Corruption has gained attention around the world as a prominent issue. This is because corruption has greatly affected several countries. Following the exploration of various definitions and types of corruption, this thesis focuses on two efforts to rein in “grand corruption”, also known as executive corruption. The thesis is informed by existing theories of corruption as well as anti-corruption agencies and then situates Peru’s experience with corruption in its theoretical context and its broader Latin American context. This work conducts a comparative analysis and follows a process-tracing approach to examine and evaluate Peru’s recent anti-corruption agencies and their effectiveness in holding politically powerful people to account. An analysis is made regarding the efforts of two presidents who claimed to be committed to battling corruption; however, each had different motivations and operated under different circumstances. These differences are showcased in the following influential pillars: institutional design, funding, and oversight within the National Anti-Corruption Commission (CNA) and the Superior Court of Justice Specialized in Organized Crime and Corruption (CSJ).

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Whenever data is stored or transmitted, it inevitably encounters noise that can lead to harmful corruption. The communication technologies rely on decoding the data using Error Correcting Codes (ECC) that enable the rectification of noise to retrieve the original message. Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding has proven to be optimally accurate, but it has not been adopted due to the lack of a feasible implementation arising from its computational complexity. It has been established that ML decoding of arbitrary linear codes is a Nondeterministic Polynomial-time (NP) hard problem. As a result, many code-specific decoders have been developed as an approximation of an ML decoder. This code-centric decoding approach leads to a hardware implementation that tightly couples with a specific code structure. Recently proposed Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) offers a solution by establishing a noise-centric decoding approach, thereby making it a universal ML decoder. Both the soft-detection and hard-detection variants of GRAND have shown to be capacity achieving for any moderate redundancy arbitrary code. This thesis claims that GRAND can be efficiently implemented in hardware with low complexity while offering significantly higher energy efficiency than state-of-the-art code-centric decoders. In addition to being hardware-friendly, GRAND offers high parallelizability that can be chosen according to the throughput requirement making it flexible for a wide range of applications. To support this claim, this thesis presents custom-designed energy-efficient integrated circuits and hardware architectures for the family of GRAND algorithms. The universality of the algorithm is demonstrated through measurements across various codebooks for different channel conditions. Furthermore, we employ the noise recycling technique in both hard-detection and soft-detection scenarios to improve the decoding by exploiting the temporal noise correlations. Using the fabricated chips, we demonstrate that employing noise recycling with GRAND significantly reduces energy and latency, while providing additional gains in decoding performance. Efficient integrated architectures of GRAND will significantly reduce the hardware complexity while future-proofing a device so that it can decode any forthcoming code. The noise-centric decoding approach overcomes the need for code standardization making it adaptable for a wide range of applications. A single GRAND chip can replace all existing decoders, offering competitive decoding performance while also providing significantly higher energy and area efficiency. / 2026-05-23T00:00:00Z

Les animaux ont toujours évolué avec leur microbiote. Toutefois, peu d’études ont analysé le rôle des bactéries sur la spéciation. Il a été démontré que le microbiote oriente la spéciation de son hôte. L’objectif principal de cette thèse est d’évaluer l’influence des bactéries sur la spéciation du grand corégone (Coregonus clupeaformis). Sous certaines conditions, il existe deux espèces de corégone qui ont évolué de façon parallèle ; l’espèce naine et l’espèce normale qui sont caractérisées par des niches trophique et écologique différentes. Plusieurs types d’interaction hôte-bactéries ont été analysés au niveau de populations de corégones sauvages et de corégones captifs, qui ont été élevés dans des conditions identiques. Chez les corégones sauvages, les résultats supportent un effet de parallélisme au niveau de la diversité bactérienne, mais cet effet n’a pas été observé au niveau de la structure des communautés bactériennes entre l’espèce naine et normale. La présence d’un noyau bactérien très conservé au niveau du microbiote intestinal démontre une influence marquée de l'hôte sur ses communautés bactériennes. L’ensemble de ces résultats soulignent la complexité de l'holobionte (hôte + bactéries) en démontrant que la direction de sélection peut différer entre l'hôte et son microbiote. Chez les corégones captifs, la différence de la structure bactérienne chez les nains, les normaux et les hybrides F1 réciproques met en évidence l’influence de l’hôte sur le microbiote. Finalement, cette étude pionnière des communautés bactériennes du grand corégone ouvre la voie à des nouvelles directions de recherche liées à l’évolution de l’holobionte. / Animals have evolved with their microbiota. However, little is known about the role of bacteria over the course of this evolution. These last few years, it has been shown that the microbiota influences speciation by controlling the pre-zygotic and post-zygotic reproductive isolation. The main goal of the thesis is to analysis for the first time the influence of the microbiota on the Lake Whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) which represents a continuum in the early stage of ecological speciation. Some species pairs of dwarf (limnetic niche specialist) and normal (benthic niche specialist) evolved in parallel inside several lakes in northeastern North America. Bacterial communities have been compared among five wild sympatric species pairs of whitefish as well as captive dwarf, normal and hybrids whitefish reared in identical controlled conditions. For the wild fish, difference of the bacterial community structure was highlighted in the three studied interactions between the bacterial community and the host: host-pathogen, host-symbiont and host-transient bacteria. Although no parallelism was detected for the bacterial community structure for these interactions, it was highlighted at the bacterial diversity level. Moreover, parallelism was not observed within the bacteria community structure, likely because the water bacterial communities, studied in this thesis, and the biotic and abiotic factors were characterized by important variation between the lake populations of whitefish. Furthermore, results revealed a strong influence of the host (dwarf or normal) on the bacterial communities with pronounced conservation of the core intestinal microbiota. Finally, our result highlighted the complexity of the holobiont (host + bacteria), suggesting that the direction of selection could differ between the host and its microbiota. In fact, three evolutionary directions have been highlighted between the fish and its bacterial communities. For the captive whitefish, an influence of host (normal, dwarf and hybrids) was also detected on bacterial taxonomic composition. Hybrid microbiota was not intermediate and its composition fell outside of that observed in the parental forms. This pioneer study on the bacterial communities of the Lake whitefish opens new research fields related to the evolution of the holobiont.

Un des supports théoriques de la biologie évolutive est la théorie de la radiation adaptative, qui stipule que la diversification des espèces est le fruit de l'action de la sélection naturelle divergente sur les populations, laquelle émerge des caractéristiques biotiques et abiotiques de l'environnement. Il existe plusieurs exemples de cas de radiation adaptative dans la littérature. Or, la majorité des études se penchent sur la variation phénotypique morphologique et sur l'histoire de vie. Ainsi y a-t-il relativement peu de données sur la variation physiologique, tant au niveau de l'organisme qu'au niveau moléculaire. De plus, la caractérisation des bases génétiques de traits phénotypiques complexes s'avère peu aisée et demeure élusive. Dans cette étude, nous avons tiré profit des nouvelles technologies de la génomique pour caractériser les bases génétiques de la variation phénotypique observée chez deux populations divergentes du grand corégone (Coregonus clupeqformis), l'écotype limnétique (nain) ainsi que l'écotype benthique (normal). À l'aide d'une biopuce à ADNc spécifique au Salmonidés, nous avons comparé les profils d'expression génétique des corégones nains et normaux issus de leur milieu naturel ainsi que d'un environnement contrôlé. Le parallélisme observé dans les patrons de transcription génétique entre deux lacs et le milieu contrôlé indique que la sélection naturelle a modulé la régulation de gènes candidats associés à des adaptations phénotypiques distinguant les deux écotypes du corégone. De plus, le compromis observé entre différents traits d'histoire de vie chez les corégones nains et normaux se reflète à travers le profil de transcription pour ces gènes candidats. Enfin, l'analyse de regroupements (cluster analysis) entre les patrons de transcription des gènes candidats suggère que les principales fonctions physiologiques impliquées dans la divergence adaptative des corégones nains et normaux sont sous le contrôle d'un seul ou de quelques gènes de régulation. / One important theoretical framework in evolutionary biology is the adaptive radiation theory, which states that species diversification is the outcome of diverging natural selection, a selective force stemming from biotic and abiotic characteristics of the environment and acting on populations. Many cases of adaptive radiation have been observed and documented in the literature, focusing mainly on morphological adaptations and on life-history traits. Thus relatively few data are available on the physiological processes of adaptation, both at the organismal and molecular levels. Moreover, characterizing the genetics of phenotypic variation for complex traits is not an easy task and remains elusive in most cases. In this study, we took advantage of technologies of the post-genomic era in order to characterize the genetic bases of adaptive phenotypic variation observed in two diverging populations of the lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis), the limnetic (dwarf) and the benthic (normal) ecotypes. Using a salmonids-specific cDNA microarray, we compared the gene expression profiles of dwarf and normal whitefish individuals sampled from two natural populations and from a controlled environment. Parallelism in regulation patterns observed between two lakes and the control environment indicates that natural selection played a role in modulating the regulation for these candidate genes, in association with phenotypic adaptations distinguishing the two whitefish ecotypes. Also, the observed trade-off between life-history traits in dwarf and normal whitefish is reflected in the expression profiles for these candidate genes. Lastly, cluster analysis performed on transcription profiles for these genes suggests that the major physiological processes involved in the adaptive divergence of the dwarf and normal whitefish are under the control of one or few regulation genes

These stories examine the lives of working class people in light of the current economic and social climate. They address and attempt to empathize with the despair and disillusionment many working class Americans express in response to their economic and social realities, and the stories attempt to walk a non-judgmental line regarding the attitudes these characters espouse. Instead of judging the characters or championing a particular moral stance, the pieces attempt to present individuals faced with major failures: child abandonment, guilt over preventable death, overriding selfishness, racism, and shame regarding social status. These failures of character or morality echo the larger failings, as the characters perceive them, of their time and place. Within this worldview of disillusionment and despair, many of the characters in these stories choose to struggle toward self-betterment—not economic or social betterment per se, but individual betterment, a reckoning with themselves and their failures that necessarily reflects and interacts with the world they inhabit. These are stories rooted in the Midwest and its rust-belt inhabitants, but for all their contemporary socio-economic concerns, the stories are first and foremost concerned with the individual and representing each individual portrayed accurately and honestly. / Master of Fine Arts