Although the 1837-38 Rebellions and the Union of the Canadas have received much attention from historians, the Special Council—a political body that bridged two constitutions—remains largely unexplored in comparison. This dissertation considers its time as the legislature of Lower Canada. More specifically, it examines its social, political and economic impact on the colony and its inhabitants. Based on the works of previous historians and on various primary sources, this dissertation first demonstrates that the Special Council proved to be very important to Lower Canada, but more specifically, to British merchants and Tories. After years of frustration for this group, the era of the Special Council represented what could be called a “catching up” period regarding their social, commercial and economic interests in the colony. This first section ends with an evaluation of the legacy of the Special Council, and posits the theory that the period was revolutionary as it produced several ordinances that changed the colony’s social, economic and political culture This first section will also set the stage for the most important matter considered in this dissertation as it emphasizes the Special Council’s authoritarianism. During this period, Lower Canadians lost all political rights and the decisions taken by the Special Council were made by non-elected councilors. The second section therefore considers the various ordinances the council passed, its obvious favoritism and authoritarianism, and the opinions of Lower Canadians towards them. The following questions are considered: did the British and French-Canadians react differently to the dissolution of their legislature and the suspension of their constitution? Considering the fact that many people, habitants and British alike, did not support the rebellion, did they view the council as a necessity in restoring peace and stability to the colony, and therefore accepted its authoritarianism, and even supported it? More importantly, did French-Canadians submit to the Special Council and all of the new laws and institutions it imposed in the years following the failed rebellions? Evidence suggests that French-Canadians were very vocal in their opposition to the Special Council.

This study addresses the discrepancy between the range of Beethoven's double bass parts and the instrument or instruments in use in Vienna in his day. Scholars and musicians have complained about Beethoven's apparent disregard for the instrument's capabilities since the middle of the nineteenth century. A systematic examination of Beethoven's orchestral writing for the double bass shows that this reputation is undeserved. In fact Beethoven paid close attention to the lower compass of the double bass throughout his orchestral writing: a clear boundary of F is observed up to op. 55, and thereafter E, though F still obtains in some late works. Beethoven's observance of the F boundary suggests that he was writing for the Viennese five-stringed violone, and not the modern form of the instrument, as has previously been assumed in scholarship. Other evidence pointing to the use of this instrument is presented. Some of Beethoven's bass parts between op. 55 and op. 125 do in fact descend to C (sounding C1); yet there is no evidence supporting the existence of a double bass instrument capable of C1 in Beethoven's day. Possible explanations for these violations of the compass of the double bass are discussed. These focus on the possibility of simple proofreading error, and on evidence for the unwritten practice of reinforcing the double bass with one or more contrabassoons. The contrabassoon in Beethoven's day had a lower compass of C1, and Vienna was an early center for its production and use. Analysis of the bulk of Beethoven's double bass parts for their range is given. Emphasis in this analysis is given to instances where Beethoven demonstrates a clear awareness of the compass of the instrument. Out-of-range pitches are compiled in table form.

Subsequent to a difficult surgery or a sever injury to the lower part of the body, often partial load bearing is needed to stimulate an optimal rehabilitation. Today, this is achieved by teaching the patient the optimal load by iteration. This has been shown insufficient for many patients, due to their difficulties of remembering the correct amount of load. Furthermore, patients who lack proprioception are unable to feel the load. A portable measuring system would enhance the patient possibility of optimal loadings. This thesis has two main objects. 1. A study of the state of the art on existing commercial system, related patents and measuring techniques. 2. A new measuring technique, which is the part that most of all determine the system performance, was developed. A new design, using off the shelf, products is proposed. The design uses a finite number of thin sensors placed onto an insole. By placing the sensors at the plantar pressure points most of the total load is captured by the insole setups. To compensate for the measuring error fitting methods were evaluated. The result depends on the insole calibration methods. The best result without individual calibration is: mean error for the group of 0.5% of the total patient load and a deviation of 24%. With individual calibration reduces the deviation to about 12%.

The study is to propose a novel design for the lower limb rehabilitation system through the motion training of stepping upward or downward. A main goal of this design is to constrain the system dimension to a small value for home use purpose. It is also desired that the functioning of system is automatic that the direction of stepping upward or downward can be changed arbitrarily in the training process. The TRIZ theory, which offers a systematic thinking process for problem solving, is adopted in this study to construct the first step of conceptual design. From the theory, the problems of system design is mainly to deal with three issues, which are the spatial analysis and optimization, motion conversion design for ladder, and the motion control of ladder. The spatial analysis is to investigate the optimal trajectory of ladder motion that the total space of the system can be minimized. It is done by assuming a specific geometrical property of ladder trajectory and solving the optimization problem through the parameter optimization. The motion conversion design is to invent an approach to change the configuration of ladder from either open-to-close or close-to-open status. To do so, a small section of ladder trajectory is asked to be flexible and a mechanism to trigger the configuration change is proposed. The motion control is to maintain the user located in an almost same location while the training is preceded. In this study, the PID control scheme is adopted to examine whether the control goal can be properly achieved. This study reveals that a proper design can be obtained through the specific process of problem solving. The system is shown to function well when the above three issues are solved by the proposed schemes.

The present work investigates the turbulent jet flow mixing of downward impinging jets within a staggered rod bundle based on previous experimental work. The two inlet jets had Reynold's numbers of 11,160 and 6,250 and were chosen to coincide with the available data. Steady state simulations were initially carried out on a semi-structured polyhedral mesh of roughly 13.2 million cells following a sensitivity study over six different discretized meshes. Very large eddy simulations were carried out over the most refined mesh and continuous 1D wavelet transforms were used to analyze the dominant instabilities and how they propagate through the system in an effort to provide some insight into potential problems relating to structural vibrations due to turbulent instabilities. The presence of strong standing horseshoe vorticies near the base of each cylinder adjacent to an inlet jet was noted and is of potential importance in the abrasion wear of the graphite support columns of the VHTR if sufficient wear particles are present in the gas flow.

No description available.

Alignment of the above-knee prostheses is one of the important factors affecting the success of patient/prosthesis matching. It has been found that the prosthetist and the patient can accept a number of alignments which produce different intersegmental loads and it has been suggested that it is possible to obtain an 'optimal' alignment satisfying certain criteria. In order to enhance the efficiency of the alignment procedure, it is necessary to understand how alignment affects the amputee's gait and the patient compensations for changes in the alignment. Biomechanical gait tests on above-knee amputees were conducted in which the alignment of the prosthesis was changed systematically. The Strathclyde television-computer system was used to record the kinematic data of the amputee, and the ground reactions were measured by two Kistler forceplates. An 8-segment biomechanical model of the above-knee amputee was developed and implemented by a suit of FORTRAN computer programs to analyze and present 3-D kinematic and kinetic data obtained. The effects of alignment changes on the above-knee amputees' gait were studied in terms of the temporal-distance parameters, angular displacements of the lower limbs and the trunk, ground reactions and intersegmental moments. It was found that the angular displacement at the hip joint on the prosthetic side showed compensatory actions of the amputee for the alignment changes. The ground reaction force was sensitive to alignment changes, and in particular, the changes in the characteristics of the fore-aft ground force could be related to the alignment changes. The antero-posterior intersegmental moments about the prosthetic ankle and knee joints were evidently influenced by alignment.

This study examines the regional stratigraphic architecture, depositional systems, and petrographic characteristics of the South Texas Pearsall shale-gas system currently developed in the Indio Tanks (Pearsall) and Pena Creek (Pearsall) fields. The Pearsall Formation was deposited as a mixed carbonate-siliciclastic system on a distally steepened ramp over a period of 11.75 million years. It was deposited between maximum floods of two second-order sequences and contains at least five third-order cycles. Up to three Oceanic Anoxic Events (OAE 1-A, Late Aptian Regional Event, and OAE 1-B) figure prominently in the deposition of the Pearsall sediments, and during these intervals, depending on the location within the Maverick Basin, sedimentation rates were between 0.5 and 2 cm/ky. Facies in the Pearsall section arise from interactions between pre-existing topography, oxygenation regime, eustatic sea-level fluctuation, and depositional processes. In the Pearsall Formation, OAEs affected depositional environments and resulting facies patterns during several time periods. The OAEs occurred in association with transgressions but not necessarily in concert with them. Outer ramp OAE facies are siliciclastic-dominated, TOC-rich, and little-bioturbated. Conversely the outer ramp facies deposited under normally oxygenated paleoenvironmental conditions tend to be carbonate-rich, TOC-poor, and are more prominently bioturbated. / text

We study fundamental properties of Locally Decodable Codes (LDCs). LDCs are motivated by the intuition that traditional codes do not have a good tradeoff between resistance to arbitrary error and probe complexity. For example, if you apply a traditional code on a database, the resulting codeword can be resistant to error even if a constant fraction of it was corrupted; however, to accomplish this, the decoding procedure would typically have to analyze the entire codeword. For large data sizes, this is considered computationally expensive. This may be necessary even if you are only trying to recover a single bit of the database! This motivates the concept of LDCs, which encode data in such a way that up to a constant fraction of the result could be corrupted; while the decoding procedures only need to read a sublinear, ideally constant, number of codeword bits to retrieve any bit of the input with high probability. Our most exciting contribution is an exponential lower bound on the length of three query LDCs (binary or linear) with high correctness. This is the first strong length lower bound for any kind of LDC allowing more than two queries. For LDCs allowing three or more queries, the previous best lower bound, given by Woodruff, is below [omega](n2). Currently, the best upper bound is sub-exponential, but still very large. If polynomial length constructions exist, LDCs might be useful in practice. If polynomial length constructions do not exist, LDCs are much less likely to find adoption -- the resources required to implement them for large database sizes would be prohibitive. We prove that in order to achieve just slightly higher correctness than the current best constructions, three query LDCs (binary or linear) require exponential size. We also prove several impossibility results for LDCs. It has been observed that for an LDC that withstands up to a delta fraction of error, the probability of correctness cannot be arbitrarily close to 1. However, we are the first to estimate the largest correctness probability obtainable for a given delta. We prove close to tight bounds for arbitrary numbers of queries. / text

MSc, PU vir CHO, 1993