: system calls are only invoked with the correct calling convention, system calls are reached through legitimate control-flow paths, and all system call arguments are free from attacker corruption. By enforcing System Call Integrity with the previously mentioned contexts, this dissertation adds further evidence that context-sensitive defense strategies are superior to context-insensitive ones. BASTION is able to prevent over 32 real-world and synthesized exploits in its security evaluation and incurs negligible performance overhead (0.60%-2.01%). BASTION demonstrates that narrow and specialized exploit mitigation designs can be effective in more than one front, to the point that BASTION not only revents code re-use, but is capable of defending against any attack class that requires the utilization of system calls. / Doctor of Philosophy / Limited security defense deployment and weak security has serious consequences, as large scale cyber-attacks are now a common occurrence. This may be surprising since many defense techniques have been proposed; yet in reality, few have become dopted by the general public. To elaborate, designing an ideal defense that is strong security-wise but does not use any computer resources is challenging. In practice, there is no free lunch, and therefore a design must consider how to best balance security with performance in an effort to be practical for users to deploy their defense. Common tradeoffs include adverse side-effects such as slowing down user applications or imposing significant memory usage. Therefore, practical and strong defense design is important to promote integration into the next generation of computer hardware and software. By sustaining practical design, the needed jump between a proof-of-concept and implementing it on commodity computer chips is substantially smaller. A practical defense should foremost guarantee strong levels of security and should not slow down a user's applications. Ideally, a practical defense is implemented to the point it seems invisible to the user and they don't even notice it. However, balancing practicality with strong security is hard to achieve in practice. This dissertation first reviews the current security landscape - specifically two important attack strategies are examined. First, code re-use attacks, are exactly what they sound like; code re-use essentially reuse various bits and pieces of program code to create an attack. Second, system call abuse. System calls are essential functions that ordinarily allow a user program to talk with a computer's operating system; they enable operations such as a program asking for more memory or reading and writing files. When system calls are maliciously abused, they can cause a computer to use up all its free memory or even launch an attacker-written program. This dissertation goes over how these attacks work and correspondingly explains popular defense strategies that have been proposed by the security community so far. This dissertation then presents two defense system solutions that demonstrate how a practical defense system could be made. To that end, the full design, implementation, and evaluation of each defense system, named MARDU and BASTION, is presented. This dissertation leverages attack insights as well as compiler techniques to achieve its goal. A compiler is an essential developer tool that converts human written code into a computer program. Moreover, compilers can be used to apply additional optimizations and security hardening techniques to make a program more secure. This dissertation's first defense solution, MARDU, is a runtime randomization defense. MARDU protects programs by randomizing the location of code chunks throughout execution so that attackers cannot find the code pieces they need to create an attack. Notably, MARDU is the first randomization defense that is able to be seamlessly deployed system-wide and is backwards compatible with programs not outfitted with MARDU. This dissertation's second defense solution, BASTION, is a defense system that strictly focuses on protection of system calls in a program. As mentioned earlier, system calls are security critical functions that allow a program to talk a computer operating system. BASTION protects the entire computer by ensuring that every time a system call is called by a user program, it was rightfully requested by the program and not maliciously by an attacker. BASTION verifies this request is legitimate by confirming that the current program state meets a certain set of criteria.

No / An analytic framework is devised, based on the principle of maximum entropy (ME), for the performance modelling and evaluation of a wireless GSM/GPRS cell supporting bursty multiple class traffic of voice calls and data packets under complete partitioning (CPS), partial sharing (PSS) and aggregate sharing (ASS) traffic handling schemes. Three distinct open queueing network models (QNMS) under CPS, PSS and ASS, respectively, are described, subject to external compound Poisson traffic processes and generalised exponential (GE) transmission times under a repetitive service blocking mechanism and a complete buffer sharing management rule. Each QNM generally consists of three building block stations, namely a loss system with GSM/GPRS traffic and a system of access and transfer finite capacity queues in tandem dealing with GPRS traffic under head-of-line and discriminatory processor sharing scheduling disciplines, respectively. The analytic methodology is illustrated by focusing on the performance study of the GE-type tandem queueing system for GPRS under a CPS. An ME product-form approximation is characterised leading into a decomposition of the tandem system into individual queues and closed-form ME expressions for state and blocking probabilities are presented. Typical numerical examples are included to validate the ME solutions against simulation and study the effect of external GPRS bursty traffic upon the performance of the cell. Moreover, an overview of recent extensions of the work towards the analysis of a GE-type multiple server finite capacity queue with preemptive resume priorities and its implications towards the performance modelling and evaluation of GSM/GPRS cells with PSS and ASS are included. / ,

Despite having being discovered nearly 80 years ago, bonobos (Pan paniscus) are still one of the least well understood of the great apes, largely remaining in the shadow of their better known cousins, the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). This is especially evident in the domain of communication, with bonobo vocal behaviour still a neglected field of study, especially compared to that of chimpanzees. In this thesis, I address this issue by exploring the natural vocal communication of bonobos and its underlying cognition, focusing on the role that vocalisations play during two key contexts, food discovery and sex. In the context of food-discovery, I combine observational and experimental techniques to examine whether bonobos produce and understand vocalisations that convey meaningful information about the quality of food encountered by the caller. Results indicate that bonobos produce an array of vocalisations when finding food, and combine different food-associated calls together into sequences in a way that relates to perceived food quality. In a subsequent playback study, it was demonstrated that receivers are able to extract meaning about perceived food quality by attending to these calls and integrating information across call sequences. In the context of sexual interactions, I examine the acoustic structure of female copulation calls, as well as patterns in call usage, to explore how these signals are used by individuals. My results show that females emit copulation calls in similar ways with both male and female partners, suggesting that these signals have become partly divorced from a function in reproduction, to assume a greater social role. Overall, my results highlight the relevance of studying primate vocalisations to investigate the underlying cognition and suggest that vocalisations are important behavioural tools for bonobos to navigate their social and physical worlds.

L'analyse quantitative a été réalisée en cotutelle avec Rémi Boivin et Pierre Tremblay et publiée dans la Revue de Criminologie: Boivin, R., Lamige, C,. Tremblay, P. (2009) La police devrait-elle cibler les taudis malfamés? Criminologie, (42)1, 225-266. / Les modèles de police de résolution de problèmes et de police communautaire sont souvent présentés en opposition l’un de l’autre. Ce mémoire présente l’évaluation d’une intervention policière réunissant des éléments des modèles mentionnés précédemment et ayant pour objectif de mettre fin au foyer de désordre causé par la présence d’un immeuble de location de chambres. Les analyses reposent à la fois sur une évaluation qualitative et quantitative des interventions communautaires et policières réalisées dans cet édifice surnommé le « Motel ». Les résultats des entretiens réalisés auprès d’organismes communautaires, de policiers et de citoyens du quartier ont permis de mieux comprendre les étapes de cette opération policière et communautaire. Ils ont également permis de connaître le mode de fonctionnement relatif au rachat d’un immeuble par une administration municipale de même que d’en mesurer l’impact d’un point de vue préventif. Les résultats obtenus ont également permis de saisir l’importance des maisons de chambres pour certains locataires « démunis » de ce quartier, mais aussi la réputation qui en découle. La méthode de gestion de ce genre d’immeubles possède une étroite corrélation avec le type de locataires présents. Une analyse de terrain effectuée trois ans après l’opération a rendu possible l’identification du type de problèmes dont souffrent la majorité des locataires de maisons de chambres à gestion privée. Dans ce cas-ci, il s’agit de problèmes reliés à la santé mentale. Les résultats de l’évaluation quantitative ont quant à eux révélé qu’un régime de patrouille intensive favorise la stimulation de la fréquence des appels logés au 9-1-1 par les citoyens et que la stratégie de profiler un taudis de mauvaise réputation pour faire diminuer les désordres dans l’ensemble du quartier n’a pas été, dans le site observé, particulièrement concluante. / Models of problem-oriented policing and community policing are often shown in opposition to each other. This thesis presents an evaluation of a police crackdown, combining elements of the above mentioned models and aimed at ending disorder outbreaks caused by tenants of a troublesome flophouse. Analyses are based on both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of community and police interventions conducted in a building known as the "Motel". Results obtained through discussions with community organizations, police and neighbourhood residents have lead to better understanding the phases of this police and community operation. They also provided the operation mode on property buyback by a municipal administration and assessed its impact by means of a preventive perspective. The results also helped to acknowledge the importance of flophouses for a number of helpless tenants in this district, but also the reputation that follows. The management process for this category of building is in close correlation with the type of tenants who live there. A field analysis, conducted three years after the operation, has made it possible to identify the type of problems afflicting the majority of tenants living in flophouses that are privately managed. In this case, the problems are linked to mental health. Results of the quantitative evaluation have demonstrated that intensive patrol surveillance increases residents’ propensity to place 9-1-1 calls and the strategy to reduce disorder in the general neighbourhood by targeting notorious slums has not been particularly conclusive on the site observed.

Thesis's Topic: The Activity Analysis of Rescue of Královehradecký kraj, station Trutnov 2006-2009 Aim of the thesis: To analyze the operation of the Emergeny Medical Service in Trutnov. Method: Research of available sources, data collection and the cooperation of the members of the Emergency Medical Service coming to the patient. Results: All here listed statistics data are base on intervetion documentation of Trutnov center. Therefore the presented results can't be taken, generalled to other centers and assumed that will be comparable. Keywords: Integrated Emergency Services, Emergency Medical Service, rapid response vehicle, advanced life support vehicle, calls for the crew of the Emergency Medical Service.

Les modèles de police de résolution de problèmes et de police communautaire sont souvent présentés en opposition l’un de l’autre. Ce mémoire présente l’évaluation d’une intervention policière réunissant des éléments des modèles mentionnés précédemment et ayant pour objectif de mettre fin au foyer de désordre causé par la présence d’un immeuble de location de chambres. Les analyses reposent à la fois sur une évaluation qualitative et quantitative des interventions communautaires et policières réalisées dans cet édifice surnommé le « Motel ». Les résultats des entretiens réalisés auprès d’organismes communautaires, de policiers et de citoyens du quartier ont permis de mieux comprendre les étapes de cette opération policière et communautaire. Ils ont également permis de connaître le mode de fonctionnement relatif au rachat d’un immeuble par une administration municipale de même que d’en mesurer l’impact d’un point de vue préventif. Les résultats obtenus ont également permis de saisir l’importance des maisons de chambres pour certains locataires « démunis » de ce quartier, mais aussi la réputation qui en découle. La méthode de gestion de ce genre d’immeubles possède une étroite corrélation avec le type de locataires présents. Une analyse de terrain effectuée trois ans après l’opération a rendu possible l’identification du type de problèmes dont souffrent la majorité des locataires de maisons de chambres à gestion privée. Dans ce cas-ci, il s’agit de problèmes reliés à la santé mentale. Les résultats de l’évaluation quantitative ont quant à eux révélé qu’un régime de patrouille intensive favorise la stimulation de la fréquence des appels logés au 9-1-1 par les citoyens et que la stratégie de profiler un taudis de mauvaise réputation pour faire diminuer les désordres dans l’ensemble du quartier n’a pas été, dans le site observé, particulièrement concluante. / Models of problem-oriented policing and community policing are often shown in opposition to each other. This thesis presents an evaluation of a police crackdown, combining elements of the above mentioned models and aimed at ending disorder outbreaks caused by tenants of a troublesome flophouse. Analyses are based on both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of community and police interventions conducted in a building known as the "Motel". Results obtained through discussions with community organizations, police and neighbourhood residents have lead to better understanding the phases of this police and community operation. They also provided the operation mode on property buyback by a municipal administration and assessed its impact by means of a preventive perspective. The results also helped to acknowledge the importance of flophouses for a number of helpless tenants in this district, but also the reputation that follows. The management process for this category of building is in close correlation with the type of tenants who live there. A field analysis, conducted three years after the operation, has made it possible to identify the type of problems afflicting the majority of tenants living in flophouses that are privately managed. In this case, the problems are linked to mental health. Results of the quantitative evaluation have demonstrated that intensive patrol surveillance increases residents’ propensity to place 9-1-1 calls and the strategy to reduce disorder in the general neighbourhood by targeting notorious slums has not been particularly conclusive on the site observed. / L'analyse quantitative a été réalisée en cotutelle avec Rémi Boivin et Pierre Tremblay et publiée dans la Revue de Criminologie: Boivin, R., Lamige, C,. Tremblay, P. (2009) La police devrait-elle cibler les taudis malfamés? Criminologie, (42)1, 225-266.

This artistic research project is an explorative study in new forms of expression of Swedish folk singing in a scenic context, exploring expressive qualities in traditional Swedish folk song from the point of view of the folk singer as a creative performer. The fundamental research question is how, in a scenic context, can space be given to what is a characteristic quality of traditional folk song, namely creative interpretation in the moment, through variation and improvisation using the song as a concept rather than a fixed work. How can this view be expressed in a staged concert form that enhances the perception of the music being created in the moment? How can the aesthetic qua- lities and forms of variation and improvisation that are inherent to traditional folk singing be explored?The artistic exploration has been performed through five productions/projects, each one with its own specific theme: ReBoot/OmStart – en folksångperformance, Kurbits-Koral, The Spirit of the Moment – en musikhändelse, Getens horn – en musikskapelse, Voice Space – Röstrymd, Kulning – en utsmyckning av oändligheten. The thesis focuses on two aspects of the knowledge that has been developed in the artistic work, namely the processes for creating the work and the artistic concepts used to explore the question artistically.In ReBoot/OmStart the subtle forms of variation typical of traditional Swedish folk singing are explored within the frame of a concert consisting of one continuous set, a folk song performance. In this work principles of varia- tion for music and lyrics that are typical for Swedish traditional folk singing are explored, as well as new concepts for associative variation in the performance. This includes improvised combinations of different melodies as well as utilizing the frame story of a ballad as the ground for the performance rather than a specific ballad text.Kurbits-Koral has been inspired by traditional folk hymns, historical evidence of traditional folk hymn sing- ing, by the role of sacred folk song in traditional contexts and from folk polyphony. It can be viewed as a prac- tical exploration of the dimension of polyphony – monophony in folk vocal performance. This concert-perfor- mance also explores a form for interactive performance where the boundary between the audience/auditorium and the artists/stage is challenged, based upon the idea that the audience and the artists are jointly involved in a musical ritual or story-telling – the concert as a musical happening.Getens horn is an ensemble performance of entirely original music, which uses the form of an associative musi- cal narration in a scenic context that was developed in the previous concert projects. The lyrics of the songs ori- ginate from traditional and new stories about creation, how everything came about. It can be viewed as a musical saga, but not in the sense of a coherent literary narrative, rather as a musical narration, an associative web.In Voice Space traditional folk singing meets live electronics in a scenic space, where the interplay between live electronics and voice/instruments creates the possibility for an associative musical narration, a Voice Space. Can the fixed, static nature of a loop pedal and the flexibility of traditional folk singing voice introduce a creative tension? Voice Space can be regarded as a playful exploration of illusions and expectations within dimensions such as space, polyphony-monophony and improvisation-composition.Kulning explores the pedagogical and artistic applications of kulning as a vocal expression, in terms of style and vocal technique. How can the art of kulning as a form for vocal and artistic expression be explored pedago- gically, from a performance perspective?The result of this doctoral project consists first and foremost of the individual works, as documented in recordings/films, a book and in ‘musical scripts’, but also of the creative methods and artistic musical concepts that have been revealed by reflective analyses documented in the written thesis. In particular, concepts and methods stimulating improvisation, variation, presence and creation in the performance have been explored, from the point of view of the song as a concept and the folk singer as a creative performer. The written thesis can be regarded complementary to the performances, and is in itself an analysis of artistic processes, methods and concepts, placed in a theoretical framework relating to concepts such as orality-literacy, performance, flow and artistic expression.

El presente trabajo de investigación muestra un modelo de negocio innovador y escalable, el cual consiste en una aplicación móvil de entretenimiento interactivo a través de videollamadas denominada LOUD App. Esta app posee funcionalidades diferentes a las aplicaciones convencionales que existen en el mercado, ya que cuenta con opciones como karaoke, música compartida, juegos en línea y conciertos en vivo que buscan entretener al público objetivo. El segmento de clientes al que se dirige está compuesto por personas pertenecientes al NSE A, B y C, entre los 20 y 39 años que residan en Lima y posean celulares con conexión a internet. Esta idea de negocio nació en la época de pandemia por la COVID-19 debido a que se detectó un problema referido a las limitadas opciones de entretenimiento interactivo online. Este modelo de negocio ha sido validado en el mercado gracias a experimentos como Mockups, entrevistas, concierge de todas las funcionalidades de la app, entre otros. Asimismo, se ha elaborado la planificación y desarrollo de diversos aspectos como ventas, recursos humanos, operaciones, marketing, financiero y responsabilidad social empresarial que son requeridos para poner en marcha un negocio. En este sentido, a través de la elaboración de este proyecto, se ha podido comprobar que LOUD es un modelo de negocio rentable y que posee una ventaja competitiva diferenciadora en el mercado. / This research work shows an innovative and scalable business model, which consists of a mobile application for interactive entertainment through video calls called LOUD App. This app has different functionalities than conventional applications that exist in the market, since it has with options such as karaoke, shared music, online games and live concerts that seek to entertain the target audience. The customer segment it is aimed at is made up of people belonging to NSE A, B and C, between 20 and 39 years old who reside in Lima and have cell phones with internet connection. This business idea was born at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic because a problem was detected regarding the limited options for interactive online entertainment. This business model has been validated in the market thanks to experiments such as mockups, interviews, concierge of all the functionalities of the app, among others. Likewise, the planning and development of various aspects such as sales, human resources, operations, marketing, financial and corporate social responsibility that are required to start a business have been prepared. In this sense, through the elaboration of this project, it has been possible to verify that LOUD is a profitable business model and that it has a differentiating competitive advantage in the market. / Trabajo de investigación

(in English) The dissertation focuses on working with long-term clients of the "Senior telefon" helpline. It elaborates on the specifics of working with the clients who use the helpline repeatedly compared to other users. The thesis is based on theoretical knowledge sourced from professional literature and statistics, as well as on the internal regulations, documents and methodological materials of the "Senior telefon" helpline. The empirical part analyses selected documents that deal with the potential of working with long-term clients, with the aim to compare the findings with the existing Methodology of working with long-term clients of the "Senior telefon" helpline.