This study evaluated the feasibility of adding rumble strips to the left side of rural freeways in New Brunswick. A review of 940 collisions that occurred on Route 2 and Route 95 was supplemented with an analysis of 547 incidents that occurred on the Brun-Way owned and operated sections of Route 2 and Route 95. The study revealed that despite significantly more traffic travelling in the right lane, a larger number of ROR crashes occurred to the left side. Four Crash Modification Factors (CMF’s) ranging from 0.87 to 0.96 were developed in order to estimate the potential benefit of left side rumble strip installation. A left side specific CMF of 0.95 was developed for all crashes and a CMF of 0.93 was developed for Fatal and Injury (FI) crashes. A benefit-cost analysis revealed that the B/C ratio of the installation of left side rumble strips ranged from 7.9 to 9.4.

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No description available.

The subject of this dissertation is the intellectual European New Right (ENR), also known as the nouvelle droite. A cultural "school of thought" with origins in the revolutionary Right and neo-fascist milieus, the nouvelle droite was born in France in 1968, the year of the spectacular student and worker protests. In order to rid the Right of its negative connotations, the nouvelle droite borrowed from the New Left ideals of the 1968ers. In a Gramscian mould, it situated itself exclusively on the cultural terrain of political contestation in order to challenge what it considered the ideological hegemony of dominant liberal and leftist elites. This metapolitical focus differentiated the nouvelle droite from both the parliamentary and radical, extra-parliamentary forces on the Right. / This dissertation traces the cultural, philosophical, political, and historical trajectories of the French nouvelle droite in particular and the ENR in general. The dissertation argues that the ENR worldview is an ambiguous synthesis of the ideals of the revolutionary Right and New Left, and that it is neither a new form of cultural fascism, nor a completely novel political paradigm. In general, the ENR symbiotically fed off the cultural and political twists of the Left and New Left, thus giving it a degree of novelty. In the 1990s, the ENR has taken on a more left wing and ecological aura rather than a right-wing orientation. As a result, some critics view this development as the formulation of a radically new, post-modern and post-fascist cultural and political paradigm. Yet, other critics contend that the ENR has created a repackaged form of cultural fascism. / The nouvelle droite has been able to challenge the main tenets of its "primary" enemy, namely, the neo-liberal Anglo-American New Right. Moreover, it has restored a measure of cultural respectability to a continental right-wing heritage battered by the burden of 20th century history. In an age of rising economic globalization and cultural homogenization, its anti-capitalist ideas embedded within the framework of cultural preservation might make some political inroads into the Europe of the future.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Biomedical image processing is a very important research area. Image analysis is one of the most important techniques in studies related to heart functions. The clinical assessment of LV function is very important to evaluate the heart function for patients or suspected heart disease sufferers. 2D echocardiography allows us to study the dynamic analysis of the heart which results in obtaining the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the LV. Cardiac function quantitative analysis depends on the heart’s shape characteristics like the enclosed area and heart wall thickness. The segmentation of medical images and obtaining the traces of the LV boundaries is an essential procedure to get the quantitative and qualitative analysis. Yet, in clinical procedure, this task depends on manual tracing which is slow, tedious and time consuming job. Hence, automating this clinical procedure during the cardiac cycle is of great importance. The aim of this thesis is to automate the manual process of detecting and tracking the LV boundaries of 2D echocardiographic image sequence. Instead of depending only on the imaging based techniques, the designed and implemented framework utilizes the LV mechanics beside the imaging based techniques. When it comes to information extraction from patterns which have been classified, it has been proved that the different contour detection methods complement each other. As a result, efficient combination of different contour detectors is expected to achieve better contour detection than if only one detector is used. This combination of contour detectors produces incremental gains in overall performance. In the first framework, the detection and tracking are accomplished by employing the extended Kalman filter framework to combine the contours estimated by the biomechanical model and the contours extracted using the deformable models. An alternative framework is used by employing averaging fusion followed by level set method. A gold standard is created from three manual outlines and utilized in the experimental results to evaluate the automated results. The tracking and segmentation of LV during the cardiac cycle was accomplished successfully in all cases. The results showed limits of agreement for an average perpendicular distance of 1.277 ±0.252 mm versus the created gold standard. This proved that this framework achieved better performance in tracking and segmenting the LV through the cardiac cycle.

The work done in this thesis focuses on the design of a square-shaped 20-way metamaterial power divider which is fabricated in microstrip technology and operates at 1 GHz. The divider comprises 12 square-shaped left-handed unit cells and 13 square-shaped right-handed unit cells, and these unit cells have the same size and are placed in a checker-board tessellation, where the left-handed unit cells are connected only to right-handed unit cells and vice versa. The divider is based upon the infinite wavelength phenomenon in two-dimensions, and this means that the insertion phase between any two ports of the left-handed unit cell is equal, but with opposite sign, to that of the right-handed unit cell. The divider gives an equal-amplitude equal-phase power division from the central input port to the output ports which are located on a straight line on each side. Thus, it is convenient to integrate with, or interconnect to, other planar circuits in a system, such as power amplifier modules. The design concept can be extended to an N-way power divider, where N = 4n and n is an odd integer.

Implantation of a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) is a potential treatment in terminal heart failure. Right ventricular (RV) failure is a severe complication in these patients and sometimes requires additional placement of a right ventricular assist device (RVAD). RVAD implantation, however, is an invasive treatment associated with both increased mortality and morbidity. The aim of this thesis was to study whether partial volume exclusion of the RV through a modified Glenn shunt or cavoaortic shunt could treat severe RV failure. The ultimate goal would be to use it as an alternative to a RVAD in RV failure during LVAD therapy. Swine were used as the model animal in all studies. In Study I, experimental RV failure was induced by ischemia, and verified by hemodynamic measurements and genetic expression. Treatment with a modified Glenn shunt reduced venous stasis and improved hemodynamics in general. In Study II, experimental RV failure was induced by the same method as in Study I. Treatment with a cavoaortic shunt in addition to LVAD therapy proved to reduce venous stasis and improved hemodynamics in general, which was feasible with preserved oxygen delivery despite cyanotic shunting. In Study III, experimental RV failure was induced by pulmonary banding, and verified by hemodynamic measurements and genetic expression. Treatment with a modified Glenn shunt reduced venous stasis but did not improve hemodynamics in general compared with a control group. In Study IV, the effects of LVAD therapy and subsequent treatment with a modified Glenn shunt on the normal RV function were studied. It demonstrated that LVAD therapy can put strain on the RV by increasing stroke work and end-diastolic volume, and that these effects can be reversed by treatment with a modified Glenn shunt during LVAD therapy. In conclusion, partial volume exclusion through a modified Glenn shunt or cavoaortic shunt is a feasible treatment of experimental RV failure. Thus, it could potentially be used as an alternative treatment to a RVAD in severe RV failure during LVAD therapy.

Since the face forms over the brain in the course of embryonic development, facial anthropometry may reflect brain structure. The motor functions of each side are controlled by the side of the brain opposite the body side. The purpose of this study was to establish whether a correlation exists between handedness and the location of the external auditory meatuses, as a possible consequence of brain asymmetry. Facial photographs were taken of 78 volunteers. Straws, placed in the external ear canals, were used to mark the external auditory meatuses. The level of the top of each meatus was measured from each volunteer's visual plane, as established by connecting the center of a point of reflected light in each pupil. Each volunteer was also given the Edinburgh Laterality Inventory (Durden-Smith and DeSimone, 1984:53) to determine "true" handedness (50 right-handers and 28 left-handers). Right-handers, as determined by either writing hand or laterality inventory, were found to exhibit a greater tendency for the left auditory meatus to be lower. Specifically, 68% of the right-handers, as opposed to 39% of the left-handers, exhibited a left external auditory meatus located at a lower position on the skull than the right meatus. This was significant at the 0.05 level. The differences in external auditory meatal distances from the visual plane were greater on the left in right-handers 68% of the time, equal 10%, and greater on the right 22% of the time. A reverse correlation for the right asymmetry for left-handers was not found. Instead, for the left-handed sample a nearly even distribution for meatal location was found: 39% left asymmetry, 29% symmetry, and 32% right asymmetry.The study strongly supported the hypothesis that right-handers have a significant tendency for left asymmetry in location of the external auditory meatuses. The study did not support the hypothesis that the meatal asymmetry correlates to the side opposite the handedness of the individual. Of-perhaps greater significance is the finding that the percentages of left asymmetry of both groups match the brain asymmetry percentages found by Galaburda (1984:15) for the planum temporale, an extension on the upper surface of the temporal lobe of the brain. The level of the external auditory meatuses, as a reflection of brain asymmetry, may serve as an external measurement of the location of Wernicke's area which is located near the planum temporale and has a major role in speaking and comprehension of the spoken word and in reading and writing. Simple techniques for locating the language centers of the brain would be an advantage in developing education plans and teaching strategies for students with each of the possible hemispheric dominance patterns. / Department of Anthropology

A name identity task was used to assess the language processing abilities of the right hemisphere of the brain. Ten undergraduates participated in each of three experimental conditions; nouns presented below threshold, nouns presented above threshold and verbs presented above threshold. Significant priming effects occurred when a picture of a noun or verb was presented above threshold and followed by a word which named the picture. The priming effect for nouns presented below threshold was not significant. No hemispheric asymmetries were found for the recognition of nouns or verbs.