Interest in the presence of environmental contaminants in the Canadian arctic and sub-arctic arises in part over concerns that Aboriginal people residing in these regions continue to rely on subsistence harvesting. Organochlorines (OCs) are a type of persistent organic pollutant (POP) that have a unique chlorine-carbon bond; this bond facilitates their unprecedented environmental longevity, lipophilicity and hydrophobic nature. OCs have been found in both the biotic and non-biotic compartments of northern ecosystems. This study examined patterns of differences with respect to body burden of organochlorines (lipid-adjusted) between the residents of the Ontario First Nations of Fort Albany (the site of MCRL Site 050), Kashechewan (no radar site), and Peawanuck (the site of MCRL 500) to assess whether geo-proximity to abandoned radar sites influenced organochlorine body burden with respect to the people of Fort Albany and Peawanuck. Correspondence analysis (CA-1) revealed people from Fort Albany had relatively higher pesticide concentrations (β-HCH and DDT, but not Mirex) and relatively lower CB (156 and 170) body burdens when compared to participants from Kashechewan and Peawanuck. CA- 2 revealed Peawanuck residents had relatively higher concentrations of CB180, DDE and hexachlorobenzene and relatively lower levels of DDT and mirex compared to participants from Kashechewan and Fort Albany. Results are suggestive but not conclusive that MCRL Site 500 may have influenced body burdens of Peawanuck residents.

The majority of people in North America have lost not only the knowledge of how to successfully sustain themselves from the land but, even more troubling, the basic knowledge of where the food comes from, what real food is, or even what to do with it. It is not only basic knowledge of food that is being lost in the consumer culture; many of the private and public spaces that were central to the social fabric of the city, street, and family are changing and losing their significance. The mass marketing of the consumer lifestyle has led to the disappearance of home gardens, local restaurants, neighbourhood coffee shops, and farmers’ markets. It has altered the fine grain of our city, streets, and homes, thereby reducing the social interactions that once created lively streets in the past. This thesis examines both the historical and current relationship and influence of food in cities, streets and homes in relation to the growing issues of access to fresh whole food and the dispersed city form. In addition, it will investigate how food orientated developments such as Community Food Centres can act as a catalyst for urban revitalization in failing urban cores and provide a resiliency to the economies of the city. The analysis of the influence of food, challenges that midsized cites are facing, and a series of precedents will provide a set guidelines for architects and planners developing urban projects. Three main themes are explored as a means to revitalization of urban neighbourhood through food: reuse of under used or abandoned land, our cultural connection to food, and the activities and culture that the two create together. These themes will explore the use and cultural significance of kitchens, markets, and restaurants and public space as architectural spaces that create community as a means to better understand what mechanisms of these aspects are the keys to the building of vibrant communities. This concept will be explored through the design of a community food centre in St. Patrick’s Ward in Guelph, Ontario.

The goal of this thesis is to investigate and propose housing that increases density while offering a better quality of life for citizens inhabiting Toronto’s Avenues. This thesis compares three different building prototypes, all of varying scales and typological characteristics. The viability of each prototype is discussed with regards to the current economic and regulatory conditions within the city, as well as the varying quality of life that each prototype creates.

The issue of downtown revitalization has been much studied over the past several decades. However, much of the existing knowledge base pertains to our largest urban centres. This leaves a significant information gap with regards to mid-size cities. As a result, past renewal attempts in these cities have often been scaled down versions of what has worked in larger cities. In most cases, this has resulted in detrimental rather than reviving effects. The current trend in cities of all sizes is the implementation of Creative City Theory. This thesis seeks to study this trend and its specific relevance to the mid-size city. The scope of research will then build on the current theory by exploring the effects of well-designed public spaces and their ability to not only unleash the creative spirit but to revitalize the post-industrial mid-size city downtown. This information will then be applied to a design study for Hamilton, Ontario where failed renewal attempts have crippled the city’s downtown. The design will concentrate on Jackson Square (formerly known as Civic Square), a superblock within the very centre of downtown Hamilton. Through a redesign of Jackson Square, the thesis proposes to create a place that not only fosters creativity, but is once again meaningful and significant to Hamilton citizens. While the application of research to Hamilton is specific, the goal is to produce a body of work with principles that can be applied to any number of mid-size cities across the post-industrial world.

This thesis evaluates how municipal transit ridership in mid-sized cities is influenced by external factors. External factors are forces outside a municipality’s direct control but potentially affect the municipality in some way, in particular its transit ridership. The thesis also determines the appropriateness of municipal levels of response to each factor. Two mid-sized municipalities in Ontario, Canada – the City of Kingston and Region of Waterloo – were studied. The evaluation, first, identifies the trends or “current conditions” between the municipalities and five sets of external factors to determine influence on ridership. The factors are 1. Population Growth and Density; 2. Demographics (Seniors, Students and Immigrants); 3. Regional Location; 4. Federal/Provincial Impacts; and 5. Fuel Prices. Second, the municipality’s level of response was measured in three ways. Staff awareness of the factor and its influence was gauged using key informant interviews and municipal councillor surveys conducted by the researcher. Internal policy and guidance documents measured whether policies relating to each factor are appropriate. Finally, observations of implemented initiatives determined whether they appropriately deal with each factor. The study finds that more external factors act on Waterloo than Kingston. Therefore, Waterloo has strong incentives to prioritize – among many municipal responsibilities – its transit system and to focus on increasing ridership. The strongest incentives for Waterloo are population growth, the student demographic and federal/provincial impacts. Kingston has only one strong incentive: the senior demographic. The study also finds that Waterloo has appropriate levels of response to more of the external factors than does Kingston. Recommendations for Kingston and Waterloo are provided for improving their levels of response to each set of factors. The paper concludes that municipal size is an important driver, but internal levels of response are critical success factors. The data analysis matrix developed for this study can be used by other municipalities to help identify appropriateness of internal responses as they relate to the influence of external factors within their municipality.

Under deregulated electric market, electricity price is no longer set by the monopoly utility company rather it responds to the market and operating conditions. Offering the right amount of electricity at the right time with the right bidding price has become the key for utility companies pursuing maximum profits under deregulated electricity market. Therefore, electricity market clearing price (MCP) forecasting became essential for decision making, scheduling and bidding strategy planning purposes. However, forecasting electricity MCP is a very difficult problem due to uncertainties associated with input variables.<p> Neural network based approach promises to be an effective forecasting tool in an environment with high degree of non-linearity and uncertainty. Although there are several techniques available for short-term MCP forecasting, very little has been done to do mid-term MCP forecasting. Two new artificial neural networks have been proposed and reported in this thesis that can be utilized to forecast mid-term daily peak and mid-term hourly electricity MCP. The proposed neural networks can simulate the electricity MCP with electricity hourly demand, electricity daily peak demand, natural gas price and precipitation as input variables. Two situations have been considered; electricity MCP forecasting under real deregulated electric market and electricity MCP forecasting under deregulated electric market with perfect competition. The PJM interconnect system has been utilized for numerical results. Techniques have been developed to overcome difficulties in training the neural network and improve the training results.

Abstract Many would agree that English has become a global language that has spread all over the world. English has been the primary foreign language in the Swedish school curriculum since the Second World War and most Swedes have some English language proficiency. Today, Swedes are not only subjected to English in school, but also come across English every day in media, in the streets or at work. A number of studies have been done on how Swedish students use English and of their attitudes towards it, but not much on how Swedes that are no longer under school influence view the matter. This study has examined the attitudes and preferences towards English among 60 adults. Most of them have a positive attitude towards English and believe that the use of English in Sweden will increase in the future. Even so, they show little concern that English might be a future threat towards Swedish. Both men and women find media as their primary source of English influence and there was only one minor difference to be noted when comparing attitudes between different age groups. The older female informants reported to use less English and have lower skills than the rest. No such trend was seen among the men belonging to the same age group. Besides this, some interesting gender differences were seen. The female informants reported to have a stronger preference for British English and the male informants showed preference for American English. These gender differences would be interesting to study further.

Tectonic windows are faulted escarpments that expose extensive sections of <em>in situ</em> oceanic crust, providing valuable opportunities to examine upper crustal architecture from a perspective unmatched by other approaches. Recent investigations of tectonic windows by submersible (<em>Alvin, Nautile</em>) and remotely-operated vehicle (<em>Jason II</em>) have recovered an unprecedented suite of dikes and lavas. We focus on compositions of dikes and lavas from intermediate- and super-fast rate crust exposed, respectively, in the Western Blanco Transform (BT) fault and the Pito Deep Rift (PD), to better understand accretionary processes at mid-ocean ridges. In the BT, the upper lavas are generally more primitive than the lower lavas, supporting geophysical and geological studies that suggest off-axis volcanism plays an important role in constructing the upper crust at intermediate-rate spreading centers. The wide range in lava compositions exposed along the BT scarp also lends caution to studies that rely on surface lavas to determine the evolution of sub-axial magmatic conditions.The PD suite allows us to examine accretionary processes over an impressive temporal range, including long-term (millions of years) changes in mantle composition and medium-rate (100s of ka) changes in magmatic regime. Compositions of adjacent dikes reveal that the ocean crust is heterogeneous on short time (<10>ka) and spatial (meters) scales, reflecting along-axis transport of magma from chemically heterogeneous portions of the melt lens. High compositional variability was also observed in adjacent dikes from Hess Deep (HD), a tectonic window into fast-rate crust, suggesting that lateral dike intrusion occurs at all mid-ocean ridges. PD lavas are offset to lower density compositions compared to dikes, an observation previously made in HD, but made here for the first time in other dike-lava populations, suggesting that buoyancy plays a major role in partitioning magma between dikes and lavas. A model for intrusion of a single dike shows that crustal density, magma pressure, and tectonic stress affect the intensity of density-based magma partitioning in a systematic way that can be related to compositions of dike-lava populations. / Dissertation

As microprocessors move towards higher frequencies, lower operating voltages and higher power consumption, supplying noise-free power to the ICs becomes increasingly challenging. Decoupling capacitors with low inductance interconnections are critical to meet the power supply impedance targets. A variety of capacitors are used today to provide decoupling at different frequencies. Surface-mount multi-layer ceramic capacitors currently used at package level provide decoupling only till about 100 MHz because of the component and lead inductances. Embedding thin film capacitors into the package can expand the operating range of package level capacitors to low GHz frequencies. Thin films with capacitance of several microfarads and organic-compatible processes are required for embedding decoupling capacitors at package level. The organic-compatible high-permittivity materials available today do not provide adequate capacitance for the application on hand. While ferroelectric thin films can provide the required capacitance, processing temperatures over 300o C are required to achieve crystalline films with high permittivity. Hence, there is a need to develop novel materials and processes to integrate decoupling capacitors into currently prevalent organic packages. To this end, hydrothermal synthesis and sol-gel synthesis of BaTiO3 films were explored in this study. BaTiO3 films were synthesized by low temperature hydrothermal conversion of metallic titanium. Hydrothermal process parameters such as bath molarity and temperature were optimized to obtain thin films with grain sizes close to 100 nm, at temperatures less than 100o C. Novel post-hydrothermal treatments were developed to improve the dielectric properties of the films. Sol-gel process requires sintering at >700o C to obtain crystalline BaTiO3 films. However, the films can be synthesized on free-standing copper foils and subsequently integrated into organic packages using lamination. Prevention of foil oxidation during sintering is critical. Nickel and titanium barriers explored in this study were ineffective due to instabilities at the interfaces. Hence, films were synthesized on bare copper foils by controlling the oxygen partial pressure during sintering. Using these techniques BaTiO3 thin films with capacitances of 400 1000 nF/cm2 and breakdown voltages of 6 15 V were demonstrated. The films synthesized via either techniques exhibited stable dielectric properties up to 8 GHz owing to fine grain sizes.

This thesis is an investigation into biogenic sulfide oxidation and sulfate reduction associated with hydrothermal systems at oceanic spreading centers. First, the production of sulfur floc and 'snowblower' events due to sulfide oxidizing bacteria is investigated. The effects of sulfur floc on the pososity is shown to be negligible. 'Snowblower' events are shown to be sulfur floc that is stored over long periods of time mixed with a component of sulfur floc being created in a bloom event. Secondly, biogenic sulfate reduction in hydrothermal recharge zones is investigated and the effects on the concentration profiles is considered.