The following thesis outlines the Chinese government's push for new-energy vehicles within their auto industry. By giving a history of the Chinese automotive industry and the central planning devices used to push the industry forward, we should develop a more refined understanding as to the direction of China' auto industry in the future.

This thesis presents an ethnographic study of the role of users in user-centered design. It is written from the perspective of science and technology studies, in particular developments in actor-network theory, and draws on the notion of the assemblage from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The data for this thesis derives from a six-month field study of the routine discourse and practices of user-centered designers working for a multinational microprocessor manufacturer. The central argument of this thesis is that users are assembled along with the new technologies whose design they resource, as well as with new configurations of socio-cultural life that they bring into view. Informing this argument are two interrelated insights. First, user-centered and participatory design processes involve interminglings of human and non-human actors. Second, users are occasioned in such processes as sociotechnical assemblages. Accordingly, this thesis: (1) reviews how the user is variously applied as a practico-theoretical concern within human-computer interaction (HCI) and as an object of analysis within the sociology and history of technology; (2) outlines a methodology for studying users variously enacted within design practice; (3) examines how a non-user is constructed and re-constructed during the development of a diabetes related technology; (4) examines how designers accomplish user-involvement by way of a gendered persona; (5) examines how the making of a technology for people suffering from obesity included multiple users that served to format the designers’ immediate practical concerns, as well as the management of future expectations; (6) examines how users serve as a means for conducting ethnography-in-design. The thesis concludes with a theoretically informed reflection on user assemblages as devices that: do representation; resource designers’ socio-material management of futures; perform modalities of scale associated with technological and product development; and mediate different forms of accountability.

Existing automatic methods of analysing musical performance can generally be described as music-oriented DSP analysis. However, this merely identifies attributes, or artefacts which can be found within the performance. This information, though invaluable, is not an analysis of the performance process. The process of performance first involves an analysis of the score (whether from a printed sheet or from memory), and through this analysis, the performer decides how to perform the piece. Thus, an analysis of the performance process requires an analysis of the performance attributes and artefacts in the context of the musical score. With this type analysis it is possible to ask profound questions such as “why or when does a performer use this technique”. The work presented in this thesis provides the tools which are required to investigate these performance issues. A new computer representation, Performance Markup Language (PML) is presented which combines the domains of the musical score, performance information and analytical structures. This representation provides the framework with which information within these domains can be cross-referenced internally, and the markup of information in external files. Most importantly, the rep resentation defines the relationship between performance events and the corresponding objects within the score, thus facilitating analysis of performance information in the context of the score and analyses of the score. To evaluate the correspondences between performance notes and notes within the score, the performance must be analysed using a score-performance match- ing algorithm. A new score-performance matching algorithm is presented in this document which is based on Dynamic Programming. In score-performance matching there are situations where dynamic programming alone is not sufficient to accurately identify correspondences. The algorithm presented here makes use of analyses of both the score and the performance to overcome the inherent shortcomings of the DP method and to improve the accuracy and robustness of DP matching in the presence of performance errors and expressive timing. Together with the musical score and performance markup, the correspondences identified by the matching algorithm provide the minimum information required to investigate musical performance, and forms the foundation of a PML representation. The Microtonalism project investigated the issues surrounding the performance of microtonal music on conventional (i.e. non microtonal specific) instruments, namely voice. This included the automatic analysis of vocal performances to extract information regarding pitch accuracy. This was possible using tools developed using the performance representation and the matching algorithm.

This PhD seeks to explore the development of a bio-molecular (i.e., genomic) map as a sovereign resource in Mexico. The basic analytical thread of the dissertation is related to the circulation of genomic variability through the policy/legal and scientific social worlds that compose the Mexican medical-population genomics arena. It follows the construction of the Mexican Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), the notion of genomic sovereignty, and the Mexican Genome Diversity Project (MGDP).The key argument for the construction of the INMEGEN relied in a nationalist policy framing, which considered the Mexican genome as a sovereign resource, coupling Mexican “uniqueness” to the very nature of genomic science. Nevertheless, the notion of genomic sovereignty was nothing similar to a paradigm, and was not based on shared visions of causality, since the very “nature” of the policy object —Mexican Genome— was, and still is, a disputed reality. It was through the rhetoric upon independence, emancipation and biopiracy: i.e. experiences of dispossession “in archaeology, botany or zoology” (IFS 2001: 25) that the novelty of population genomics became amenable to be understood as a sovereign matter. Therefore, the strategic reification of Mexicanhood fuelled the whole policy and the legal agenda of the INMEGEN as well, which permitted cooperation without consensus and opened the process of policy innovation. Conversely, scientists considered genomic sovereignty an unfounded exaggeration, but anyhow they cooperated and even created a new policy and scientific enterprise. Genomic sovereignty exemplifies the process of cooperation without consensus on its most extreme version .So, as the notion circulated and gradually became a law to protect Mexican genomic patrimony, the initial coalition of scientists, lawyers and policy makers disaggregated. Many of the original members of the coalition now think of genomic sovereignty as a strategy of the INMEGEN to monopolise genomic research in the country. This dissertation additionally explores the way in which the MGDP is constructed in mass media, in INMEGEN´s communication and in the laboratory practices. These different dimensions of the MGDP depict the difficulties that emerge between the probabilistic, relative and multiple constructions of population genomics and the rhetorical strategies to continually assert the existence of the unique “Mexican Genome”. I argue that the Mexican case study provides an entry point to what I and others (Benjamin 2009; Schwartz-Marin 2011) have identified as a postcolonial biopolitics in which the nation state is reasserted rather than diluted. However the relation between sovereignty, race and nation is not mediated by the biological purification of the nation (Agamben 1998; Foucault 2007), or the active participation of citizens looking to increase their vitality (Rose 2008, Rose & Rabinow 2006), but on an awareness of subalternity in the genomic arena and a collective desire to compete in the biomedical global economy.

Currently, over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes; among them are nearly 21 million refugees. Thus, the discussion of refugees and refugee camps on a global scale is ever more salient given the recent heightened attention to the global crises. This thesis uses an interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society (STS) approach to analyze the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) policies, refugee camps, and their implication in the greater society.

How might new technical verification capabilities enhance the prospects of success in future nuclear arms control negotiations? Both theory and evidence suggest that verification technologies can influence the dynamics of arms control negotiations by shaping and constraining the arguments and strategies that are available to the involved stakeholders. In the future, new technologies may help transcend the specific verification challenge of high-security warhead authentication, which is a verification capability needed in future disarmament scenarios that address fewer warheads, limit new categories of warheads, and involve nuclear weapons states other than the United States and Russia. Under these circumstances, the core challenge is maintaining the confidentiality of the classified information related to the warheads under inspection, while providing transparency in the verification process. This analysis focuses on a set of emerging warhead authentication approaches that rely on the cryptographic concept of zero-knowledge proofs and intend to solve the paradox between secrecy and transparency, making deeper reductions in warhead arsenals possible and thus facilitating future nuclear arms control negotiations.

Since the implementation of the latest reform in the education programs of Quebec, the adaptation of teaching has taken on an important place in the concerns of all actors in education. However, this adjustment towards the adoption of teaching practices that require more participation on the part of the pupil is not accomplished so easily, particularly in the field of science and technology (ST). In order to gain a better understanding of these processes of adaptation, it is opportune to question ourselves on the factors and dynamics of interest at stake, especially in disadvantaged environments. Such environments are faced with situations where other difficulties coexist: integration of pupils, lack of interest, problems in classroom management, multi-ethnicity, etc. As a result, such difficulties give rise. to particular limitations, expressed in the form of needs, by pupils and teachers, likely to have a restrictive effect on the adaptation of teaching practices. Accordingly, our research focuses on the needs perceived by teachers in high school ST classrooms in disadvantaged school environments, since they present a privileged means to better understand the processes involved in the adaptation of practices. The adoption of an ecosystemic perspective, centered on these needs and their contribution towards the dynamics of decision-making, enabled us to better apprehend the complexity of these processes in ST classrooms. We were able to identify the needs perceived by teachers by following the methodology of conceptanalysis of needs, and by combining focus groups with the DRAP software. The results account for the large variety of needs to be considered in the equation of adaptation of teaching practices. These needs generally belong to the classroom system (microsystem). For pupils, they are mainly cognitive needs, but for teachers, they pertain to organization and structure. The influence of these needs on the adaptation processes depends on the interpretation by teachers of teaching situations, so much so that a same need can at times be assumed as negative pressure, generating obstacles, or at other times as a positive impulse, facilitating adaptation.

The purpose of this paper is the examination of previous STS-based frameworks for rational risk evaluation and the role of Fukushima residents as co-creators of new technical codes in safety and risk. To accomplish this task, the causes of nuclear refugees’ uncertainty and distrust towards the industry and the applicability of frameworks for scientific proceduralism and democratic rationalization by Kristin Shrader-Frechette and Andrew Feenberg to this issue will be discussed.

Master of Science / Food Science Institute, Animal Science & Industry / Fadi M. Aramouni / In order to improve the quality of products available for consumers who require a gluten-free diet, this study examined the effects of heat and ozone treatments on sorghum flour functionality in gluten-free bread and cake. In the ozone treatment experiment, commercially milled food-grade sorghum flour was subjected to ozone at the rate of 0.06 L/min for 15, 30, and 45 minutes. In the heat treatment experiment, commercially milled food-grade sorghum flour was subjected to dry-heat at two temperatures (95ºC and 125º) for 15, 30, and 45 minutes. Characterization of flour from each treatment included measurements of flour pH, color, and pasting properties. Evaluation of bread quality from each treatment included measurements of specific volume, color, crumb properties, and crumb firmness. Evaluation of cake quality from each treatment included measurements of specific gravity, volume, symmetry, uniformity, color, crumb structure, and crumb firmness. Bake testing using ozonated sorghum flour in a high-ratio white layer cake formulation showed that volume significantly increased (p<0.05) as ozonation time increased. Additionally, longer ozonation exposure times increased cells per slice area, lightness, and slice brightness values in gluten-free cakes while reducing crumb firmness. Despite improving lightness and slice brightness values, ozonation did not significantly increase (p>0.05) the specific volume of gluten-free batter based bread. In the heat treatment experiment, the optimum time and temperature relationship for improving sorghum flour was 125ºC for 30 minutes. This treatment level produced bread with the highest specific volume (3.08 mL/g) and the most cells per slice area (50.38 cells/cm2). This treatment level also produced cakes with the highest volume (72.17 cc) and most cells per slice area (79.18 cells/cm2). Additionally, cake and bread made from this heat treatment was deemed more acceptable in comparison to the control during consumer testing. The control sorghum flour in both studies produced breads and cakes with low volume, poor crumb properties, and dense textures. These results can assist in the product development process in advancing the quality of sorghum-based gluten-free foods for the consumers who require a gluten-free diet.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Human Nutrition / Mark D. Haub / Objective: The objective was to compare the postprandial glycemic and insulinemic responses to nutrition bars containing either cross-linked RS type 4 (RS4[subscript]XL) or standard wheat starch in normoglycemic adults (n=13; age= 27±5 yr; BMI=25±3 kg/m²). Methods: Volunteers completed three trials during which they consumed a glucose beverage (GLU), a puffed wheat control bar (PWB), and a bar containing RS4[subscript]XL matched for available carbohydrate content. Serial blood samples were collected over two hours and glucose and insulin concentrations were determined and the incremental area under the curve (iAUC) was calculated. Results: The RS4[subscript]XL peak glucose and insulin concentrations were lower than the GLU and PWB (p<0.05). The iAUC for glucose and insulin were lower following ingestion of RS4[subscript]XL compared with the GLU and PWB trials. Conclusions: These data illustrate, for the first time, that directly substituting standard starch with RS4[subscript]XL, while matched for available carbohydrates, attenuated postprandial glucose and insulin levels in humans. It remains to be determined whether this response was due to the dietary fiber and/or resistant starch aspects of the RS4[subscript]XL bar. Keywords: insulin sensitivity, diabetes, dietary fiber, prebiotic, glycemic index