Government of Canada communications professionals work in an increasingly challenging environment, characterized by an intrusive 24/7 media cycle, a frenetic pace of evolving communication technologies, layered accountability requirements, political tension, and waning public trust. Scholars call on professional communicators to help rebuild public trust, which is intrinsic to a healthy democratic government. The Three-dimensional Model for Transparency in Government Communication developed by Fairbanks, Plowman and Rawlins (2007) serves as the theoretical framework for investigating the Government of Canada’s approach to transparent citizen-focused communications from the perspective of communications professionals. The model’s adaptability to the Government of Canada context is tested through 23 qualitative semi-structured interviews with Government of Canada senior communications advisors, managers and executives. The data is analysed using constant comparative thematic analysis. The findings demonstrate that Government of Canada communicators strongly value transparency. Furthermore, the key components of the transparency model – communications practices, organizational support and provision of resources – encapsulate the factors that influence the practice of transparent citizen-focused communications by the Government of Canada. The study concludes by offering recommendations for future research and practical applications.

The need for aggregating privacy policies is present in a variety of application areas today. In traditional client/server models, websites host services along with their policies in different private domains. However, in a cloud-computing platform where aggregators can merge multiple services, users often face complex decisions in terms of choosing the right services from service providers. In this computing paradigm, the ability to aggregate policies as well as services will be useful and more effective for users that are privacy conscious regarding their sensitive or personal information. This thesis studies the problems associated with the Platform for Privacy Preference (P3P) language, and the present issues with communicating and understanding the P3P language. Furthermore, it discusses some efficient strategies and algorithms for the matching and the merging processes, and then elaborates on some privacy policy conflicts that may occur after merging policies. Lastly, the thesis presents a tool for matching and merging P3P policies. If successful, the merge produces an aggregate policy that is consistent with the policies of all participating service providers.

We study a two-way amplify and forward relay network with two transceivers which communicate through a network of nr relays while there is no direct link between the two transceivers. Each relay is equipped with a single antenna for transmitting and receiving. We study the minimization of the total transmit power that is used in all of the network nodes given the condition that the transceiver which calculates the optimal transmitting power has a full knowledge about the channels between itself and the relays and the variance with zero mean of the channels between the relays and the other transceiver. The total average power is minimized subject to a soft constraint which guarantees that the outage probability is below a certain level. The optimal solution is derived in closed form and leads to a single relay selection criterion. / UOIT

In wireless communications, channel estimation is necessary for coherent symbol detection. This thesis considers a network which consists of two transceivers communicating with the help of a relay applying the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying scheme. The training based channel estimation technique is applied to the proposed network where the numbers of the training sequence transmitted by the two transceivers, are different. All three terminals are equipped with a single antenna for signal transmission and reception. Communication between the transceivers is carried out in two phases. In the first phase, each transceiver sends a transmission block of data embedded with known training symbols to the relay. In the second phase, the relay retransmits an amplified version of the received signal to both transceivers. Estimates of the channel coefficients are obtained using the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimator. The performance analysis of the derived estimates are carried out in terms of the mean squared error (MSE) and we determine conditions required to increase the estimation accuracy. / UOIT

Massive young star clusters and OB associations (M > 10 000 Msun) dominate the energetic feedback from stars into the interstellar medium. They contain the most massive and luminous stars in the Galaxy, which shape their environments through winds, ionizing flux, radiation pressure, and eventually supernovae, destroying their natal molecular clouds and inflating superbubbles. Few such clusters have been identified in our Galaxy. We systematically investigate the most luminous H II regions, which we identify using the WMAP foreground maps. We find that the 13 most luminous sources produce one-third of the Galaxy’s total ionizing luminosity, all with expected powering populations of M > 40 000 Msun. These populations are grouped in small numbers of clusters or associations for each WMAP source. The emission from these regions is dominated by the diffuse component at large radii (∼10-70 pc) indicating a high leaking fraction of ionizing photons. Using 8 μm maps from Spitzer GLIMPSE and published radio recombination line observations, we resolve the large (> 1◦) WMAP sources into 40 star forming complexes (SFCs) exhibiting shell morphology with evidence of expansion due to a central powering source. We develop a method, based on differential extinction of the galactic disk, to identify the SFC’s powering cluster candidates with 2MASS. We identify 22 cluster candidates within the 40 SFCs having extinctions consistent with their distances. With near-infrared spectroscopy from the New Technology Telescope, we have confirmed the existence of the most massive of these associations, the Dragonfish Association, with M = 100 000 Msun. Of the 50 sampled stars, we identify 2 Luminous Blue Variable candidates, a Wolf-Rayet, and 15 O-type stars, consistent with the yield expected from the candidate contamination rate, verifying the candidate cluster identification method. This investigation doubles the number of massive young star clusters and OB associations known and produces the most complete picture of the upper end of the Galaxy’s cluster mass function to date.

Syftet med denna studie är att studera några utvalda lärares syn på individualise­ring i matematikundervisningen för årskurs 4-6. Denna studie belyser och analyserar hur lärarna i studien ser på individualisering och vilka möjligheter och begränsningar de upplever, vad lärare grundar sin individuali­sering på och hur de sedan planerar och anpassar den i sin matematikunder­visning. Med hjälp av en urvalsenkät, där lärare svarade kortfattat på ett fåtal frågor angående deras individualisering i matematikundervisning, valdes lärare ut till sex olika kvalitativa intervjuer. De kvalitativa intervjuerna genomfördes för att få en djupare förståelse för lärares syn, förhållningssätt, målsättningar och planeringar med individualisering. De intervjuade lärarna har alla en god medvetenhet om individualisering och genomför den framförallt genom olika arbetsmoment och arbetsmaterial i sin undervisning. För att individualisera i sin matematikundervisning använ­der sig lärarna i studien av en stor variation av arbetsmoment och arbetsmate­rial för att innehålls-, omfångs-, nivå-, hastighets- och materialindividualisera. Trots detta ser de individualisering främst som något som förekommer i ele­vernas enskilda arbete och inte i lika hög grad som anpassning av hela under­visningssituationen.

Government of Canada communications professionals work in an increasingly challenging environment, characterized by an intrusive 24/7 media cycle, a frenetic pace of evolving communication technologies, layered accountability requirements, political tension, and waning public trust. Scholars call on professional communicators to help rebuild public trust, which is intrinsic to a healthy democratic government. The Three-dimensional Model for Transparency in Government Communication developed by Fairbanks, Plowman and Rawlins (2007) serves as the theoretical framework for investigating the Government of Canada’s approach to transparent citizen-focused communications from the perspective of communications professionals. The model’s adaptability to the Government of Canada context is tested through 23 qualitative semi-structured interviews with Government of Canada senior communications advisors, managers and executives. The data is analysed using constant comparative thematic analysis. The findings demonstrate that Government of Canada communicators strongly value transparency. Furthermore, the key components of the transparency model – communications practices, organizational support and provision of resources – encapsulate the factors that influence the practice of transparent citizen-focused communications by the Government of Canada. The study concludes by offering recommendations for future research and practical applications.

This study analyzes the official Vkontakte group of United Russia during the period of January 10 – April 10, 2013. Parliamentary majorities of United Russia have been a pillar of the Russian political regime which, despite being undemocratic, is still characterized by considerable competition. Therefore, the study draws upon the two-way symmetrical model of public relations which is compatible with the catch-all character of the party and the horizontal, open-ended nature of social networks. According to the model, an organization wishing to build an attractive image should communicate with its publics in a two-way fashion and be ready to change in accordance with people’s preferences.   The method of content analysis is employed in the study in order to establish instances of two-way communication between the members of the group and its moderators. Special attention is paid to discussions regarding legislation since such conversations can clearly evidence that the party is ready to react to ordinary people’s interests and preferences. However, according to the findings of the study, the users’ messages seldom received feedback and almost all of their suggestions and questions regarding legislation were ignored.

In the study of quantum computation, data is represented in terms of linear operators which form a generalized model of probability, and computations are most commonly described as products of unitary transformations, which are the transformations which preserve the quality of the data in a precise sense. This naturally leads to unitary circuit models, which are models of computation in which unitary operators are expressed as a product of "elementary" unitary transformations. However, unitary transformations can also be effected as a composition of operations which are not all unitary themselves: the one-way measurement model is one such model of quantum computation. In this thesis, we examine the relationship between representations of unitary operators and decompositions of those operators in the one-way measurement model. In particular, we consider different circumstances under which a procedure in the one-way measurement model can be described as simulating a unitary circuit, by considering the combinatorial structures which are common to unitary circuits and two simple constructions of one-way based procedures. These structures lead to a characterization of the one-way measurement patterns which arise from these constructions, which can then be related to efficiently testable properties of graphs. We also consider how these characterizations provide automatic techniques for obtaining complete measurement-based decompositions, from unitary transformations which are specified by operator expressions bearing a formal resemblance to path integrals. These techniques are presented as a possible means to devise new algorithms in the one-way measurement model, independently of algorithms in the unitary circuit model.

Using Gene Sharp’s guidelines for nonviolent action and Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s four arenas of contestation (electoral, legislative, judiciary, and the media) that allow opposition forces to challenge, weaken, or defeat competitive authoritarian regimes, this study provides a functionalist analysis of Serbia’s Otpor movement. Serbia under Milošević was a particular type of hybrid regime called competitive authoritarianism, a regime where the rules of a fully democratically integrated government are violated so often and to such extent that competitive authoritarian incumbents fall short of the bare minimum standards of conventional democracy, bordering the line of authoritarian dictators. Combining Sharp, Levitsky, and Way’s functionalist perspective on social movements with those of sociologists Charles Tilly and Lesley Wood and Charles Stewart’s functional approach to the rhetoric of social movements, this study outlines Otpor’s strategies and analyzes them in hopes of outlining a blueprint for future social movements with similar political opportunities available.