The purpose of this study is to formulate criteria for the evaluation of the declamation, the selection of material for declamation, the method of coaching, the method of delivery, and the value of the declamation contest as a method of teaching.

This dissertation addresses the question of women's descriptive underrepresentation in Canadian politics at the federal level. Previous studies of women's underrepresentation in Canada and elsewhere have largely focused on analysing the results of elections, and studies that do account for earlier factors such as recruitment and candidate selection are limited in their scopes. In this dissertation I analyse women's representation in a holistic manner, accounting for factors from the pre-nomination stage up through election. Conceptually, I approach the path to political office as a three-stage "representation pipeline," comprising candidate emergence, candidate selection, and election. I base my analysis on Elections Canada's records of nomination contests held by federal political parties for the 2004 through 2019 general elections, paired with relevant district-level demographic factors from the Canadian census. I complement this analysis with an original survey of nomination contestants in the 2019 election. I find that women's underrepresentation in Canada is determined chiefly by issues in candidate emergence, rather than by issues in candidate selection or electoral discrimination. Instead, nominations in Canada are in the strong majority of cases acclamations, making candidate emergence and election the only meaningful barriers to women's representation in most cases. Furthermore, women face a small but significant degree of electoral discrimination, with women having slightly lower odds then men of winning election even when controlling for their party's past performance in the district. Finally, I find that urban districts are more conducive to women's representation at all three stages of the representation pipeline.

The experiences of some children participating in the demanding and intensive world of elite sport appear to compromise one of the primary aims of both childhood and parenthood, which should be for children to arrive on the threshold of adulthood with their futures open and unlimited. A body of evidence in the medical and socio-psychologicalliterature contends that child athletes participating in elite sport are being harmed physically, psychologically, and socially by the intensive training and competition practices required of athletes in sports such as women's gymnastics, figure skating, and others. Participation by children in the highest levels of sport change attitudes and impels behaviours in ways that are unique in their extent and devastating in their consequences. As the varying and often conflicting agendas of athletes, parents, coaches, agents, and sporting bureaucracies come into conflict, considerations of care and regard for the athletes become down played or even ignored, resulting in these young athletes being harmed, and their futures compromised. Children are characterised by their vulnerability, naivety, and inability to formulate their own life-plans, necessitating a degree of parental paternalism in their relationships with adults. This paternalism is justified by the child's dependency on others for protection, and for developing the necessary skills for self-sufficiency and self-determination secured through their burgeoning autonomy as they advance towards adulthood. Under law, parents are given primary responsibility for the health and welfare of their children, because they are ideally situated to determine their child's best interests. In sport, this responsibility is regularly transferred from the parents to the coach and other involved adults. Unfortunately, however, children may be exploited by the very individuals who are entrusted with their care and nurturance. A further body of evidence claims the inescapability of paternalism in relationships between adults and children in elite sport has been exploited: it is disrespectful of the child's burgeoning autonomy, and jeopardises his or her right to an open future. The child's right to an open future is an autonomy right-in-trust saved until he or she is more fully formed and capable of exercising self-determination. This right may be violated in advance of adulthood by foreclosure of options. In this thesis, I argue that elite sport children require a form of paternalism that protects their interests while at the same time is autonomy-respectful. This is actualised by a bifurcated rights system, which works towards securing non-harmful sports practices and preventing the premature foreclosure of life opportunities for elite child athletes post-sport.

This thesis examines Britain’s relationship with the Olympic Games between 1908 and 1920, a period which witnesses Britain’s first serious entrance into the Olympics and the development of the Olympic Games into the movement which it is today. This thesis uses the British media as the primary source to analyse and examine the development of the nation’s attitudes and identities towards the Olympics. The Games of this period, from London (1908), Stockholm (1912), Antwerp (1920), along with the preparations for the aborted 1916 Berlin Olympics are considered. The reaction to the British performance at each of the Olympics is the main focus of the research. There is also extensive examination into the periods in between the Games, as at this time the most plentiful discussion regarding the British approach appears, particularly that after the Stockholm Olympics. In an attempt to create a well rounded picture of how the Olympics are perceived across Britain, sections of the press in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales have been examined. Throughout the thesis there are reoccurring themes that appear. British perspectives towards the Olympics and their own identity are considered, and throughout there is analysis regarding this. Athletics is at the centre of British Olympic involvement, but field events are viewed as a poorer cousin to track events by those in England in particular, this thesis examines this identity. The period of this thesis is prominently remembered for the First World War, and consequently the relationship between Britain and Germany from an Olympic perspective is examined.

Multi-robot systems have the potential to improve performance through parallelism. Unfortunately, interference often diminishes those returns. Starting from the earliest multi-robot research, a variety of arbitration mechanisms have been proposed to maximize speed-up. Vaughan and his collaborators demonstrated the effectiveness of an arbitration mechanism inspired by biological signalling where the level of aggression displayed by each agent effectively prioritizes the limited resources. But most often these arbitration mechanisms did not do any principled consideration of environmental constraints or task structure, signalling cost and precision of the outcome. These factors have been taken into consideration in this research and a taxonomy of the arbitration mechanisms have been presented. The taxonomy organizes prior techniques and newly introduced novel techniques. The latter include theoretical and practical mechanisms (from minimalist to especially efficient). Practicable mechanisms were evaluated on physical robots for which both data and models are presented. The arbitration mechanisms described span a whole gamut from implicit (in case of robotics, entirely without representation) to deliberately coordinated (via an established Biological model, reformulated from a Bayesian perspective). Another significant result of this thesis is a systematic characterization of system performance across parameters that describe the task structure: patterns of interference are related to a set of strings that can be expressed exactly. This analysis of the domain has the important (and rare) property of completeness, i.e., all possible abstract variations of the task are understood. This research presents efficiency results showing that a characterization for any given instance can be obtained in sub-linear time. It has been shown, by construction, that: (1) Even an ideal arbitration mechanism can perform arbitrarily poorly; (2) Agents may manipulate task-structure for individual and collective good; (3) Task variations affect the influence that initial conditions have on long-term behaviour; (4) The most complex interference dynamics possible for the scenario is a limit cycle behaviour.

Many recent discoveries in animal cognition have shown that species once thought to be relatively simple are in fact capable of complex problem-solving in accordance with their ecological needs. These findings have resulted from experiments designed with the evolutionary history of the focal species in mind. Transitive inference (TI), the abiliy to infer the ordering of non-adjacent objects within a series, is a cognitive skill once thought to be exclusive to humans. Now considered a litmus-test for logical-relational reasoning, TI is thought to have evolved in social species in order to help track dominance relationships. Although recent work has shown that animals can display TI, it has yet to be demonstrated in the natural context in which it evolved. Songbirds may use TI to gain relative dominance information about others during countersinging interactions, through their use of network communication. Here I demonstrate that black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) use TI to judge the relative rank of unknown territorial intruders during the breeding season using dominance information provided through song contests. Using a multispeaker playback, I provided focal males with the relative ranks of three simulated “males” through two countersinging interactions (A > B, B > C). I predicted that when presented with the non-adjacent pair (A and C) with no relative rank information provided, focal males would choose to defend against the intruder they perceived as the greater threat. Consistent with my predictions, the majority of focal males approached “male” A. Additionally, male responses were influenced by age, with older males (in their second or later breeding season) approaching the dominant intruder more consistently than younger males (in their first breeding season). This is the first instance of TI being demonstrated in a natural population of untrained animals, and has important implications for the understanding of songbird communication networks. Transitive inference may be used in several natural situations by chickadees throughout the breeding season and a number of possible avenues for future TI research are discussed. Additionally, methods are suggested for the examination of TI during the non-breeding season. / Thesis (Master, Biology) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-24 10:45:17.316

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De nos jours, les entreprises font de plus en plus face au manque d’idées créatives en interne (Leimeister et al., 2009). Ce constat a conduit un nombre important d’entre elles à faire appel au crowdsourcing pour bénéficier de la créativité des participants sur Internet. Malgré les multiples bénéfices que cette stratégie procure aux entreprises, les chercheurs et praticiens soulignent l’existence d’un manque de participation de la part des consommateurs. Cette recherche vise à comprendre cette problématique en identifiant les facteurs explicatifs de la participation des consommateurs aux initiatives de crowdsourcing, plus particulièrement aux concours créatifs. Pour y répondre, le présent travail doctoral propose une série d’études empiriques destinées à : (1) comprendre les objectifs managériaux associés au crowdsourcing, ses conditions de réussite et ses freins (2) examiner les principales motivations de la participation et le profil des individus participants et (3) tester l’influence d’un ensemble de variables sur l’intention de participer par le biais d’une étude expérimentale. Les résultats soulignent que la force ou l’attrait de la marque, l’attachement à la marque, le gain financier et la volonté d’apprendre influencent positivement l’intention de participer aux concours créatifs. Cette recherche contribue à la littérature existante en apportant une meilleure compréhension du rôle modérateur des traits individuels des participants et de l’attitude à l’égard du brief dans l’explication de l’intention de participer. Finalement, nous terminons ce travail doctoral par une discussion des principaux résultats obtenus et des voies de recherche à envisager dans le futur. / Nowadays, companies have to increasingly face a lack of internal creative ideas (Leimeister et al., 2009).This has led a significant number of companies to resort to crowdsourcing to benefit from the creativity of participants on the Internet. Despite its multiple benefits, businesses, researchers and practitioners notice a lack of user participation. This research aims to understand this problem by identifying the factors explaining the participation of users in crowdsourcing initiatives, especially in creative competitions. Following an incursion into the literature to understand and delineate the outlines of crowdsourcing, we identify the factors explaining participation in such initiatives. In order to feel the gap of the literature to some extent, this doctoral work proposes a series of empirical studies aiming at: (1) understanding the managerial objectives associated with crowdsourcing, its conditions of success and its constraints, (2) examining the main motivations for participation and the profile of participants, and (3) testing the influence of a set of variables on the intention to participate through an experimental study. The results point out that brand strength, brand attachment, financial gain and willingness to learn positively influence the intention to participate in creative contests. This research contributes to the existing literature by providing a better understanding of the moderating role of participants' individual traits and their attitude towards the brief in explaining the intention to participate. Finally, we conclude this doctoral work with a discussion of the main results obtained and the research paths to be considered in the future.

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Submitted by Nadir Basilio (nadirsb@uninove.br) on 2017-03-31T14:37:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Anderson Rocha de Barros.pdf: 3399807 bytes, checksum: f1b6b0ea888af6f58fe6e7df4f01b4ea (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-03-31T14:37:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Anderson Rocha de Barros.pdf: 3399807 bytes, checksum: f1b6b0ea888af6f58fe6e7df4f01b4ea (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-08-25 / All businesses have processes that define how a product or service will be delivered. Therefore, knowledge of the business process is an important factor to deliver to customers, satisfactory results and get the desired profit. A methodology that contributes to the understanding of this process is known as BPM (Business Process Management) that, through the Process Architecture technique helps in understanding of critical processes, organizing them for a better flow of information, resulting in effective communication among those involved in process of a company. This study was applied to an organizer of tender that, after consecutive errors in the application of an objective test, required that its procedures were revised and improved. With the application of Process Architecture and Business Process Mangement, it was possible to identify problems, organize them and develop a system, automating the improved process in the departments of the company organizing contests. Several applications of objective tests were performed after the process improvement and as a result, the company organizing contests showed no more mistakes and retain many customers. / Todas as empresas possuem processos que definem como será entregue um produto ou serviço. Portanto, o conhecimento do processo de negócio é um fator importante para entregar aos clientes, resultados satisfatórios e obter o lucro desejado. Uma metodologia que colabora para a compreensão desse processo é conhecida como BPM (Business Process Management) que, por meio da técnica de Arquitetura de Processos, ajuda na compreensão dos processos críticos, organizando-os para um melhor fluxo da informação, resultando em uma comunicação eficaz entre os envolvidos no processo de uma empresa. Este estudo foi aplicado em uma empresa organizadora de concursos públicos que, após erros consecutivos na aplicação da prova objetiva, necessitava que seus processos fossem revisados e melhorados. Com a aplicação da Arquitetura de Processos com a metodologia BPM, foi possível identificar os problemas, organizá-los e desenvolver um sistema, automatizando o processo melhorado nos departamentos da empresa organizadora de concursos. Diversas aplicações da prova objetiva foram executadas após a melhoria do processo e, como resultado, a empresa organizadora de concursos não apresentou mais erros e fidelizou clientes.