Thèse (M.Eng.) -- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, programme en extension à l'Université du Québec à Rimouski, 2006. / La p. de t. porte en outre: Mémoire de recherche présenté à l'Université du Québec à Rimouski comme exigence partielle du programme de maîtrise en ingénierie pour l'obtention du grade ès sciences appliquées (M.Sc.A.). CaQCU Bibliogr.: f. [125]. Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (University of Texas Digital Repository, viewed on Sept. 9, 2009). Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

L’utilisation des colonies d’abeille mellifère, Apis mellifera, comme outil de biosurveillance est une alternative intéressante pour assurer le suivi de polluants atmosphériques comme les métaux et les hydrocarbures aromatiques polycycliques (HAP). Son utilisation a été validée Europe, mais peu explorée en contexte nord-américain. Étant donné les préoccupations manifestées par les résidents des quartiers plus défavorisés, quant aux diverses sources de pollution dans leur milieu, le but principal de cette étude était de documenter le possible gradient d’exposition à certains polluants atmosphériques entre les quartiers défavorisés et favorisés de la Ville de Québec. La complémentarité de la biosurveillance, aux mesures prises par les stations d’échantillonnage de l’air conventionnel (SEC), a également été examinée. Pour ce faire, huit ruches ont été installées dans différents quartiers, potentiellement caractérisés par différents niveaux de pollution : rural et urbain, ce dernier étant divisé en zone favorisée et défavorisée. La collecte des abeilles a été effectuée mensuellement sur une période de cinq mois (mai à septembre). Au total, six HAP et quatre métaux ont été analysés en laboratoire. Des différences significatives ont été détectées pour les contaminants à certains moments entre le milieu rural et urbain, mais également entre la zone urbaine favorisée et défavorisée. Cependant, des gradients d’exposition clairs entre les milieux n’ont pas été observés, sauf pour l’arsenic. De plus, il n’est pas possible de conclure sur la complémentarité des méthodes puisqu’une seule corrélation entre les mesures de la biosurveillance et des stations d’échantillonnage a été établie. Cela peut notamment s’expliquer par des contraintes méthodologiques comme le décalage entre l’échantillonnages des deux méthodes. Les résultats de cette étude permettent de confirmer que l’abeille est un bio-indicateur suffisamment sensible pour détecter des différences entre des environnements qui se distinguent en termes de pollution atmosphérique, mais également entre des environnements qui présentent des niveaux similaires de pollution. / Honeybees have been widely used in Europe as an environmental bioindicator for heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). However, their potential in North America has not been explored, especially in smaller cities where the pollution is weaker and presumed more homogeneous. While citizens in a deprived area of Québec city were much preoccupied about the air quality in their neighborhood, especially in regard exposure gradients of some pollutants, the aim of this study was to document their concerns. Also, because little is known about how honeybees could be a complementary method to formal environmental monitoring through physicochemical stations, comparisons have been performed between results obtained by the two different methods. To do so, we sampled honeybees at 8 locations possibly characterized by different levels of pollutant (rural and urban, the latter of which was then divided into deprived and favorized areas) over a 5-month period (May – September). 6 PAHs were analyzed by ultra-performance liquid chromatography, while 4 heavy metals were analyzed by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Significant differences were detected at some sampling time for heavy metals and PAHs between rural and urban environments, but also between deprived and favorized areas. Nevertheless, a clear gradient of exposure, could not be detected except for As considering that differences for the other contaminants were not often found during the sampling period and varied greatly. Even though we were not able to find a correlation between physicochemical and biomonitoring stations, except for one heavy metal, our results indicate that honeybee is a good biological indicator and is sensitive enough to detect differences between environments who showcased similar level of contaminants.

Many tasks require surveillance and analysis in order to make decisions regarding the next course of action. The people responsible for these tasks are usually concerned with any event that affects their bottom-line. Traditionally, human operators have had to either actively man a set of video displays to determine if specific events were occurring or manually review hours of collected video data to see if a specific event occurred. Actively monitoring video stream or manually reviewing and analyzing the data collected, however, is a tedious and long process which is prone to errors due to biases and inattention. Automatically processing and analyzing the video provides an alternate way of getting more accurate results because it can reduce the likelihood of missing important events and the human factors that lead to decreased efficiency. The thesis aims to contribute to the area of using computer vision as a decision support tool by integrating detector, tracker, re-identification, activity status estimation, and event processor modules to generate the necessary event statistics needed by a human operator. The contribution of this thesis is a system that uses feedback from each of the modules to provide better target detection, and tracking results for event statistics generation over an extended period of time. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system, it is first used to generate event statistics that measure productivity on multiple construction work sites. The versatility of the proposed system is also demonstrated in an indoor assisted living environment by using it to determine how much of an influence a technology intervention had on promoting interactions amongst older adults in a shared space.

Consumer surveillance, seen in the social sorting capabilities of loyalty marketing, is gendered. Using Canadian examples, gender is added to the existing literature on social sorting in relation to class (Burrows and Gane 2006; Parker, Uprichard and Burrows 2007) and racial or ethnic background (Gandy 1993; 1996; 2006a; 2006b; 2010; 2011). The prevalence of loyalty programs in Canada raises some significant issues regarding social sorting, as they tend to allocate unequal life chances and choices based on certain aspects of individuals’ profiles, allowing retailers to focus their efforts and resources toward their most desirable clientele. It is important to consider the role that gender plays in loyalty marketing in order to understand how being labelled a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ can influence how one’s personal information is categorized and utilized by companies. As these programs use data mining and social sorting techniques to attract preferred customers, men and women are targeted in different ways by different loyalty marketing schemes, depending on the perceived value of their digitized profiles. The findings of the 2006 Globalization of Personal Data survey are interrogated for a background analysis of gender and loyalty. A statistical analysis of the Canadian responses investigates whether membership rates and popular attitudes about loyalty programs vary significantly between different demographic groups. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-06-26 10:41:49.585

Influenza is suspected to be endemic in tropical climates, with peaks during and/or following cold or rainy seasons. To date, only one study has been conducted examining the epidemiology and seasonality of influenza in Uganda. The focus of this analysis is to determine whether a change in the seasonality of influenza can been seen between three distinct regions of Uganda: Central, Northwest, and Western. Secondary data analysis was conducted on surveillance data collected by the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) between April 2007 to September 2010 from 10 surveillance sites. Surveillance sites were grouped for this analysis into three regions: Central, Northwest, and Western. A total of 3,944 samples were collected and tested for any strain of influenza. The prevalence of influenza over the 4 years of surveillance was 10.1%. The majority of cases came from the Central region (81.7%) and the highest prevalence of influenza-positive samples were collected in the Central region (88.7 cases/1,000 persons). A clear difference in influenza activity was observed during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Uganda reported its first case of H1N1 in July 2009 (Relief Web). The Central region experienced its initial flux of influenza activity in July and August 2009 (Figure 1). However, the Northwest region did not experience a flux in activity until October 2009 (Figure 2). Influenza activity in the Central and Northwest regions appear to coincide with colder temperatures and both rainy seasons. The Northwest region was the only region to experience a peak corresponding with warmer weather. Results showed a slight change in the seasonality of influenza between the Central and Northwest regions of Uganda from surveillance data collected between April 2007 and September 2010.

The purpose of this research has been to develop a technique by which satellite constellations in different classes of orbit may be realistically compared. Previous work on constellation design has tended to focus on minimising the number of satellites required to provide coverage of the Earth. The variations in satellite vehicle design, which result from the use of different orbits, have, in general, been neglected in such analyses. The purpose of this research is to bridge this gap between constellation design and satellite design using a Figure of Merit. This Figure of Merit incorporates the coverage value provided by the satellite constellation, measured in terms of percentage coverage time, and the overall mass of the satellites which are required to provide this coverage. The coverage value is measured against a specific requirement, which is defined geographically, and which may be weighted by the user to reflect the relative importance of different regions. This allows arbitrary, asymmetric, real-world requirements to be adequately represented. This also marks something of a departure from previous work, in that the goal of much constellation design work has been to provide un-weighted coverage of the entire globe. Simplified mass models are developed for generic communications and surveillance satellites in a variety of orbits, and are then used to calculate the Figure of Merit for individual satellites. It is shown that the best solution depends crucially upon the geographical distribution of the requirement, and other user-defined parameters, such as the minimum elevation angle which can be tolerated. It is also shown that, for certain typical requirements, the Figure of Merit correctly identifies geostationary orbit (GEO) and low Earth orbit (LEO) as having particular advantages. iii The technique of characterising the requirement geographically may also be used as a means of optimising the orbital parameters of the candidate constellations, and a preliminary description of this procedure is also provided. The Figure of Merit Technique is then applied to representative communications satellite constellations in order to demonstrate its ability to differentiate between candidate options. The Figure of Merit technique is also used to investigate the possibility of using a surveillance satellite at very low altitudes.

The focus of this research is to study how targets can be more faithfully detected in a multi-camera CCTV network system using spectral feature for the detection. The objective of the work is to develop colour constancy (CC) methodology to help maintain the spectral feature of the scene into a constant stable state irrespective of variable illuminations and camera calibration issues. Unlike previous work in the field of target detection, two versions of CC algorithms have been developed during the course of this work which are capable to maintain colour constancy for every image pixel in the scene: 1) a method termed as Enhanced Luminance Reflectance CC (ELRCC) which consists of a pixel-wise sigmoid function for an adaptive dynamic range compression, 2) Enhanced Target Detection and Recognition Colour Constancy (ETDCC) algorithm which employs a bidirectional pixel-wise non-linear transfer PWNLTF function, a centre-surround luminance enhancement and a Grey Edge white balancing routine. The effectiveness of target detections for all developed CC algorithms have been validated using multi-camera ‘Imagery Library for Intelligent Detection Systems’ (iLIDS), ‘Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance’ (PETS) and ‘Ground Truth Colour Chart’ (GTCC) datasets. It is shown that the developed CC algorithms have enhanced target detection efficiency by over 175% compared with that without CC enhancement. The contribution of this research has been one journal paper published in the Optical Engineering together with 3 conference papers in the subject of research.

Modes of communication in modern society have become instant and frequent. Internet users usually post ongoing activities and check their friends’ statuses with texts and photos in social networking sites. During information seeking and sharing processes, they enable peer-to-peer surveillance on the Internet. The present research adopts Foucault’s (1977) Panopticon as a metaphor to investigate this new advent of online surveillance. Surveillance from unknown people on the Internet may not always exist, but the perception of being surveilled could be embedded in the users’ mind. This kind of suspicion may generate some surveillance effects such as low self-esteem and communication discouragement, namely panoptic effects without the presence of actual surveillance (Botan, 1996). This study focuses on the negative panoptic effects to Internet users, leading to three hypotheses related to privacy infringement, Internet stress and self-monitoring. An online survey was conducted with 325 respondents aged from 18 to 29. Regression analyses were used to investigate the explanatory power of one’s perception of being surveilled on the outcome variables. The results showed that the respondents with higher level of perceived online surveillance report higher sense of privacy infringement, more situational stress and higher desire of self-monitoring in their online disclosure. With awareness of being surveilled, the respondents realize the information they share online may be exposed to anonymous observers and be prone to storage and dissemination, resulting in privacy infringement. Since online information could be exposed and misused, the respondents feel stressful to share their views and emotions online. They may conduct self-censorship on their online disclosure so as to acquire credits from other Internet users and avoid punishment for improper manner. Implications of these findings are discussed in detail.

Sun Po-Wan. / Thesis submitted in: October 2002. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-70). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Lightwave Transmission System --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- PMD-induced Degradation in System Penalty --- p.1 / Chapter 1.3 --- A Device Mitigating Distortion Caused By Polarization-Mode Dispersion --- p.3 / Chapter 1.4 --- The Need For A Surveillance Scheme --- p.4 / Chapter 1.5 --- A Scalable Non-Intrusive Surveillance Scheme for Long-Haul Transmission --- p.5 / Chapter 1.6 --- Outline of the Thesis --- p.6 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- A Device for Mitigation of First-Order Polarization-Mode Dispersion --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Origin of Polarization-Mode Dispersion --- p.7 / Chapter 2.3 --- Polarization-Mode Coupling --- p.9 / Chapter 2.4 --- Statistical Characteristics of Polarization-Mode Dispersion --- p.11 / Chapter 2.5 --- Common Schemes of PMD Compensation --- p.15 / Chapter 2.6 --- A Proposed Design of Faraday Polarization Controller for First-Order PMD Mitigation --- p.20 / Chapter 2.7 --- Theory of Magnetooptic Effects --- p.25 / Chapter 2.8 --- Compact Size of Faraday Polarization Controller --- p.28 / Chapter 2.9 --- Characterization of Faraday Polarization Controller --- p.31 / Chapter 2.9.1 --- Polarization State of FPC Output Against Input Current --- p.31 / Chapter 2.9.2 --- Frequency Response of Faraday Polarization Controller --- p.38 / Chapter 2.9.3 --- Use and Calibration of Polarimeter --- p.40 / Chapter 2.10 --- Summary --- p.43 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Performance Evaluation of the Proposed Device in Mitigation of PMD-induced Distortion --- p.45 / Chapter 3.1 --- System Impairment and Power Penalty Due to First-Order PMD --- p.46 / Chapter 3.2 --- An Experiment for Testing PMD Compensation Capability of the Proposed Device --- p.47 / Chapter 3.3 --- Experimental Results --- p.50 / Chapter 3.4 --- Summary --- p.52 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- A Scalable Non-intrusive Surveillance Scheme for Long-Haul WDM Transmission --- p.53 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.53 / Chapter 4.2 --- Various Fault Surveillance Methods --- p.54 / Chapter 4.3 --- Limited Scalability of Previous Surveillance Schemes --- p.55 / Chapter 4.4 --- Principle of the Proposed Scheme --- p.56 / Chapter 4.5 --- Experimental Results --- p.58 / Chapter 4.6 --- Summary --- p.62 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- p.64 / Chapter 5.1 --- Conclusion --- p.64 / Chapter 5.2 --- Future Work --- p.65 / Bibliography --- p.67