The presence of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution of Canada has transformed the historic discourse about what types of people should be appointed to the Supreme Court and the manner in which they should be selected. During the period between 1949, when the Supreme Court replaced the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Britain as Canada's highest appellate body, and the Charter's entrenchment in 1982, the debate centered almost exclusively on questions of federalism. Specifically, the provinces argued that in a federal country, it is inappropriate that the status and composition of the court of last resort be left to the sole discretion of the central government. The Charter, with its enumeration of a variety of social categories, has produced new demands that the Court be more socially representative. Feminist legal scholars and women’s advocacy groups claim that a more representative judiciary in general and Supreme Court in particular would perform both symbolic and instrumental functions, while ethno cultural organizations have to date concentrated almost solely upon the symbolic dimension. By contrast, claims for self-government and separate justice systems illustrate that many aboriginal leaders believe their peoples’ grievances can best be met through disengagement from, rather than further integration into, Canadian political and legal processes. The Charter's presence also has conditioned demands for are formed appointment process. Now that the Court is to serve as the arbiter of citizen-state relations, many suggest, it is improper for the state to have sole control over who is appointed to that body, and therefore a more participatory and pluralistic appointment process is advocated. Clearly, these two broadly-defined reform agendas can conflict with one another. While the provinces demand more diffuse government involvement in the appointment of judges, those concentrating on the Court's Charter responsibilities believe that the state already unduly dominates the process. However, the current debate has further, largely unexplored consequences for potential reform. The failure of most participants in the debate, be they governments, scholars or advocacy groups, to articulate coherent approaches to questions of jurisprudential theory, combined with the difficulties inherent in applying the concept of representation to a judicial body, renders their critiques less valuable as guides to reform. Worse, their inadequate treatment of these issues often results in such critics undermining the legitimacy of the institution whose reform they seek. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

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While the phenotypic effects of sexual selection have been well studied, the consequences for population mean fitness remain unclear. Additionally, there is a need to more fully characterize how various forms of inter- and intrasexual selection combine to affect the evolution of traits under sexual selection. Here, I address these issues as they relate to male territoriality in Drosophila serrata, a model system for the study of female preference for male pheromones. First, I demonstrate that territoriality occurs and is a likely component of male sexual fitness. Results from a phenotypic manipulation indicate that territorial success was also condition-dependent, and that sexual selection against low condition males tended to be stronger given a high opportunity for territory defense. Territorial success depended on body size but not on pheromones. How this and other components of male mating success interact to affect trait evolution and population mean fitness remains an important area for future study.

In this thesis, I aim to answer the following questions: (1) is there a relationship between the gender of the nominator and the beauty of the ministers that he or she selected, and (2) do nominators select more attractive ministers of the opposite sex. I compare and contrast the physical beauty of ministers of three cabinets nominated by a male prime minister and three cabinets nominated by a female prime minister. My descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analysis, in which I control for the age of the nominator, the physical attractiveness of the nominator, the professional experience of the nominator, the age of the minister and the margin of victory of the nominator`s party, reveal interesting results. I find that both male and female prime ministers nominate better-looking women, and that this tendency is even stronger and slightly more pronounced for female nominators than it is for male nominators.

In this thesis, I investigate the relationship between two variables for which persistent directional sexual selection is an evolutionary driver: condition dependence and sexual dimorphism. This joint dependence on sexual selection predicts that among traits within a given species, greater dimorphism should be associated with stronger condition dependence. Very few studies have tested this prediction, and those that have focus on species with highly exaggerated and strongly dimorphic traits between the sexes. Here, I quantified variation in a suite of morphological traits in a dipteran species – the antler fly, Protopiophila litigata – in which sexual dimorphism is less extensive. I manipulated condition via different larval diets and then quantified the effects on adult body size and shape in both sexes. Across traits, I found that the extent of sexual dimorphism was positively associated with the strength of condition dependence in males but not in females. These results suggest a shared developmental basis to condition dependence and sexual dimorphism in body shape, and suggest that this has arisen via sexual selection in males despite the absence of extremely dimorphic shared traits.

Modern smartphones contain multiple sensors and long lasting batteries, making them ideal platforms for mobility monitoring. Mobility monitoring can provide rehabilitation professionals with an objective portrait of a patient’s daily mobility habits outside of a clinical setting. The objective of this thesis was to improve the performance of the human activity recognition within a custom Wearable Mobility Measurement System (WMMS). Performance of a current WMMS was evaluated on able-bodied and stroke participants to identify areas in need of improvement and differences between populations. Signal features for the waist-worn smartphone WMMS were selected using classifier-independent methods to identify features that were useful across populations. The newly selected features and a transition state recognition method were then implemented before evaluating the improved WMMS system’s activity recognition performance. This thesis demonstrated: 1) diverse population data is important for WMMS system design; 2) certain signal features are useful for human activity recognition across diverse populations; 3) the use of carefully selected features and transition state identification can provide accurate human activity recognition results without computationally complex methods.

One of the major research challenges is the ability to test selective forces in a wild population. A recent discovery of a new dipteran species, Protopiophila litigata, can enable researches to test selection in the wild. Most research has focused on mating behaviour, male mating success and senescence. In this study a small sample of wild mating and non-mating flies were collected, cuticular hydrocarbons were extracted and morphometric traits were obtained to assess the strength of sexual selection. There was significant linear sexual selection on cuticular hydrocarbons and, mid tibia length, hind tibia length and wing length. Overall, further establishes P. litigata as a model species for studying selection in the wild. Earlier studies have demonstrated strong sexual selection on male cuticular hydrocarbons in Drosophila serrata. Recently wing interference patterns have been documented to be under sexual selection in Drosophila melanogaster. A sample of cuticular hydrocarbons and wing interference pattern values were analyzed to understand the combined effects on male mating success. Cuticular hydrocarbons were under sexual selection, however wing interference patterns were not. Overall, this study confirms selection on cuticular hydrocarbons, but highlights the difficulty in accurately capturing and measuring wing interference patterns.

the mail goal is to explore a procedure of seizing working station "Exportní prodejce" and a the process of long stabilization of the new workers in this working station in the company Velteko,s.r.o, identify eventually absences and try to project solution and the ideal procedure of obtaining, selection, adaptation and stabilization workers on the working station "Exportní prodejce".

The diversity and range of the biological functions of non-coding RNA molecules (ncRNA) have only recently been realised, and phylogenetic analysis of the RNA genes that define these molecules can provide important insights into the evolutionary pressures acting on RNA genes, and can lead to a better understanding of the structure and function of ncRNA. An appropriate dataset is fundamental to any evolutionary analysis, and because existing RNA alignments are unsuitable, I describe a software pipeline to derive RNA gene datasets from genomic alignments. RNA gene prediction software has not previously been evaluated on such sets of known RNA genes, and I find that two popular methods fail to predict the genes in approximately half of the alignments. In addition, high numbers of predictions are made in flanking regions that lack RNA genes, and these results provide motivation for subsequent phylogenetic analyses, because a better understanding of RNA gene evolution should lead to improved methods of prediction. I analyse the RNA gene alignments with a range of evolutionary models of substitution and examine which models best describe the changes evident in the alignment. The best models are expected to provide more accurate trees, and their properties can also shed light on the evolutionary processes that occur in RNA genes. Comparing DNA and RNA substitution models is non-trivial however, because they describe changes between two different types of state, so I present a proof that allows models with different state spaces to be compared in a statistically valid manner. I find that a large proportion of RNA genes are well described by a single RNA model that includes parameters describing both nucleotides and RNA structure, highlighting the multiple levels of constraint that act on the genes. The choice of model affects the inference of a phylogenetic tree, suggesting that model selection, with RNA models, should be standard practice for analysis of RNA genes.

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