This study investigates the types, frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters employed in L1 and L2 argumentative paragraphs written by Turkish learners of English with pre-intermediate level of proficiency. It aims to uncover whether or not Turkish learners of English writing in L1 and L2 display any transfer in their employment of hedges and boosters. The extent to which the academic writing teaching materials result in any measurable change in the employment of hedges and boosters is also pursued. To this end, the data that is comprised of 104 (52 Turkish and 52 English) argumentative paragraphs written as a response to a TOEFL essay prompt are collected. The analysis of the data is done manually and each paragraph is coded and formatted in CLAN CHILDES. Later, PASW is used to run the descriptive statistics and calculate the frequency and percentages of hedges and boosters. The results show that the types, frequencies, and meanings of hedges and boosters are culture and language-specific and they are topic and genre dependent. Research v findings also reveal that the participants in this study often express appropriate degree of certainty and pragmatic vagueness while writing in L1 and L2. However, there are some cases in which the evidence of rhetorical transfer are observed with respect to functions of certain hedges. The findings further indicate that there is a parallelism between the teaching materials used in academic writing classes and the types, frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters produced in L2 paragraphs.

Chlamydia trachomatis infection is the most common bacterial sexually transmitted disease in the United States. Irregular screening to identify infected individuals and a lack of sterilizing immunity to C. trachomatis has led to a dramatic increase in the number of reported C. trachomatis infections over the last twenty years. Repeated infections with C. trachomatis lead to serious sequelae such as pelvic inflammatory disease and ectopic pregnancy, which can result in infertility.

No description available.

Dysregulation of adipokines in obese adipose tissue contributes to inflammation and insulin resistance. Fatty acids and lipopolysaccharide (LPS) can modulate adipokine secretion, however, less is known about their effects in combination. Long-chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) exert anti-inflammatory effects and less is known about other n-3 and n-6 PUFA, which are more prevalent in the typical diet. Co-incubation of 3T3-L1 adipocytes with LPS and long-chain n-3 PUFA decreased LPS-induced secreted MCP-1 protein. n-6 PUFA arachidonic acid and LPS synergistically increased MCP-1 and IL-6 secreted proteins. Plant-derived PUFA were relatively neutral stimuli. mRNA expression results suggest potential roles for G protein-coupled receptor 120 and toll-like receptor 2 in mediating the effects of long-chain n-3 PUFA and arachidonic acid, respectively. Overall, this thesis suggests that both n-3 and n-6 PUFA are important factors to consider in the development of nutritional strategies for improving adipose tissue inflammation associated with obesity. / NSERC CGS, Ontario Graduate Scholarship

No description available.

The increase in the prevalence of obesity and obesity-related diseases has caused greater attention to be placed on the molecular mechanisms controlling adipogenesis. In this study, we studied the role of 5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine (5-Aza-dC), an inhibitor of DNA methylation, on adipocyte differentiation. We found that inhibiting DNA methylation by 5-Aza-dC significantly inhibited adipocyte differentiation whereas promoting osteoblastogenesis. Wnt10a was up-regulated by 5-Aza-dC treatment and it was suggested that Wnt10a might play a vital role in suppressing adipogenesis and promoting osteoblastogenesis by inhibiting DNA methylation. In 3T3-L1 cells, Wnt signaling inhibitor IWP-2 was found to reverse the inhibitory effect of 5-Aza-dC on Adipocyte differentiation, whereas in mesenchymal stem cell line, ST2 cells, IWP-2 treatment reversed the effect of 5-Aza-dC on promoting osteoblastogenesis. These studies will provide a better understanding to the cause and treatment of obesity and bone-related diseases.

cette thèse porte sur le développement du récit chez les enfants francophones monolingues entre 3 et 11 ans. Etude de la référence aux personnages, aux actions et de la connexion

Le codage parcimonieux permet la reconstruction d'un signal à partir de quelques projections linéaires de celui-ci, sous l'hypothèse que le signal se décompose de manière parcimonieuse, c'est-à-dire avec peu de coefficients, sur un dictionnaire connu. Le codage est simple, et la complexité est déportée sur la reconstruction. Après une explication détaillée du fonctionnement du codage parcimonieux, une présentation de quelques résultats théoriques et quelques simulations pour cerner les performances envisageables, nous nous intéressons à trois problèmes : d'abord, l'étude de conception d'un système permettant le codage d'un signal par une matrice binaire, et des avantages apportés par une telle implémentation. Ensuite, nous nous intéressons à la détermination du dictionnaire de représentation parcimonieuse du signal par des méthodes d'apprentissage. Enfin, nous discutons la possibilité d'effectuer des opérations comme la classification sur le signal sans le reconstruire.

A multirotor is a type of aerial vehicle that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Multirotors have found applications in a variety of different fields and they are used by scientists and researchers, commercial UAV companies and radio control enthusiasts alike. In this thesis a multirotor with eight rotors, also called an octorotor, is used. A physical model of the octorotor has been developed using theory from rigid body mechanics and aerodynamics. The unknown parameters in this model have been found using several identification experiments. The model has been used for controller design and comparison in a simulation environment. An attitude estimation algorithm has been designed and implemented on the target hardware. The algorithm is referred to as a nonlinear complementary filter and it uses a quaternion rotation representation and onboard measurements to compute an estimate of the current aircraft attitude. Two different attitude controllers have been designed and evaluated. The first controller is based on PID techniques which are commonly used in multirotor flight stabilization systems. The second controller uses a novel control structure based on L1 adaptive control techniques. A baseline attitude PD controller is augmented with an L1 adaptive controller in the rate feedback loop. The two controller structures are compared using a simulation environment based on the developed model of the octorotor. The results show that the proposed structure gives a notable performance increase with respect to robustness against modeling errors and input disturbance rejection compared to the PID controller. However, the L1 adaptive controller is more complex to implement and gives less noise attenuation. The PID controller has been implemented on the platform's hardware and initial flight tests have been performed with promising results. / En multirotor är en typ av flygande farkost som har fått mycket uppmärksamhet under senare år. Multirotorer tillämpas inom flertalet områden och de används av bland annat forskare och vetenskapsmän, kommersiella UAV- företag samt hobbyentusiaster. I detta examensarbete används en multirotor med åtta rotorer, en så kallad oktakopter. En fysikalisk modell av oktakoptern har tagits fram med hjälp av teori från stelkroppsmekanik och aerodynamik. De okända parametrarna i modellen har skattats med hjälp av ett flertal identifieringsexperiment. Modellen har använts för att designa och jämföra regulatorer i en simuleringsmiljö. En algoritm för att skatta farkostens attityd har designats och implementerats på oktakopterns hårdvara. Algoritmen är en variant av ett olinjärt komplementärt filter och använder en kvaternionrepresentation av attitydvinklar och uppmätt sensordata för att skatta farkostens nuvarande attityd. Två olika attitydregulatorer har designats och utvärderats. Den första regulatorn är baserad på PID-teknik vilket är vanligt för stabilisering av multirotorsystem. Den andra regulatorn använder en ny regulatorstruktur baserad på L1-adaptiv teknik. En grundregulator av PD-typ utökas med en L1-adaptiv regulator i vinkelhastighetsloopen. De två regulatorstrukturerna jämförs i en simuleringsmiljö baserad på den framtagna modellen av oktakoptern. Resultaten visar att den föreslagna regulatorstrukturen ger en betydande prestandaökning gällande robusthet mot modellfel och undertryckning av ingångsstörningar jämfört med PID-regulatorn. Dock är L1-regulatorn mer komplex att implementera och den ger mindre brusundertryckning. PID-regulatorn har implementerats på plattformens hårdvara och inledande flygtester har genomförts med lovande resultat.

The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the effects of acquiring a second language (L2) at later periods of language development and native-like homonym processing in the first language (L1) from the perspective of Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) using a cross-modal lexical decision task. To date, there is a lack of neurophysiological investigations into the effect that acquiring an L2 can have on processing strategies in the L1, and whether or not there is a precise age at which L2 exposure no longer affects native-like language processing. As such, my goal is to pinpoint this sensitive period specifically for homonym processing. To achieve this, I will present and discuss the results of two studies. The first study employs behavioural response measures using a cross-modal lexical decision task where participants simultaneously heard a sentence and made a decision to a visually-presented pseudoword or real word. The second study employs ERP measures using a novel ERP paradigm which investigates not only the main objective of this dissertation, but the second objective as well. This second objective is for this dissertation to become the first to evaluate the outcome of combining the cross-modal lexical decision task with ERPs. The behavioural and neurophysiological results for the monolingual group support the Reordered Access Model (Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988) while the results for the bilingual groups do not. The results of the current studies indicate that those bilinguals who acquired French as an L2 rather than as a second native L1 show increasing divergence from monolingual native speakers in L1 homonym processing, with later acquirers exhibiting an exponentially marked divergence. This was found even though the task was carried out in English, the L1 (or one of the L1s) of all participants. The diverging performances of the bilinguals from the monolinguals were apparent in behavioural responses as well as in the amplitude, scalp distribution, and latency of ERP components, These differences were unique to each group, which supports the hypothesis that the acquisition of an L2 influences processing in the L1 (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). Specifically, the early and late bilingual groups exhibited a marked divergence from the monolingual group as they revealed syntactic priming effects (p<.001) as well as lexical frequency effects (p<.001). They also revealed the greatest P600-like effect as they processed target words which were inappropriately- related to the priming homonyms (such as skin in Richard had a shed in the back of the garden). This suggests a heightened sensitivity to surface cues due to the L2 influencing homonym processing in the L1 (Cook, 2003; Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). Comparatively, the monolingual group revealed equal N400-like effects for lexical ambiguities overall compared to the unrelated conditions, and a context-by-frequency-interaction slowing their processing of the target word that is appropriately-related to the subordinate reading of the priming homonym, suggesting that they are not as sensitive to these same surface cues. Importantly, these results confirm that using ERPs along with a cross-modal lexical decision task is a promising paradigm to further study language processing.